Music

In Paris, a moving and wistful performance installation by Lina Lapelyte gathers untrained singers for reflections on regret and inability.PARIS — The first time I sang, it was by ear. I imagine that’s often the case. Toddlers join their favorite characters in Disney movies or echo their parents with mumbled renditions of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” When children begin to sing in school, they usually learn not from scores, but from lyrics memorized through repetition.Then things change. The melodies become notated. Some people develop into disciplined singers and instrumentalists; others abandon musical study altogether. What of that last category, those for whom singing is simply something to be enjoyed, regardless of whether they can carry a tune in the car or at karaoke?Those types of performances — the ones just for pleasure — are typically treated as unfit for the hallowed spaces of musical expression. But “The Mutes,” Lina Lapelyte’s moving, wistful and immersive installation at Lafayette Anticipations here, elevates that amateur naïveté to high art.“The Mutes,” organized by Elsa Coustou, takes place in an airy environment designed to subvert expectations at every turn, and unfolds on a roughly 50-minute loop for six hours a day, five days a week until July 24. The durational performance setup is reminiscent of “Sun & Sea,” Lapelyte’s much-traveled opera created with her fellow Lithuanian artists Vaiva Grainyte and Rugile Barzdziukaite, which won the top prize at the Venice Biennale in 2019.That work and the team’s “Have a Good Day!” (2013), a kaleidoscopic glimpse into the inner lives of cashiers, were expansive in scope. “Sun & Sea,” one of the most effective and indelible operas of this century, hides a sickening portrait of climate inaction in catchy, sedative melodies sung from an artificial beach — a set that could one day serve as a natural history exhibition of the Anthropocene’s leisure and laziness.Here, Lapelyte is working on her own, and by comparison “The Mutes” is much smaller. Yet the intimate scale is also more relatable, and more heartbreaking. With a libretto assembled from Sean Ashton’s novel “Living in a Land,” it expresses only the things its characters haven’t done. This is music of regret, of inability, music that can underscore the feeling that “we live in time not place.”The small ensemble of performers were auditioned with something like anti-musicality in mind; people who had been told explicitly that they were bad singers were the most ideal candidates. On Wednesday, they delivered the libretto’s English lines with heavy French accents and imprecise intonation. Some were more extroverted than others. One man forgot a line halfway through.Surrounding the performance is an installation of clustered nettles and sculptures that deal in subverted expectations.Marc Domage“I’ve never had mumps,” the first performer, walking through the installation, sings coolly. More never-have-I-evers follow: had a pen pal, learned a language, ate tapas, cried in the cinema, bought and sold at the right time, or at any time. “It is unlikely, is it not, that I shall ever be given the keys to the city,” an ensemble member declares into a microphone. Someone else offers, “It is unlikely, is it not, that I shall ever be invited back to my old school, to show what I have done with my life, what I have made of myself.”All these lines are given simple melodies, the kind you could learn easily by ear. More complicated are choral passages, especially antiphonal ones, a challenge for untrained performers but a compelling study in building harmony. These moments have the appearance of a community choir rehearsal — perhaps the most widespread form that music-making takes, if one that exists outside what is traditionally thought of as mainstream performance.The spirit of that deliberate contradiction — of a formal space given over to seemingly informal performance, and of perceived disorder giving way to balance — pervades the installation. Nettles, medicinally beneficial but disliked as prickly weeds, are clustered throughout an earthy landscape indoors. Slanted stones form a precarious ramp; so do sculptural shoes with uneven soles. But with complementary shapes, they together create a flat surface to stand on with stability.Visitors can explore the environment at will — though they can’t try on the shoes — before any performers enter, and continue to do so as the music unfolds. The singers move as if unaware of the audience members, who can follow any and all of them, and are responsible for staying out of the way.That opening line, about mumps, is joined by mentions of other diseases: measles, chickenpox, syphilis. And beneath vocal writing is a Minimalist score typical of Lapelyte, ostinatos executed with electronics and built from a rising two- or three-note motif, or a single tone at a steady beat. But where that formula had an almost somnolent effect in “Sun & Sea,” here it is complicated by added layers of improvisatory playing by Lapelyte and Angharad Davies on violin, along with John Butcher on saxophone, and Rhodri Davies on harp.Their instrumental contributions, prerecorded and played through speakers with meticulous spatial design, betray the emotions behind the straightforward singing. Jazzy riffs and percussive string techniques add an element of unsettled agitation and worry. Realizing, too late, that you’ve never “been canoeing” or “cultivated a vegetable garden” can be both sad and exasperating.But mostly these statements are sad, as life inevitably is, because of the people conveying them. Their sound unrefined and their performance effortful, these singers were compelling in a way professionals couldn’t be. Everything about them — their feelings, characteristics, appearances — was familiar. They reminded me of so many friends and relatives, and for that were more touching than, say, the protagonist of a Schubert song cycle or a Verdi tragedy.I wonder whether it was more difficult for them to sing together as adults than as children. When we’re young, we take up choral music uncritically, as if by instinct; later, a closer, more attentive kind of listening is required to achieve harmony. It’s as though, in learning everything else, we forget exactly the thing we should always remember.The MutesThrough July 24 at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; lafayetteanticipations.com. More

He combined his love for travel and music to turn the Long Island Youth Orchestra into a globe-trotting powerhouse.Martin C. Dreiwitz, who drew on his twin passions for travel and classical music to found the globe-trotting Long Island Youth Orchestra, conducting his student musicians before audiences as close as Great Neck and Brookville and as far away as Karachi and Kathmandu, died on June 20 at a hospital near his home in Oyster Bay, N.Y. He was 91.Steven Behr, the president of the orchestra’s board of directors, said the cause was a heart attack.The orchestra may have counted some 100 performers, but Mr. Dreiwitz (pronounced DRY-witz) was practically a one-man show: He raised the funds, he scouted for new members, he cajoled parents to bring snacks on rehearsal days, and he conducted every performance from its founding in 1962 to his retirement in 2012.He was also the orchestra’s travel agent. In addition to playing four concerts a year, mostly at a performance hall on the campus of Long Island University Post in Brookville, N.Y., the orchestra went on a summer tour, almost always abroad, with multiple stops and often on multiple continents. One trip, in 1977, took them to Greece, Kenya, the Seychelles, India, Sri Lanka and Israel, with every detail arranged by Mr. Dreiwitz.Though he trained as a classical clarinetist, Mr. Dreiwitz was, in fact, a travel agent by trade, and he used his skills and connections to plot intricate journeys that even a professional orchestra might shrink from. He took pride in being among the first Western orchestras to play in places like Pakistan and Nepal, performing sold-out shows with students who often had never before left Long Island.He treated his musicians like adults, and saw his mission as one less about pedagogy than about preparation for a professional music career. He eschewed the typical youth orchestra fare — Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” — in favor of deep cuts from Mozart and Rossini and avant-garde composers like Virgil Thomson (a personal friend, who sometimes used the orchestra to test-run his latest work).He also tended to steer clear of Broadway scores, though he did have a soft spot for the music of George Gershwin, especially “Porgy and Bess,” and often included selections from that opera on the orchestra’s summer tour.Mr. Dreiwitz saw travel as another form of preparation. It was, he insisted, important for budding violists and clarinetists to learn how to perform at their best in strange new venues, in strange new cities, in front of strange new audiences.But he also simply loved the challenge of planning, say, a five-week trip for 85 students across five countries in East Asia. In between raising money and running rehearsals, during the school year he would dash off on reconnaissance trips, scouting each site for an upcoming tour — arranging hotels (or just as often private homes), checking out venues, even taste-testing restaurants. When the students arrived, months later, everything would be perfect.The orchestra ran on a shoestring budget, especially early on, when Mr. Dreiwitz refused to charge tuition. Instead, funds came from family donations, annual candy sales and, quite often, his own pocket. Every spring he offered a $2,500 scholarship to be split among the three best high school seniors, as judged by an outside panel.The Long Island Youth Orchestra in 1974. Alumni have gone on to play in most of the country’s major symphonies, and they populate countless chamber groups and academic music departments.Lester Paverman for The New York TimesMr. Dreiwitz’s hard work paid off. The orchestra’s 4,000 (and counting) alumni have gone on to play in many of the country’s major companies, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and they populate countless chamber groups and academic music departments.Mr. Dreiwitz could be stern and exacting on the podium, but, many of his former musicians said, he ran the orchestra like a family, fostering a vibe of collegiality instead of competitiveness.“I don’t twist anyone’s arm to join,” he told The New York Times in 1964. “They’re giving up their own time because they love music and want an opportunity to play. I don’t think you can find a more enthusiastic group of musicians any place.”Martin Charles Dreiwitz was born in Weehawken, N.J, on June 15, 1931, and raised in Brooklyn. His father, Samuel Dreiwitz, worked in the fur industry, and his mother, Charlotte (Silver) Dreiwitz, was a homemaker.He is survived by his two sons, Tuan Dinh and Dung Dinh.A gifted musician even as a child, he played clarinet and graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & the Arts), and he majored in music at the University of Chicago. Along the way he studied under woodwind luminaries like Simeon Bellison, the principal clarinetist for New York Philharmonic, and Anthony Gugliotti, who held the same post with the Philadelphia Orchestra.After graduating from college in 1953, he moved to Europe, where he traveled and studied to be a conductor, including a stint with Wilhelm Furtwängler in Vienna.He returned to the United States in the early 1960s and settled in suburban Long Island, hoping to find a job conducting. To make ends meet, he took a job as a travel agent and offered private clarinet lessons on the side.One day in 1962, one of his particularly talented students put down his instrument and frowned.“I’ve gotten this far,” Mr. Dreiwitz recalled the student saying, “and now I must wait years, until I get into a major orchestra, before I get some really good experience. Where do I go from here?”The seed was planted, and took root: Mr. Dreiwitz held auditions for what he initially called the North Shore Symphony Orchestra in September 1962. He started with just 52 musicians, and they held a concert the next spring. A few years later, he took them on their first trip, to Chicopee, Mass.It was stop and go in the early years, with Mr. Dreiwitz hitting up Nassau County music teachers to find promising players. But by the end of the 1960s, he no longer needed to. Eager students lined up outside his travel agency to audition, and every year he had a wait list. The orchestra went on its first overseas trip, to Europe, in 1971.He took emeritus status in 2012, handing the baton to Scott Dunn, a former student. He continued to come in to rehearsals at L.I.U. Post, though less and less often, and then not at all.But Mr. Dreiwitzhad one more hurrah. In 2018, hundreds of alumni returned for a concert in his honor, and he even mounted the podium, to conduct a selection from his beloved “Porgy and Bess.” More

At 21, she was a founding member of the Russian anti-government punk collective. At 22, she was imprisoned. A decade later, she’s still fighting, this time using cryptocurrency to help her subvert the system.“I’m a super-introvert,” said Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, one of the founding members of Pussy Riot, as the elevator zoomed to the Rainbow Room on the 65th floor of Rockefeller Center, where the NFT Now gala was in full swing on June 21. “But it’s a job. As an activist, you have to do it,” she said of the schmoozing. “You have to put your work out there.”The doors dinged and slid open. As Ms. Tolokonnikova, 32, strode toward the entrance, the cacophony of hundreds of voices grew louder. “But when I hear all this noise, my heart freezes a bit,” she said quietly, switching to Russian.She did not pause to collect herself. There was no time. Ms. Tolokonnikova, a musician, artist and activist who goes by Nadya, was in New York to mingle with the crypto crowd at a conference focused on NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. Her schedule was packed with discussions, parties, panels and several performances.Since being jailed for 21 months for performing a guerrilla-style piece called “Punk Prayer” — which protested the government’s cozy relationship with the church — at a cathedral in Moscow a decade ago, Ms. Tolokonnikova has not gotten any quieter about her feelings toward the Russian powers that be. She was released from prison in 2013, and the following year, she and Maria Alyokhina, another Pussy Riot member who served time in prison, founded Mediazona, an independent news outlet in Russia. In 2018, Ms. Tolokonnikova published a book, “Read & Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism.” Ms. Tolokonnikova calls her uniform “feminist superhero,” or “something between Spiderman and Catwoman and Sailor Moon.”Ye Fan for The New York TimesIn December, Russian authorities labeled her a “foreign agent,” a category used to suppress opposition figures. (As a result, she does not disclose where she lives.) After Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, Ms. Tolokonnikova led an effort to raise $7.1 million in cryptocurrency for medical aid in Ukraine. “Putin is a bloody dictator, a terrorist who must be stopped as soon as possible,” she said.In the years after she was released from prison, Ms. Tolokonnikova dealt with a severe depression and relied on art as a form of therapy. A classically trained pianist, she now makes music that zips across genres like pop, techno and punk. On Aug. 5, Pussy Riot will release its first mixtape, “Matriarchy Now!” Ms. Tolokonnikova is the lead musician on the album, with the Swedish singer Tove Lo as the executive producer. Collaborators include Salem Ilese, ILoveMakonnen and Big Freedia.Some of the other well-known Pussy Riot members, like Ms. Alyokhina, who recently escaped from Moscow by wearing a delivery-service uniform, are not on the mixtape. Ms. Alyokhina and others, but not Ms. Tolokonnikova, are performing as part of a multicity antiwar tour in Europe this summer. Ms. Tolokonnikova said Pussy Riot is a loose network with no hierarchy; there are no leaders, and anyone can become a member and use the name as part of their protest efforts.Ms. Tolokonnikova posed in front of a billboard whose text is the same as the title of Pussy Riot’s first mixtape.Ye Fan for The New York TimesOn this rainy Tuesday in June, however, Ms. Tolokonnikova’s presence in New York wasn’t primarily about music. In March, Ms. Tolokonnikova and several partners created UnicornDAO, a fund-raising and investment vehicle built on a blockchain whose goal is to commission and buy NFTs made by women, nonbinary people and members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community. She had come to New York to raise awareness.So far, UnicornDAO has purchased more than 1,000 works by artists like Sofia Crespo, Claire Silver and Olive Allen, and raised $4.5 million in funding. The musician Grimes, who is a member of the DAO (it stands for “decentralized autonomous organization”), donated an NFT of her work to the DAO’s permanent collection, and the singer Sia is an active member. After a quick lunch of seafood spaghetti and a few sips of an Aperol spritz at the Roxy Hotel, where she ran into the D.J. Steve Aoki, a friend, Ms. Tolokonnikova bounded over to Spring Studios nearby for brainstorming sessions hosted by ConsenSys, a blockchain software company. During the cocktail hour that followed, a group formed around Ms. Tolokonnikova, with people asking for her thoughts about NFTs and fund-raising, or simply expressing their admiration toward her. She lingered for about 45 minutes, then made a quick exit. On the way out, a fan requested a selfie. When people ask her for a photo, she said, “they always say, ‘I never do this.’” She paused, then smiled. “That’s what I said when I got a selfie with Bernie Sanders in Chicago,” she said. Next stop was the gala, where the dress code was “inspired.” Ms. Tolokonnikova showed up in a uniform of sorts: black fishnets, white platform shoes, a short skirt, a ruffled top and finger-less gloves. One guest after another sought Ms. Tolokonnikova’s attention at the N.F.T. Now gala, though she describes herself as “a super introvert.”Ye Fan for The New York TimesShe called that day’s outfit “feminist superhero.” The look’s origins stretch back to when Pussy Riot started in 2011, when Ms. Tolokonnikova was 21. “I was thinking that we would be something between Spider-Man and Catwoman and Sailor Moon, and maybe we would be the superheroes that will come and save everyone,” she said. At the gala, the mood was buoyant, seemingly unaffected by the crypto crash, which has led ordinary and amateur investors to lose large amounts of money and crypto companies to lay off employees.For about an hour, Ms. Tolokonnikova sipped on a glass of sparkling wine and chatted with guests, including Joe Lubin, a founder of the Ethereum blockchain; the musician Miguel; and Michael Winkelmann, a digital artist who goes by the name Beeple. Mr. Winkelmann famously sold an NFT of his artwork at Christie’s for $69 million last year and is a member of UnicornDAO.“She actually makes me feel lazy because every time I turn around she’s started another DAO or a charity that’s raised, like, $10 million,” Mr. Winkelmann, 41, said. “And it’s like, ‘What did you do?’ I drew a bunch of pictures of wieners or something.” Backstage at the Bowery Ballroom, Ms. Tolokonnikova chatted with Salem Ilese, one of the artists featured on Pussy Riot’s first mixtape, while John Caldwell, another founder of UnicornDAO, lingered in the background. Ye Fan for The New York TimesMs. Tolokonnikova said she gets along easily with “crypto bros.” “The world of finance is super-toxic and a total no for me,” she said. “Crypto is a bit different. There are bros. Many of them are nerds. I myself am a nerd. We’ve always spoken the same language.” Growing up in Norilsk, a city in Siberia, Ms. Tolokonnikova said she was the one who helped other students with their homework, in part because it meant they wouldn’t be mean to her. Eventually, she studied philosophy at Moscow State University.She said she realized the potential fund-raising capability of the crypto world when she sold an NFT for a four-part Pussy Riot video artwork series made in collaboration with several other artists for 178 Ether, or about $356,000 at the time. “This is life-changing money,” she said. It was distributed among everybody who worked on the project and a portion went to a shelter for domestic violence survivors in Russia, she said. (Today, after the crash, the dollar value of the Ether they earned is significantly less: about $196,000.)As an activist, she said she has always kept herself abreast of technological shifts like cryptocurrency, blockchain and NFTs because she thinks that these are new tools she could harness while the rules around their usage are still being understood and established.The final stop of the evening was Bowery Ballroom. When the car pulled up to the club, she dashed in and reappeared minutes later onstage, performing Ms. Ilese’s “Crypto Boy,” a tongue-in-cheek song about getting frustrated with a boy who is talking too much about crypto. At the end of a long day of networking, Ms. Tolokonnikova joined Ms. Ilese to perform Ms. Ilese’s song “Crypto Boy” at the Bowery Ballroom.Ye Fan for The New York TimesIn response to the Supreme Court’s leaked decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Ms. Tolokonnikova’s UnicornDAO created a crypto wallet that makes donating digital currencies to a reproductive rights fund safer, anonymous and easier. The fund UnicornDAO is supporting is funneling money to seven reproductive rights organizations, including Planned Parenthood and Fund Texas Choice. So far, the fund has received more than $87,000 in donations. Independently, Ms. Tolokonnikova teamed with Ms. Ilese to sell several NFTs of the song “Crypto Boy.” The money they raised, $170,000, went to the Center for Reproductive Rights. Ms. Tolokonnikova was not shocked by the Supreme Court’s ruling, but she was deeply disappointed. With “Punk Prayer” in 2012, “we loudly declared that the government and religion have no right to get involved in our decisions about our bodies,” she said. “Years later, the country that calls itself the leader of the free world is allowing a ban on abortion. It’s really, really sad.”“Of course, it’s just a drop in the ocean,” she said of her fund-raising efforts. “But I think that if we all make these drops and unite in one great ocean, then there will be a lot we could change and influence.” More

His sound and look influenced everyone from Anohni to Lady Gaga. He also sang backup vocals for David Bowie.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.A wide range of musical genres fueled New York’s nightclubs in the late 1970s and early ’80s, including new wave, no wave, punk and post punk. Klaus Nomi, who performed during that era, defied being categorized under any of them.“I wouldn’t give it a label,” Nomi said of his sound in a Belgian television interview. “Maybe the only label is my own label: It’s Nomi style.”His music combined opera, infectious melodies, disco beats, German-accented countertenor vocals and undeniable grandeur. He influenced everyone from the singer-songwriter Anohni to Lady Gaga; in 2009, when Morrissey was asked to select eight essential records for the BBC radio program “Desert Island Discs,” Nomi’s version of Schumann’s “Der Nussbaum” made the list.Nomi’s stage look was equally eclectic, and inseparable from his sound. The gender-fluid mix included dark, dramatically-applied lipstick as well as nail polish, the occasional women’s garment and often a giant structured tuxedo top that suggested Dada as much as sci-fi. His style influenced the fashion world as well, in collections by designers like Jean Paul Gaultier and Riccardo Tisci.Nomi’s look was indisputably nonbinary, and a bit otherworldly. “He still comes across as an outrageously expressive and strange figure,” Tim Lawrence, author of the 2016 book “Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983,” said in a phone interview.“There was something about his entire being, which seemed to be queer, around makeup and voice and music and dress,” Lawrence said.Nomi — or Klaus Sperber, the name he was born with — moved to New York City from his native Germany in the early 1970s. He fell in with a group of creative friends and in late 1978 joined many of them to perform at New Wave Vaudeville, a series of quirky variety shows. The bill included a stripper, a singing dog and a performance artist dressed as a sadistic nun.Nomi, in the background at center, at the Mudd Club in Manhattan in 1979, the year he met David Bowie there.Alan KleinbergAs the closing act, Nomi sang an aria from Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila” while wearing a transparent raincoat over a shiny, fitted top and pants along with dramatic eye makeup and lipstick.“He really blew people’s minds,” Ann Magnuson, who directed the shows, said in an interview. “He had all these snarky punk rockers out there who were speechless.”With the performances came a new name, inspired by the name of a magazine focused on outer space, Omni.“Klaus said, ‘I can’t go out as Klaus Sperber,’” his friend Joey Arias, the singer and performance artist, recalled by phone. “‘That’s not a star’s name.’”Soon he was performing as Klaus Nomi at tastemaker Manhattan clubs like Max’s Kansas City and Hurrah, with a set list created with the help of Kristian Hoffman, a musician who served for a time as his musical director. The material included edgy originals and unconventional takes on well-known hits. Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” became an enraged dirge, for example; the chorus of “Lightnin’ Strikes” morphed into an aria. The thought was that pop songs would “catch the ear of an audience who isn’t ready for opera,” Hoffman said in an interview.As The New York Times put it in a review of one of his performances, Nomi’s music was “positively catchy, in a strange sort of way.”One night in late 1979, Nomi and Arias were at the Mudd Club, in TriBeCa, when they met David Bowie there. Nomi called him later — Bowie had asked him to, scribbling his phone number with a friend’s eyeliner — and Nomi and Arias were recruited to be Bowie’s backup singers for an appearance that December as the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live.”For the show’s three songs, they wore clinging women’s Thierry Mugler dresses, purchased at Henri Bendel. The look was extremely provocative at the time, especially on national television. Throughout, the TV cameras’ focus seemed to be as much on them as on Bowie.“It legitimized everything, because it had been sort of a private scene, and all of a sudden there it is, right in front of you on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” said Katy Kattelman, a designer who is known professionally as Katy K and who was a friend of Nomi’s.Soon after, Nomi signed a record deal with RCA France. His debut album, titled simply “Klaus Nomi,” was released in Europe in 1981; a second album, “A Simple Man,” came out the next year. The records sold well — “Klaus Nomi” earned gold-record status in France — and he performed abroad to packed venues.Nomi returned to New York toward the end of 1982, excited by the prospect of possible American tours and releases. But he arrived gaunt and exhausted — he had contracted AIDS. He died of complications of the illness on Aug. 6, 1983. He was 39.A scene from the 2004 documentary “The Nomi Song” showing Nomi getting ready for a performance.Palm PicturesNomi at Hurrah, one of many nightclubs he performed at in New York City.Harvey WangKlaus Sperber was born on Jan. 24, 1944, in Immenstadt, a town in what was then West Germany. He was raised by his mother, Bettina, who worked odd jobs. A fling with a soldier, whom Klaus never met, resulted in his birth. When he was a child, he and his mother moved to the city of Essen, about 400 miles away. Opera music was often playing in their house, and it set Klaus on his path.“The first time I heard an opera singer on the radio I said, ‘My God, I want to sing just like that,’” he said in interview footage that is included in the 2004 documentary “The Nomi Song.” As a teenager, he became equally fond of Elvis Presley.He moved to West Berlin and worked as an usher at Deutsche Oper, where he sometimes sang for colleagues after the audience had left. But he aspired to sing professionally, and, Arias said, “he felt like he was at a dead end.”“He wanted to come to New York because he felt like it would change his life,” Arias added.Nomi settled in Manhattan’s East Village. He worked for a while in the kitchen of the Upper East Side cafe and celebrity hangout Serendipity 3 and started a baking business with Kattelman called Tarts, Inc., supplying restaurants with desserts made in Nomi’s St. Marks Place apartment.Nomi was known to frequent after-hours clubs, like the Anvil and Mineshaft, where casual sex was commonplace. There were sexual encounters at home as well — Arias said he once arrived at Nomi’s apartment to find a naked Jean-Michel Basquiat toweling off.To get a green card, he married a woman, Melissa Moon, a U.S. citizen, in 1980.“I don’t think he was in any way being anything that wasn’t himself, which was pretty gay as far as I knew,” said the artist Kenny Scharf. “When you’re creating your persona, the sexuality part is obviously part of the persona. It was all part of his sense of style and him being an artist in every way.” More

In Diego Ongaro’s patient and subtle new film, Freddie Gibbs plays a hip-hop artist struggling with a career malaise.“Down With the King” is the first movie I’ve seen that confronts the Great Resignation, if not as a social phenomenon then at least as a mood. Money Merc, a hip-hop artist sensitively played by the real-life rapper Freddie Gibbs, struggles with a career crisis specific to his personality and profession that is also likely to resonate with anyone who has ever felt trapped, overwhelmed or just plain tired out by work.Merc has retreated to a lovely, secluded spot in rural New England, ostensibly to work on material for a contractually mandated new album. He clearly enjoys the solitude, the company of at least a few of the locals and some of the chores and routines of country life. He clears deadfall with a chain saw, helps a neighbor butcher a hog (and later, with less success, a steer) and gazes thoughtfully on the hillsides in their autumnal glory. But in the midst of the pastoral calm and natural beauty, you feel the pull of his melancholy, the weight of his malaise.Merc’s mother (Sharon Washington) named him Mercury, after the Roman god, and a kitschy plaster statue of the deity is part of the décor in Merc’s spacious Berkshires getaway. Mercury is a perpetually busy mythical figure, associated with commerce, speed and movement — everything his namesake wants to escape.The director, Diego Ongaro, a French filmmaker who lives and works in New England, doesn’t overdramatize Merc’s situation, or tether him to the machinery of a plot. Merc is a Black man in a very white place, a fact that the movie deals with bluntly, and also subtly. “Down With the King,” which shares its title with a Run-DMC comeback classic, isn’t a fish-out-of-water comedy or a culture-war melodrama. The story emerges slowly and organically, following the rhythm of days spent trying to get stuff done and to find ways to avoid doing it. Merc is visited by his mother, various friends and a manager (David Krumholtz) who pushes him to stay on track. There are money at stake and a reputation to uphold.More than that, Merc isn’t entirely alienated from a creative pursuit that has brought him fulfillment as well as success. His verbal and musical skills are still in evidence, as is the slow-burning charisma that keeps the fans engaged on social media. He’s expected — and expects himself — to use his rustication as a chance to recharge, and then to step right back onto the relentless escalator of his career.What’s the alternative? Merc falls into a romance with Michaele (Jamie Neumann), who works at a hardware store and hopes to resume her education after being knocked sideways by addiction. He develops a friendship with a local farmer — played by Bob Tarasuk, an actual Berkshires farmer who starred in Ongaro’s previous feature, “Bob and the Trees” — that bridges differences of age and background. These relationships are sweet and surprising, but the movie doesn’t overstate their transformative potential.The trait “Down With the King” exhibits most powerfully is patience, something in short supply in modern cinema or, for that matter, the modern world. Instead of pushing to resolve conflicts or simplify contradictions, it asks us to examine how we live by walking for a while in someone else’s shoes and feeling how they no longer fit.Down With the KingRated R. Rap lyrics, racial slurs and (legal) weed. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

The institution will present 22 programs from late September through next June, and feature performers from five continents.Since its arrival in New York three-and-a-half decades ago, Jazz at Lincoln Center has worked to define jazz as a high art form that could only have been made in America. But in recent years, the center has increasingly embraced the music’s role on the international stage, and the ways jazz has been adopted, passed around and reshaped.That will be the focus of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 35th season, which will present 22 programs from late September through next June, and feature performers from five continents, the center announced Tuesday.Many of the season’s headlining shows will be anchored by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, who continues as Jazz at Lincoln Center’s artistic director.The band will be joined by featured performers and guest bandleaders, including Naseer Shamma, an Iraqi oud virtuoso, performing with the orchestra (Jan. 20-21); the Japanese-born pianist and big-band leader Toshiko Akiyoshi, who will play her compositions with the orchestra (March 10-11); and the Cuban pianist Elio Villafranca and the Colombian harpist Edmar Castañeda, who will each present newly commissioned works with the orchestra (April 14-15). The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will kick off the season with its own featured performance, Sep. 30 and Oct. 1: the U.S. debut of Marsalis’s “Shanghai Suite.”Some of the season’s other headliners will include the French guitarist Stephane Wrembel, paying tribute to Django Reinhardt (Nov. 4-5); the South African pianist Nduduzo Makhathini and the Brazilian mandolinist Hamilton de Holanda, performing together (Feb. 24-25); and the Brazilian vocalist and guitarist Rosa Passos, performing March 24-25 with the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master Ron Carter on bass and Kenny Barron on piano, plus the Brazilian percussionist Rafael Barata.A number of guiding lights from jazz’s under-40 crowd will lead their own bands, something that doesn’t always happen on Jazz at Lincoln Center’s concert stages. They include the pianist Emmet Cohen (Oct. 21), the vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant (May 19-20) and the trumpeter Etienne Charles (June 9-10).A number of education-oriented events will serve audiences of all ages: programs celebrating the jazz legends Charles Mingus (Oct. 22) and Thad Jones (March 25), and a pair of engagements in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Journey Through Jazz series, with the orchestra giving lessons on jazz history in the form of live performances (Nov. 17-19 and Feb. 16-18).All of the season’s shows will take place at one of the center’s two major stages: the Rose Theater or the Appel Room. Nightly bookings continue year-round at Dizzy’s Club, a more intimate venue also housed in the center. Tickets are at jazz.org. More

Choose something in your range. Avoid cold drinks to save your throat. “Don’t sing ‘I Will Always Love You’ if you cannot hit those notes,” says Garvaundo Hamilton, 33, who won the Karaoke World Championships in 2020. Just because you like a song does not mean you should sing it. Many classic songs should probably be avoided unless you’re a trained vocalist with an expansive range — including all of Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Journey and Queen, particularly “Bohemian Rhapsody.” If you want to sound good, he also suggests caution when attempting “rap that’s really too fast for you.” Hamilton, a general manager at a print shop in Seattle, goes out to karaoke nearly every night of the week. He spends at least four hours a day singing to himself in the car, in the shower, at his desk and anywhere else he can. Use a karaoke app on your phone to practice. Hamilton keeps a list of go-to songs on his phone divided into different categories, including up-tempo, ballads and duets. His favorite is Alexandra Burke’s version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” For karaoke, you don’t need to have all the lyrics memorized, but it helps to have practiced a song until you can sing it confidently. Given the choice, Hamilton avoids private karaoke rooms, opting instead for the bar-style public ones where your audience includes strangers. If you’re shy or planning to sing something new, alcohol can sometimes ease nerves. Don’t overdo it, and choose a room-temperature drink. “Cold beverages aren’t good for your throat,” Hamilton says. You don’t have to be a great vocalist, but your skill level should be a consideration when choosing what to sing. An upbeat party song that prompts a singalong can be a good option for so-so singers who might struggle to carry a song alone.Karaoke varies by geography. Hamilton first started as a teenager in Jamaica, where, in his experience, audiences tolerated only accomplished singers. “They’ll boo you, they’ll stop you, they’ll kick you off the stage,” he says. Hamilton has found that some cities have more skillful singers (New York, Atlanta) and some lean more toward tone-deaf drunks (Los Angeles, Chicago). For the most part though, your fellow karaoke-goers are looking for joy and release; expect to be supported so long as you’re making a heartfelt effort. “Most people are there to sing and not to be judgmental,” Hamilton says. More

The accomplished astronomer was, one historian said, “the Einstein of his time.” But before he surveyed the sky, he was a prolific musician.Within the four-square opening of William Herschel’s Symphony No. 8 is a phrase that sounds like one of the delicately reorchestrated pop songs in “Bridgerton.” The first violins play a goading, syncopated refrain as the harmony lurches underneath, slithering to a resolution before launching into grand second subject. It’s a standout moment, and an earworm.That is, if you ever get the opportunity to hear it.If Herschel (1738-1822) is talked about today, it’s probably not for his music. He’s better remembered in the world of science, as a distinguished astronomer notable for discovering Uranus, infrared radiation, Saturn’s moons Enceladus and Mimas; for the idea that stars are born and die like other living things; and for a rigorous approach to cataloging the night sky on his sweeps of the skies that set in motion a method of conducting scientific research.“He was the Einstein of his time,” said Sarah Waltz, an associate professor of music history at University of the Pacific in California. “But of course, Herschel was much better at music than Einstein was.”This year is the bicentennial of Herschel’s death, and an occasion to explore his musical life. The range of works that survive today — 24 symphonies, a dozen concertos, the same number of violin sonatas, six published harpsichord sonatas, music for church services — suggests he was no compositional slouch.But does he stand out in the crowded marketplace of 18th-century symphonies, among the reigning works of Mozart and Haydn? Assessing one of the few commercial recordings of Herschel’s compositions, the Gramophone critic Stanley Sadie wrote that this is “no music of the spheres,” and bemoaned its structural predictability and lurching modulations.Perhaps, though, composing was one of many tools in the arsenal of a talented and successful freelance musician who plied his trade until the age of 44. He had been born in Hanover, Germany, in 1738, the son of an oboist who led that city’s military band. Intellectual curiosity was encouraged in the family, with William and his brother Jacob engaging in detailed musical debates in the margins of their correspondences. William learned to play the oboe, violin and organ, and followed his father into the band. But, as war with France loomed in 1757, he fled to England.In the early 1760s, Herschel worked as a teacher, composer, performer and impresario across northern England. Although he would later be regularly employment as an organist, his contemporary and peer Edward Miller noted his particular talent on the violin: “Never before had we heard the concertos of Corelli, Geminiani and Avison, or the overtures of Haydn performed more chastely, or more according to the intention of the composers than by Mr Herschel.”Herschel was not entirely happy with a freelancer’s life. “From one place to another; from one social circle to another; from one lifestyle to another; —— what an intolerable condition!” he wrote in 1761. A paper trail of his many movements exists almost by accident, with most of his symphonies including the precise locations of their composition: Pontefract, Leeds, Sunderland, Richmond.However, Herschel was unwilling to entertain a move to the busy but musically competitive London. So, after a brief stint as organist of Halifax Parish Church in West Yorkshire — according to Miller, he informed the panel in his audition that he had already accepted a better offer elsewhere — he moved to Bath in 1776, entering a city of emergent upper-class sophistication, with a budding intellectual scene and the newly built Octagon Chapel, from which Herschel constructed a small musical empire built around oratorio performances and subscription concerts.Several years earlier, William’s sister Caroline had followed her brothers to England. Accounts of her story also obscure her early musical interest. The first woman to receive the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the first published woman to publish scientific research and the first female scientist to receive a salary, Caroline moved to England after an intervention from her brother — to rid her from a life of household drudgery following the death of their father — and began to take singing lessons, eventually becoming the resident soprano in William’s oratorio performances, at a time when performing families were in fashion.Herschel believed that music belonged as one of the four liberal arts of the quadrivium, alongside arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. With the aid of two 18th-century books by the Cambridge scholar Robert Smith — “Harmonics” and “A Compleat System of Opticks” — he began to tackle astronomy with the same autodidactic zeal employed when learning English through the dense texts of John Locke. And one of his first homemade Newtonian reflector telescopes brought about a change that would turn Herschel into an overnight celebrity: the discovery, in March 1781, of Uranus, which he initially believed to be another comet. Herschel obsequiously named that planet Georgium Sidus to the delight of King George III, who later offered him a salary with the title of “the King’s Astronomer.”The position involved taking a large pay cut from his profitable music business, but Herschel nevertheless abandoned music to focus his gaze on the heavens. As the Herschels moved to Slough to be closer to the king, the telescopes got bigger, the surveys more ambitious and the celebrity more intense.Although Herschel’s musical compositions had ground to a halt with the move, there is mystery surrounding his relationship with Haydn, who visited the observatory in June 1792. In “Essays in Musical Analysis,” classic volumes from the 1930s, Sir Donald Tovey concluded that looking through Herschel’s famed 40-foot telescope provided the cosmic inspiration for the famous opening of Haydn’s oratorio “The Creation.” The problem: Records show that Herschel was out of town at the time. But perhaps Caroline, at this point his trusted assistant, could have ushered Haydn toward his moment of clarity?Waltz, the music historian, and Woody Sullivan, an astronomy professor from the University of Washington, are currently undertaking a critical biography of Herschel that combines science with music.“We’re trying to remind people that a musician at this time period is not necessarily a composer first, the way that we think of them today,” Waltz said. “They were composing as part of the package.”Much like Herschel’s pathbreaking surveys of the heavens, studying his life requires starting with the big picture, then adding details, piece by piece. More