Music

As pop fandoms go to battle on social media wielding data about their favorite stars, Metascores averaging critical opinions have become ammunition, much to the site’s chagrin.For Metacritic, a website that collects and quantifies reviews of music, movies, TV shows and video games, a Taylor Swift album drop is one of the best days of the year.“There’s nothing quite like Taylor Swift,” Marc Doyle, 51, one of the site’s founders, said in an interview last week. “We get a great deal of traffic and user participation, a lot of people sharing it on social media.” In 2020, when Swift released “Folklore,” her eighth studio album, traffic swelled by “roughly a half million page views,” including user review pages, he said.Metacritic, as its name suggests, aggregates entertainment criticism using a principle of meta-analysis, stripping reviews of their qualitative assessments and assigning them a value between 0 and 100. And it has helped turn pop culture into a game of sabermetrics.Its tallies, known as Metascores, started off simply as a consumer guide. But over the past decade, as music superfans have gone to battle on social media wielding data — sales and streaming figures, Billboard chart positions, tour grosses, number of Grammys won — Metascores have increasingly become ammunition. Passionate fan armies keep careful track of the scoreboard, and one of the most fervent is devoted to Swift, who will release her 10th studio album, “Midnights,” on Friday.But who is behind Metacritic, and how does it tabulate its figures?In 1999, Jason Dietz, like Doyle, a graduate from the U.S.C. Gould School of Law, had the idea for a website that applied meta-analysis to a range of media, and asked Doyle to join his effort to build one. (The movie aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes went live that year, but Dietz was unaware of it.) Dietz, the site’s current features editor, had learned how to code HTML, creating websites including one called List of Possible Band Names.In late 1999, Doyle’s sister and her husband contributed the majority of Metacritic’s start-up fund. (Earlier this month, Metacritic and six other sites were acquired by Fandom, a developer of entertainment platforms dedicated to superfans, in a deal estimated at $50 million; Doyle declined to comment on the sale.) Together, they began poring over thousands of print and online reviews, compiling them into an Excel spreadsheet and organizing them according to their own schematics — what would soon become their trademark Metascores.Doyle said the group started making daily visits to publications that run reviews. “Every time they publish a review, you throw it in the system,” he said. “Once you get to four reviews, then you generate the Metascore, which is an average score.” For the games section, the site sends outlets a list of questions “so you can really get to know their scoring philosophy,” he added, a process it has only recently started “for potential movies section partners.”Metacritic went live in January 2001 with a film vertical and a rundown of how its staff calculated Metascores. For letter grades (used by publications like Entertainment Weekly), an A represents 100, while an F corresponds to zero. For reviews that aren’t assigned an alphanumeric value, the site’s staff — Metacritic currently has five full-time employees who work remotely from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas and Portland, Ore. — will assess the tone of the review before assigning a value themselves.Metacritic’s page for Swift’s 2017 album “Reputation,” which divided critics. The website Consequence of Sound recently said it regretted its D+ rating. “We get comments all the time like, ‘This review seems so much better than a 3/10,’ so then I’ll take that comment to another editor, ask what they think, and we’ll give it a reread,” Doyle wrote over email. “Over the years, we’ve also been lobbied to either de-publish a review or drop a publication from our system for a variety of reasons. If it’s not a case of plagiarism or fraud (which usually is self-reported from a member publication), such appeals are generally unsuccessful.”Before they are averaged, the scores are weighted according to the critic’s perceived prestige and volume of reviews. “From the very beginning we’ve believed there are so many critics out there who are so incredible at what they do — why should they be treated exactly the same as a brand-new critic at a regional paper?” Doyle said.But Metacritic declined to explain more about which publications and critics are given priority status. “That’s really the secret sauce,” Doyle said. So, how do they avoid biases? “You just have to trust us,” he added. “We’re a professional outfit.” The site makes money from advertising, licensing Metascores and affiliate revenue.Metacritic’s music section began in March 2001 with a scoreboard of recent album releases. Pulling data from 30 publications — today, that number has expanded to 49 — on launch day, Aimee Mann’s “Bachelor No. 2” ranked highest with a Metascore of 90, while Juliana Hatfield’s “Pony: Total System Failure” landed lowest with a Metascore of 25. (The site has tracked reviews from 131 sites in its history.)For almost a decade, the section didn’t gain much online traction. Attention remained mostly fixed on the site’s games vertical, which has had the “greatest notoriety and impact,” Doyle explained; its metrics have affected game design, marketing strategies, even employee compensation.In an interview, the game designer Chris Avellone said that in 2010, Bethesda, the publisher of the game Fallout: New Vegas, “chose to include a clause in the contract that said if you deliver a title with a Metacritic score above 84, we’ll give you a bonus.” The game missed by one point.Metacritic began playing a larger role in music around the same time. In December 2009, after collating 7,000 reviews, the site released its first top artists of the decade list. Its No. 1 came as a surprise: Spoon, the indie-rock band.Before long, users began posting Metascores on Twitter as empirical proof that an artist had succeeded or failed. “Kanye got 93 on Metacritic, Taylor Swift got 75. Yeezy Forever!” one fan tweeted in 2010.“People used Metascores as an argument settler, a metric to put in each other’s faces,” Doyle said. “That really was not the intention of the site, and we hate to see it used as a sword or shield to go into battle with different pop fandoms.”Critics themselves got caught in the crossfire. In 2016, an anonymous Ariana Grande fan started a petition against Christopher R. Weingarten, a writer who had reviewed Grande’s “Dangerous Woman” for Rolling Stone. In June 2020, a Pitchfork editor was doxxed and threatened after writing what fans perceived as an unjust review of Swift’s “Folklore” that would lower its Metascore.“I’ve heard from critics whose inboxes have been slammed with complaints,” Doyle said, noting that low scores are often equated with bias. “Despite this, we certainly want to encourage critics to tell it like it is.”Swift, who has a particularly active online fan base, has been the spark for other Metacritic dust-ups. The music site Consequence of Sound announced last month that one of its biggest regrets was giving her 2017 album, “Reputation,” a D+ and “screwing up the Metacritic score.”The idea of scoring artists may seem unnecessary or make some critics uncomfortable — Rolling Stone recently abolished its star rankings — but there’s a strong appetite among listeners to have numbers at their fingertips. Perkins Miller, the chief executive of Fandom Inc., compared Metacritic to the N.F.L. — where he previously worked — and its Next Gen stats platform, noting, “There is a greater crossover between sports fans and music fans today.”Among very online pop fans, data capital is tied to social capital. “Metacritic is always brought up on Taylor Swift Twitter,” said PJ Medina, a 21-year-old fan from the Philippines. “If she gets a high score, it means that she’s critically acclaimed. It means that more people will care.” More

A songwriter in her own right, she was known for renditions of pop and rock songs, “Pinball Wizard” among them, that made them sound like mountain ballads.Mary McCaslin, a pure-voiced folk singer who sang plaintive laments for the fading Old West, reimagined pop and rock classics as mountain ballads and was an innovator of open tunings on the guitar, died on Oct. 2 at her home in Hemet, Calif., southeast of Los Angeles. She was 75.The cause was progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurological disease similar to Parkinson’s, said her husband, Greg Arrufat.Ms. McCaslin got her start in the mid-60s at the Troubadour, the fabled West Hollywood music incubator, performing at its Monday Night Hoots, as the club’s open-mic nights were known, often hosted by Michael Nesmith, who later found fame as a TV Monkee.John McEuen, a founder of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Penny Nichols, who was then his girlfriend, were frequent stage mates.“We thought for a moment we might be the next big something or other trio,” Mr. McEuen said in a phone interview. “It was a lot of fun for no money. Mary was a unique singer who always sounded like someone on an old country record. Like Iris DeMent before Iris DeMent, or Ginny Hawker. She had a really natural mountain voice for someone who grew up in Southern California — an authentic and very traditional Americana sound.”Ms. McCaslin was strait-laced and focused on her music, Mr. McEuen added. “She was unusual, even at that time in the ’60s, and all she cared about was getting the music as right as possible,” he said.She would become a hard-working folk festival and coffee house favorite, if not a household name. On her first album, “Way Out West,” in 1974, she wrote of gamblers, rounders and outlaws and, in the title song, of heartbreak and disillusionment:My family left home when I was a childTo head out West, all open and wildI couldn’t wait to ride the prairie on a ponyBut we passed over the plains and on downInto the great suburban stucco forestThe people there all held my dreams in jestSomehow I grew to spite themWay out WestThe album cover shows a serious-looking young woman, her face framed by a curtain of long hair and bangs in the style of the day. In its review, Rolling Stone noted her “clear, delicately affecting vocals,” and how her “unorthodox guitar tunings create unusual, ethereal melodies of striking beauty.”Ms. McCaslin, who also played banjo and ukulele, was self-taught, and her open tuning — tuning the strings to sound like a specific chord, as Joni Mitchell did — distinguished her guitar playing.“While Joni’s tunings were more jazz-inflected,” said Mitch Greenhill, president of Folklore Productions/Fli Artists, who managed Ms. McCaslin and her first husband, the folk singer Jim Ringer, starting in the mid-70s, “Mary’s went the opposite way. They were more angular, more Celtic sounding. And she always put the tunings on her albums, which aspiring musicians always appreciated.”She recorded her albums mostly on Philo, a small independent New England label. One newspaper called her an “L.A. cowgirl who records in Vermont.” Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote that she was known as “the prairie songstress.”Along with her own songs, Ms. McCaslin sang western standards and pop and rock classics, like the Supremes’ “My World Is Empty Without You” and the Who’s “Pinball Wizard,” transforming that classic power rocker into an Appalachian ballad with her clawhammer-style banjo playing.Her “pure, narrow soprano,” as John Rockwell of The Times described her vocal style, recalled that of Kate Wolf or Nanci Griffith. Her songs have been recorded by Tom Russell, David Bromberg and Ms. Wolf, among others.It was in 1972 that Ms. McCaslin met Mr. Ringer, a gruffly charming, rumpled folk singer 11 years her senior with a honky-tonk style and a colorful biography — from freight hopping to logging to a bit of jail time in his youth — and they began performing and touring together. They were a study in contrasts — her unadorned soprano and demure stage presence and his outlaw persona — and when they recorded an album of duets, they called it “The Bramble and the Rose.” They married in 1978.“The tug between Miss McCaslin’s childhood dream of the Old West and the reality of the New West is what gives her music much of its mythic resonance,” Mr. Holden wrote 1981, when Mr. Ringer and Ms. McCaslin played the Bottom Line in Manhattan. “Her point of view suggests a woman who grew up riding horses under the open sky of the high plains. Even Miss McCaslin’s experiments with Motown songs conjure a plaintive rusticity.”Her version of the Supremes’ hit “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” he said, “transforms the tune from an urban teen-oriented lament into a mountain-flavored folk song of quiet, adult desperation.”In her own songs, Ms. McCaslin rued the increasing urbanization of the American West.“I’ve always been attracted by the desert and the beautiful mesas in Arizona and Utah,” she told Mr. Holden. “I get upset that more and more of the land is being developed. Soon there will be no room to graze cattle for food. It’s funny that so many of the people who are singing about cowboys today probably never sat on a horse.”Ms. McCaslin in a 1992 album cover photo. “It’s funny that so many of the people who are singing about cowboys today probably never sat on a horse,” she said.Stuart Brinin, via FLi ArtistsMary Noel McCaslin was born on Dec. 22, 1946, at a home for unwed mothers in Indianapolis and was adopted by Russell McCaslin, a factory worker, and Lorraine (Taylor) McCaslin, a homemaker. Mary grew up in Redondo Beach, Calif., listening to early rock ’n’ roll, bluegrass and country music; her father often took her to concerts.She counted among her influences the ballads of Marty Robbins, the country and western singer popular at midcentury, and the songs of Petula Clark, the English crooner. She bought her first guitar when was 15 with her babysitting money and performed for the first time at 18 at the Paradox, a club in Orange County.In addition to her husband, Ms. McCaslin is survived by her sister, Rose Brass, and a brother, Eric Mauser. She and Mr. Ringer divorced in 1989.On her 1994 album, “Broken Promises,” Ms. McCaslin writes of heartaches and breakups, her wariness and surprise at a new love (that would be Mr. Arrufat, who worked in music production and had been a friend for years) and, on the song “Someone Who Looks Like Me,” her yearning to know her biological parents:’Cause I would almost give it allTo see my family treeIn my life I’ve never seenSomeone who looks like meIn 2013, she did meet her birth mother, Ooh Wah Nah Chasing Bear, a member of the Kiowa Apache tribe, and her brother, Eric. Ms. Ooh Wah Nah Chasing Bear gave her daughter a Native American necklace, Mr. Arrufat said, and he asked if it might be appropriate to give his wife a Native American name.Ms. Ooh Wah Nah Chasing Bear approved his choice, he said, which was Mary Noel Singing Bear. Mr. Greenhill, her former manager, marveled that Ms. McCaslin, who had made a career singing of Western imagery and themes, turned out to be, as he said, “a true Native American artist.” More

Steve Lehman’s varied stylistic language draws from classical and jazz traditions as well as funk and hip-hop.On a recent afternoon at David Geffen Hall, the New York Philharmonic’s violins began to play an ensemble pizzicato pattern underneath a turntable-scratch solo by the artist DJ Logic. I couldn’t help but smile.That gratifying moment hit during jazz trumpeter Etienne Charles’s “San Juan Hill,” which Lincoln Center commissioned for the Philharmonic. It was a musical fusion, executed surprisingly well in a surprising space.But while it may have been unusual for Lincoln Center, it isn’t a shock for New York as a whole. In between Charles’s new piece and the Philharmonic’s 1997 performance of “Skies of America” — a collaboration with the composer-saxophonist Ornette Coleman and his Prime Time ensemble — a broad artistic network has cleared fresh paths for American composers, ones in which varied stylistic languages can draw energy from classical traditions, jazz-influenced improvisation and the beat-work of funk and hip-hop.And beyond large institutions like Lincoln Center, musicians have been making this happen in smaller spaces. To take one example, shortly before the Philharmonic premiere of “San Juan Hill,” Roulette, in Brooklyn, hosted a concert that brought together the saxophonist-composer Steve Lehman and the Orchestre National de Jazz with its artistic director, Frédéric Maurin.The compositions were by Lehman, who played in the ensemble, and Maurin, who conducted. In addition to the 15 acoustic players — members of Lehman’s regular ensembles, like the trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, and artists of Maurin’s group — both composers also employed another electronic musician, who manned a laptop that was running real-time interactive software developed by Ircam, the French electronic music center founded by Pierre Boulez in the 1970s.Ircam checked the box for cutting-edge classical music. The acoustic improvisers channeled the history of jazz performance. And the head-nodding sounds of experimental hip-hop came into view in the rhythms of the half-dozen scores that Lehman contributed to the concert.Roulette posted the concert on YouTube. And from the outset of Lehman’s music, beginning with “Los Angeles Imaginary,” about 11 minutes into the video, the keyboardist plays a complex ostinato pattern across two different manuals: one acoustic, one electronic. The riff is not an obviously danceable one. But after the percussionist comes in — offering a steady syncopation with the keyboard — the vibe of New York’s late 1990s underground hip-hop rears its head.Next comes the addition of the acoustic bass. But the piece really blooms when Lehman triggers the reeds and brasses — along with a granular, spectral wash of electronic sound that comes from the laptop artist embedded within the orchestra. A saxophone solo by Lehman, 44, adds textures that he’s honed on his alto instrument: slantwise methods that he developed in formal training and time on the New York scene. During his undergraduate years at Wesleyan, he studied with the saxophonists Anthony Braxton and Jackie McLean, while also learning from the avant-garde music of Iannis Xenakis. While working on his Ph.D. in composition at Columbia, he worked with the French spectral composer Tristan Murail and the American experimentalist George Lewis.In a recent interview, Lehman recalled studying with Murail and focusing on the limits of what listeners might grasp, in terms of complexity. Lehman obsessed over questions like: “When does a single note start sounding like chord, or vice versa? Or when does an electronic sound start sounding acoustic? Or when does something sound like it’s in a tempo versus out of tempo?”Lehman added that, ever since that time with Murail, he has always tried to “exploit those transitions to make music that’s meaningful or exciting to listen to.” He’s enjoyed wide-ranging success on that front, writing chamber music for Grossman Ensemble and a larger-scale work for the American Composers Orchestra.The show included real-time interactive software developed by Ircam, the French electronic music center founded by Pierre Boulez in the 1970s.Matt Mehlan, via Roulette IntermediumHe has also collaborated with the composer-performers Tyshawn Sorey and Vijay Iyer, and Lehman’s releases on the Pi Recordings imprint have proven broadly influential in jazz circles. Lehman’s latest album on that label, “Xaybu: The Unseen,” was produced with yet another group that he participates in: the international jazz-rap fusion ensemble Sélébéyone.In addition to Lehman, Sélébéyone includes the soprano saxophonist and composer Maciek Lasserre, the drummer Damion Reid, as well as two M.C.s: HPrizm, known to fans of Antipop Consortium as High Priest, and the Senegalese artist Gaston Bandimic, who raps in the Wolof language. (“Sélébéyone” is the Wolof word for “intersection” — befitting perhaps any Lehman ensemble, but particularly one that involves bilingual rhyming.)“Xaybu: The Unseen,” offers yet another way to hear the contemporary cross pollination of classical, rap and jazz. In Lehman’s work “Liminal,” you can hear the influence of spectral harmony on his electronic production. And toward the end of one verse from HPrizm, — after the rapper mentions “riding on bare rims” — Lehman’s polyrhythms pile up, making a wild ride even bumpier.

Xaybu: The Unseen by Steve LehmanIn the interview, Lehman said that in his work with Sélébéyone, he often samples some of his classical music. “Any time you hear a harp or anything like that, or some kind of spectral, chamber music chord,” he said, it likely came from a piece like “Ten Threshold Studies,” which he wrote for the American Composers Orchestra.That work, which I heard at Zankel Hall in 2018, is ripe for consideration as Lincoln Center and New York Philharmonic branch out. (Sélébéyone would sound good in the newly renovated David Geffen Hall, too.)But regardless of whether Lehman is invited, his work is, thankfully, being well documented by Roulette, Pi Recordings and more.Whether considering large-ensemble jazz writing or experimental rap or orchestral music, Lehman said, “I’m trying to survey the landscape, and figure out: Where do I fit in? What am I sort of uniquely equipped to contribute? And, in a best-case scenario, kind of add on to these histories.” More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherThe country music titan Loretta Lynn died this month at 90. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, she was a chart regular, singing — and often writing — songs about the circumstances of women’s lives, even as she resisted being claimed by the emergent feminist movement.She performed crucial duets about collapsing relationships, underscored the challenges faced by divorced women and sang about the arrival of the birth control pill. She was a vivid chronicler of growing up hardscrabble in Butcher Holler, Ky. And she was one of the genre’s great vocal stylists, delivering heartbreak and sternness with equal aplomb.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Lynn’s sly radicalism and the way she was initially received by the country music industry, the many readings and misreadings of her work, and the manner in which legends age in public.Guest:Jewly Hight, a contributor to NPR MusicConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

The 23-year-old British singer-songwriter Robin Skinner has a listenership devoted to his sensitive (but not despairing) music.If you want to get Robin Skinner to open up, ask about his cat. In conversation, the musician who records and performs as Cavetown is soft-spoken and cautious. But he excitedly recounted Juno’s growth from a timid kitten who hid for a week when she arrived at his London apartment to his affectionate companion who presides over the windowsills of his current house in Cambridge. Then he apologized for rambling.Juno makes frequent appearances on Cavetown’s social media channels. She also shows up a few times on his new album, “Worm Food,” due Nov. 4, most notably on the song that chronicles their bond in its devastating chorus: “I do it for Juno/Pretend her life is on the line/Manipulate myself into staying alive.”For almost a decade, Skinner, 23, ​has amassed a following with his melding of the whimsical and the weepy, revealing his vulnerabilities over melodious alt-rock. Though he’s a sensitive soul, he doesn’t wallow in misery. As a result, he’s found a natural audience in teenagers and some even younger children who are drawn to his kindness in an often cruel world.“The function of music for me is therapeutic,” he said during a video interview, his usually red hair dyed black and thin-framed glasses dominating his face. “Most of my songs come from something sad because it’s my way of making it into something better, or something that I can control when it’s a feeling that I’m finding confusing.”Many Cavetown songs reflect a pervasive nostalgia for childhood and the feelings associated with it, but not Skinner’s childhood in particular. Guy Bolongaro for The New York TimesSkinner sometimes takes his own struggles with depression and anxiety and turns them into characters in his songs. For “Lemon Boy,” from his 2018 album, he transformed his bitterness into a persistent garden creature in need of a friend. More recently, he’s returned to the bully who lives in his head as a representation of debilitating self-criticism. “It’s helped me to personify that as a separate thing, because often I forget that I’m more than that,” he said.Skinner was born in Oxford to two classical musicians. When he was 8, the family moved after his father got a job at the University of Cambridge, where he still leads a choir and teaches early music history. His mother gives flute and recorder lessons privately and in schools. The couple divorced when Skinner was 14, but he wasn’t upset by their split. On “Devil Town” from 2015, which remains one of Cavetown’s most popular songs, he nonchalantly sings, “Mom and daddy aren’t in love/That’s fine, I’ll settle for two birthdays.”But on “1994,” the crunchy and tuneful lead single from “Worm Food,” Skinner sounds wistful for a period in their lives that he never witnessed. “From pictures and from memories that they’ve shared with me, that sounds like a happy time for them when they were really in love with each other,” he said. “Part of me is curious about what that could have been like and I feel like I missed out a little bit.”Many Cavetown songs reflect a pervasive nostalgia for childhood and the feelings associated with it, but not Skinner’s childhood in particular. “I grew up pretty fast, for various reasons,” he said. “I missed out on the childhood that I would want to have. Then there’s also missing the freedom that I had then to be a kid. I didn’t realize that I had that freedom at that time.”When he was younger, Skinner’s parents encouraged his interest in music as he tried out instruments like the trumpet and violin. He resisted his mother’s attempts to teach him theory, and remains largely self-taught and self-sufficient, producing all his songs and playing most of the instruments himself.He didn’t have many friends at school during his early adolescence, but found a community online through Twitter, using the platform as a diary for his thoughts. He started a YouTube channel in late 2012 and eventually began uploading ukulele covers of songs by artists like Twenty One Pilots and the Libertines. As Skinner grew as a musician, the ukulele was replaced with guitars, the covers turned into original compositions, and the sparse arrangements were filled in with drums and shimmering electronic textures. His YouTube channel grew to over two million subscribers.In 2018, the musician Chloe Moriondo became one of the many teenagers who found the online Cavetown community, and when she posted a cover of “Lemon Boy,” Skinner left a supportive comment. They eventually became frequent tourmates and collaborators, and Moriondo, now an amped-up pop singer, contributes guest vocals to “Grey Space” on Cavetown’s latest album.“A lot of Robin’s writing is incredibly honest and relatable in a strange and a universal way,” she said. “He really puts himself out there completely and shares his heart with people. That is a really beautiful thing.”After several self-released albums, sold mostly through the digital distributor Bandcamp, Cavetown signed to Sire, and his major label debut, “Sleepyhead,” arrived at the end of March 2020. Skinner has mixed feelings about the LP, which was completed on the road and under stress.“The function of music for me is therapeutic,” Skinner said. “Most of my songs come from something sad because it’s my way of making it into something better, or something that I can control when it’s a feeling that I’m finding confusing.”Guy Bolongaro for The New York TimesBut “Worm Food” was made at his own pace and in cozier spaces. The process included a pivotal songwriting trip to San Diego, where he connected with Vic Fuentes, the lead singer of the post-hardcore band Pierce the Veil, Skinner’s favorite group when he was a teenager. They recorded the dynamic and serrated “A Kind Thing to Do” in Skinner’s rental house on the beach, with Skinner in a chair and Fuentes seated on the bed. “You can just tell he is just one of those natural talents waiting to explode,” Fuentes said in an interview.In October, Skinner, who is transgender, also created the This Is Home Project, which aims to give more than a million dollars to the L.G.B.T.Q. community over the next three years. It’s named for a Cavetown song that many fans interpret as being about Skinner reconciling his own identity. For years he has received GoFundMe links from people looking for help, but with This Is Home he hopes to formalize his contributions to foundations that can fund top surgeries, safe housing or other needs.It’s become an unofficial tradition at Cavetown shows for someone in the crowd to pass Skinner a trans flag, which he ties around his neck and wears like a cape. The first time it happened, it just felt like the natural thing to do. “I am part of the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community and it’s not something that I necessarily talk explicitly about very often,” he said. “I find it hard to find the right words to use and so just holding a flag or having it around me onstage is a silent way of being like, ‘I love you, I understand, and this is a space for us.’ It helps me feel like we’re part of the same world together.”Self-examination remains a major part of “Worm Food,” but Skinner’s also working toward self-forgiveness. On the anxiously peppy “Heart Attack,” he sings, “I’m measuring up against the wall again/It’s always the same, but maybe this time I’ve changed.”In the months leading up to the release of “Worm Food,” Cavetown has been performing the new song “Frog” live. With its blatantly romantic endearments (“I feel wrong/My head’s gone funny, princess/But I’m your frog/Kiss mе better all night long”) it’s already become a favorite, and young fans have thrown stuffed frogs onstage or come wearing frog hats. Skinner thinks a large part of the song’s appeal is just that kids like frogs, but maybe there’s something bigger happening too: “It’s the only happy song on the album that’s genuinely written about a happy thing.” More

To hear his mother tell it, Dominique Jones always was a special child.Before he was Lil Baby, Atlanta’s latest international rap superstar — and even before he was known only locally on the southwest side of his city as a formidable gambler and precocious teenage hustler — Dominique tended to be a quick study.As a toddler, he was already helping his mother, Lashon, around the house, diligently folding laundry and straightening up the refrigerator without prompting. When Dominique was about 4, Lashon recalled when we spoke in 2019, she bought him a pair of in-line skates and was amazed when, without instruction or even a hand held for balance, her youngest child and only son had soon mastered his glide, tricks and all.“I look up, and he’s out there skating backward,” Lashon said. “He looks at it, he sees it and he can do it.”Dominique also revealed himself early on as a sponge for language. Before he could read, he was quoting the Bible, gaining a reputation as something of a local attraction among the Baptist preachers who visited the Black Southern hub of Atlanta to spread the word. “They would always look for him — ‘Where’s the young man that always gets so excited at church?’” Lashon has said. “Every time they came to town — ‘Where the little preacher man?’”After those verses came music. Once, when Dominique was still a small child, Lashon was driving with her younger sister while listening the local Atlanta bass rapper Kilo Ali. “Turn it up a little bit,” Dominique demanded from his car seat, according to his mother’s memory.After taking in the song for a moment, he called again toward the adults up front. “Turn it down now,” he said, considering what he had just heard. “That’s Kilo Ali?” Dominique asked, apparently knowing full well. “I went to school with him.”“It’s the upbringing, it’s the culture, it’s the things we see, the people we watched on TV,” Lil Baby said of his hometown. “It’s a repeating cycle of greatness.”Kevin Amato for The New York TimesLashon and her sister could only exchange confused glances. Dominique had never been to school a day in his life, and certainly not with an adult rapper from the nearby Bowen Homes projects. Yet somehow, the city’s sounds were already somewhere within him, as if through osmosis. “What’s your comeback after that?” Lashon said, reminiscing and still astonished. “We was blowed.”Some two decades later, the story of Lil Baby, 27, whose triumphant new album, “It’s Only Me,” was released last Friday, is both an individual tale of roundabout stardom by an idiosyncratic artist and also a recurring pattern. As the latest in a long line of Atlanta rappers to take a raw Southern sound to the top of the pop charts — from ’90s and early 2000s industry trailblazers like Outkast, T.I., Jeezy and Gucci Mane to the streaming stars Future, Migos, 21 Savage, Young Thug, Gunna and Playboi Carti — Lil Baby could only have come from one place.“Honestly, I think there’s something in the water,” he said in an interview over FaceTime last week. “It’s the upbringing, it’s the culture, it’s the things we see, the people we watched on TV. It’s a repeating cycle of greatness.”That he and his forebears all happen to share geographic roots with Martin Luther King Jr. and the Ku Klux Klan, Uncle Remus and Spike Lee, “Gone With the Wind” and the Black spring-break party Freaknik is not a coincidence. It could only have been Atlanta.Long a site of collision — politically, racially — and contradictory cultural history, Atlanta was called “south of the North, yet north of the South” by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903. In the decades since, the city has been “a bastion of both white supremacy and Black autonomy,” according to one historian, and often “on the brink of either tremendous rebirth or inexorable decline,” in the words of another.Building upon this confluence of tension and opportunity is Atlanta’s constantly regenerating rap scene, which has become, over the last 30 years, one of the most consistent and consequential musical ecosystems in the world. The generations (and micro-generations) of local artists who have emerged from it have routinely exploded the expectations of what a Black man from little or nothing — and they have, until recently, tended to be overwhelmingly men — could hope to achieve in the wider American consciousness.Largely through music, Atlanta has become a conveyor belt of exceptions.LIL BABY IS nothing if not a product of the city’s extensive rap lineage, but he has been equally influenced by Atlanta’s nonmusical history. Now a mainstream figure and the father of two sons, he grew up the unruly teenager of a single mother on government assistance.Baby’s eventual descent into what he and his friends refer to as “the streets” — an amorphous world of violence, drug-dealing, camaraderie, rivalry, risk and reward — would go on to inspire most of his music. But even beyond the effects of Atlanta’s vast income inequality, or the neglect and destruction of its public housing around the 1996 Olympic Games, the harsh realities he raps about in semi-autobiographical detail also stem from how he was raised, rooted in his mother’s own story.Lashon grew up in a strict Baptist family in Atlanta’s West End neighborhood, an area that had once been an upper-class white suburb but was 86 percent Black by 1976, following waves of white flight. Her father worked for Delta, fixing planes for the Atlanta institution that helped to make the city a worldly concern.But Lashon’s otherwise placid youth was rattled by what came to be known as the Atlanta child murders, when more than 20 Black boys and girls were kidnapped and killed between 1979 and 1981. The sixth child to go missing, Jeffrey Lamar Mathis, 10, was one of Lashon’s best friends at J.C. Harris Elementary School. (The spelling of Mathis’s first name varies in the public record, from FBI files to news accounts, a detail perhaps indicative of the attention paid to the case.) She knew him as the class clown.In the neighborhoods directly affected, parents saw the lack of initial law-enforcement interest in the disappearances as neglect based on their racial and socioeconomic status. Children were no longer allowed to play outside, some were pulled from school altogether and the city eventually imposed a curfew.“We definitely couldn’t go anywhere,” Lashon recalled. “We could hardly go out and play, and we weren’t even really allowed to before that. But after, we never gonna have a childhood.”The writer James Baldwin, who covered the case for “Playboy” and later in a book, “The Evidence of Things Not Seen,” tied the violence and tragedy of those years to the area’s history, dismantling the fantasy that Atlanta, only 100 years on from slavery, represented any sort of sanctuary for Black people. “There is absolutely nothing new in this city, this state or this nation about dead Black male bodies floating, finally, to the surface of the river,” he wrote.On “It’s Only Me” — his 10th release since 2017 — Lil Baby sounds further than ever from the neighborhoods where he grew up. But he is adamant that Atlanta will always be a part of him.Kevin Amato for The New York TimesIn 1982, Wayne Williams, a local aspiring music mogul, was convicted of killing two adults, and blamed also for the child murders, although no one was ever tried in those cases. In the years that followed, skepticism remained, especially in the Black community, about the scope of Williams’s overall guilt.This was the backdrop against which Atlanta rap was born, and the sounds, words and beats that would come to define the city bore more than a trace of the chaos and pain of this era.André Benjamin and Antwan Patton, who would become known as André 3000 and Big Boi of Outkast, were 4 years old when the first children disappeared. Jermaine Dupri, the mastermind behind So So Def Recordings, was 6. Jeezy and 2 Chainz were toddlers. T.I. and Gucci Mane were right behind them. All were raised among the paranoia, the skepticism of institutions and the two-sided coin of parenting options — shelter versus exposure to the cold world — only exacerbated at that time.“The music, storytelling, folklore and culture that emerge from the poor and marginalized communities of Atlanta — what we call ‘trap’ — are built on the generational, psychological, linguistic and ideological roots that grew from the traumas of the Atlanta Child Murders,” wrote Dr. Joycelyn Wilson, who has used hip-hop to teach social justice.FOR LASHON, THE crimes were decidedly local, close at hand. “The crazy part was, we knew Wayne Williams,” she said. He had worked with one of her aunts. “It took me a long time to get over it.”Yet it was only later that Lashon realized how directly she could trace that foundational thread of her life through the decades to the kind of mother she would become.As Dominique grew into a mischievous and independent teenager, earning the nickname Lil Baby from the older boys he hung around with in the nearby Oakland City neighborhood, her initial instinct was to smother him the way she had been smothered by her parents.But Lashon soon realized that this was futile — a mother’s desperate helplessness in the face of her son’s unwieldy ambitions. “Skipping school, smoking weed — I was rebellious,” Baby said. On “Shiest Talk,” from “It’s Only Me,” he raps, “Of all my mama’s children, I’m the bad one/I admit that.”But Baby knows now that his success in music may have rearranged those rankings, and finally being able to make his mother proud — and financially secure — is a sentiment that occurs over and over again in his new songs. “Mama, I got rich/look at your dropout,” he raps on another track.“I was the bad one, but now I’m the good one,” Baby said with a smirk during our recent interview. “Look how life changes.”Lashon had warned her son all along about “the streets,” to the extent that she could. “When you make the decision to get in them, know that it’s consequences for being out there,” she told him. But she knew he had to find out for himself.“At first, I didn’t let him do nothing or go nowhere,” she said. “But I felt guilty for keeping him in, ’cause he’s a boy — they supposed to get out, do stuff, have friends. I don’t know if that was because of my childhood — sheltered because of the Wayne Williams thing. But I knew that boys, once they get out there, they get out there.”Lashon was confident that her son was bright, self-possessed and excelling at the things he was putting his mind to, even when she was forced to confront what exactly that was. She realized that Baby’s drug-dealing and gambling money was serious when she heard him going up to the attic repeatedly. One day, unable to quell her curiosity, she went to see the gains for herself and found stacks of dirty bills, smoothed out and carefully rubber-banded.But by the time he was 20, following arrests for guns and marijuana possession, plus some failed diversion programs, Lil Baby found himself in a maximum-security prison.IT WAS WHILE incarcerated that he finally decided he would give rap a try. After his release in 2016, he started working with Quality Control, an Atlanta label that specialized in stories like his, joining the flock of the local executives Kevin Lee, or Coach K, and Pierre Thomas, who had shepherded acts like Migos and Lil Yachty to stardom.In his first two years as a rapper, Baby showed his commitment by releasing seven mixtapes and albums, ultimately leaving his old life behind. In 2020, his breakout LP “My Turn” became the most-listened-to release of the year in any genre, topping even Taylor Swift.“I moved on from slanging drugs and pistols/can’t be thinking simple,” he declares on “Real Spill,” the opening track from “It’s Only Me.”But first, in prison, Baby learned the extent of the Atlanta area’s small-town feel, the way that his mother’s life folded into his. “That’s one of the most craziest things she’s ever told me,” he said of her connection to the child murders. “But I actually ended up in prison with Wayne Williams. In the same dorm.” Williams worked around the facility, so they saw each other every day.“My upbringing, my manners, my way of thinking, my way of living. Everything comes from Atlanta,” Lil Baby said.Kevin Amato for The New York TimesThat, to Lil Baby, was the essence of Atlanta — his ties to the city’s darker side as omnipresent and relevant to his story as his pre-fame relationships with rappers. “There’s so much of a deep-rooted connection,” he said. “Even the artists. If it wasn’t for the Young Thugs, the Migos, the Peewee Longways — I was around a lot of people, and I’ve seen them come from where I come from. That gave me a lot of inspiration.”Today, Lil Baby has been nominated for eight Grammys, winning once, and earned corporate endorsement deals, an Amazon documentary and a spot performing at the 2022 World Cup.On “It’s Only Me” — his 10th release since 2017 — Baby sounds further than ever from the neighborhoods where he grew up, something he expresses not just with boasts, but with survivor’s guilt and ambivalence.“Youngins out here wildin’ with no guidance/all they care about is who they kill,” he raps on “Heyy.” “I was tryna keep that [expletive] in order/it got harder ’cause I was never there/it’s a better life out here/I promise, brodie, I’mma keep it in they ear.”There is even a song called “California Breeze,” with lyrics about private dinners in Malibu.But Baby is adamant that Atlanta will always be a part of him, his roots there inseverable and his essence inextinguishable. “The main thing that I do still keep with me from Atlanta, when I go everywhere, is me,” he said. “My upbringing, my manners, my way of thinking, my way of living. Everything comes from Atlanta. No matter where I go, I’ll never be able to get distance from Atlanta.”“Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story” will be published on Oct. 18 by Simon & Schuster. More

The pianist returned to Carnegie Hall with the first complete performance of the 24 Preludes and Fugues there.The pianist Igor Levit presents compelling ideas with a remarkable ease.On his most recent album, “Tristan,” he casually posits a connection between the well-known grandness of Wagner and the less-recognized grandeur of the 20th-century modernist Hans Werner Henze. Outside the concert hall, Levit has mastered the art of social media — both as a musician and a passionately political civilian — and conducted sustained, substantive conversations with journalists, whether for his book “House Concert” (whose English translation comes out in the United States in January) or the recent documentary “Igor Levit — No Fear” (out now in Europe).Given his multifaceted public profile, it can be possible to lose sight of his artistry. But on Tuesday night at Carnegie Hall, Levit brought the focus back to the piano.He played just one work: Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87. That music, though — inspired by Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” and written in the early 1950s, during one of Shostakovich’s frequent bouts of official Soviet censure — is a marathon, a two-and-a-half-hour kaleidoscope of melodic and harmonic invention. Until Tuesday, it had never been performed in its entirety at Carnegie.Levit released a recording of the Preludes and Fugues with Sony Classical in 2021, so the evening also provided an opportunity to hear him continue a conversation with Shostakovich. On Tuesday, that dialogue was rich in risk taking, and rewarding. From the first prelude, in C, Levit’s daring tempo — much slower than on his album — made clear that he was not on autopilot, but taking advantage of the Stern Auditorium’s resonance to consider the music anew.But if the first pair seemed to signal a gentler interpretation more broadly, Levit dispelled the notion with a flashy, upbeat second prelude. Live, as on disc, he proved as fleet as Keith Jarrett (whose recording of the work came out in 1992) or Tatiana Nikolayeva (who gave it its public premiere in 1952). Yet Levit produced his devilish speed with even articulation, bringing to mind Glenn Gould’s mature Bach. And the second fugue made clear that Levit would push into louder dynamics, too.Throughout the evening’s first half, Levit offered contrast after contrast. Using Carnegie’s acoustics, he emphasized Shostakovich’s prismatic writing, as when the cautiously eerie beginning of the fourth prelude was juxtaposed with a hazy, enveloping account of its partner fugue.And Levit made connections within this mammoth work. The dotted-note patterns of the sixth prelude sounded more joyous here than on Levit’s starker recording, and suggested an affinity with the more obviously lighthearted 11th prelude. Elsewhere, a forceful bass voice in the eighth fugue served as a preview of the climactic wallops in the ninth and 12th fugues.After intermission, Levit’s account of the final 12 preludes and fugues did not move along with the same thrills. That might have been by design — a decision to slacken the pace of interpretive variation so that big moments could come across even more powerfully. Or it could have been that work’s immensity was taking its toll, since Levit frequently stretched his right arm and wrist, as though he were trying to wring out pain.Whatever the cause, some stretches felt underdramatized. Still, Levit saved enough power for the big moments — especially the 15th prelude and fugue.Officially in the key of D flat, it’s more a flirtation with crunchy, 12-tone modernism. Some artists treat every musical reference in Shostakovich as an opportunity for a broad joke, but Levit’s unalloyed sincerity as a performer steers him away from that — which paid off marvelously here as he unfurled a prelude and fugue that sang out even while rumbling and barreling along.After the conclusion of the 15th fugue, someone in the audience let out an admiring, brisk “bravo.” Then more applause rippled out from the Carnegie crowd, which up until then had been respectfully silent.There was pleasant laughter — and then even more forceful applause, which Levit gratefully acknowledged before continuing. This truly spontaneous ovation was another reminder of Levit’s power as a musician: He turned a moment of atonal imitation into the pinnacle of the evening.Igor LevitPerformed on Tuesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

“I hope the exit is joyful — and I hope never to return.” Frida Kahlo confided these remarks to her diary in 1954, just a few days before making her final exit.In a new opera, “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego” (“The Last Dream of Frida and Diego”), the composer Gabriela Lena Frank and librettist Nilo Cruz imagine Kahlo overcoming her reluctance to return from beyond. She is summoned back on the Day of the Dead with a mission: to escort her husband, Diego Rivera, to the underworld. What lures her is the prospect of being given a chance to paint once more.“Sueño,” the debut opera by Frank, 50, has had a long road to the stage. In 2007, she was invited by the Arizona Opera artistic director Joel Revzen to write a work. He suggested the Mexican painter‌ Kahlo as an ideal topic. It resonated with her immediately.“On a personal level, the fact that Frida is a multiracial woman of color with a disability is something I can really relate to,” Frank said in a recent video interview, referring to her heritage — Peruvian-Chinese on her mother’s side, Lithuanian-Jewish on her father’s — as well as her history of hearing loss and Graves’ disease. “She lived this rich, full life that any able bodied, non-disadvantaged person would love to be able to live. And she did so through some very dangerous times in world history.”The commission from Arizona Opera fell through. But in the meantime, Frank established herself as a significant American composer, winning the Latin Grammy Award for best contemporary classical composition in 2009.Frida Kahlo’s “The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl” from 1949, which depicts Rivera as a child, embraced by Kahlo and by an earth goddess.The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and the Vergel Foundation; Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New YorkWhen the “Sueño” project was revived, San Diego Opera’s general director, David Bennett, took the lead. In 2015, he convinced San Francisco Opera to come onboard as a co-producer, securing the support needed to bring “Sueño” to the stage. Now, after further pandemic delays, the work will premiere at San Diego Opera on Oct. 29, with San Francisco’s production coming in June.The material is well-trodden — Kahlo’s life and work have inspired films, books, dance and Robert Xavier Rodríguez’s musical theater-tinged opera “Frida” (1991) — but Frank and Cruz determined from the outset to take a novel approach to it. Instead of dramatizing Kahlo’s physical and emotional torments and her notoriously tempestuous relationship with Rivera realistically, they embed these biographical details in the mythic context of a Day of the Dead ritual. Motifs from their paintings are integral to the story — as is the act of painting itself.“I thought: Let’s do something different,” said Cruz, 62, recalling the first time he and Frank met to discuss the project. Frank had gravitated toward Cruz, a Cuban American playwright and poet, after reading his “Anna in the Tropics,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2003. “It looked like a libretto,” she said, “with monologues that could obviously be arias and lots of witty banter with a great sense of rhythm that composers can get into.”Thus began a collaboration that has shaped the development of the careers of these two artists. Over the course of the opera’s prolonged incubation, the pair have worked on about a dozen projects, from a brief choral piece about the assassination of the poet Federico García Lorca to “Conquest Requiem,” an oratorio inspired by the complex, contradictory legacy of the Nahua woman Malinche and her role in Cortés’s war against the Aztecs.And the long postponement of “Sueño” had its upside. “The opera is different for having this long relationship,” Frank said.Sketches by the costume designer Eloise Kazan; above, Frida. Eloise KazanAnd, here, Catrina. Eloise KazanA rendering of a “Sueño” set, by the scenic designer Jorge Ballina.Jorge BallinaWhen they started to work on it, Frank played samples of her music for Cruz, including “Requiem for a Magical America: El Día de los Muertos” (2006), a “folk requiem” ballet originally scored for band and dancers, and “La Llorona,” a viola concerto about death and the afterlife. Cruz found these pieces so evocative that he decided to use the Mexican folk tradition of the Day of the Dead to anchor the opera.“What I love about that idea is that we go into a mythic landscape that is bigger than life,” he said. “I think those are the brushstrokes that an opera needs.”‌The Spanish-language libretto ‌he wrote uses the Day of the Dead to enact a reversal of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice — a myth central to the history of opera itself. Frida crosses the threshold from the underworld to the living for the single day allotted and guides the ailing Diego back with her as he accepts his mortality.The opera is replete with references to the pre-Columbian Mexican culture and folklore that so profoundly inspired Kahlo and Rivera. The realm where the departed souls reside is depicted as Mictlan, the Aztec underworld. Access back to the world of the living for the Day of the Dead ritual is controlled by Catrina, a trickster figure.Catrina also serves as the mouthpiece for the wit that leavens Cruz’s poetic, magic realism-inflected text. “Nothing illustrates the Mexican sense of humor and irony toward death more than the sugar-candy skulls that are made for the festivities of the Day of the Dead,” Cruz said, “as if death were sweet to eat and it can disintegrate in our mouths.”The most surprising of the opera’s quartet of characters is a young actor named Leonardo — a countertenor role — who impersonates Greta Garbo for a fan, whom Leonardo crosses over from Mictlan to visit every year.Leonardo embodies the world of art, which coexists with the worlds of the living and of the dead. The entire opera is structured around the passage among these three worlds, which are separate yet also connected. Frank said she set out to create “evocative soundscapes so that the audience is very clear when we enter a different phase of Frida and Diego’s story.”Frank established a musical vocabulary to conjure these worlds by assigning distinct gestures and instrumental colors to each: lush harmonies to evoke “the grandeur of the underworld beneath the moonlight, a big, night sound”; hints of folkloric music and lighter dance rhythms for the world of the living; and intimate, chamber music-like textures for the world of art.Diego Rivera’s “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park,” at the Diego Rivera Mural Museum, in Mexico City.Fernando Llano/Associated PressFor authenticity, said Bennett from San Diego Opera, it was important to round out the creative team with Mexican artists and to hire native Spanish-speaking singers for the two leads. The mezzo-soprano Guadalupe Paz and the baritone Alfredo Daza will create the roles of Frida and Diego.The Mexican-born conductor, Roberto Kalb, who recently led the premiere of Tobias Picker’s opera “Awakenings,” admires the diversity of colors in Frank’s score, with the marimba threaded throughout as a unifying timbre. “She’s a master orchestrator and writes for the chorus as well as anyone,” he said. “It’s her first opera, but it doesn’t sound like it.”Frank’s references to Mexican music tend to be subtle and, for Kalb, “are always done elegantly, with great respect. As a Mexican, I appreciate that, because so many pieces just slap it on.”Kalb described the overarching tone of Frank’s music as “ancient spectralism” — referring to a focus on the phenomenon of sound itself, which she blends with an early-music flavor.“A timeless kind of sound is important,” Frank said. “That’s how Frida and Diego saw what they did. Yes, they were creating new art. But they were obsessed with old Mexican art and tradition.”Specific examples of their art influenced Cruz’s ideas for the dramatic structure. In “The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl,” from 1949, Kahlo depicts Rivera as a child, embraced by herself and by an earth goddess. Cruz said that from this image he derived the opera’s core concept of Kahlo helping Rivera cross over at the end of his life, three years after her death: “It is a self-portrait that celebrates the union of the Riveras, perhaps in the afterlife, or in a more idealistic and artistic world.”Rivera’s mural “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon at Alameda Central Park” (1946-47), which mingles his life story with a political history of Mexico, springs to life at the beginning of second act as the artist is shown painting it. Frida emerges from its composition to re-enter the world of the living.The director, Lorena Maza, who is from Mexico City, said that she and her design team took their cues from the two painters’ shared love of Indigenous and folk art, as well as their activism. But equally fundamental to the opera’s mise-en-scène are their differences in outlook: the intimacy of the self-portraits that figure so prominently in Kahlo’s work — “each one a battle against pain and disintegration” — and the social realism of Rivera’s epic murals.“Mainly what we bring to the table is the Mexican view of the story,” Maza said. “What Anglo-Saxon culture knows about the Día de los Muertos, or about Frida and Diego, is a bit different from how we live it. We want to avoid the folkloric, cliché version of this celebration and of these two artists. For us, these are very close, personal characters who have been with us since we were children and who both created a Mexican visual identity for us.”The opera’s aim, suggested by the final lines of the chorus of departed souls, is to invite us to enter into the world of Frida and Diego, to erase the borderlines between the real and the imagined:“Life is briefbut the light will followthe strokes of your paintbrush.From your paintings emerge,an anthem of sun,the glory of your gaze.” More