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      Music Festivals Try to Go Green and Carbon Neutral

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      A handful of festivals are striving to become carbon neutral by reducing waste, using high-tech dance floors and offsetting emissions.In Nashville this past August, about 5,000 revelers in neon chaps, gothic chains and kaleidoscopic crop tops descended on Bicentennial Park for an electronic music festival. They gyrated to pulsating sets by the British D.J. Chris Lake and the electronic duo Snakehips. They watched choreographed light shows and got massages in a healers’ village.And when they raised their arms in the air, many of them flashed a green wristband, signifying a commitment to partying in a way that was carbon neutral.Billed as the “greenest festival” in the country, Deep Tropics had no trash cans (though there were plenty of recycling and compost bins), and single-use plastics were banned. Festival organizers said that all the carbon consumed for the two-day event (including the fuel used by all the festivalgoers) will be offset by the planting of some 23,000 trees.“We’re the next generation of festivals,” said Blake Atchinson, 39, who founded Deep Tropics in 2017 with his twin brother, Joel Atchinson. “We are trying to be on the cutting edge of technology and culture and sustainability and art.”The festival was founded by Blake and Joel Atchison. “We are trying to be on the cutting edge of technology and culture and sustainability and art,” Blake said. Taylor Baucom for The New York TimesTraditional music festivals consume a lot of resources. The sound systems and lights alone guzzle tons of power. Bigger festivals like Lollapalooza and Tomorrowland draw hundreds of thousands of revelers, who use energy to get there and leave behind mountains of waste. What isn’t carried in by hand needs to be trucked in.And that’s not counting the D.J.s. A 2021 report by Clean Scene, a climate collective in Berlin, found that 1,000 of the top D.J.s together took more than 51,000 flights in a single year, emitting 35 million tons of carbon dioxide — equivalent to the amount of power consumed by 20,000 households.But there is a novel push by eco-minded organizers to make festivals greener, sometimes through smaller, feel-good initiatives like compost toilets and vegan food trucks. Others are striving for bigger impact by offsetting their carbon emissions, or tapping dancers’ body heat to power their heating and cooling systems.“There’s pressure on festivals, especially because they’re such large events,” said Fallon MacWilliams, 37, a D.J. and promoter in Berlin who is one of the three founders of Clean Scene. “This year while touring I saw a lot of festivals changing the way they’re doing things when it comes to plastic and encouraging artists to take trains to the festival.”Vision: 2025, a nonprofit in Bristol, England, has gotten more than 40 festivals in Britain to pledge to cut their emissions in half and double their recycling rates by 2025. Daybreaker, which organizes sober dance parties worldwide, hosts a series of morning raves where single-use plastics are prohibited and public transportation is encouraged.Some festival organizers say the changes need to be more systemic. Music festivals are “completely dependent on cheap flights and therefore the consumption of fossil fuels,” said Eilidh McLaughlin, 35, a founder of Clean Scene. “Any effort to advance sustainability is essentially greenwashing unless you are working to actively break the cycle and reduce your carbon footprint by touring more sustainably.”The festival took place in Nashville in August.Taylor Baucom for The New York TimesThe lights and sounds will be offset by the planting of trees.Taylor Baucom for The New York TimesIn 2020, DGTL, an organization in Amsterdam that produces electronic music festivals, pledged to be climate neutral. “We are trying to create a new festival landscape where sustainability will be the norm,” said Mitchell van Dooijeweerd, 31, the sustainability manager for DGTL. “It’s become a business model, because we are experts in this and everybody wants to change.”For this year’s Deep Tropics, the organizers teamed with Green Disco, a company in New York that helps events become environmentally friendlier. During the festival, its founders Jonah Geschwind, 22, and Jacob Chandler, 21, stood at the entrance and sold $20 “eco-bands”: green wristbands that funded the planting of trees and other environmental causes.“If you make sustainability easy and as cool as possible, people are going to naturally adopt it,” said Mr. Chandler, who said they sold about 500 bracelets, which he estimates will offset 400 metric tons of carbon dioxide.A group called Green Disco sold “eco-bands” that will offset carbon emissions. Taylor Baucom for The New York TimesBigger festivals are also making efforts: Coachella has increased vegan food options, urged its attendees to car pool and pledged to slash emissions; Burning Man announced a 10-year sustainability road map in 2019.And some music acts are trying, too. Coldplay has pledged that its current tour will create half as much greenhouse gas emissions as its previous one. The band is also touring with a kinetic dance floor that uses human movement to create electricity. The floor was a previous attraction at Club Watt, a dance club in Rotterdam that’s now closed.Still, real-world practicalities sometimes get in the way. At this year’s Burning Man there were 12-hour traffic jams, leaving ravers stuck in hot, idling cars while Nevada temperatures crept above 100 degrees. And at Deep Tropics, some vendors used plastic packaging despite signing pledges.There were no trash cans at the festival (though plenty of recycling and compost bins).Taylor Baucom for The New York TimesThat doesn’t mean progress isn’t being made, said Heather White, 49, an environmental scientist in Bozeman, Mont., and founder of the nonprofit One Green Thing.“From a 30,000-foot level, does all this matter?” she said. “It absolutely matters. These electronic music festivals are drivers of culture change. We have to have these living laboratories, where people can see zero waste at a concert, because without culture change, big policy solutions are not going to work.” More

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      What I’ve Learned in 60 Years of Listening to the Philharmonic

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      When Anthony Tommasini was a young, aspiring musician, he made his first forays into the orchestra’s concert hall. He realized it would not do.In April 1962, having just turned 14, I attended a New York Philharmonic concert at Carnegie Hall that brought together my top two classical music heroes: Leonard Bernstein and Rudolf Serkin. Well, three heroes, if you include Beethoven, the evening’s featured composer. I can still see Serkin swaying on the piano bench, mouthing the German words to a joyous theme, almost a beer hall tune, in the “Choral Fantasy,” as he played along. Their exhilarating performance of the mighty “Emperor” Concerto made me fantasize about somehow, someday playing it.After the concert, I waited at the stage door and, mumbling shyly, got Serkin’s autograph. I still have two scrapbooks of programs and playbills from those days, now falling apart.That Carnegie concert was just five months before the orchestra was to take up residence in its new home, Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center. For years this project had been promoted as the beginning a new era for the performing arts in New York, and the country. I bought into the hype. After all, Bernstein — Uncle Lenny to aspiring young musicians like me — had been talking up the hall big time, asserting that the orchestra needed a state-of-the-art space, a home of its own and a place of honor in this ambitious cultural complex. It sounded like a great idea to my teenage self.Later, as a music critic, I would spend an enormous amount of my professional life with the New York Philharmonic and what became Avery Fisher Hall, then David Geffen Hall. Now that the Philharmonic is opening the doors to its transformed auditorium, and welcoming audiences to what it hopes will be not just a new era, but a creative rebirth for the orchestra and its audiences, I’ve been reflecting on my early concert-going life. And some of my youthful impressions turned out to be perceptive about problems that would vex this hall for some 60 years.Back then, I didn’t see what the problem was with Carnegie Hall. Yes, it was dusty and worn, with chipped paint, torn seat cushions and no air conditioning. All that made it seem more welcoming, somehow — its storied history as tangible as the dust particles. I felt like I belonged there, just by dint of loving music so much.When Philharmonic Hall opened, almost immediately critics, artists and architects complained about its acoustics. I remember reading the coverage by the lofty New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg. In one column he wrote that the “first night was a near-disaster, acoustically,” that the sound “was too dry,” that “low strings could scarcely be heard” and that quick adjustments to the hall left it, at best, inconsistent. Whew, I thought, he certainly seemed sure of himself.I was too consumed with school — the Third Form at St. Paul’s in Garden City, Long Island — along with practicing the piano and entering competitions, to get to Philharmonic Hall until the summer of 1963. It certainly looked plush and elegant. But it’s telling that I have such vague memories of the music from that night. The performances (by a festival orchestra), the sound of the music, must not have grabbed me. The musicians seemed kind of distant.Thinking back, my memories of Philharmonic concerts I attended during those first years, usually sitting somewhere in the balconies, remain vague, though I heard some exciting performances, including Duke Ellington leading the orchestra in his suite “The Golden Broom and the Green Apple.” I finally heard Bernstein conduct the orchestra there in early 1966, and I can’t say I have lingering memories, even with Prokofiev’s powerful Fifth Symphony as a closer.Newly renovated versions of the hall have been unveiled over the years, including this one in 1976.Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
      What was wrong? At that time I was also going to the Metropolitan Opera, the “old” Met on 39th Street, and though I can hardly remember what the house looked like and have only scant recollections of productions, I remember the music vividly and in detail. In retrospect I blame Philharmonic Hall: the setting, the stiff formality and stuffiness.I acclimated to Philharmonic Hall, or so I thought, when I attended the orchestra’s Stravinsky Festival in the summer of 1966. The first concert, led by Bernstein, ended with “The Rite of Spring” (with Stravinsky in the audience). The last one ended with Stravinsky conducting his “Symphony of Psalms.”OK, I thought, this place will do. After all, the music, what’s being presented, matters most. Then, a month later, I heard Bernstein conduct the “Rite” again, preceded by Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, in an open-air tent as part of the Long Island Festival at C.W. Post College.This concert was an epiphany. I “got,” I’m sure, the point Bernstein was making by pairing these pathbreaking scores. Sitting maybe 15 rows from the stage, I was overwhelmed by the sheer audaciousness of both pieces. It was clear to me that no concert at Philharmonic Hall could have the visceral impact that this one did.Fast forward to 1997, when I joined the staff of The New York Times as a classical music critic. Now it was my job to report on performances and hold the orchestra to high standards. I went to concerts at Avery Fisher Hall all the time, usually sitting in the same choice seat. I wanted to be open-minded and maintain a larger perspective. Yes, the hall was no Carnegie or the Musikverein in Vienna, but the badness of the acoustics was often overstated. On a given night, a concert there could be terrific.Since I started this look back with memories of Beethoven at Carnegie, let me use him to explain how I’ve experienced the hall over the years. When I got the critic’s job, Kurt Masur, a self-professed Beethoven expert, was the Philharmonic’s music director. His Beethoven had heft and rectitude but it came across as ponderous and imposing, somehow above it all, rather like the hall itself.The contrast was stunning when, in 2006, Bernard Haitink brought the London Symphony Orchestra to Avery Fisher for a survey of Beethoven’s nine symphonies. The playing was crackling and robust, confident yet spontaneous. The maestro and his players seemed to be delving into these sublime, sometimes strange scores for the first time. I forgot about the drab surroundings and the acoustical limitations.I fully supported the decision to hire the young Alan Gilbert, who took over as music director in 2009. Some critics and patrons found his Beethoven performances uninspired. I didn’t really agree, and I didn’t care. The orchestra became newly adventurous under his watch. At the end of his first season, working with the inventive director Doug Fitch, Gilbert turned the featureless hall into a wonderfully makeshift opera house for a riveting production of Ligeti’s modernist opera “Le Grand Macabre.” I forgot all about acoustics. That night the hall seemed cool, the place to be.But it wasn’t, really. And there were too many nights when stirring Bach choral works, animated Mozart symphonies, intense Brahms concertos, diaphanous Debussy scores and more just sounded wan, and I felt restless in my seat.Over the years, there have been a few attempts at major renovations to correct the hall’s shortcomings. They weren’t radical enough. So it was past time to get it right, to reconfigure the entire space and to turn David Geffen Hall into a welcoming and acoustically lively home for America’s oldest orchestra. When the visionary Deborah Borda was appointed president of the Philharmonic in 2017, her second stint running the orchestra, she swept aside existing plans and started afresh. (She and Henry Timms, the new president and chief executive of Lincoln Center, worked to make it happen, helped by the closure from the pandemic, which allowed construction to speed up.)During a recent rehearsal at Geffen, she said that the goal was to create an “intimate-feeling hall.” The word “feeling” is crucial. The new auditorium, after all, seats 2,200 concertgoers. But being in it, standing on the stage looking out, I felt the space was invitingly intimate. I felt the same sitting in various seats close and far, high and low.Though critics have pledged not to discuss acoustics until after concerts begin, and it will take time to assess, I can’t help saying that I’m guardedly optimistic about what has been accomplished.The transformation of the public spaces already seems a triumph. Especially the spacious yet cozy main lobby just off the plaza, which has a 50-foot-wide video screen on the back wall, upon which live performances will be screened for free, so passers-by can get a sense of what’s going on upstairs.Still, as Borda told me in an interview last year, “If we don’t get the acoustics right, it’s not going to be a success.” Giving concerts, after all, is what orchestras do, the whole point. We’ll see. More

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      David Geffen Hall Reopens, Hoping Its $550 Million Renovation Worked

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      When the New York Philharmonic opened its new home at Lincoln Center in 1962, it held a white-tie gala, broadcast live on national television, with tickets having sold for up to $250 apiece, or nearly $2,500 in today’s dollars.It was a glittering affair, but the hall’s poor acoustics — a critical problem for an art form that relies on unamplified instruments — ushered in decades of difficulties. After the last major attempt to fix its sound, with a gut renovation in 1976, the hall reopened with a black-tie gala and a burst of optimism. But its acoustic woes persisted.Now Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic are hoping that they have finally broken the acoustic curse of the hall, now called David Geffen Hall, which reopened on Saturday after a $550 million overhaul that preserved the building’s exterior but gutted and rebuilt its interior, making its auditorium more intimate and, they believe, better sounding.But this time they are taking a different approach to inaugurating the new hall. Geffen reopened to the public for the first time not with a pricey formal gala, but with a choose-what-you-pay concert, with some free tickets distributed at the hall’s new welcome center.And instead of opening with Beethoven (as the orchestra did in 1962) or Brahms (as in 1976), Geffen opened with the premiere of “San Juan Hill,” a work by the jazz trumpeter and composer Etienne Charles that pays tribute to the rich Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood that was razed to clear the land for Lincoln Center. The work, commissioned by Lincoln Center, was performed by Charles and his group, Creole Soul, and the New York Philharmonic under the baton of its music director, Jaap van Zweden.“It really is like a homecoming, but there are some different family members around this time, which is a great thing,” Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s president and chief executive, said in an interview.The reopening of the hall drew several elected officials, who saw it as a hopeful sign for a city still trying to recover from the damage wrought by the coronavirus. Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York predicted that people would look back at the moment as more than the opening of a new concert hall: “They will say you got it done in the middle of a pandemic.”Senator Chuck Schumer was among the elected officials at the reopening of the hall, which was described as a hopeful moment for a pandemic-battered city. Christopher Lee for The New York TimesBoth Lincoln Center, which owns the hall, and the Philharmonic, its main tenant, see the new hall as an opportunity to become more accessible and welcoming. They are seeking both to lure back concertgoers and to reach a more diverse cross-section of New Yorkers, including Black and Latino residents, who have long been underrepresented at these events.“This is not your grandmother’s Philharmonic,” said Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s president and chief executive. “We are thinking of the totality of the artistic and human and social statement.”Instead of one big celebration, there will essentially be a month of festivities, part of an effort to showcase the hall’s versatility, to break through into the consciousness of media-saturated New Yorkers — and to avoid placing too much emphasis on a single high-pressure night that could yield quick-fire judgments on the renovation and the acoustics.Dozens of people lined up outside the hall on Saturday morning for a chance to get free tickets to “San Juan Hill.” Joanne Imohiosen, 83, who has been attending concerts since the Philharmonic came to Lincoln Center in 1962 and lives nearby, said she hoped the renovation would finally remedy the hall’s acoustic issues. “They should have figured it out by now,” said Imohiosen, who used to work as an assistant parks commissioner. “They’ve been fiddling with it for years.”After “San Juan Hill,” the Philharmonic will return with a couple of weeks of homecoming concerts pairing works by Debussy and Respighi with pieces by contemporary composers including Tania León, Caroline Shaw and Marcos Balter, whose multimedia work “Oyá” is billed as a fantasia of sound and light.There will be not one, but two galas — one featuring the Broadway stars Lin-Manuel Miranda, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Bernadette Peters, and another featuring a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. A free open-house weekend will close out the month, with choirs, youth orchestras, Philharmonic players, hip-hop groups, dance troupes and others performing each day in different spaces in the hall.Much is riding on the success of the revamped Geffen Hall. The 180-year-old Philharmonic, which is still recovering from the tumult of the pandemic and grappling with longstanding box-office declines, is hoping that a more glamorous hall with better sound will lure new audiences.“The stakes are very high; everybody’s waiting and hoping that it’s going to work out,” said Joseph W. Polisi, a former president of Juilliard whose new book, “Beacon to the World: A History of Lincoln Center,” has sections tracing the trials and tribulations of the building. “$550 million is a lot of money. It’s a very big bet.”At the core of the Philharmonic’s strategy is a desire to make Geffen Hall not just a concert venue, but a welcoming gathering place. The new hall includes a coffee shop, an Afro-Caribbean restaurant and a welcome center next to the lobby. Small performances, talks and classes on music and wellness will take place inside a “sidewalk studio” visible from Broadway.The renovation, which equipped the main auditorium with a film screen, an amplified sound system and other technical improvements, gave the Philharmonic an opportunity to reimagine its programming. “San Juan Hill” and “Oyá” showcase the Philharmonic’s new abilities, mixing music with film, 3-D imagery, electronics and light.“The new hall can do things that we’re going to do as a 21st-century orchestra,” Ms. Borda said.A critical test of the new hall will be its audiences. The Philharmonic and Lincoln Center have worked over the past several years to attract more low-income residents to performances, and Lincoln Center has been handing out fliers at nearby public housing complexes advertising upcoming events at Geffen Hall. For the opening, they made a point of inviting former residents of the San Juan Hill neighborhood, as well as schools that serve large numbers of Black and Latino students.“This is a home for all New Yorkers,” Ms. Borda said. “We want to invite them in.”Throughout the hall’s history, politicians, architects, musicians and critics have at times declared past renovations successful, only to see acoustical issues resurface soon after.Mr. Polisi, the former Juilliard president, said that this time seemed different, given the crucial decision to reduce the size of the hall — it now seats 2,200 people, down from 2,738. He said if the Philharmonic had finally remedied the sound problems, it would allow the orchestra to focus on other priorities, including building closer ties to the community and finding a conductor to replace van Zweden, who steps down as music director in 2024.“If they’re a happy orchestra now and they’re able to feel comfortable in their home, that’s also going to be a very psychologically important element for the organization,” said Mr. Polisi, whose father, William Polisi, had been the principal bassoonist of the Philharmonic.As construction workers made finishing touches on the hall this week, unpacking furniture and installing metal detectors in the lobby, the Philharmonic’s players filed into the auditorium for rehearsals. The early reviews from the musicians have been largely positive: Many say that they can finally hear one another onstage and that the sound feels warmer.Ms. Borda and Mr. Timms said they were confident that the Philharmonic would finally have a hall to match its abilities, though they said they did not want to jinx the reopening. “The thing about curses,” Mr. Timms said, “is you never claim they’re broken. You let them speak for themselves.”Ms. Borda, who first began trying to revamp the hall in the 1990s, when she served a previous stint as the Philharmonic’s leader, said she had prepared an image of an atomic explosion to send to Mr. Timms if the renovation turned out to be a disaster.“If it’s really bad,” she joked, looking at Mr. Timms, “I’m sending you this first.”Adam Nagourney More

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      A Welcome Sight at the Upgraded David Geffen Hall: More Bathrooms

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      David Geffen Hall boasts many innovations, including a new welcome center, a 50-foot-wide digital screen and, most important, a revamped auditorium. But for some concertgoers, the most important change may be more practical: the bathrooms.Before the renovation, finding a restroom could be excruciating, especially for women. At intermission, lines snaked through the lobby and jams formed near sinks and paper-towel dispensers.In the new hall, the number of toilets and urinals has risen by more than 50 percent, to 138 from 91. There are now 75 toilets for women, compared with 47 before the renovation, and 52 toilets or urinals for men, compared with 41 earlier.“Bathrooms too often are simply done to meet codes,” the architect Billie Tsien, who worked on the public spaces, said on the eve of the reopening. “But if you have a bad experience — it colors your entire experience. This is especially true when at a theater.” Because the new Geffen Hall has some 500 fewer seats than the old one, fewer people are expected to be using the facilities at any given time, further helping reduce congestion.So there will now be one toilet or urinal for every 15 audience members, according to Lincoln Center, compared with one for every 35 before the renovation. More

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      Much is riding on the reopening of the hall.

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      After years of missteps and false starts, David Geffen Hall, the Lincoln Center home of the New York Philharmonic, finally reopened today after a $550 million renovation that aims to fix its longstanding acoustic woes and create a world-class hall that can entice new generations of concertgoers.The renovation hopes to end, once and for all, an acoustic curse that has plagued the hall since 1962, when it became the first theater at Lincoln Center to open. The auditorium has been gutted and totally rebuilt, removing 500 seats to create a more intimate experience and using rippling wood panels on the walls to diffuse the sound.The Philharmonic hopes the rebuilt hall will provide a burst of energy to help it recover from the coronavirus pandemic, when the 180-year-old orchestra canceled more than 100 concerts and lost $27 million in anticipated revenue. New York has yet to see tourism fully rebound, and attendance at many performing arts organizations has lagged. The reconfigured hall is seen as an opportunity to try to lure old concertgoers back, and to bring new audiences in.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesThe renovation comes as Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic are redoubling efforts to draw a more diverse cross-section of New Yorkers. The opening program symbolizes those ambitions: It features the premiere of “San Juan Hill,” a work by the jazz trumpeter and composer Etienne Charles that pays tribute to the rich Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood that was razed to clear the land for Lincoln Center. The work will be performed by Charles and his group, Creole Soul, along with the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Jaap van Zweden. Tickets were made available on a choose-what-you-pay basis, with some given away free. More

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      Geffen Hall Commissions New Art That Honors Black and Latino History

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      Public art commissions are tricky. The creator has to make something that’s accessible but enduring, relevant to the site but also able to stand on its own. Still, Jacolby Satterwhite and Nina Chanel Abney, tapped by Lincoln Center, the Public Art Fund and the Studio Museum in Harlem to celebrate the reopening of David Geffen Hall with a pair of major new installations, make it look easy.Photo of “An Eclectic Dance to the Music of Time,” a video by Jacolby Satterwhite at David Geffen Hall in Manhattan.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesSatterwhite, 36, a Brooklyn-based artist, works in performance, 3-D animation and sculpture, often incorporating drawings by his mother, Patricia Satterwhite, into elaborate installations. Abney, 40, best known for painting, also lives in New York and is a public art veteran. They were chosen from a short list of nominated artists after submitting proposals. Between them, the artists incorporate the history of the Lincoln Center and its performing companies, and also of San Juan Hill, the largely Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood displaced by the performing arts complex, into deeply thoughtful pieces that are also joyful and welcoming.Both will stay up 18 months before giving way to new commissions. (Sadly missing is Richard Lippold’s majestic, 40-foot “Orpheus and Apollo,” removed from the hall in 2014 and currently slated to reappear at La Guardia Airport.)“San Juan Heal,” Abney’s contribution, comprises 35 large vinyl squares ornamenting most of the building’s northern facade. Collagelike shapes render an apropos figure, letter or phrase: “Soul at the Center,” “San Juan Hill,” Thelonious Monk in a red cap. (He lived in the area.) The mixture captures the sometimes dissonant vibrancy of this particular patch of Manhattan; several large letter Xs could stand for multiplying different influences or for the overlooked histories that have been crossed out. But the bold colors and easy legibility, and the way the whole thing makes the building look almost like an educational children’s toy, reach out and grab you across Broadway.Satterwhite’s “An Eclectic Dance to the Music of Time,” a half-hour video that will play on all 400 square feet of the lobby’s digital wall whenever it’s not simulcasting concerts, offers a kind of simulated timeless Lincoln Center. News tickers share factoids about the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic, especially relating to Black musicians and composers (like the opera singer Marian Anderson or the child prodigy Philippa Schuyler).Dancers and musicians, choreographed by Satterwhite, silently follow their muses under billboard-size photos of performers from the past in a constantly moving digital landscape. As the views swing gently in and out and the video’s muted colors cycle through four sections, the piece achieves an extraordinary balance between stasis and movement, picture and narrative, the excitement of the present and the grandeur of history. More

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      Anton Fier, Drummer Who Left Stamp on a Downtown Scene, Dies at 66

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      He worked with everyone from the Feelies to Herbie Hancock to Laurie Anderson, as well as leading the indie-rock supergroup the Golden Palominos. But there was a troubled side.Even at his musical peak in the 1980s, Anton Fier, a drummer, producer and bandleader who brought power and precision to his work with acts as diverse as the Feelies, Herbie Hancock, Laurie Anderson and his own star-studded ensemble, the Golden Palominos, seemed to glimpse a dark end for himself.The film and music critic Glenn Kenny, in an email, remembered running into Mr. Fier in the mid-1980s at the Hoboken, N.J., nightclub Maxwell’s, then a cauldron of indie rock, and querying him about alarming details on the sleeve of the Palominos’ album “Visions of Excess.”The rear cover featured a photograph of Mr. Fier, visibly drunk, quaffing a cocktail at a rock club. With it was an acknowledgment that read, “For Jim Gordon and Bonzo,” a reference to the Derek and the Dominos drummer who murdered his own mother during a psychotic episode, and to John Bonham, the Led Zeppelin drummer who died at 32 after consuming some 40 shots of vodka.Mr. Fier seemed to be hinting at his own grisly demise. “I don’t care,” Mr. Kenny recalled him saying. “I’m not going to live to be 35.”With anyone else, the episode might fit a familiar narrative — the self-destructive rocker in a death spiral. But throughout his life, friends said, Mr. Fier always resisted easy categorization.He was a punk-rock provocateur who could extemporize, seemingly for hours, about free-jazz pioneers and Ghanaian percussion luminaries; an artist with big ambitions and a web of platinum connections, but also a loner who shunned interviews and self-promotion; a prickly contrarian who seemed to revel in confrontation, but who was also known among friends for a kind, generous spirit.“Anton was kind of like a Tootsie Pop, with a hard exterior and a soft core,” the singer-songwriter Lianne Smith, a close friend who worked with him, said in a phone interview.Little wonder, then, that his death on Sept. 14 at 66 — confirmed by a cremation notice from a service in Basel, Switzerland — left as many questions as answers. The cause was rumored to be voluntary assisted dying, the location said to be in Switzerland, and suicide itself did not seem out of the question. Plagued by money troubles and waning career prospects, he had openly discussed the topic among friends in recent years. But where? When? How?He had certainly fallen on hard times. Dogged by money woes, lacking musical inspiration and, after injuring his wrists, hindered in playing drums to his own high standards, he had lost his only outlet. “He had a lot of pressures and a lot of anxieties,” Ms. Smith said. “But when he played music, he was a complete human being.”Mr. Fier in 1987. “Anton was kind of like a Tootsie Pop,” a friend and fellow musician said, “with a hard exterior and a soft core.”Rick McGinnisAnton John Fier III was born on June 20, 1956, in Cleveland, to Anton J. Fier Jr., an electrician and former Marine, and Ruthe Marie Fier. His parents split up when he was young, and Mr. Fier, who was known as Tony in his school days, endured a difficult relationship with his stepfather, a polka musician, he later told friends.Turning to music, he worked in a record store as a teenager and eventually drummed his way into the Cleveland proto-punk scene, recording with a version of the Styrenes and playing on the seminal 1978 EP “Datapanik in the Year Zero” by Pere Ubu, the conceptual band that calls its genre “avant garage.”Soon after, Mr. Fier followed his musical dreams to New York, where he brokered his encyclopedic knowledge of music into a job at the SoHo Music Gallery, a record store catering to the downtown music cognoscenti. There, he seemed more interested in chatting about records than selling them.Mr. Kenny recalled, “I remember walking in one day and these two cats” — Mr. Fier and the experimental saxophonist John Zorn, a fellow clerk — “were sitting up front talking about Charlie Parker, treating browsers like they were minor inconveniences.”Mr. Fier did more than talk about music. A gifted and ferocious drummer, he got his big break in 1978 when he answered an ad in The Village Voice placed by the Feelies, a cerebral indie group from New Jersey that The Voice had recently called the best underground band in New York. The group was looking for a drummer.“We asked the people who called what they thought of Moe Tucker,” Glenn Mercer, the band’s guitarist and vocalist, said, referring to the Velvet Underground’s drummer. “We were thinking in terms of very simple, primitive drumming. I think he was the only one that even knew who she was.”With a bookish air and a subversive sensibility, Mr. Fier fit the ethos of the band. His explosive drumming helped fuel the group’s first album, “Crazy Rhythms,” which the critic Robert Christgau later described as “exciting in a disturbingly abstract way, or maybe disturbing in an excitingly abstract way.”But Mr. Fier’s personality proved explosive as well, making his tenure with the band a short one. As the Feelies pulled up to a gig at one club, where the line was around the block, he gushed about how thrilled he was to be in the band. After a raucous set that had the packed house cheering, his mood inexplicably turned.“When the show was over, he was like, ‘You guys are so controlling, I can’t believe it,” Mr. Mercer recalled Mr. Fier saying. “Just like that, a 180.”Mr. Fier with the Golden Palominos in 2012.Christopher Gregory for The New York TimesEven so, Mr. Fier’s career continued to flourish. He joined the Lounge Lizards, John Lurie’s avant-jazz combo, for their first album, released in 1981, before Mr. Lurie rose to fame as an archetype of New York cool with his roles in Jim Jarmusch’s indie films “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Down by Law.”His career rose to new heights in the mid-1980s: He toured with the jazz keyboardist Herbie Hancock following Mr. Hancock’s 1984 pop-funk crossover hit “Rockit,” and played on Laurie Anderson’s acclaimed 1984 album, “Mister Heartbreak.”By that point his musical ambitions could not be contained behind the drum kit, so Mr. Fier formed the Golden Palominos, an ever-evolving indie-rock supergroup that attracted a parade of guest stars, including Michael Stipe, John Lydon and Richard Thompson, through the rest of the 1980s and into the ’90s.“The band revolved around anyone Anton liked at the time,” Syd Straw, the iconoclastic singer-songwriter who got her start with the group, said by phone. “He had pretty bizarre social skills, but he was a magnet for brainy musicians. I think that he was, at heart, an amazing casting director.”In whatever musical role, Mr. Fier was exacting. “He never ‘settled,’’’ Chris Stamey, a founder of the indie band the dB’s who performed with the Palominos, recalled in an email. “And this could be unsettling at times. But we all wanted to see that blissful smile when something finally met his high standards.”Through the 2000s and early 2010s, Mr. Fier began to focus more on producing, working on albums by Ms. Smith, Julia Brown and the guitarist Jim Campilongo, although he did continue to perform with a highly regarded combo headed by the singer, guitarist and bassist Tony Scherr, a former Lounge Lizard.He also quit alcohol, a habit that had grown prodigious, particularly since the hard-partying Hancock tour, Mr. Stamey said.Hounded by creditors, however, Mr. Fier drifted further and further off the grid, avoiding even banks. He seemed to conclude, in eerily analytical fashion, that life was no longer worth living. Ms. Smith said he told her that he wanted to “fly to Thailand, have a wonderful vacation, take a lot of drugs and walk into the ocean.”The pandemic seemed only to deepen his despair. Without work or family (his only marriage, in 1976, lasted less than a year), he began researching his options. Last fall, Mr. Stamey recalled, Mr. Fier told him that he had been burned when he paid $900 over the internet for a veterinary tranquilizer, which he had decided “was the most peaceful way to go.”A few months ago, Mr. Fier texted his friend J.P. Olsen, a filmmaker and musician who had recently moved to Indiana, asking him for his new address. Mr. Fier had some boxes he wanted to send him. On Sept. 21, word began circulating that he was dead, apparently from an assisted suicide in Switzerland. Four days later, Mr. Olsen received the boxes, which were filled with piles of Mr. Fier’s clothes.And on Oct. 1, Nicky Skopelitis, a Palominos guitarist and the executor of Mr. Fier’s estate, received the cremation notice, dated Sept. 14, along with Mr. Fier’s remains.Questions about his last days linger. But in a way, friends said, that seems fitting for a man who was only too comfortable with loose ends.Two years ago, Mr. Stamey urged Mr. Fier to write a memoir, to pull him out of his funk. Mr. Fier’s response, Mr. Stamey recalled, was curt: “He said that he wanted to be the only one who didn’t write a book.” More

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      Liverpool Will Host 2023 Eurovision Song Contest

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      The popular competition would have been held in Ukraine, which won this year’s event, but safety concerns sent it to Britain instead.Liverpool will host the Eurovision Song Contest in 2023, organizers of the musical competition announced on Friday, choosing the birthplace of the Beatles for one of Europe’s premier cultural events.The M&S Bank Arena, an 11,000-capacity arena, will stage the competition on May 13, 2023, organizers said.The announcement capped an unusual selection process, in which Ukraine, which earned the right to host next year’s event after winning this year’s contest, was ruled out by Eurovision organizers, who said the war-torn country could not provide the necessary “security and operational guarantees.”Instead, Britain, the runner-up in 2022, was named host. Liverpool was selected from a shortlist of seven cities that also included Glasgow, the runner-up, along with Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield.Hosting Eurovision “means everything” for Liverpool, the city’s director of culture, Claire McColgan, told the BBC on Friday.“We’re doing it for Ukraine first of all, for our brilliant city and for the people who come here,” Ms. McColgan said. “It’s going to be incredible.”Ukraine had offered three potential locations that it said were safe from the fighting: Lviv, in western Ukraine; the Zakarpattia region, which borders Hungary and Slovakia; and the capital, Kyiv.But the European Broadcasting Union, which organizes the competition, announced in July that Britain would host instead. At the time, Martin Österdahl, Eurovision’s executive supervisor, pledged that Ukraine would be “celebrated and represented throughout the event,” with representatives from a Ukrainian broadcaster working with the BBC.Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, also said the network was “committed to making the event a true reflection of Ukrainian culture alongside showcasing the diversity of British music and creativity.”Eurovision began in 1956, gathering musical artists from countries across Europe, as well as some farther afield, including Australia and Israel.Britain has hosted the event eight times, most recently in 1998 in Birmingham.The selection will bring a major international spotlight to Liverpool. Over 160 million people watched in May as Kalush Orchestra, a Ukrainian rap act, was crowned the winner in Turin, Italy.Sixty-two years after the Beatles formed, Liverpool remains closely tied to the enormously influential rock band. The band is central to the city’s tourism, with Beatles-themed museums, tours and a statue along the waterfront.Though Liverpool has produced fewer star international acts recently, the local music scene is small-scale and “healthy,” said Karl Whitney, the author of “Hit Factories: A Journey Through the Industrial Cities of British Pop.” There are “lots of great bands from Liverpool,” he said, “but the Beatles, obviously, sort of overshadow everything.”The city plans collaborations with Ukrainian street artists, designers and musicians to bring the country’s culture to the city, The Liverpool Echo reported this week. Claire McColgan, the director of Culture Liverpool, told the newspaper that “this is their party, it just happens to be in our house,” referring to the Ukrainians.“If we are chosen as host city there’s no question Eurovision will take over Liverpool in a way no single event has ever done before,” she said this week. More