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Joe Tarsia, an Architect of the Sound of Philadelphia, Dies at 88
His work as an engineer at Sigma Sound Studios left a sonic stamp on R&B hits by the O’Jays, the Delfonics, the Stylistics and many others.Joe Tarsia, the recording engineer and studio operator who was among the architects of the lush, fervent blend of soul, disco and funk known as the Sound of Philadelphia, died on Nov. 1 in Lancaster, Pa. He was 88.His death, at a retirement community, was confirmed by a friend, the video producer Steve Garrin, who did not cite a cause.At Sigma Sound Studios, the recording hub he established in 1968, Mr. Tarsia worked with the producers Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff and Thom Bell on blockbuster hits by Philadelphia soul luminaries like the O’Jays and the Delfonics. Known for his precision at the mixing board and his imaginative use of echo and other ambient effects, Mr. Tarsia was the engineer on scores of gold and platinum recordings.“We were lucky to be recording at Sigma Sound with Joe Tarsia,” Mr. Gamble said in a 2008 interview with Crawdaddy magazine. “He was a great engineer and got a clean, clear sound from every instrument.“If you record the music right, it’s easier to mix, and, as an engineer he was the best,” Mr. Gamble added. “He knew what he wanted and kept us moving at the speed of thought.”In the early 1970s alone Mr. Tarsia captured the sound of dozens of acknowledged Philadelphia soul classics, including the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly, Wow,” the Spinners’ “I’ll Be Around” and Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes’ “If You Don’t Know Me by Now.”“TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia),” a proto-disco workout by MFSB, the Sigma Sound house band (the initials stood for Mother Father Sister Brother), became the theme song for the long-running television show “Soul Train.” “TSOP” was among Mr. Tarsia’s collaborations with Gamble and Huff that topped both the R&B and pop charts, as were the O’Jays’ “Love Train” and Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones.”Mr. Tarsia was known to refer to the sumptuous strings, syncopated rhythms and gospel-bred call and response of the Philadelphia sound as “Black music in a tuxedo” — an aesthetic he in no small way shaped through the richness and clarity he lent to so many recordings.“If I made a contribution, it was that Philadelphia had a unique sound,” Mr. Tarsia told The Philadelphia Inquirer in an interview commemorating the 50th anniversary of Sigma Sound in 2018. “You could tell a record that came from Philly if you heard it on the radio.”Several years before opening Sigma Sound, Mr. Tarsia established himself as an audio engineer at Cameo-Parkway, one of the leading independent record companies of the early 1960s.The Cameo and Parkway labels were important sources of music and talent for “American Bandstand,” Dick Clark’s nationally televised dance show. “Bandstand” was based in Philadelphia, and local artists like Bobby Rydell and Chubby Checker, who recorded for Cameo-Parkway, received exposure they might not have gotten had the show been produced elsewhere.Mr. Tarsia, who became the chief engineer at Cameo-Parkway in 1962, attributed his early success there to Mr. Clark’s support.“He’s the reason I’m in the business,” he was quoted as saying of Mr. Clark in the book “Temples of Sound: Inside the Great Recording Studios” (2003), by Jim Cogan and William Clark.“He was an approachable guy. If you went up to him and said, ‘I have a record,’ and he played it, it was worth a thousand promotion guys, because it was heard all over the country.”Mr. Tarsia in 1980. He was known to refer to the sumptuous strings, syncopated rhythms and gospel-bred call and response of the Philadelphia sound as “Black music in a tuxedo.” — an aesthetic he in no small way shaped.Arthur StoppeJoseph Dominick Tarsia was born in Philadelphia on Sept. 23, 1934. He was the younger of two sons of Joseph and Rose (Gallo) Tarsia. His father was a tailor, his mother a homemaker.After graduating from Edward W. Bok Technical High School in South Philadelphia, Mr. Tarsia took technical courses elsewhere before being hired at the electronics company Philco. He was later a service technician for local recording studios, work that led to his decision to pursue a career in music.“I was always moonlighting at something,” he was quoted as saying in “Temples of Sound.” “I was fixing TV sets, and one day this guy says, ‘Can you fix a tape recorder?’ and I said, ‘Sure!’ It turned out that tape recorder was in a recording studio, and I never left.”Mr. Tarsia had been at Cameo-Parkway for just a few years when “American Bandstand” moved to Los Angeles in early 1964, effectively ending the company’s tenure as a pipeline for the show’s music.The Beatles’ first tour of the United States that year only compounded matters, as Cameo-Parkway’s teenage-oriented pop gave way to British invasion rock ’n’ roll and eventually the psychedelia of the counterculture.Meanwhile, Mr. Tarsia met and befriended Mr. Gamble, who as an aspiring songwriter would drop by Cameo-Parkway to shop his songs. He was eventually the engineer for several early recordings produced by the Gamble-Huff team, most notably “Expressway to Your Heart, a Top 10 R&B and pop hit for the blue-eyed soul group the Soul Survivors in 1967.Later that year, convinced that his future lay with the soul music of emerging vocal groups like the Intruders and the Delfonics, Mr. Tarsia borrowed against his home and used his savings to lease studio space in Philadelphia’s Center City. Naming it after the Greek letter he saw on a place mat in a Greek restaurant, he opened Sigma Sound the next August. Success quickly followed with hits produced by Mr. Gamble and Mr. Huff like Jerry Butler’s “Only the Strong Survive.”Established artists like Wilson Pickett and Dusty Springfield soon began traveling to Mr. Tarsia’s studios to record. In 1971, CBS Records offered Mr. Gamble and Mr. Huff, by then regular clients at Sigma Sound, a major distribution deal. That led to the founding of Philadelphia International Records, which became home to many of the acts associated with the Sound of Philadelphia.By the mid-1970s the likes of Stevie Wonder, David Bowie and the Jacksons were booking sessions at Sigma Sound as well. Seizing the moment, Mr. Tarsia opened Sigma Sound of New York, a trio of studios that, in the late ’70s and ’80s, hosted sessions by Madonna, Whitney Houston, Steely Dan and others.In 1990, Mr. Tarsia’s son, Michael, who died last year, became the president of Sigma Sound. Mr. Tarsia eased into retirement, increasingly spending his time lecturing and supporting educational programs like Grammy in the Schools. In 2003, 15 years after Sigma Sound of New York was closed, he and his son sold their original Philadelphia studios.Mr. Tarsia was a founder of the Society of Professional Audio Recording Services and a trustee of the Recording Academy. He was inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville in 2016.He is survived by his wife of more than 60 years, Cecelia (Giarrizzo) Tarsia; a daughter, Lorraine Rawle; and three grandchildren.Mr. Tarsia was proud of the stamp he put on music in the 1960s and ’70s.“In those days, before the computer,” ” he recalled to The Philadelphia Inquirer, “records had personalities. There was the Motown sound. The Memphis sound. The Muscle Shoals sound. And there was the Sigma sound.” More
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Elizabeth Stewart, Champion of Scotland’s Folk Music, Dies at 83
She was part of a musical family of Scottish Travellers that furthered the nation’s folk revival and influenced its American counterpart.Elizabeth Stewart, a folk singer, pianist and composer who furthered the legacy of her musical family and the culture of the ethnic grouping known as Scottish Travellers through her recordings, performances and musicology, died on Oct. 13 in the village of Kemnay, near Aberdeen, Scotland. She was 83.Thomas A. McKean, director of the Elphinstone Institute at the University of Aberdeen, a center for the study of folklore and ethnology, confirmed the death. No cause was specified.Ms. Stewart’s extended family, identified with the Aberdeenshire village of Fetterangus, is part of the Travellers, a group with a distinct culture and history. Many live an itinerant lifestyle, though the Stewarts were a “settled” Traveller family with a business dealing in secondhand goods when, in 1954, the Scottish folklorist Hamish Henderson came calling at the family home and began documenting the family’s rich musical history.He recorded Lucy Stewart, Elizabeth’s aunt, and before long others made the same pilgrimage, including the American folklorists Kenneth S. Goldstein and Charles Joyner. Though Mr. Goldstein released an album of Lucy Stewart singing a selection of the traditional songs known as Child ballads in 1961, she did not generally perform for paying audiences or otherwise promote herself. It was left to Elizabeth to further the family’s musical heritage, singing the traditional songs of love, ghosts, war and hardship she had heard since childhood.“Elizabeth was a peerless singer, pianist, storyteller, teacher, dealer and raconteur, as well as a unique player of Scottish traditional music on the piano,” Dr. McKean said by email.“Behind her,” he added, “she had centuries of folk music tradition: the songs and ballads carried so well by Traveller communities across Scotland and further afield, the dance music and piping traditions of reels, strathspeys, jigs and marches.”She became part of the folk music revival in Scotland in the 1950s and ’60s, playing in dance halls and hotels and, later, at folk festivals. At the same time, the United States was undergoing its own folk revival, and the influence of the Stewarts and other musicians from northeast Scotland seeped into North American music.Ms. Stewart in the late 1950s. She became part of the folk music revival in Scotland in those years, playing in dance halls and hotels and, later, at folk festivals.via Stewart FamilyDr. McKean said artists like Joan Baez and Neil Young could trace their family roots to northeast Scotland. Others took a liking to the songs that originated in the region, including Bob Dylan, whose debut album, released in 1962, included “Pretty Peggy-O,” a version of the Scottish song “The Bonnie Lass o’ Fyvie.” The influence can also be heard in Appalachian folk music, which in turn influenced country music and early rock ’n’ roll.“The northeast of Scotland is one of the most fertile areas for folk song anywhere in the world,” Dr. McKean noted, “home to thousands of songs and ballads composed by ordinary folk as they went about their work and to entertain themselves in the long winter evenings.”Ms. Stewart recorded many of those songs on “Atween You and Me” (1992) and “Binnorrie,” a double CD released in 2004.“Listen to her delivery of ‘The Gallant Rangers,’ ‘The Butcher’s Boy’ or even the humorous ‘Little Ball of Yarn,’” Mary DesRosiers wrote in a review of “Binnorrie” in Sing Out! magazine, “and you can tell she comes from a tradition where the telling of the story is paramount.”Ms. Stewart also told her family’s story, interspersed with the music and lyrics for numerous folk songs, in a memoir, “Up Yon Wide and Lonely Glen: Travellers’ Songs, Stories and Tunes of the Fetterangus Stewarts,” compiled and edited by Alison McMorland and published in 2012.“For me,” she said near the end of that book, which is written in the Scots language, “the music is in my blood an when I’ve been sad, it’s made me happy, an when I’ve been happy, it’s made me happier! It’s niver a burden, an it’s teen me fae one side o the world tae the other.”Ms. Stewart and her siblings in 1960. From left, Jane, Frances, Elizabeth and Robert.via Kenneth S. and Rochelle Goldstein CollectionElizabeth Campbell Stewart was born on May 13, 1939, in Fetterangus, Aberdeenshire. Her father, Donald Stewart, was a soldier and later a laborer. Her mother, Jean Stewart, was a musician and bandleader who played multiple instruments but was especially known for her accordion skills.Elizabeth’s mother led a band that was heard on BBC broadcasts, and by the age of 9 Elizabeth was joining her onstage and on the air. In addition to her aunt Lucy, Elizabeth’s extended family included skilled pipers and fiddlers.“Tunes hiv been whirlin aroon in the air an in ma heid an hairt since I wis a bairn, an I wis composing tunes an songs even then,” she wrote in her book. “At hame I’d hear my mother’s beautiful piano an accordion pieces. I’d sit by my Uncle Ned’s fireside an listen tae his sweet fiddle airs, an I’d hear my ither uncles playin the pipes in the open air.”But not everything was blissful at home. In her book, she described her father as physically and emotionally abusive toward her mother; once, she said, he sold her prize accordion without her knowledge.Jean Stewart died in 1962, at age 50.Mr. Henderson’s visits in the mid-1950s brought the Stewart musicians wider fame, and he and Elizabeth became lifelong friends. Mr. Henderson suggested to Mr. Goldsmith that he come for a visit, and he did, in 1959, staying for the better part of a year. (Not all those to beat a path to Fetterangus left a good impression, however. “They wid come an take oor songs, an then go,” Ms. Stewart wrote.)About that time Ms. Stewart and her sister Jane reached a broader audience by contributing their versions of traditional folk songs to “Singing the Fishing,” one of a series of so-called “radio ballads” that mixed music and narrative. Radio ballads were innovative for the time in that they used actual villagers, rather than actors reading a script, to tell a story. “Singing the Fishing” was made by Charles Parker, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger (half sister of Pete) and was widely acclaimed, though the Stewart sisters’ musical contributions often went uncredited.“The songs that were featured in the broadcast went on to become world famous, and you still hear them to this day,” Ms. Stewart told The Aberdeen Press and Journal in 2007. “It upsets me when you hear it sung the way we sang it all those years ago, because we never get the recognition. We took the traditional words and set them to modern, pop melodies. They sounded great, and they still do.”In the early 1970s, Mr. Joyner arranged a tour of American colleges and folk festivals for Ms. Stewart. It was one of several trips she made to the United States.Ms. Stewart, whose only marriage ended in divorce in 1971, is survived by her sister Jane; three children, Jeannette Stewart Reid, Elizabeth Morewood and Michael Hutchison; seven grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.In his email, Dr. McKean recalled his first meeting with Ms. Stewart, at a folk festival in 1988.“Standing in the lobby afterwards, she took my hand, looked me in the eye and sang to me, into me, and, it seemed, to me alone,” he said. “No one, and I mean no one, could put a song across like Elizabeth, sometimes so well that she herself couldn’t go on, overcome by the unfolding tragedy and by the constellation of family, history, love and emotional life that informs the songs.” More
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Disco Is Back. And So Is Donna Summer.
Listen and follow Still ProcessingApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicWesley Morris and Elyssa Dudley, Hans Buetow and Donna Summer’s 1977 hit “I Feel Love” is the inspiration for the final track on Beyoncé’s new album, “Renaissance.” Summer became the queen of disco in the ’70s, but her catalog goes much further than that. You can hear her legacy in decades of electronic and R&B. “She is an architect of the pop culture we experience today,” J says.In this episode, J and Wesley revisit her 1982 album, “Donna Summer” — and explore why, out of all of her music, this self-titled album is the most distinctly Donna.Photo Illustration by The New York Times. Photo by Harry Langdon/Getty ImagesHosted by: Wesley Morris and J WorthamProduced by: Elyssa Dudley, Hans Buetow and Christina DjossaEdited by: Sara Sarasohn and Sasha WeissEngineered by: Marion LozanoExecutive Producer, Shows: Wendy DorrSpecial thanks: Paula Szuchman, Sam Dolnick, Mahima Chablani, Jeffrey Miranda, Eslah Attar and Julia Moburg. More
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Drake and 21 Savage’s ‘Her Loss’ Review: A Frisky Experiment
The rappers’ collaborative album is loose and untethered, a frisky experiment that’s intermittently successful.One of the grim inevitabilities of new pop star albums is how they are parsed, chewed through and cracked into gossipy bites the moment they arrive. Within minutes of the release of “Her Loss,” the new collaborative album by Drake and 21 Savage, Twitter and hip-hop news and gossip sites were aflame: a stray reference to Serena Williams’s husband, nods to old rap industry quarrels, an ambiguous multiple entendre referencing Megan Thee Stallion.Drake knows this will be chum, of course. It’s not fan service like Taylor Swift’s Easter eggs, but it reflects an understanding that for many listeners, and perhaps especially for those who may not bother to listen at all, the metanarrative matters.And yes, this is one way to measure an album’s success: how much chatter it engenders. Even the marketing strategy for “Her Loss” — which featured elaborate imitations of Vogue magazine and mock appearances on NPR’s Tiny Desk series and “The Howard Stern Show” — suggested an awareness of the utility of, and disdain for, the way information flows online these days.But somewhere underneath all of that lies the music itself, which, nowadays, ends up serving as a distraction from the chatter as much as the other way around.“Her Loss” is frisky and centerless, a mood more than a mode. Drake has done a full-length collaborative project before; “What a Time to Be Alive,” with Future, released in 2015, was an assertion of grimy gloss, adding fresh texture to Drake’s already formidable arsenal.But he and 21 Savage have a different sort of chemistry. Drake is endlessly malleable, a Zelig figure forever testing prevailing winds, while 21 Savage is a classic stoic, set in his thoughts. Often on this album — “More M’s,” “Privileged Rappers” — it feels as if they are ceding space to each other, side by side but not interwoven. Sometimes, like on “Spin Bout U,” they successfully melt into something greater than their parts.This is the lesser of Drake’s two projects this year, lacking the cohesion and unexpected ambition of “Honestly, Nevermind,” the dance floor-focused album he released in June. (The one outlier on that album was “Jimmy Cooks,” a collaboration with 21 Savage that went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.)But the fact that these two albums live side by side reflects something about how one of the most potent pop stars of the decade intends to navigate a far less stable era: embracing quick-burn place holders in lieu of big transitional ideas.And so “Her Loss” is, in many ways, a playground for Drake. The exuberant “Circo Loco” riffs on Daft Punk’s “One More Time” in a concession to pop glimmer. There’s flow pattern and melodic experimentation on “Backoutsideboyz.” “Hours in Silence” is a master class in Drake’s self-eviscerations and recriminations: “There’s three sides to the story, girl/The one you subtweet, the one your group chat gets to read, the one you come and tell to me.” On “Rich Flex,” there’s a particularly cheeky run of acronym rhymes: CMB, CMG, B&B, PND, PTSD, TMZ, GMC, B&E, DMC, BRB.Because this album arrives with slightly lower stakes than a stand-alone Drake release, it also permits him to lean in to his deeply bawdy impulses. Part of Drake’s ongoing appeal is that there is still a bit of frisson in hearing him at his rawest, proof that the most dexterous artist of the last decade still wants to play in the mud. That tendency recurs through the album, especially on “On BS,” where he raps about the strip club with winking toxicity: “I’m a gentleman I’m generous/I’m blowing half a million on you hoes, I’m a feminist.”But “Her Loss” also features the other side of Drake, the one whose true subject is his own ascendance. “Middle of the Ocean,” a six-minute rumination late in the album, is a classic of that approach. The rapping is a little slow, as if he’s accessing the memories in real time: “For your birthday, your man got a table at hibachi/Last time I ate there, Wayne was doing numbers off the cup like Yahtzee/And Paris Hilton was steady ducking the paparazzi.”These are the most vivid lyrics on the album, and also the ones that ground it in Drake’s most familiar gestures without conceding to what it’s taken to make Drake as crucial a figure as he is. And perhaps as he moves through the middle section of his career, he’ll feel less tethered than ever.“Thought I was a pop star,” he raps on “More M’s.” “I baited ’em.”Drake and 21 Savage“Her Loss”(OVO/Republic/Slaughter Gang/Epic) More
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Taylor Swift’s Second-Week Sales Are Still Among the Year’s Biggest
The singer’s blockbuster new album, “Midnights,” holds strong atop the Billboard 200 chart, and her single “Anti-Hero” is No. 1 on the Hot 100.Following the expectation-shattering blockbuster debut of her new album, “Midnights,” Taylor Swift has coasted to a second week atop the charts, earning the equivalent of another 342,000 album sales, according to the tracking service Luminate.Although “Midnights” experienced a 78 percent drop in its second week of release — down from 1,578,000 in sales the week prior — Swift’s follow-up performance was still good enough for the third-largest total of the year so far, topping even the debut of Beyoncé’s “Renaissance.” (Other than “Midnights” last week, only Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” sold more.)Swift managed to move more than one million copies of “Midnights” in its first week largely on the strength of physical merchandise, including vinyl, CDs and even cassettes. But the album lingers at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 this week thanks to its consistency on streaming services, where it totaled 294 million plays (down from 549 million).Combining digital plays, downloads and purchases of the complete album, the second-week sales of “Midnight” were the largest for any album in its second week since Adele’s “25” in 2015, Billboard said.Swift also maintains a healthy standing on the singles chart, the Hot 100, where she had previously occupied all of the Top 10 — a first in the chart’s history. This week, the single “Anti-Hero” holds at No. 1, with Swift songs also landing at No. 6, 7 and 9.Rihanna’s new single, “Lift Me Up,” a ballad from the “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” soundtrack, debuts at No. 2.Rounding out the Top 5 on the album chart are Lil Baby’s “It’s Only Me” at No. 2, Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” at No. 3, the special edition reissue of the Beatles’ “Revolver” at No. 4 and Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” at No. 5.In its 95 weeks on the chart, Wallen’s album has only fallen from the Top 10 once. More
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Cate Blanchett’s ‘Tár’ Puts Mahler in the Spotlight
The Austrian composer’s Symphony No. 5 is the obsession of the conductor played by Cate Blanchett — and of the fans of her latest film.For a 70-minute Austrian symphony first performed more than a century ago, Mahler’s Fifth makes a surprisingly strong case for itself as the song of the season.No, Gustav Mahler didn’t occupy the top 10 spots in the Billboard Hot 100, as Taylor Swift did last week, and the piece’s lush fourth movement has yet to be co-opted by the TikTok crowd. But the symphony, which plays a central role in the new Cate Blanchett drama, “Tár,” seems to have a way of sticking with audiences long after they’ve left the theater, finding its way onto the strolling, cleaning and cooking playlists of listeners who might otherwise be more inclined toward Adele, OneRepublic or Beyoncé.Enjoying a brisk autumn day walking around Manhattan listening to Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. I’ve been TÁR-pilled.— jeff becomes her 🔮 (@jheimbrock) October 19, 2022
Dalton Glass, a tech worker in Lakeland, Fla., is not a total stranger to classical music: He listened to a lot of it as a child, and as an adult, he hears at least a bit whenever he has an incoming call. (His ringtone of several years is a snatch of Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier.”) Still, he has some blind spots.“I’d never heard Mahler before in my life until that movie,” said Mr. Glass, 30. Now, he said, the piece is in regular rotation.Cate Blanchett as the fictional conductor Lydia Tár on the cover of a new soundtrack album.Deutsche GrammophonThe model for the “Tár” soundtrack cover is a 1993 release featuring Claudio Abbado.Deutsche GrammophonMr. Glass’s fascination with the film — he and a friend talked about it for the entire hourlong drive home from Tampa, where he caught the first of the two screenings he has seen to date — echoes the fixation of the imperious heroine brought to life by Ms. Blanchett.‘Tár’: A Timely Backstage DramaCate Blanchett plays a world-famous conductor who is embroiled in a #MeToo drama in the latest film by the director Todd Field.Review: “We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art,” our critic writes about the film’s protagonist.An Elusive Subject: Blanchett has stayed one step ahead of audiences by constantly staying in motion. In “Tár,” she is as inscrutable as ever.Back Into the Limelight: The film marks Field’s return to directing, 16 years after “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” made waves.Learning to Act: Sophie Kauer, a cellist in real life and in the film, had zero acting experience when she auditioned. She learned the craft from Blanchett, and from Michael Caine videos.In “Tár,” Mahler’s Fifth is something of a white whale for the celebrated (fictional) maestro Lydia Tár, the only Mahler symphony she has yet to record with a major orchestra in order to complete what audiences are told is a kind of Grand Slam of conducting. Throughout the film’s two and a half hours, she pursues the live recording with single-minded intensity, even as her professional and personal lives begin to unravel amid the fallout from her abuses of the power of the podium.Gage Tarlton, a 24-year-old playwright who lives in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, saw the movie in large part because he is a huge fan of Cate Blanchett. “I’ve loved Cate Blanchett for a really long time,” he said. “If Cate Blanchett is in a movie, I’m going to see it.”Although many of Mr. Tarlton’s feelings about the film are proving to be a slow burn — he said he “docked half a star” from his initial appraisal of the movie on Letterboxd after taking some time to puzzle out the story’s lingering questions and ambiguities — he didn’t waste any time adding some Mahler to his life.“I looked it up as soon as I got home,” he said.Others seem to have had the same idea. In October, streams of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 on Apple Music were up 150 percent from the previous month, according to data provided by the platform. Compared with the same month last year, they had more than tripled.Of the many recordings of the symphony available for streaming, Mr. Tarlton’s go-to is a 1993 Deutsche Grammophon album featuring the Berlin Philharmonic under the baton of Claudio Abbado. In the movie, Ms. Blanchett’s Tár uses that album’s cover image, a photograph of Abbado marking up a score while seated in a concert hall, as a model for her own Deutsche Grammophon photo shoot.“I actually tried a couple different ones, and that is the one that I like the most,” Mr. Tarlton said.A deliciously — or perhaps deliriously — meta concept album issued by Deutsche Grammophon shows Ms. Blanchett in a similar pose. It features audio excerpts from the film, original compositions by the Oscar-winning composer Hildur Gudnadottir and Ms. Blanchett plunking out “The Well-Tempered Clavier.”So when the soundtrack slipped the notice of even some dedicated fans of the movie, it was very possibly a function of timing: It came out on Oct. 21, the very same day as a certain blockbuster album whose first-week sales obliterated expectations of what was possible in the streaming era.The entry of Mahler’s Fifth into pop culture echoes the resurgences of works by Beethoven and Pachelbel in the 1970s and 1980s.Photo illustration by Kyle Berger for The New York Times“I listened to Taylor’s album probably at 5 a.m. the day after it came out,” said Millie Sloan, 47, referring to Ms. Swift’s album “Midnights.” Ms. Sloan, an account manager at her family’s construction company in Atlanta, said she was not aware of the “Tár” tie-in album. She said on Twitter that she had been listening exclusively to Mahler and “Midnights” for a week — though not on the same playlist. (“It’s a different listen,” she explained.)Ms. Sloan maintains a playlist of instrumental music that she encounters in the wild on TV and in movies, so the symphony had an obvious home in her Spotify account. What was less clear was where it would fit into her life.“I did put it on while I was cooking dinner the other day,” she said. But after gamely trying to soldier through the meal, she and her husband ultimately found the piece “a little too exuberant for a dinnertime listen.” She now listens to it mostly while walking and doing chores.The symphony (full title: Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor) is regarded as one of Mahler’s greatest achievements. First performed in Cologne, Germany, in October 1904, the piece was once described by a New York Times critic as “the first of Mahler’s orchestral works in which the ensemble seems to embody a single mind: a churning, reflective and obsessive being. It is, to be sure, a neurotic mind, full of mercurial and unpredictable reactions.”It is far from the first classical composition to enjoy a moment of sudden pop cultural relevance. Particularly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, plum placements in popular films thrust masterworks into the mainstream. Among those to get a boost from Hollywood: Pachelbel’s Canon (“Ordinary People”), Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” (“Apocalypse Now”) and Beethoven’s Fifth, a cheekily reconfigured version of which — “A Fifth of Beethoven,” anyone? — figured in the disco-era bible that is the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack.Mahler’s Fifth does seem to have achieved an unusual distinction: featuring prominently in two New York Film Festival darlings that opened in American movie theaters last month. In addition to its star turn in “Tár,” there is “Decision to Leave,” a fast-paced detective thriller by the South Korean director Park Chan-wook that makes defiant use of the symphony’s fourth movement. More
