Music

The film’s thesis is blunt: Put a woman in power, and she’ll be as sexually inappropriate and badly behaved as any man.Early in the new film “Tár,” an eminent conductor, played by Cate Blanchett, has strewn classical LPs over her floor. They’re designed in the old-school style of the Deutsche Grammophon label, which had the grandest maestros of the 20th century — the likes of Leonard Bernstein, Herbert von Karajan and Claudio Abbado — brooding from the covers of recordings of symphonies by Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner.Lydia Tár is sorting through them with her foot — as if in disgust, like she can’t bear to touch them. As if she’s toppled the whole patriarchal tradition and can now stand above it, a David who’s killed all the Goliaths.But we soon discover that she wasn’t mulling over the records in that spirit; she was merely looking for inspiration. For her new Mahler album, she’s decided that she wants to be photographed sitting alone — oversize score open, face solemn, lighting dramatic — in the seats of the Berlin Philharmonic’s home hall. Just like Abbado and the rest.Tár represents a radically different face of classical music. Barely any women — in the film or in real life — have done what she has: made it to the top tier of the world’s orchestral podiums. Let alone that of the Berlin Philharmonic, perhaps the most celebrated of them all, which Blanchett’s character rules with cool authority.“We don’t see women at the top of this food chain ever,” said Marin Alsop, who during her tenure at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra was the first and only female leader of one of the 25 largest American ensembles.But, as we gradually learn, Tár represents anything but a radical break with the past.In the music world, that past is embodied in the worship of maestros, whose hard-to-define, near-spiritual, silent yet crucial role as conduits of the great composers has long granted them fearsome dominance. Theirs is a position so flush with power that it has been all too easy for them to abuse it.Blanchett plays a powerful conductor in “Tár,” which posits that classical music is addicted to the myth of the all-knowing, all-hearing leader.Focus FeaturesIt’s become an assumption for many inside and outside the field that, as women and people of color slowly but steadily diversify the ranks of top conductors, the problems associated with maestro worship — that outsize power, eye-popping (even deficit-encouraging) salaries, sexual misconduct, anger issues, reactionary repertory choices, dependence on name-brand conductors to sell tickets — will ease.Not so fast, says “Tár,” written and directed by Todd Field.The film posits a more unsettling, intractable possibility: that classical music remains so robustly addicted to the myth of the all-knowing, all-hearing leader that it will continue to grant those leaders a degree of power that will inevitably corrupt women and men alike.For Lydia Tár is no better — certainly no better behaved — than any of the rageaholic, underling-seducing men we are often assured are going extinct.‘Tár’: A Timely Backstage DramaCate Blanchett plays a world-famous conductor who is embroiled in a #MeToo drama in the latest film by the director Todd Field.Review: “We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art,” our critic writes about the film’s protagonist.An Elusive Subject: Blanchett has stayed one step ahead of audiences by constantly staying in motion. In “Tár,” she is as inscrutable as ever.Back Into the Limelight: The film marks Field’s return to directing, 16 years after “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” made waves.Big-Screen Aesthetics: “Tár” was among several movies at the New York Film Festival that offered reflections on the rarefied worlds of classical music and visual art.That some of those men have, in recent years, undergone steep falls from grace for their misconduct doesn’t seem to give Tár pause. She is a sexual predator, imperious, controlling. She grants plum gigs to her crushes and turns up her nose at fresh sounds as she elevates the standards: The movie centers on her rehearsing the Berlin orchestra in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which she decides to pair with Elgar’s equally classic Cello Concerto (featuring, of course, a talented young woman who has caught her eye as soloist).“Tár” says that the fundamental structure of the field — the persistent over-glorification of the podium, casting even benign conductors in a paternal role — is the problem. And it’s a problem that won’t necessarily be solved by changing the identity of the person holding the baton. The film’s thesis could be bluntly stated: Women, too, can be inappropriately horny and generally evil.The woman Field creates has achieved more power than any female conductor in history. She wields it malignantly, and she is humiliated for doing so, even more catastrophically than any of her real-life male counterparts.If that fantasy is persuasive, it’s because, for all its noirish, even horror-movie trappings, “Tár” is a largely realistic depiction of its subject matter. (Far more so than “Black Swan” in relation to ballet, or “Whiplash” to jazz.) Blanchett gestures on the podium like a real conductor; a few references to the symphony she is preparing as “the Five” — rather than “the Fifth” or “Mahler Five” — are almost the only slips of tone.Marin Alsop, here conducting the Baltimore Symphony in 2015, was the only female conductor of a top American orchestra, when she stepped down last year. (Now, a year later, there is again one.)Gabriella Demczuk for The New York TimesThe protagonist is clearly based partly on Alsop, who stepped down from the Baltimore podium last year — leaving the number of women in top American positions at zero until Nathalie Stutzmann became music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra this month.Alsop, like Tár, is a lesbian with a partner and a child. And like Tár, she founded a fellowship program for young women seeking to follow in her footsteps. Unlike Tár, Alsop has never been accused of misconduct, with the fellows or otherwise.When we spoke by phone recently, Alsop said that the premise that women would fall into the traps laid by traditional power structures was “premature.”“There haven’t been any women in those positions,” she added. “There haven’t been any people of color in those positions. To assume that they will also be taken under the spell of this maestro mythology, it really is presumptuous.”Presumptuous or not, the film is a reminder that the change we should hope and work for is as much about modesty as it is about identity: a vision of conducting as a vehicle for building community, for giving back, rather than solely for wielding authority in the service of a tiny group of pieces from the ever more distant past. (It is not only men who perpetuate this limited view of the repertory: Stutzmann, for one, told The New York Times recently that she would proudly be focusing on music from before the 20th century.)Cultural changes may well force modesty on the field, like it or not. In the wake of pandemic lockdowns, and as classical music continues to drift further from the mainstream, ticket sales that were once energized by the names and faces of beloved maestros have dried up. Audiences haven’t heard of almost any conductors. Deutsche Grammophon and the other record labels that hawked those brooding visions of paternal authority are shadows of what they were just a few decades ago.Conductors will always be responsible for wrangling a single vision from a stage of 100 musicians; for making decisions; for leading. But that leadership can be more demystified, more collaborative, more modest. It’s a change that must involve more diversity on the podium — but, as “Tár” cautions us, not just that.“I hope the premise that women or people of color will be just as autocratic can be disproved,” Alsop said. “I hope we’re given the opportunity to disprove it.” More

A familiar voice on the California airwaves for almost 80 years, he saw the appeal of old rock ’n’ roll records practically before they were old.Art Laboe, the disc jockey who as a mainstay of the West Coast airwaves for decades bridged racial divides through his music selections and live shows, reached listeners in a new way by allowing on-air dedications and helped make the phrase “oldies but goodies” ubiquitous, died on Friday at his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 97.An announcement on his Facebook page said the cause was pneumonia.Mr. Laboe worked in radio for almost 80 years. In 1973, The San Francisco Examiner was already calling him the “dean of Los Angeles rock ’n’ roll broadcasting,” and he would be on the air for almost a half-century more after that.He started in the business as a teenager during World War II, working at a San Francisco station, KSAN, before gravitating to KPMO in Pomona and KCMJ in Palm Springs. The idea of a disc jockey with a distinctive personality had not yet become the norm in radio — at KCMJ, a CBS affiliate, he was mostly an announcer doing station identifications and such between radio soap operas — but for an hour late at night he was allowed to play music.He featured big bands, crooners and other sounds of the day. But as tastes changed, his selections changed, and sometimes he was at the front edge of the evolution. In 1954, by then working in Los Angeles, Mr. Laboe “was largely responsible for making the Chords’ ‘Sh-Boom’ (sometimes cited as the first rock ’n’ roll record) an L.A. No. 1,” Barney Hoskyns wrote in “Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes, and the Sound of Los Angeles” (1996).He also saw the appeal of “oldies” practically before they were old. Around 1949 he had started working at KRKD in Los Angeles, selling advertising by day and playing music in the wee hours. He thought an all-night restaurant, Scrivener’s Drive-In, might be interested in advertising on his all-night show, so he paid a visit and sold the owner, Paul Scrivener, some spots. A few months later, Mr. Scrivener made a suggestion.“‘You know, that show’s pretty good,’” Mr. Laboe, in a 2016 interview with The Desert Sun of Palm Springs, recalled Mr. Scrivener saying. “‘Why couldn’t you do that show from my drive-in?’ So I did.’”Mr. Laboe issued the first volume of his “Oldies but Goodies” series of compilation albums in 1959. It stayed on the Billboard chart for more than three years, and many more volumes followed.JP Roth CollectionHe would broadcast from the restaurant (he moved to KLXA and then KPOP in this period), stopping by cars and asking the occupants to pick a song from a list.“At the bottom of the list,” The San Francisco Examiner wrote in 1973, “were a half a dozen ‘oldies’ titles — songs at that time no more than three years old — and when this portion of the list began to show the heaviest action, Laboe wondered if there might be something to this.”He had already formed his own record label, Original Sound, and in 1959 it issued “Oldies but Goodies, Vol. 1,” a compilation album — a relatively new concept — that included “In the Still of the Night” by the Five Satins, “Earth Angel” by the Penguins and 10 other songs that, although they’d been on the singles charts only a few years earlier, had already begun to acquire a nostalgic feel. The album stayed on the Billboard chart for more than three years, and many more volumes followed.Early in his career Mr. Laboe began taking requests on the air, allowing listeners to dedicate a song to a friend, love interest or other special person. It became one of his signatures; few if any other disc jockeys were doing that in his early days. Some callers would dedicate a song to a loved one who was incarcerated. And early on, Mr. Laboe welcomed Black and Mexican callers, a barrier-breaking thing to do at the time.In the 1950s, Mr. Laboe also began producing and serving as M.C. at live music shows at the American Legion Stadium in El Monte, a blue-collar city east of Los Angeles, that were known for the racially diverse crowd they attracted. The Penguins, Ritchie Valens and countless other acts performed at the El Monte shows.Mr. Laboe with Jerry Lee Lewis at the American Legion Stadium in El Monte, Calif., in 1957. The shows Mr. Laboe produced there were known for the racially diverse crowd they attracted. Art Laboe Collection“Friday and Saturday night rhythm-and-blues dances at the El Monte Legion Stadium drew up to 2,000 Black, white, Asian American and Mexican American teenagers from all over Los Angeles city and county, becoming an alternative cultural institution from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s,” the scholar Anthony Macias wrote in American Quarterly in 2004.Mr. Laboe was still producing live shows into his 90s.“If you come to one of our concerts,” he told KQED in 2019, “you’ll see a mixture, a complete mixture, of what we have in California.”He was also still on the radio, on the syndicated “Art Laboe Connection,” after having logged time at assorted stations. In 2002, Greg Ashlock, the general manager of KHHT-FM in Los Angeles, where Mr. Laboe had a long run, summed up Mr. Laboe’s appeal in an interview with The Los Angeles Times.“There’s nobody that connects with the community like him,” he said. “The audience knows him and loves him like a family member. It’s almost like tuning in to Uncle Art.”Wherever he was spinning, Mr. Laboe made it a point of mixing genres and generations.“Sometimes the 20-year-old who wants to hear Alicia Keys will tolerate the Spinners,” he told The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif., in 2008. “It’s not off the course enough to make them want to change stations.”Russell Contreras/Associated PressArthur Egonian was born on Aug. 7, 1925, in Salt Lake City to a family of Armenian immigrants. His obsession with radio began at a young age: His sister gave him his first radio for his eighth birthday. In a 2020 interview with The Press-Enterprise, he recalled being amazed by the “box that talks.” That experience sparked his interest in the nascent radio scene.He attended George Washington High School in Los Angeles and studied engineering for a time at Stanford University.He was hired at KSAN while still a teenager; his voice, he said, had not yet acquired the timbre that became his calling card.“The very first words I uttered on radio myself, I said, ‘This is K-S-A-N San Francisco,’ and it was in 1943,” he said.The station manager suggested he Americanize his name, and he is said to have taken “Laboe” from the name of a secretary there. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he moved to Southern California, which became his home base.Information about his survivors was not immediately available.In 2015, the nonprofit online radio station DubLab turned the tables on Mr. Laboe, the man who was a conduit for so many on-air dedications, giving his fans an opportunity to call in and dedicate a song to him.“I don’t know what we would have done without you,” one caller said. “I spent a lot of time in a car without anything but a radio, and you made it good, and you exposed me to a lot of beautiful music.” More

The 2022 awards are going to artists, activists, scholars, scientists and others who have shown “exceptional creativity.” The grants are a bit bigger than before: $800,000 over five years.The 2022 MacArthur fellows include a sociologist working to understand what drives people to own guns; an astrodynamicist trying to manage “space traffic” and ensure that satellites don’t crash into each other in Earth’s orbit; and a lawyer seeking to expose inequities in the patent system that stifle access to affordable medications.The 25 winners of the fellowship, announced on Wednesday, study things as small as molecular materials and as vast as outer space. They are esteemed in their fields, if not yet all household names. And now, in addition to being publicly celebrated for their work, they will have more funding to keep it going.Known colloquially as the “genius” award — to the sometime annoyance of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation — the MacArthur Fellowship comes with a no-strings-attached grant of $800,000 to be awarded over five years. (Program officials noted that the size of the stipend has increased for the new group of fellows, from $625,000.)The class includes scholars tackling some particularly timely topics. Jennifer Carlson, 40, investigates the motivations and assumptions that shape gun culture in America. The longtime activist Loretta J. Ross teaches a class that works to combat so-called cancel culture. And some of Yejin Choi’s work involves using computational linguistics to help detect everything from fake consumer reviews to fake news.“I didn’t think much of myself,” said Professor Choi, 45. “I thought this award was supposed to be for other people out there — not ever for me.”“Being an immigrant, being a woman — I had to overcome a lot,” she said. “I had impostor syndrome.”The fellowship is meant for those who “show exceptional creativity in their work and the prospect for still more in the future,” according to the foundation.The purpose “has always been to provide recipients with unrestricted financial support so that they might further their creative work and their creative inclinations with as much freedom as flexibility as possible,” said Marlies Carruth, director of the MacArthur Fellows program.Few honors carry the prestige — and mystique — of the MacArthurs. Potential fellows cannot apply but are suggested by a network of hundreds of anonymous nominators from across the country and narrowed down by a committee of about a dozen people, whose names are not released.Professor Ross said she was driving when she got a call from the foundation. She assumed, at first, that someone wanted an employment reference: “I told them, kind of rudely, ‘I’m driving right now, I’ve got to teach today, call me back at 4:15.’”She did not give the caller time to explain. “I don’t drive and talk,” she said.The foundation called back at 4:15 p.m., as instructed.“I felt honored and I felt a little bewildered,” Professor Ross said. “The hardest part is that they told me a month ago and I had to keep it all to myself.”Much of the winners’ work feels urgent. Jenna Jambeck, an environmental engineer, investigates the scale and pathways of plastic pollution and is among the researchers who provided the first estimate of the amount of plastic waste entering the ocean annually (eight million metric tons).Moriba Jah, 51, the astrodynamicist, is an advocate for a different kind of environmentalism: space environmentalism, which calls for treating Earth’s orbit, which now contains almost 30,000 human-made objects, as a finite natural resource.Priti Krishtel, 44, the lawyer, is trying to change the patent system so that pharmaceutical companies can no longer file multiple patents on small changes to existing drugs — a move aimed at increasing access to affordable medications.In some cases, the urgent work is the study of the past. The literary historian P. Gabrielle Foreman founded the Colored Conventions Project, a digital initiative that documents Black organizing efforts between 1830 and the 1890s.“We know about white-led movements for social change in a way that has a tendency, in the public square, to overshadow Black brilliance, Black leadership and Black organizational capacity,” Professor Foreman said.“Why don’t we know about Black-led movements? One reason is because they are saying the same thing we are saying today,” she continued, noting that the conventions dealt not just with ending slavery but also with issues like equal pay, labor rights, voting rights and other issues that remain pressing almost two centuries later.There are multiple artists in the class as well. Among them is Amanda Williams, whose “Embodied Sensations” installation was at the Museum of Modern Art in 2021. There are also musicians like Ikue Mori, who, over five decades, transformed the use of percussion in improvised music, and the jazz cellist and composer Tomeka Reid.The youngest fellow is Steven Prohira, 35, a physicist engineering new tools to detect subatomic particles. The oldest, at age 69, are Professor Ross and Robin Wall Kimmerer, a plant ecologist known for environmental stewardship that is grounded in both scientific research and the body of knowledge cultivated by Indigenous peoples.Steven Ruggles, 67, is also among this class of fellows. A historical demographer, he built the world’s largest publicly available database of population statistics.“I’m not the most obvious candidate for something like this,” he said, noting that he is older and has already procured considerable grant money. Still, he, conceded, “It’s a humbling thing.”This year’s fellows also include: the artists Paul Chan, Sky Hopinka and Tavares Strachan; the mathematicians June Huh and Melanie Matchett Wood; the historian Monica Kim; the writer Kiese Laymon; Danna Freedman, a synthetic inorganic chemist; Martha Gonzalez, a musician and scholar; Joseph Drew Lanham, an ornithologist and naturalist; Reuben Jonathan Miller, a sociologist, criminologist and social worker; and Emily Wang, a primary-care physician and researcher.Professor Choi, a computer scientist with expertise in what is known as natural language processing, has focused much of her recent research on common sense knowledge and reasoning — and developing artificial intelligence systems that can reason with that common sense.“People really looked down on me,” she said, recalling that someone had once chased her down at a conference to convince her that attempting to study common sense was a fool’s errand.Getting a MacArthur, she said, has been “enabling” — both financially and mentally, Professor Choi said. The same person who had sought her out at the conference asked her years later to recommend reading for a class the person wanted to teach, she said. The topic of the class? Common sense. More

At the San Francisco Symphony, Magnus Lindberg’s music is being conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, his fellow Finn and former classmate.Look at the biographies of Magnus Lindberg and Esa-Pekka Salonen, and you’ll notice that the similarities stack up pretty quickly.These two Finnish artists — both composers, both performers and, in Salonen’s case, one of the world’s great conductors — are the same age, 64, attended the same music school and, on Thursday, will jointly present the premiere of Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the San Francisco Symphony.Well, they’re not exactly the same age. “Magnus is four days older than me,” Salonen said in a joint video interview with Lindberg, “which I’ve never let him forget.”Lindberg laughed. They are friends, of course, and this week’s premiere is the latest chapter in a lifelong relationship defined by mutual support and even the occasional collaboration, as when Salonen recorded Lindberg’s first piano concerto, a 1994 work loosely inspired by Ravel but in a thoroughly modernist vein.The second piano concerto, which the New York Philharmonic debuted in 2012, is a product of Lindberg’s residency there, and was conducted by Alan Gilbert. It is a grand, deceptively conventional piece, running nearly half an hour over three movements. During a reunion with Gilbert three years ago in Hamburg, Germany, Lindberg saw Yuja Wang perform Shostakovich’s two piano concertos with the NDR Elbphilharmonie.“I found that interesting, and we had dinner, and we started to discuss this and that,” Lindberg said, recalling his first meeting with Wang. “I said I would like to do another piano concerto one day, and it became a project.”In the interview, Lindberg and Salonen discussed their history and that project — in which Wang will be the soloist, and which will travel to the New York Philharmonic in January under the baton of their fellow Finn Santtu-Matias Rouvali. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Salonen and Lindberg — both composers, both performers and, in Salonen’s case, one of the world’s great conductors — are the same age, 64, and attended the same music school.Ulysses Ortega for The New York TimesHow did you meet?ESA-PEKKA SALONEN We met at 15 in a music theory group in the precollege department of the Sibelius Academy.MAGNUS LINDBERG We were thrown out of music theory after two weeks because we were trying to know everything better than everyone else. And that teacher put us in the hands of another teacher, who became our theory teacher for eight years. We spent basically all Saturday mornings together during those years.SALONEN We had this iron principle that no matter what happened Friday evening — whether a party or whatever — we were always there Saturday morning.LINDBERG It was typically the three of us playing on two pianos, six hands. We would go through Scriabin’s First Symphony, and then we would analyze it and check the harmonies and play it. Also, we ended up having Esa-Pekka conduct if we played four hands. For me, at least, it was sort of a lifesaver because music theory was always around music with this teacher. It was always making noise, never theoretical.SALONEN During those years, we went through not only the Western music canon but all kinds of things that did not belong to the canon. We developed a party trick that became really unpopular, which is that we played music by Josef Matthias Hauer, the weird Austrian composer who invented a 12-tone system before Schoenberg. We played “Apokalyptische Phantasie” on four hands, and it was not super popular, but we did it anyway because we thought the best thing we can give to friends is to widen their horizons.Yuja Wang, left, will be the soloist on Lindberg’s new piano concerto, which she helped influence.Ulysses Ortega for The New York TimesAnd to the public. You were founders of the group Korvat Auki.SALONEN We had a group of composing students and also instrumental students who were interested in contemporary music, who felt that we needed something new in Finnish music life and to open the windows to the newest things in Europe. So together with other friends and fellow students we started Korvat Auki. That’s how we met Kaija Saariaho, in the first meeting of the society. The first meeting, in fact, took place in Kaija’s then-boyfriend’s apartment. He was a painter, so he brought in his visual arts friends, and there was cross-pollination.The idea was to bring new music to people. So we did concerts in schools and hospitals and so on — outside gas stations in the middle of nowhere, in snow banks. I organized one concert in my old school, which was totally faultlessly executed except that I had forgotten to announce it. Nobody knew that this concert had happened. I started studying conducting as well, mainly because no one seemed interested, so we had to bring someone from our own ranks.LINDBERG We founded a group called Toimii, and that definitely came out of an enormous respect for what Stockhausen was doing. Aside from playing written music, we also did a lot of improvisation. We thought that should be a natural way of expressing musical thoughts.SALONEN That was the group that once performed music at Ojai in bunny suits. That was a children’s concert; the kids seemed to like it.Children have the most open ears.SALONEN Exactly. They are the best audience, no question.How have those years influenced your careers?SALONEN In terms of Magnus and me, the cross-influence has been massive. We have spent countless hours talking about orchestration, notation, form, this and that. It’s been a lifelong school, in a way, and it’s still ongoing. Now I’m getting ready to rehearse his piano concerto tomorrow morning, and it’s a style that I know very well. But the delight here is for me to see, “Oh that’s new; that chord you haven’t used before.”I tell my young conducting colleagues and students: Form relationships with composers. Because in the best-case scenario, you might find a working partner for the rest of your professional life. Of course, growing up in Helsinki in the 1970s was a great place for this to develop because it was a statistically unusual situation where like-minded composers were studying together and hanging out, and despite the different stylistic approaches, we were completely loyal to one another.LINDBERG And we’ve been keeping on with the tradition that every time one of us has written a new piece, we gather and listen, and we give feedback. Being a composer in this strange world is astonishingly alone. Having someone you can trust telling you what he is thinking is crucial.SALONEN The funny thing is that composing gets lonelier as you get older and become more famous. Because fewer people dare to say anything. So at the end of the day, you have your old friends and colleagues.“In terms of Magnus and me, the cross-influence has been massive,” Salonen said. “We have spent countless hours talking about orchestration, notation, form, this and that. It’s been a lifelong school, in a way, and it’s still ongoing.”Ulysses Ortega for The New York TimesWhat new directions, Magnus, did you take with this new piano concerto?LINDBERG I am sort of free. I don’t have to invent the concerto as a sort of individual-collective setup. This piece, despite being in three movements, would almost rather be like three concertos — a concerto in three concertos. I spent a lot of time working on it, and last winter, when it wasn’t fully ready, Yuja and I went through, and I allowed her to influence the writing. The specialties of her technique and her approach to the piano are quite stunning.What should audiences listen for?SALONEN The first time I went through this score, I spotted a few old friends: a moment, very fleeting, where there is a strong allusion to an existing piano piece. There’s one where the orchestra quiets down and the piano starts playing the first bar of “Ondine.” It’s like this hallucination almost, and it goes by very quickly. This is a technique that Magnus has been using since the very beginning. It’s like bumping into somebody in the crowd on the subway. It’s a familiar face — “I must know that person” — and then it’s over.LINDBERG You think you invent something, then you realize, Oh, my God, that was so close to something that exists. Instead of abandoning it, for a brief moment you can give it a tribute, and go away from it.SALONEN These moments, the accidental ones, happen to every composer — at least all the composers who respect the history of music and are aware of it. There’s something nice about the fact that you sometimes go back to your ancestors. It’s a sign of love and respect. More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherWhen the Scottish singer-songwriter Katie Gregson-MacLeod recorded a verse of an unfinished song called “Complex” and posted it to TikTok in August, she was tapping into the app’s penchant for confessional storytelling, and demonstrating its ease of distribution and repurposing.Overnight, the snippet propelled her into viral success, leading to a recording contract and placing her in a lineage of young women who have found success on the app via emotional catharsis — sad, mad or both. That includes Olivia Rodrigo, whose “Drivers License” first gained traction there, and also Lauren Spencer-Smith, Sadie Jean, Gracie Abrams, Lizzy McAlpine, Gayle and many more.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the evolution of TikTok’s musical ambitions and the expansion of its emotional range, how the music business has tried to capitalize on the app’s intimacy, and the speed with which a bedroom-recording confessional can become a universal story line.Guest:Rachel Brodsky, who writes about pop music for StereogumConnect 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

On his debut album, the Alaskan singer-songwriter moved into new emotional territory.Born in Anchorage to a wedding D.J. father and a karaoke-loving mother (whose own grandfather was a skilled luthier), Quinn Christopherson got his start in a music scene he describes as “closed in, so there’s nowhere to run.” For about six years, he played local shows and open mic nights while doing construction gigs and working with homeless and runaway teens at Covenant House. But that all changed in 2019, when he won NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest with his melancholy single “Erase Me,” which details his raw feelings relating to his gender transition. Last month, after wrapping a summer tour with Sharon Van Etten, Julien Baker and Angel Olsen, he released his debut album. “Write Your Name in Pink” is the sort of dreamy record you want to listen to at night, maybe with some flickering candles.“I’m glad I gave music a full-time shot, because in the past my songs were really sad,” says the 30-year-old Alaska Native, who is of Ahtna and Iñupiat ancestry. “The sliver of time I spent on music was spent trying to heal myself. When I started coming into my studio every morning, I could cover all kinds of emotions instead of just using [my music] as therapy.”His new offerings are more joyful — a celebration, he says, of his youth. Not that the songs are any less deeply felt. “Neighborhood,” the first track he wrote for the album, concerns Christopherson’s complex relationship with his mother. “Retelling these stories, I learn along the way,” he says. “My mom and I had some really rough times, but she was hurt before she hurt me. Having empathy for her younger self is important in telling my story, too.”His family has never hid their struggles, Christopherson says, and their openness has inspired him to be vulnerable in his music. “We, as native people, have had a lot to overcome, and we’re still climbing our way out of it,” he says. “You can take a lot of things from people, but you can’t take our stories.” More

The English composer deserves a fresh assessment as the world does (and doesn’t) observe the 150th anniversary of his birth.Ralph Vaughan Williams understood what his fate was likely to be.“Every composer cannot expect to have a worldwide message, but he may reasonably expect to have a special message for his own people,” Vaughan Williams, an Englishman, said in a series of lectures on folk music and nationalism at Bryn Mawr College in 1932. “Many young composers,” he went on, “make the mistake of imagining they can be universal without at first having been local.”There was a time when it seemed plausible that Vaughan Williams might become, if not exactly a universal composer, then at least something more than the countrymen he had described as “unappreciated at home and unknown abroad” in the 1912 essay “Who Wants the English Composer?”Several of Vaughan Williams’s nine symphonies were staples in the United States in his lifetime, and from the depths of the Blitz around 1940 to the front-page news of his death in 1958, he was among the 20th-century composers that American orchestras played most. The New York Times critic Olin Downes even placed him near the summit of contemporary composition in 1954, though he feared that his “kinship to modern society” meant that “the music of the Englishman will age sooner than that of Sibelius with the passing of the period that bore it.”So it seemed. When Harold Schonberg, Downes’s successor, argued in The Times in 1964 that “Vaughan Williams may turn out to be the most important symphonist of the century,” he did so while complaining that his scores were no longer performed, and alongside a report about how busy Benjamin Britten had become.If Vaughan Williams’s music has since recovered in Britain after a period when it was the butt of modernist jokes — “The Lark Ascending” and “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” are routinely elected the favorite works of radio listeners there — the same has hardly been true elsewhere, even in this, the 150th anniversary of his birth.Perhaps Aaron Copland’s judgment in 1931, that Vaughan Williams was “the kind of local composer who stands for something great in the musical development of his own country but whose actual musical contribution cannot bear exportation,” was in the end right.On this page of Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony, he referred to “Pilgrim’s Progress” with the inscription “Upon this place stood a cross, and a little below a sepulchre.”via Royal College of MusicIT IS AT THIS POINT in an essay on an arguably overlooked composer that a critic will often suggest that the judgment of history is wrong, explaining that new research shows that the subject, if renowned as a conservative, was in fact a progressive, deserving of a fresh assessment.It’s an easy enough argument to make in Vaughan Williams’s case, and he does repay another listen. An excellent new biography by the musicologist Eric Saylor makes clear that the composer — who was born in Gloucestershire on Oct. 12, 1872, wrote his first piece at 6, the year of the Brahms Violin Concerto, and his last at 85, in that of Stockhausen’s “Gruppen” — was not, or at least not entirely, the parochial reactionary that he has sometime appeared to be, the comforting nostalgist and purveyor of rustic folksiness who dressed like a gentleman farmer, as Copland called him, and composed like one, too.Especially in the 1920s and ’30s, Vaughan Williams was amply capable of wielding ferocious, dissonant violence, most sardonically in his Fourth Symphony; Bartok admired his percussive Piano Concerto. His modal vocabulary, flecked with pentatonic and other outré accents, could be profoundly ambiguous — sometimes stark, as in “Job,” a ballet in all but name, and sometimes discomforting, as in the otherworldly Sixth. Even the “Lark,” for all its pastoral popularity, has an indeterminate form and a sense of “sonic freedom,” Saylor writes.Nor did Vaughan Williams, a student socialist who remained left-leaning, always flee the present into an Arcadian past, despite the wistfulness of works like his Oboe Concerto. He confronted a broken world in “A Pastoral Symphony,” which despite its title reflects on World War I, in which he witnessed death as a medical orderly and artilleryman, and in “Dona Nobis Pacem,” a pleading antiwar testament from 1936 that anticipates Britten’s “War Requiem.”In truth, though, it is hard to tell any sort of simple story about Vaughan Williams. He cared not at all for trends, making sure he knew what was going on elsewhere in contemporary music — he did, after all, study with Ravel — but remaining indifferent to much of it. “Schoenberg meant nothing to me,” he wrote after the serialist’s death in 1951, “but as he apparently meant a lot to a lot of other people I dare say it is all my fault.” Michael Kennedy, a biographer and friend, recalled that he liked to pronounce “tone row,” impishly, as if it rhymed with “cow.”“Why should music be ‘original’?” Vaughan Williams grumbled in 1950. “The object of art is to stretch out to the ultimate realities through the medium of beauty. The duty of the composer is to find the mot juste. It does not matter if this word has been said a thousand times before as long as it is the right thing to say at that moment.”He was therefore a pragmatist, with an independent streak as strong as his patriotism. He was not beholden to English music as he found it — neither Elgar’s imperial grandeur nor the examples of his tutors, Parry and Stanford — but sought through folk songs and hymnals to refine a national style that he could preserve, and through which he could prosper. Oxymorons work better for him than simplistic categories; he was a conservative iconoclast, an unconventional traditionalist.“There is a unity of style, it’s just that he was able to stretch it in so many different directions,” the conductor Andrew Davis, who is president of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society, said in an interview. “Elgar’s style was quite consistent, and Britten changed over the years, but there was not the radical breadth of emotional range that you find in Vaughan Williams.”During World War I, Vaughan Williams witnessed death as a medical orderly and artilleryman.via RVW TrustOn account of that breadth of emotional and compositional range, there are any number of entry points into Vaughan Williams’s work; for me, the moment of discovery came hearing the Fifth Symphony.ON ITS FACE, the Fifth is one of Vaughan Williams’s most straightforward works, and more than debatably his most purely beautiful. Dedicated to Sibelius, it premiered at the Royal Albert Hall, with the composer conducting on June 24, 1943, and it was immediately hailed for its lustrous consolation amid total war. After a New York Philharmonic performance the following year, Downes called it “the symphony of a poet, regardless of the throng, who communes with the ideal.”That poetry, especially the yearning of its Romanza, was hard-earned. Vaughan Williams started the symphony after he met Ursula Wood in 1938, his eventual second wife, who offered him musical as well as personal rejuvenation. He found inspiration piecing together scraps from other works, including from an opera he feared he would not finish, “The Pilgrim’s Progress” and short contributions to a pageant that he had directed, “England’s Pleasant Land.” They were called “Exit for the Ghosts of the Past” and “A Funeral March for the Old Order.”The result is not the exercise in dishonest nostalgia that some critics have heard. The scholar Julian Horton has argued that, from its uneasy opening harmonies to its concluding passacaglia, seraphic at the last, its rarefied blend of archaic modes and modern tonalities created “a new musical order,” a way out of a musical and civilization collapse.Put another way, the Fifth, which the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will play next month, is a symphony about hope. And whether Vaughan Williams intended it or not, it was initially heard by some as a political work, though not necessarily in the way one might expect from an avowed English nationalist.Far too old to fight in World War II, Vaughan Williams still made himself useful, writing scores for propaganda films, aiding European refugees, even collecting scrap metal to do what he could for the war effort. No composer, he told Michael Tippett in 1941, could “sit apart from the world & create music until he is sure he has done all he can to preserve the world from destruction.”But the Fifth struck some listeners as a different sort of contribution to the conflict. From Vaughan Williams’s nationalism, intriguingly, flowed a genuine internationalism; around the start of the war, he founded a branch of Federal Union, an activist group that, among other political arrangements, sought a United States of Europe. For his friend and fellow traveler Adrian Boult, the Fifth’s “serene loveliness” indeed showed, “as only music can, what we must work for when this madness is over.”If the Fifth offers an idealist corollary to the defiance of Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony, its finest interpreters make that idealism sound plausible. Boult’s readings have too stiff an upper lip for me, though their authority is unmistakable; others, from Serge Koussevitzky’s muscular account to the soaring grandeur of John Barbirolli’s, the radiant patience of André Previn’s to the touching honesty of the composer’s own, give more of a sense of the stakes involved.But the 20th century was harsh on “loveliness” like this. Who could believe in such an uncomplicated optimism now? Vaughan Williams’s grim Sixth, which was such a sensation after its debut in 1948 that the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra all played it at Carnegie Hall in 1949, stands as the answer, with its desolate epilogue. Vaughan Williams half-joked that he called it “The Big Three,” a reference to the great-power leaders who crushed dreams of a new world order after the war; critics, to his annoyance, heard it as portraying a nuclear apocalypse.Yet there the Fifth remains, an expression in sound of what once was thought possible. “To imagine beauty under such conditions,” Saylor suggests of its writing, “and to express that beauty so that others too might find hope within the wreckage — that is the mark of the true artist.” Perhaps, dare I say it, a universal one. More

She and her background vocalists were heard “oohing” and “aahing” on thousands of country and pop hits recorded in the 1950s and ’60s.Anita Kerr, the prolific session singer and arranger who was an architect of the sumptuous Nashville Sound and later had a multifaceted career in pop music, died on Monday in Geneva. She was 94. Her death, at a nursing home in the city’s Carouge district, was confirmed by her daughter Kelley Kerr.Working with producers like Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley, Ms. Kerr and her quartet of background vocalists, the Anita Kerr Singers, were heard “oohing” and “aahing” on thousands of recordings made in Nashville in the 1950s and ’60s. In the process, they contributed to the birth of the lush orchestral Nashville Sound, refining the rough-hewed provincial music for which the city was known into something that appealed to a wider audience.Just as important, Ms. Kerr and her ensemble helped preserve country music’s viability in the face of the commercial threat presented by the emergence of rock ’n’ roll.Ms. Kerr sang soprano and wrote and conducted arrangements for the group, which included the alto Dottie Dillard, the tenor Gil Wright and the bass Louis Nunley. Together they performed on hits by future members of the Country Music Hall of Fame like Red Foley, Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow, as well as on major pop singles, including Bobby Helms’s “Jingle Bell Rock” (1957), Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry” (1960) and Burl Ives’s “A Little Bitty Tear” (1961).Ms. Kerr and her singers also crooned the indelible “dum-dum-dum, dooby-doo-wah” on “Only the Lonely,” a No. 2 pop hit for Roy Orbison in 1960.With the possible exception of the Jordanaires, the Southern gospel quartet featured on landmark recordings by Elvis Presley and Patsy Cline, no vocal ensemble was in greater demand for session work in Nashville in the 1950s and ’60s than the Anita Kerr Singers.“At the beginning we recorded two sessions per week,” Ms. Kerr wrote on her website, describing the postwar boom in Nashville’s music industry. “Then, by 1955, we were recording eight sessions per week, plus a five-day-a-week national program at WSM with Jim Reeves.”“Gradually,” she went on, “we grew to 12 to 18 sessions per week, and I was writing as many arrangements for these sessions as was physically possible. Loving every minute of it, mind you. Tired at times, but happy.”Beginning in 1956, the group began working in New York City as well, winning a contest on the popular CBS television and radio variety show “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.” They soon began making regular trips to appear on the program.In 1960, another quartet led by Ms. Kerr, the short-lived Little Dippers, had a Top 10 pop hit with the dreamy ballad “Forever.”Ms. Kerr, center, with the 1970 version of the Anita Kerr Singers in Amsterdam. She, her husband and her daughters moved to Switzerland that year.Fotocollectie AnefoThe Anita Kerr Singers signed a contract with RCA Victor Records in 1961 and went on to release a series of albums of easy-listening music, some of them credited to the Anita Kerr Quartet. One, “We Dig Mancini,” which featured renditions of TV and movie themes written by Henry Mancini, won a Grammy Award for best performance by a vocal group in 1966, besting the Beatles’ “Help!” for the honor.The Kerr group won the same award the next year for their cover of “A Man and a Woman,” the theme song from the 1966 French film of the same name.During the early ’60s, the group, augmented by four additional vocalists, released several albums of contemporary pop material as part of RCA’s Living Voices series.Ms. Kerr and her ensemble also lent their voices to a number of significant R&B hits of the day, including Carla Thomas’s “Gee Whiz” (1960), Esther Phillips’s “Release Me” (1962) and Bobby Bland’s “Share Your Love With Me” (1963).In addition, Ms. Kerr wrote and recorded jingles for some of the era’s popular AM radio stations, including WMCA in New York City and WLS in Chicago.Anita Jean Grilli was born on Oct. 13, 1927, in Memphis to William and Sofia (Polonara) Grilli, Italian immigrants who settled in Mississippi with their families as teenagers and became farm workers. Moving with his wife to Memphis, her father opened a grocery store there. Her mother, a contralto, had the opportunity to study classical music in New York but instead became a homemaker.Anita and her two older brothers studied piano at their mother’s insistence, but only Anita, who began taking lessons at the age of 4, stayed with it. By the time she was in the fourth grade at St. Thomas Catholic School, she was playing organ for the school’s Masses.At 15, she was hired as a staff musician for an after-school radio program in Memphis. She also played with local dance bands, for which she composed arrangements.She married Al Kerr in 1947 and moved to Nashville after he accepted a job as a disc jockey at the local radio station WKDA. Ms. Kerr again worked with dance bands, and she also assembled a vocal quintet that was eventually hired by WSM, the station that broadcast “The Grand Ole Opry,” to perform on its show “Sunday Down South.”A year later, Ms. Kerr and members of her group were hired as background singers for Decca Records. They changed their name, at the label’s urging, from the Sunday Down South Choir to the Anita Kerr Singers.In 1965, after almost two decades in Nashville — and after she had divorced Mr. Kerr and married Alex Grob, a Swiss businessman who became her manager — Ms. Kerr moved to Los Angeles, where she wrote orchestral scores and worked in pop, jazz, Latin and other idioms besides country music.She assembled a new edition of the Anita Kerr Singers and released a series of musically omnivorous records, including three mariachi albums credited to the Mexicali Singers. She made several records devoted to the catalogs of songwriters like Burt Bacharach and Hal David and composed, arranged and conducted the music for “The Sea,” an album featuring the poetry of Rod McKuen. And she served as the choral director for the first season of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in 1967.In 1970, Ms. Kerr and her husband, along with her two daughters from her first marriage, moved to Switzerland. Ms. Kerr formed yet another edition of her singing group there and continued to write, record and conduct. Two of the gospel albums she made during this period were nominated for Grammys.In 1975, she and her husband established Mountain Studios in Montreux. They later sold it to the English rock band Queen, which eventually turned it into “Queen: The Studio Experience,” a museum and exhibition benefiting the Mercury Phoenix Trust.Ms. Kerr remained active into the 1980s and beyond, writing scores for films including the 1972 drama “Limbo” and conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and other ensembles.Ms. Kerr, who wasn’t always credited for her work as an arranger and group leader in Nashville — and is still is not a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame — received a special award from the music licensing organization ASCAP in 1975, recognizing her “contributions to the birth and development of the Nashville Sound.” In 1992 she was honored by the Recording Academy with a Governors Award for her “outstanding contribution to American Music.”“Anita Kerr: America’s First Lady of Music,” a biography written by Barry Pugh with a foreword by Mr. Bacharach, was published this year.In addition to her daughter Kelley, Ms. Kerr is survived by her husband; another daughter, Suzanne Trebert; five grandchildren; and two great-granddaughters.From early childhood on, Ms. Kerr said, she knew she would spend her life making music.“I did everything regarding music, I couldn’t get enough,” she wrote on her website. “I never had the problem of wondering what I was going to do when I grew up. I always knew that it would be music.” More