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      Music, Science and Healing Intersect in an A.I. Opera

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      “This is what your brain was doing!” a Lincoln Center staffer said to Shanta Thake, the performing arts complex’s artistic director, while swiping through some freshly taken photos.It was the end of a recent rehearsal at Alice Tully Hall for “Song of the Ambassadors,” a work-in-progress that fuses elements of traditional opera with artificial intelligence and neuroscience, and the photos did appear to show Thake’s brain doing something remarkable: generating images of flowers. Bright, colorful, fantastical flowers of no known species or genus, morphing continuously in size, color and shape, as if botany and fluid dynamics had somehow merged.“Song of the Ambassadors,” which was presented to the public at Tully on Tuesday evening, was created by K Allado-McDowell, who leads the Artists and Machine Intelligence initiative at Google, with the A.I. program GPT-3; the composer Derrick Skye, who integrates electronics and non-Western motifs into his work; and the data artist Refik Anadol, who contributed A.I.-generated visualizations. There were three singers — “ambassadors” to the sun, space and life — as well as a percussionist, a violinist and a flute player. Thake, sitting silently to one side of the stage with a simple, inexpensive EEG monitor on her head, was the “brainist,” feeding brain waves into Anadol’s A.I. algorithm to generate the otherworldly patterns.“I’m using my brain as a prop,” she said in an interview.The “ambassadors” included, from left, Debi Wong, Laurel Semerdjian and Andrew Turner.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesDigital art by Refik Anadol was projected above the Tully stage.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesJust to the side of the stage, level with the musicians, sat a pair of neuroscientists, Ying Choon Wu and Alex Khalil, who had been monitoring the brain waves of two audience volunteers sitting nearby, with their heads encased in research-grade headsets from a company called Cognionics.Wu, a scientist at the University of California, San Diego, investigates the effects of works of art on the brain; in another study, she’s observing the brain waves of people viewing paintings at the San Diego Museum of Art. Khalil, a former U.C. San Diego researcher who now teaches ethnomusicology at University College Cork in Ireland, focuses on how music gets people to synchronize their behavior. Both aim to integrate art and science.Read More on Artificial IntelligencePublic Defenders: Clearview AI’s facial recognition software has been largely restricted to law enforcement. Now, the company plans to offer access to defense lawyers.Creating Art: Artwork made with artificial intelligence won a prize at the Colorado State Fair’s art competition — and set off fierce backlash about how art is generated.Generative A.I.: Apps like Stable Fusion use artificial intelligence to create images. Some say it is the key to unlock creativity, but critics abound.Are These People Real?: We created our own artificial-technology system to understand how easy it is for a computer to generate fake faces.Which makes them a good match for Allado-McDowell, who first pitched “Song of the Ambassadors” in January 2021 as a participant in the Collider, a Lincoln Center fellowship program supported by the Mellon Foundation. “My proposal was to think about the concert hall as a place where healing could happen,” said Allado-McDowell, 45, who uses the gender-neutral pronouns “they” and “them.”Healing has long preoccupied them. They suffered from severe migraines for years; then, as a student at San Francisco State University, they signed up for a yoga class that took an unexpected turn. “I was besieged by rainbows,” they recalled in a forthcoming memoir. “Orbs of light flickered in my vision. Panting shallow breaths, I broke out of the teacher’s hypnotic groove and escaped to the hall outside. As I knelt on the carpet, cool liquid uncoiled in my lower back … as a glowing purple sphere pulsed gold and green in my inner vision.”This, they were told, was a relatively mild form of kundalini awakening — kundalini being, in Hindu mythology, the serpent that is coiled at the base of the spine, a powerful energy that generally emerges from its dormant state only after extensive meditation and chanting. Others might simply have dropped yoga. “For me, it was an indication that I didn’t understand reality,” Allado-McDowell said. “It showed me that I didn’t have a functional cosmology.”Audience volunteers were outfitted with research-grade headsets from a company called Cognionics.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWhat followed was a yearslong quest to get one. Along the way, they picked up a master’s degree in art and went to work for a Taiwanese tech company in Seattle. At one point, while sitting in a clearing in the Amazon rainforest, they had a thought: “A.I.s are the children of humanity. They need to learn to love and to be loved. Otherwise they will become psychopaths and kill everyone.”Later, in 2014, Allado-McDowell joined a nascent A.I. research team at Google. When the leader suggested collaborations with artists, they volunteered to lead the initiative. Artists and Machine Intelligence was launched in February 2016 — 50 years after “9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering,” the pioneering union of art and technology led by Robert Rauschenberg and the AT&T Bell Labs engineer Billy Kluver. The connection was not lost on Allado-McDowell.One of the earliest partnerships they established was with Anadol: first for “Archive Dreaming,” a project inspired by the Borges story “The Library of Babel,” then for “WDCH Dreams,” Anadol’s A.I.-driven projection onto the billowing steel superstructure of the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. For “Song of the Ambassadors,” Anadol said, “we are transforming brain activities in real time into an ever-changing color space.”Anadol’s artwork also responds to Skye’s music, which alternates between periods of activity and repose. “We wanted to bring people in and out of a space of meditation,” Skye said. “I carved out these long gaps where all we’re doing is environmental sounds. Then we slowly bring them out.”All this is tied to Allado-McDowell’s goal of testing the therapeutic powers of music in a performance setting. “Might there be policy implications?” they asked. “Might there be a role that institutions could play if we know that sound and music is healing? Can that open up new possibilities for arts funding, for policy, for what is considered a therapeutic experience or an artistic experience?”The jury is still out.“We know that listening to music has an immediate impact for things like mood, attention, focus,” said Lori Gooding, an associate professor of music therapy at Florida State University and president of the American Music Therapy Association. Positive results have been found for people who have suffered a stroke, for example — but that’s after individualized therapy in a medical or professional setting. The approach in “Song of the Ambassadors,” she said, is different because of “the public aspect of it.”Derrick Skye’s score was performed by musicians including the violinist Joshua Henderson.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOne goal of the project is to turn a hall like Tully into a public healing space.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWu and Khalil, the neuroscientists involved with the production, have yet to analyze their data. But at a panel discussion preceding Tuesday’s performance — and yes, this opera did come with a panel discussion — Khalil made a prediction that left the audience cheering.“We’ve started to understand that cognition — that is, the working of the mind — exists far outside our head,” he said. “We used to imagine that the brain is a processor and that cognition happened there. But actually, we think our minds extend throughout our bodies and beyond our bodies into the world.”With music, he continued, these extended minds can lock onto rhythms, and through the rhythms onto other minds, and then onto yet more. As for the spaces where that happens, Khalil said, “You can start to think of them as healing places.” More

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      Steve Keene Made 300,000 Paintings in a Home Full of Easels

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      The artist’s studio and living space, created with his wife, Starling Keene, an architect, houses a one-man assembly line of affordable art — enough to fill a new book.When the artist Steve Keene and his wife, Starling Keene, an architect, spent $140,000 on a dilapidated former auto body shop to live in, in Brooklyn in 1996, it was understood that he would use most of it for his studio space. His brightly painted works are typically not large, but they are numerous: Over the last 30 years, he says, he’s created more than 300,000.Sold them, too — most for $10 or less apiece. His images, with visible brushstrokes on plywood panels that he cuts himself, are done in rapid-fire multiples: lo-fi renderings of album covers, presidents, streetscapes and pastorals inspired by discount art books from the Strand, sometimes with a lyric or funny non sequitur on top — “just to kind of slow you down, to look at it,” he said. He spends upward of eight hours a day painting, up to 120 canvases at a time, 52 weeks a year. (He doesn’t like to take vacations.) When the Keenes moved into the building, in Greenpoint, they built a nest for themselves in the back, a lofted area with a dorm-room fridge. The rest was easels.Now, at 65, Steve Keene may still be New York’s most prolific painter, and certainly the one most beloved in ’90s indie-rock circles. A college radio D.J. in his native Virginia, he got his start showcasing his paintings in scuzzy bars during his favorite bands’ sets, and did album art and commissions for groups like Pavement, Silver Jews and the Apples in Stereo. He earned an M.F.A. in printmaking at Yale, perfected his sense of primary color as a commercial silk screener in New York — a job he hated, he said, “though half of what I do is kind of based on that” — and eventually attracted collectors like the restaurateur David Chang, who hung a 12-foot Keene at Momofuku in Toronto. His prodigious output and enduring D.I.Y. ethos is cataloged, for the first time, in “The Steve Keene Art Book,” out this month.Keene’s paintings are rapid-fire multiples, executed with visible brushstrokes on plywood. Most are sold for $10 or less apiece.Lila Barth for The New York Times“This is a 30-year affordable art experiment that he’s been undertaking,” said Daniel Efram, who produced the new “Steve Keene Art Book.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesIn essays and commentary by Shepard Fairey, the downtown gallerist Leo Fitzpatrick, the artist Ryan McGinness and the musician Chan Marshall (Cat Power), it makes the case for Keene as a cultural signifier, a subversive success — an artist who, though he has shown in galleries, art fairs and museums, still sells (and packages, and ships, via UPS) his work entirely himself, prizing accessibility above all.“To me, one of the things that has cemented his importance is, here’s an artist who has a full understanding of the traditional art world, but chooses a pathway that is about directly making art and sustenance in a very modest way,” said Daniel Efram, a photographer and the Apples in Stereo’s manager, who produced the book. “This is a 30-year affordable art experiment that he’s been undertaking. It’s dramatic, it’s joyful and it’s created a community of fans that are very loyal.”Thanks to a recent influx of attention, Keene’s website, where he sells bundles of paintings for $70, has been overwhelmed with orders. Efram, who has known him since the ’90s, crowdsourced the book, borrowing hundreds of pieces from around the U.S. to photograph. “People see his work and they smile,” he said. “I think because it’s vibrant — and because it’s a really good deal.”Fairey, the street art star, said he owned more than half a dozen Keenes, and called him an inspiration. “He’s mixing gestural or impressionistic mark-making with pop and underground imagery in an assembly line that yields repetition with variation,” Fairey wrote in an email. “He’s like a folk hero Warhol.”Lo-fi renderings of album covers are a frequent Keene subject.Lila Barth for The New York TimesWhat has enabled Keene’s grand-scale, low-priced career — besides the foresight to acquire a 90-foot-long home studio early on — is Starling Keene, 63, the director of architecture for the city’s Department of Design and Construction, an agency responsible for helping to actually build New York. It’s more logistics than glamour: Her favorite project lately is a giant fuel yard and administrative depot for the Department of Transportation.In previous roles, she has also created a mansion in the hills for a Hollywood heavyweight and helped erect Little Island, the Hudson River park, as a partner in Standard Architects. (The British firm Heatherwick “designed it,” she said, “but we had to make it work.”)When I visited the Keene household, I asked about her own architectural style. After mulling it over for a while, she called it “industrial hermit crab.”“Because I do love an existing space, and then reacting to it, more than almost anything else,” she explained. “The willingness to constantly change — I do love that, too.”The Keenes’ thrifty fluidity is on ample display in their home. As the couple raised two daughters, now college age, Steve’s studio had to shrink, and they encircled it with a backyard-style chain-link fence that he affectionately calls “the cage.” It was inspired by the 2001 Frank Gehry exhibition at the Guggenheim — in Gehry’s early projects, the architect used the outdoor material “as color on a facade, because it changes the light,” Steve said.Also, Starling added, “We did need a way to separate the toddlers” from the paint-splattered studio.Keene with his wife, Starling, the director of architecture for the city’s Department of Design and Construction. “She’s a better artist than me, a better painter and a better everything else,” Steve said.Lila Barth for The New York TimesIn the last dozen years, guided by Starling’s design and engineering know-how — “My claim to fame is, I taught Steve trigonometry in one day,” she said — Steve has also built just about every stitch of their furniture, most of it white and curlicued. Made entirely of interlocking wood pieces like a jigsaw puzzle, it doubles as stairs, storage and artistic display, not to mention hiding spot (or launchpad) for their four cats and two dogs.“Star’s always trusted me visually,” Steve said, looking at his wife. “She’s always trusted me when I wanted to do things — like, I remember calling you up and I said, ‘Is it OK? I took out the bathroom ceiling.’”In January, they will celebrate their 40th anniversary.Steve’s exhibitions often involve him doing live painting, and the couple’s latest thrill is in crafting custom-made displays for each setting, from just a rough sketch — they are so conversant in each other’s drawing style that, Steve said, “people don’t like to play Pictionary with us.”“I couldn’t do this without her,” he added, of his work. “I’m very artsy and she’s super logical. I mean, she’s a better artist than me, a better painter and a better everything else.” (Starling has lately been engrossed in fiber arts, making an abstract weaving inspired by the Citi tower in Queens, in the fog.) “When I run into any kind of problem, she solves it.”The Keenes’ D.I.Y. couch: floor pillows covered in a blanket on a platform of wooden canvases.Lila Barth for The New York TimesGuided by Starling’s engineering know-how, Steve has built nearly every piece of their furniture.Lila Barth for The New York TimesAn aluminum foil chandelier Steve created years ago for a daughter’s fourth birthday party still hangs in the space.Lila Barth for The New York TimesTheir artistic inclination to repurpose materials collides, frequently, with domesticity: an aluminum foil chandelier that Steve made for a daughter’s fourth birthday party is still up; plastic grocery baskets serve as drawers in their closet — an ingeniously constructed space, like an inverted boat, with a scalloped trellis that also supports their loft bed. “It’s like being inside a little cloud,” Starling said.The couch — constructed from floor pillows she stitched, and covered in a serape-style blanket — rests on a platform made of hundreds of large wooden canvases. They’re a new, engraved style that Steve developed in the last decade and has hardly exhibited yet.“He rarely likes to do things that other people ask him,” Efram said. “He has to feel it, and I really respect that.” The Keenes seemed surprised to find that, at a recent exhibition that Efram curated in Brooklyn, he was able to sell some larger Keene pieces for substantially more than normal — they were $150.Over the years, Starling said, they have wondered whether they could make more money from Steve’s paintings. But he likes to price them low so they’re “irresistible,” she said. And besides, the art world hustle has never interested him.“He doesn’t want to even think about, like, is somebody going to think one is good and one is bad,” she said, “which is why he makes so many.”He allowed Efram to produce the book on the condition that he didn’t have to get heavily involved. “I still haven’t really sat down and looked at it, page by page,” Steve said. “It’s just overwhelming. It’s wild that it’s a static thing, it doesn’t change.”As much as his work is about an iterative process, it’s also revitalizing to him with every brush stroke, he said. “I think the reason why I have so much energy to do this, it’s because every week it’s new — stuff goes to UPS, I don’t see it, so I need more work.”“Everybody has these rituals,” he added. “Making art for me became that system of losing yourself, or finding infinity. Or something.”“Or something!” Starling repeated, and they laughed together. More

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      Review: Dimming the Lights for Sensuously Flowing Bach

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      The harpsichordist Jean Rondeau played the “Goldberg” Variations at Weill Recital Hall with patience and a vibrant yet subtle touch.A quiet battle over lighting simmers in classical music. During concerts, halls tend to be kept bright enough for audience members to be able to find their cough drops and consult their programs. But where’s the focus and drama in that? The brightness can come across as stilted and bland compared with what it’s like at a movie or play. But the lights have stayed, mostly, on.For his return to Carnegie Hall on Thursday evening, though, the superb harpsichordist Jean Rondeau turned them off.He made Weill Recital Hall, the most intimate of Carnegie’s three spaces, unusually dark for his performance of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations. The only illumination was a dim spot on him and his instrument. The effect was nocturnal, even séance-like, adding extra dreaminess to his brief improvisation at the start that flowed into the familiar opening of Bach’s gentle Aria.Despite the dramatic lighting and that surprising prelude, this “Goldbergs” avoided attention-grabbing thrills. Rondeau, 31, is not an artist of stark contrasts or broad colors. His theatricality is patient and natural; his touch is vibrant but subtle.This rendition of the “Goldbergs” — Bach’s set of 30 variations on that Aria — was not the kind to exaggerate or even emphasize the, well, variation. (Mahan Esfahani, another leading harpsichordist of the younger generation, does that vividly on his 2016 recording.) Rondeau’s version more takes the form of an unfurling carpet: variety in its pattern, but one long piece of fabric.This impression of sustaining a single arc is all the more remarkable given the considerable length of his rendition. His performance of the “Goldbergs” on Thursday had roughly the same dimensions as the 106-minute recording he released earlier this year — of a piece that often runs half an hour shorter than that.Rondeau gets to that duration by opening up small pauses and spaces for breath and ornamentation, gradually increasing the run time without (usually) taking tempos that come off as unduly slow.The result isn’t lugubrious on the album, and it isn’t in performance, either. Rondeau’s Bach is a voyage taken with sensual but serene, silvery lightness of texture and moment-by-moment flexibility, though it took some time on Thursday to acclimate to what, over the first half-hour or so, seemed almost homogeneous.But by the ardent legato flow of his 13th Variation — a steadily unwinding lyricism made possible by the precision of his technique — the accumulating power of the interpretation was clear. Even with a substantial pause between the 17th and 18th variations, Rondeau maintained a sinuous connection between the tension of the harmonic wanderings in the first and the strumming release of the second.In the 20th, the clarity of his finger work allowed him to bend, shape and blur the meter without losing the pulse. He refused to milk the melancholy of the sprawling 25th, maintaining an elegant restraint that coursed into the virtuosic combination of courtliness and dense, smoky chromatic fireworks in the late variations.The return of the Aria after this odyssey was hardly a safe, secure homecoming. Rondeau ornamented it so elaborately — though, still, so unshowily — that it felt like yet another variation. Another stop on an ongoing journey, not the end.Jean RondeauPerformed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      In Brooklyn, a New Gathering Space for Tower Records

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      Plus: surrealist gardening tools, vintage runway accessories and more recommendations from T Magazine.Welcome to the T List, a newsletter from the editors of T Magazine. Each week, we share things we’re eating, wearing, listening to or coveting now. Sign up here to find us in your inbox every Wednesday. And you can always reach us at tlist@nytimes.com.Visit ThisTower Records Returns With a Brooklyn Gathering PlaceAt Tower Labs, the lounge will host recorded interviews and discussions with artists, brands and key figures within the music industry.Christian AnwanderWhen musicians want to celebrate the release of an album, they’ll once again gather at Tower Records — its first new location in 16 years, called Tower Labs. After the iconic music seller shut its doors in 2006, there was a period of mourning: In 2015, Colin Hanks released a documentary featuring the likes of Elton John and Dave Grohl (who once worked at the Washington, D.C., location in the early ’90s), charting its impact and lamenting its closure. But in 2020, Tower Records relaunched as an online store — and this November marks its physical reincarnation. Located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the wood-paneled, warmly lit space was designed by the creative director Rebecca Zeijdel-Paz and the architect Louis Rambert, known for his work on the Lower East Side shop Beverly’s NYC. Customers will be able to pick up limited-edition vinyl records and merch from a window on Kent Avenue, while intimate concerts will be held on a stage with speakers custom-made by the New York D.J. Booker Mitchell. “The intention of Tower Labs is for artists and bands to host personal gatherings with their community, similar to a backstage experience,” says Tower Records’ president, Danny Zeijdel. “In an increasingly digital world, it is imperative for artists to have a physical space where they can connect and create.” Tower Labs opens Nov. 4, tower.com.Covet ThisA Surrealist Set of Gardening ToolsThe bronze garden tool set from Flamingo Estate and Campbell-Rey. Pia RiverolaWhen Richard Christiansen, the Australian creative director behind Los Angeles’s Flamingo Estate, first met Duncan Campbell of the British design studio Campbell-Rey during a 2018 trip to Marrakesh, the aesthetes bonded over the city’s grand Jardin Majorelle as well as their own budding botanical ambitions. “Duncan is one of the few people I know who can also geek out over an English rose,” says Christiansen. Once back at their respective homes, they carried on their floriculture conversation, fawning over the flowers found on each other’s Instagram feeds — and commiserating over the less-than-inspiring landscaping supplies in their yards. The latter subject led Christiansen to make a proposal: Would Campbell and his business partner, Charlotte Rey, create gardening tools as romantically refined as the duo’s signature consoles and coupe glasses? In a nod to the surrealist imaginings of Salvador Dalí, Les Lalanne and Elsa Schiaparelli, the resulting limited-edition, trompe l’oeil spade and garden fork pairing incorporates a number of the 150 species grown on Flamingo Estate’s sprawling seven acres: The fork’s tines were meticulously sculpted to resemble fleshy aloe vera leaves, while the curved handle of the banana leaf-shaped trowel recalls a nightshade plant’s unfolding petals. Handcrafted at the third-generation Collier Webb foundry on England’s south coast, the patinated solid bronze set, which Campbell and Rey put to the test in their gardens on the outskirts of London, is surprisingly weighty — and completely wondrous. “They’re beautiful, decorative objects that you can actually use,” notes Rey. To which Christiansen adds, “I say let’s get them as muddy and dirty as possible.” Available from Nov. 1, price on request, flamingoestate.com.Collect ThisThe Row Revisits Its Vintage Runway AccessoriesLeft: the Row spring 2023. Right: Line Vautrin collectibles, available at the Row. Courtesy of the RowWhen Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen staged the Row’s spring 2023 show at a grand Parisian hôtel particulier this past September, some models carried subtle, glistening surprises: petite gilded bronze boîtes created by Line Vautrin — the 20th-century French artist whose imaginative, intricately crafted jewels were once worn by the likes of Françoise Sagan, Ingrid Bergman and Yves Saint Laurent — and sourced from the collection of Mon Vintage founder Marie Blanchet. “The Row’s authentic reverence for vintage is like no other,” says the archivist, who also helped Mary-Kate curate a range of secondhand sartorial treasures (a 1967 Madame Grès dress; a Yohji Yamamoto coat from his spring 1999 wedding collection) for the Row’s e-commerce site last year. Starting Nov. 1, those decorative boxes — as well as 12 additional Vautrin designs from 1930 to 1965, including a multicolored Murano glass necklace and a chunky bracelet handmade from lightweight Talosel resin — will be available to purchase at the Row’s London boutique, followed by the brand’s New York and Los Angeles locations. Shown alongside equally enduring leather handbags and refined ready-to-wear, the traveling display presents a rare opportunity to take in — and perhaps even take home — the one-of-a-kind collectibles. As Blanchet puts it, “They are pieces of art that go beyond fashion.” Price on request.Get ThisA Maximalist Collaboration From Cabana and LibertyLeft: a fusion of English and Italian design, the Cabana x Liberty Tapestry bedding features two archival Liberty designs dating back to the early 1900s. Right: the Edwina Poppy tablecloth is made from a cotton and linen blend with a hand-painted heritage Liberty print.Antony CrollaWhen Martina Mondadori moved from Milan to London in 2012, she would often visit Liberty, the British department store. Its shelves of fabrics and haberdashery matched her love of a layered space, which she would eventually showcase in the pages of her interior and decorative arts publication, Cabana, when it launched in 2014. Now, coinciding with the magazine’s 18th issue, Mondadori has collaborated on a line of housewares with Liberty, pulling from the company’s 147-year history of textile making.While Mondadori began making housewares in 2017 under the name Casa Cabana, partnering with Liberty meant gaining access to its print archive. Choosing which patterns to use had the potential for overwhelm, but Mondadori was decisive: She spent just a single day looking through the historic artworks and swatches hidden away in oversize books and labeled boxes, settling quickly on a selection of four patterns and a solid mustard yellow. The resulting collection of bedding (cushions, sheet sets, reversible quilts) and table textiles (place mats, napkins, tablecloths) are meant to be mixed and matched. For inspiration on how to style the patterns together, those in London should make a trip to Liberty, where on the fourth floor, Mondadori has arranged a scene pulled out of the pages of Cabana. A long table is set under a souk-inspired canopy made of hand-printed Cabana x Liberty cotton material. In another nook, Uzbek suzani fabrics are draped on Liberty’s lofted walls above twin beds dressed in autumnal sheets. From $110, cabanamagazine.com.See ThisKate Nash Songs Come to the Stage in the Musical ‘Only Gold’Gaby Diaz as Tooba, a princess, and Ryan Steele as Jacques in the new production “Only Gold.”Daniel J. VasquezOne of my favorite go-to songs about unrequited love is Kate Nash’s “Nicest Thing,” from the London-born singer-songwriter’s 2007 debut album, “Made of Bricks.” But it was still exciting to hear the kooky lo-fi tune placed in the middle of a new Off Broadway musical, “Only Gold” (in previews now at MCC; opening Nov. 7), to encapsulate the longing, both requited and not, between a king and his queen; a princess and her betrothed; and a watchmaker and his wife. All of this unspools in a stripped-back stage version of 1920s Paris, where Nash stars as narrator, connecting the story lines and performing snippets of songs for which she’s known — at least by her many fans — alongside new ones she wrote for the show. She was brought on to the project a decade or so ago by its director and choreographer, Andy Blankenbuehler, whose syncopated style won him his third Tony for “Hamilton” in 2016, and who co-wrote the book for this “dance musical,” as they’re calling it, with the playwright Ted Malawer. If its set and staging are minimal, that’s only because the play foregrounds the power and movement of its ensemble who, of course, need lots of space to spin around while Nash sings beautifully along. mcctheater.org.Buy ThisAn Iconic Lamp in a Bright New ShadeIn honor of the Tizio lamp’s 50th anniversary, Artemide is re-releasing Richard Sapper’s iconic design in a brand-new color: red.ArtemideRichard Sapper created the lamp he wanted but couldn’t find when he made the elegant yet functional Tizio lamp in 1972. The clever design incorporated two counterweights and a swivel base, which allowed it to direct light in any direction, plus a halogen bulb whose previous application had mostly been limited to industrial use. Although it was developed in the ’70s, the angular design really hit its stride in the 1980s as an affordable icon of high-tech minimalism. As a young investment banker new to the city, I ogled it in the windows of the home shop D.F. Sanders on Madison Avenue and it became my first design purchase. Fifty years later, the Tizio lamp endures. To celebrate the occasion, Artemide has produced a fiery red version with one update that keeps it cutting edge: an energy-saving LED bulb. Starting at $480, artemide.net.From T’s InstagramA Tangier House Is Given New Life, and an Extension More

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      Robert Gordon, Punk Rocker Turned Rockabilly Revivalist, Dies at 75

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      Weary of the angry and aggressive sound of New York’s musical underground of the late 1970s, he returned to rock’s roots and seeded a rockabilly revival.Robert Gordon, a 1950s-influenced rocker with a silky baritone and towering pompadour who emerged from the New York punk underground of the 1970s to help stoke a rockabilly revival, died on Oct. 18 in a hospice in Manhattan. He was 75.His sister Melissa Gordon Uram said the cause was acute myeloid leukemia.Mr. Gordon had been the frontman for the buzzy CBGB-era band Tuff Darts when he traded his punk attitude for a tin of Nu Nile pomade and released his first album, a collaboration with the fuzz-guitar pioneer Link Wray, in 1977. At the time, 1950s signifiers like ducktail haircuts and pink pegged slacks had scarcely been glimpsed for years outside the set of “Happy Days” or the Broadway production of “Grease.”But, turning his back on both the pomp of ’70s stadium rock and the rock ’n’ roll arsonist ethos of punk, Mr. Gordon helped seed a rockabilly resurgence that would flower during the 1980s, with bands like the Stray Cats and the Blasters hitting the charts and punk titans like the Clash and X also paying their respects.Neo-rockabilly became the soundtrack to a broader wave of ’50s nostalgia during the Reagan years, marked by Buddy Holly-esque Wayfarer sunglasses, James Dean haircuts and ubiquitous images of tail-fin Cadillacs in music videos, in retro-themed malt shops and at the Hard Rock Cafe.With a look and sound that seemed to travel by time machine from Sun Studio circa 1956, Mr. Gordon was a curious presence in an era when the rock world seemed split between Fleetwood Mac-type rockers with feathered tresses and Sex Pistols-style punks with spiked locks. Lester Bangs, the gonzo rock critic, once said of Mr. Gordon’s neo-hepcat look that he could be a museum display labeled “Bopcatus Americanus.”Mr. Gordon never achieved the fame of the musicians who followed in his wake, but his influence was felt. “Many fans and music historians believe that, had he been recording in the ’50s, he might have become a rockabilly legend,” the music journalist Mark McStea wrote in Guitar Player magazine last year. “Instead, he kick-started the worldwide rockabilly revival.”He never scored a hit on the level of the Stray Cats’ “Stray Cat Strut” or another ’50s-nostalgia chestnut, Los Lobos’ cover of Richie Valens’ “La Bamba,” which hit No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart in 1987.Mr. Gordon, left, with his band backstage at the Lone Star Cafe in New York in 1981. From left: the guitarist Chris Spedding, the drummer David Van Tieghem and the bassist Tony Garnier.John Kisch Archive/Getty ImagesBut, with Mr. Wray — who carved his place in rock history with the ’50s instrumental classics “Rumble” and “Raw-Hide” — he hit No. 83 on the Hot 100 with “Red Hot,” a cover of a 1955 R&B song by Billy “The Kid” Emerson that became a rockabilly staple when Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men covered it two years later. If it was too early for him to reap a windfall from the rockabilly wave he had helped begin, Mr. Gordon also had the misfortune of coming in early with songs that would become hits for other artists. His 1981 solo album, “Are You Gonna Be the One,” included the single “Someday, Someway,” a Gene Vincent-inspired number written by his fellow retro-rocker Marshall Crenshaw, which peaked at No. 76 a year before Mr. Crenshaw’s version hit the Top 40.His 1978 album, “Fresh Fish Special,” which featured the Jordanaires, a vocal group famous for backing Elvis Presley, included the song “Fire,” written by his friend Bruce Springsteen, with Mr. Springsteen himself on piano. The song became a smash for the Pointer Sisters, climbing to No. 2 on the Hot 100. Later in his career, Mr. Gordon bristled at the rockabilly pigeonhole, referring to his sound as “roots music” and citing his forays into country and other genres. Still, rockabilly was in his bones, and he said that his life changed the first time he heard Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.”“I just remember hearing that one as a kid, I guess I was 9 years old, and it just opened new horizons,” Mr. Gordon recalled in a 2010 Australian radio interview. “The sound of that echo, and of course his smoldering delivery, was great. For a little kid, it was just amazing.”Robert Ira Gordon was born in Washington on March 29, 1947, the second of four children of Samuel Gordon, an antitrust lawyer and later a judge, and Arline (Rose) Gordon, a painter who did sets for regional theater companies.Growing up in the Bethesda-Chevy Chase area of Maryland, Mr. Gordon lived in a house where a record player or radio was usually blaring, Ms. Uram said in an interview. Their parents had a huge record collection, heavy on jazz and opera, and the children cranked up the volume on everything from rockabilly to Motown to British Invasion bands.But Mr. Gordon set his sights on a different retro genre when he turned to a singing career. “He fashioned himself after crooners like Frank Sinatra and Jack Jones,” Ms. Uram said. “He could sing ballads like the best of them.”He moved to New York in the early 1970s to pursue a career in music, starting out in a folk trio called Reunion. But when punk hit, with its stripped-down sound and frenetic energy, an echo of early rock ’n’ roll, he joined the fray.His band Tuff Darts became a fixture in the scene centered on CBGB, the Bowery punk cauldron where future industry game-changers like Talking Heads, Blondie and the Ramones were launching careers.But Tuff Darts never broke out like the others, and Mr. Gordon left the band before it recorded its first album in 1978.“I left that group because, I’ll tell you the truth, because it was pretty sadistic,” he said on “The It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Podcast” in 2020. “The lyrics were pretty chauvinistic. I was into more of the roots thing.”With the pouty good looks and Eisenhower-era attire of an old-school Brooklyn street tough, Mr. Gordon also tried his hand at acting. He played a killer in a 1976 film, “Unmade Beds,” which also featured Blondie’s Debbie Harry, and a greaser thug in “The Loveless,” a low-budget “Wild Ones”-style motorcycle-gang movie from 1981 starring Willem Dafoe and co-directed by Kathryn Bigelow.Mr. Gordon in performance at a festival in Spain in 2020.Juan Naharro Gimenez/RedfernsIn addition to Ms. Uram, Mr. Gordon is survived by his wife, Marylee, whom he married in 1995; his son, Jesse, from a previous marriage; and another sister, Jackie Gordon Spalding.Over the course of a half century, Mr. Gordon continued to churn out albums, collaborating with influential musicians like Chris Spedding, who has played guitar with Elton John and Paul McCartney, and Danny Gatton, the guitarist known for what he called “redneck jazz.” His final album, “Hellafied,” with Mr. Spedding, is set to be released by Cleopatra Records in November.“I always thought that Rob never had the stardom that he should have had,” Ms. Uram said. “He was incredibly handsome and photogenic and his voice was amazing, and his choice of musicians to play with was always spot on.”Still, Mr. Gordon played an important role as a bridge between eras, helping keep a treasured American music genre alive. He recorded his first album in April 1977. His idol, Elvis Presley, died four months later. More

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      Clara Schumann and Florence Price Get Their Due at Carnegie Hall

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      Two works by these composers have been marginalized in classical music, but they were never forgotten, as their histories show.Two composers marginalized by history will take center stage at Carnegie Hall this week.On Friday, the Philadelphia Orchestra will perform Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3 and Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto, which is making its Carnegie debut with Beatrice Rana as the soloist 187 years after its premiere.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Philadelphia ensemble’s music director, called the concert, which sandwiches those two pieces between classics by Ravel, an example of varying artistic perspectives. “A work of art is a viewpoint from an artist,” he said in an interview. “And if you have only one part of society that always gets their viewpoint heard, we constantly hear one viewpoint. It’s so important to have different viewpoints.”As a result of rediscoveries and shifting approaches to programming, works by Schumann and Price have migrated to classical music’s mainstream in recent years, with attention from major orchestras, especially Philadelphia, and recordings on prestige labels like Deutsche Grammophon. But they were never truly forgotten, as their histories show.Schumann: Piano Concerto in A minorIn 1835, the piano concerto by Schumann (then Clara Wieck, not yet married to the composer Robert Schumann) premiered at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, Germany, under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn. She was just 16, but already famous as a composer and virtuosic performer. The work earned ovations, and later, the Viennese demanded three performances in one season. But after Robert Schumann’s journal, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, among others, reviewed it as a “lady’s” composition, she shelved it.The concerto’s second edition didn’t come about until 1970, according to Nancy B. Reich’s biography “Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman.” (The pianist Michael Ponti is believed to have made the first recording in 1971.) Decades of work by musicians and musicologists culminated in Schumann’s widely celebrated 200th birthday in 2019. But despite new recordings by Ragna Schirmer and Isata Kanneh-Mason, who recently debuted the concerto with the Baltimore Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, major orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, continue to ignore it.Some artists have shrugged off the concerto, which Schumann completed when she was 15, as the work of a teenager. But it has had a long-ranging influence on some of the most beloved piano concertos that came after it.“It was written at a pivotal point in the history of the genre,” Joe Davies wrote in “Clara Schumann Studies,” published by Cambridge University Press last year. “It invites a powerful reimagining of what the concerto can be and do. Stylistically and expressively, she put her own stamp on the genre.”In an interview, Rana, who called the concerto “a genius work in many ways,” said: “I think that it’s very, very underestimated — the intellectual value of this concerto in the history of music.” Schumann’s nontraditional, through-composed form, seamless without breaks between movements, Reich has noted, bears the influence of Mendelssohn’s First Piano Concerto. Rana called it as revolutionary as concertos by Liszt and Robert Schumann, both of which it predates by over a decade.Yannick Nézet-Séguin leading the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie in a program featuring Florence Price’s music in February.Steve J. ShermanThe concerto’s powerful march opening, deceptively simple in its orchestral unison, contains the five-note motif that unites the themes across its three movements. In its transformative second movement Romanze, a tacit orchestra listens to the piano sing an exquisite love duet with a solo cello — an instrument that both Robert Schumann and Brahms featured in their concerto’s solo movements. Its final, longest movement displays the full breadth of Clara’s pianistic prowess and personality.Alexander Stefaniak, the author of “Becoming Clara Schumann,” writes that Robert emulated her form and improvisatory style; Robert also inverted Clara’s piano entrance in his piano concerto (also in A minor). Based on that, you could consider her reach extending to Grieg’s and Rachmaninoff’s first concertos, which echo Robert Schumann’s. Brahms might even have been inspired by her third movement Polonaise in his First Concerto’s third-movement Hungarian dance.“You can see she was a great virtuoso because what she writes is very challenging for the piano,” Rana said.At Carnegie, Nézet-Séguin intentionally avoided the cliché of programming Schumann with her husband’s work. For him, she and Price stand on their own. As composers, they had “the self-confidence to believe in what they wanted to bring to the world,” he said. “They are works that have no equivalent.”Price: Symphony No. 3 in C minorPrice’s Third Symphony is a work rooted in the traditions of symphonic Romanticism and classical Black composition, simultaneously adding to and expanding the expectations of orchestral technique. “A cross-section of Negro life and psychology” is how she described it in a letter to Sergei Koussevitsky, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music director, in 1941. That was a year after the symphony’s premiere, with Valter Poole and the Michigan W.P.A. Symphony, which was positively received in the Detroit press and even earned a mention in Eleanor Roosevelt’s syndicated column, “My Day.”Price’s music, Nézet-Séguin said, is “like a great wine that really ages very well.” He and the Philadelphia Orchestra released a Grammy Award-winning recording of her First and Third Symphonies last year. Since then, he added, “We keep exploring all the finesse and the detail and the language.”Philadelphia’s recording of the Third is the most high-profile, though not the first. (That was by Apo Hsu and the Women’s Philharmonic, released in 2001.) The album comes after decades of artists championing Price’s work, including luminaries like Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price, as well as present-day virtuosos like Michelle Cann, Samantha Ege and Randall Goosby, whose live recording of the violin concertos with the Philadelphia Orchestra will be released on the Decca label next year.Rae Linda Brown, in her book “The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price,” described the Third Symphony as a reflection of “a maturity of style and a new attitude toward Black musical materials.” Rather than applying African American music idioms through melody and harmony alone, Price incorporates conventions of form, texture, rhythm and timbre, an approach she also used in her Concerto in One Movement (1934), Violin Concerto No. 1 (1939) and Violin Concerto No. 2 (1952). Her percussion section calls for snare drum, cymbals, triangle, orchestral bells, castanets, wood blocks and sand blocks, to name a few; and she expands the brasses and woodwinds beyond the sets of twos from her earlier works. The first and final movements feature more contrapuntal motion and tonal ambiguity.Nézet-Séguin said that during a rehearsal, a Philadelphia Orchestra member mentioned that Price probably played a lot of Bach, and that the third movement Juba-Allegro’s melody seemed to be a reference to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. That speaks to another core aspect of her style: her use of the African American musical procedure of signifyin(g), in which older works and forms are referred to and transformed in new, unexpected directions.The juba dance movement of Price’s Third features asymmetrical phrasing, rhythmic complexity and interaction between sections. The cool trio section, with habanera rhythms and a muted trumpet, and her use of a modified jazz progression for the main theme, reflects a creative palette that crosses time, region and culture.UNLIKE SCHUMANN’S CONCERTO, Price’s symphony is not making its Carnegie Hall debut. But it has been performed there only once before — by the Gateway Music Festival Orchestra this year. By contrast, according to the hall’s archives, the Ravel works on Friday’s program, “Le Tombeau de Couperin” and “Boléro,” have been performed there 48 and 114 times.“We’ve had too much of the white European male for too long,” Nézet-Séguin said, adding that it was time to aim “for a certain kind of balance in terms of what we see on our concert stage.”Nézet-Séguin is an established Price champion by now; he and the Philadelphians brought her works to five European cities this summer alone. And Rana can say the same about Schumann, having toured the concerto with Nézet-Séguin, and having prepared a recording to be released in February.“The only way to give dignity to a piece is to listen to it,” Rana said. “It needs to be played. It needs to be heard.”Sarah Fritz, a musicologist who is writing a book about Clara Schumann, teaches at the Westminster Conservatory of Music at Rider University.A. Kori Hill is a musicologist, freelance writer and staff member of the nonprofit ArtsWave. She lives in Cincinnati. More

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      Music Thwarted by the Holocaust Will Now Be Published

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      G. Schirmer will publish more than 400 pieces by Jewish composers, allowing them to be heard on a wider scale.As fascism spread in Europe in the 1930s, Jewish artists and composers struggled to have their music heard. They faced persecution by the Nazis, and were banned by orchestras and cultural institutions because of their Jewish identity. Many fled abroad.As a result, hundreds of works by promising composers were lost or neglected. But a group of researchers and publishers is now working to ensure that their music is heard again.G. Schirmer, a major music publishing house, and Exilarte, an organization at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, announced on Thursday an initiative to publish more than 400 pieces by Jewish composers whose careers were disrupted by the Holocaust, making it possible for them to be performed and recorded on a wider scale.“Our understanding of the 20th century is incomplete without these composers,” Robert Thompson, the president of G. Schirmer, said in an interview. He added that it was vital to guarantee that “composers who were silenced during World War II are not forgotten and their legacies are restored.”The list of music to be published includes more than 300 songs, 100 chamber music pieces, 50 orchestral works and other pieces, in genres including classical, opera, jazz and film music. The first works will be published next spring.“The Nazis wanted a world in which the music of Jewish composers would have been banned and forgotten,” Gerold W. Gruber, Exilarte’s founder and chairman, said in a statement. “It is therefore our obligation to counteract these policies by rescuing the music of exiled composers from oblivion.”Walter Arlen, whose family fled persecution in 1939, is among the composers to be published.Exilarte ArchiveMore than two dozen composers are represented. They include Walter Arlen, a 102-year-old who was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna. He longed to study music professionally in Austria, but he and his relatives fled in 1939 to escape persecution by the Nazis.Arlen’s songs and piano pieces will be among the first to be published by G. Schirmer. In a telephone interview from his home in California, Arlen said that he was humbled his works would reach a broader audience.“It’s a lovely experience,” he said. “It’s not easy to be published. I lived long enough to be part of it, to see it happen.”He added that it was important that Jewish voices are remembered. “Six and a half million Jews were killed in the Holocaust,” he said, “including a lot of composers and musicians.”Other notable artists whose work will be published include Julius Burger, a Vienna-born pianist, composer and conductor, who fled to the United States in 1938; and Walter Bricht, whose career in Austria was cut short after it was revealed that he had Jewish grandparents, and who also left for the United States in ’38.The initiative builds on longstanding efforts by Exilarte, which was founded in 2006 to recover, restore and study music banned by the Nazis. Michael Haas, a senior researcher at Exilarte, said that the works by these composers represent an overlooked part of the repertory.“It has the potential to be enormously appealing to the public and to musicians,” he said in an interview. “This is an opportunity to start investigating an area of 20th century music which has been completely unrecognized.” More

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      Review: Gustavo Dudamel Comes to Town, Megawatt Appeal on Display

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      Dudamel led his Los Angeles Philharmonic in two concerts at Carnegie Hall that included a scorching New York premiere by Gabriela Ortiz.Over two nights at Carnegie Hall, Gustavo Dudamel defied expectations.Dudamel is the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic — one of the country’s top orchestras — a collaborator of choice for pop artists like Billie Eilish and the voice of Wolfgang Amadeus Trollzart in the animated film “Trolls World Tour.”But at Carnegie, this celebrity conductor refused to take a solo bow, choosing instead to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Los Angeles players and absorb one standing ovation after another as part of their rank. The only thing that made him pop — besides, of course, his megawatt charisma, corkscrew curls and elegantly powerful restraint on the podium — was his white dress shirt amid a sea of black.Dudamel’s personal appeal and his ability to fire a city’s — and donors’ — enthusiasm for classical music have landed him on wish lists for the music directorship of the New York Philharmonic if he doesn’t renew his contract with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which ends in 2026. (Jaap van Zweden, New York’s maestro, is leaving in 2024.)On Tuesday night, Dudamel conducted the New York premiere of Gabriela Ortiz’s blazing violin concerto “Altar de Cuerda,” with the stupendous soloist María Dueñas, and Mahler’s First Symphony. The next night, he and his players unveiled two more local premieres — Ortiz’s brief “Kauyumari” and, with the violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, Arturo Márquez’s “Fandango,” along with Copland’s Third Symphony.The new pieces brought undeniable pizazz to Dudamel’s tightly conceived programs, in which passing similarities among the works encouraged listeners to draw connections.“Altar de Cuerda,” or “String Altar” — the seventh of Ortiz’s “Altar” pieces — set a high bar that was unsurpassed over the two nights. It begins with a scorching statement in the violin, with whacks of triangle and crotales (spooky sounding cymbals) that rise off the stage like puffs of smoke in a roiling brew. At a few points, the woodwind and brass musicians played tuned crystal cups that conjured ritualistic magic.Little of what Ortiz wrote for the solo violinist is classically beautiful, yet Dueñas was wholly captivating. Her tone was scratchy and possessed in fiendish runs, leaps and double and triple stops. She could also produce brilliance and high-frequency top notes that pinged like artificial sound effects. Low-pitched trills had a guttural quality, and she slashed at the violin so furiously she could have drawn blood from its strings.Dueñas, the soloist in Ortiz’s “Altar de Cuerda,” was wholly captivating.Chris LeeFor the cadenza, Dueñas played a series of repeated figures in a free tempo, like an actor teasing out the subtleties of a line with different inflections. The emotions, though, weren’t merely joy and sadness; there was also worry, self-consciousness, maybe even shame.Remarkably, Dueñas is just 19 years old.Dudamel expertly controlled the coiled tension of “Altar de Cuerda,” a feat he repeated with the Ortiz piece that opened the second night’s program. He clearly connects with her compositions; he organized the irrepressible energy of “Kauyumari” into a churning engine of sound, and its fanfares presaged the arrival of Copland’s symphony — with its interpolation of “Fanfare for the Common Man” — after intermission.Where “Kauyumari” draws on a Mexican creation story, Márquez’s “Fandango” draws on that country’s music, turning the orchestra into a lively rhythm section that allowed Meyers’s violin to sing with a silky tone, even if her passagework could be difficult to hear.The Mahler and Copland symphonies, the evenings’ longest pieces, took pride of place after intermission on their programs. Each begins with the falling interval of a fourth in the woodwinds, supported by strings, but the effect couldn’t be more different. In the Mahler, there’s traditionally an eerie evocation, a world of frost gently warming to life. Dudamel’s rendition felt plain; he seemed much more at ease with the hopeful yearning of Copland’s open octaves — upright, columnar, blindingly bright.In both symphonies, Dudamel subverted tradition. Conductors tend to emphasize the grotesque elements of Mahler’s First, but Dudamel aligned himself with the flute’s fluttery bird song over the clarinet’s bizarre, intriguing cuckoo calls and the heroic horns over the blaring, nasally trumpets. In the Copland, you would never have recognized the second movement’s almost twee character in Dudamel’s insistent, spirited treatment of its delicately interlocking motivic cells.Ultimately, he brought the pieces closer together — making the Mahler a little more human in its warm, unrushed spaciousness, and the Copland a little more mysterious.Coming out for an encore on Wednesday, Dudamel held up his index finger, as if to say, “OK, we’ll do one more,” and the audience roared. After a brief, whirring, mischievous selection from Copland’s ballet “Billy the Kid,” Dudamel exited, this time for good, and the lights went up.It was the kind of tease that leaves audiences wanting more. And with the question of the New York Philharmonic hanging in the air, it remains to be seen how much more New Yorkers will get.Los Angeles PhilharmonicPerformed on Tuesday and Wednesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More