Music

The recent discussions over racial justice and gender disparities appear to have accelerated efforts to bring more diversity to classical music.American orchestras have long fallen short when it comes to performing compositions by women and people of color, sticking to a canon of music dominated by white, largely male composers.But the protests over racial justice and gender disparities in the United States appear to have prompted some change.Compositions by women and people of color now make up about 23 percent of the pieces performed by orchestras, up from only about 5 percent in 2015, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Institute for Composer Diversity at the State University of New York at Fredonia.The increase comes amid a concerted effort in the performing arts to promote music by women and people of color, prompted in part by the #MeToo movement and the death of George Floyd.“The change that has been talked about for a very long time has suddenly been tremendously accelerated,” Simon Woods, president and chief executive of the League of American Orchestras, which helped produce the report, said in an interview.The coronavirus pandemic, which posed a threat to many institutions, seems to have also contributed to the change. Before the pandemic started, many ensembles took a more traditional approach to programming, planning their seasons years in advance. The virus has appeared to have led to experimentation.“The pandemic has been kind of a jolt to the patterns that we’ve known for so long,” Woods said, allowing orchestras “to be much more responsive.”Over all, ensembles seem to be embracing more music written by contemporary artists. This season, works by living composers made up about 22 percent of the pieces performed by orchestras, compared with 12 percent in 2015. The report was based on data from hundreds of orchestras across the United States.Many ensembles in recent years have taken steps to nurture the composing careers of women and people of color. The New York Philharmonic, for example, in 2020 started Project 19, a multiyear initiative to commission works from 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which brought women the right to vote.While orchestras have shown a greater willingness to program works by living composers in recent years, several obstacles remain, including that some new music is performed only once.The League of American Orchestras, aiming to make works by living composers a more permanent part of the orchestral landscape, announced an initiative last month to enlist 30 ensembles in the next several years to perform new pieces by six composers, all of them women. More

A revival of the Fats Waller musical revue emphasizes the blues in its blueprints.PITTSFIELD, Mass. — I don’t know whether the creators of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” were sending a deliberate message of ambivalence by front-loading the 1978 revue, after its delightful title number, with a song called “Lookin’ Good but Feelin’ Bad.”In any case, the team behind the rousing Barrington Stage Company revival, playing through July 9 in this becalmed Berkshires city, sure are. The up-tempo zing of that song’s melody, by Thomas Waller, better known as Fats, never completely undoes the sting of a lyric, by Lester A. Santly, that speaks of “weary days and lonely nights” spent “grievin’ over you.”That’s because the double message in this “Fats Waller Musical Show,” as the subtitle puts it, is more than intentional: It’s emblematic. Leaving intact the original plotless structure — which Richard Maltby Jr. hammered together from 30 of the hundreds of songs Waller wrote or recorded — the director and choreographer Jeffrey L. Page has subtly shaped the show to push the “grievin’” further past romance and into the sphere of Black identity.That’s true even in the breezy first act, as five skilled performers sail through insanely catchy and often risqué songs like “’T Ain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness If I Do” (which Waller recorded) and “Honeysuckle Rose” (which he wrote with Andy Razaf). These numbers are set in Harlem between the world wars, specifically at the Savoy Ballroom, as Black artists perform for Black audiences.And though it’s hard to have deep thoughts while watching people jitterbug — or while listening to “The Joint Is Jumpin’,” the exuberant first act finale — you keep noticing phrases and attitudes that have been slightly retuned. If Maltby’s brilliant original production favored a perfect coat of Broadway gloss, the Barrington version, which he approved, looks for cracks in the show’s composure.Spangled, feathered and zooted: Jarvis B. Manning Jr., from left, Allison Blackwell, Anastacia McClesky, Maiesha McQueen and Arnold Harper II in Oana Botez’s playful costumes.Daniel RaderSometimes, it’s a matter of design. Oana Botez’s exaggerated costumes — the three women profusely spangled and feathered and the two men wearing the zootiest zoot suits ever — suggest that even the playfulness of self-advertisement amounts to a form of disguise. Hidden in the proscenium of Raul Abrego’s black-and-gold Art Deco set are images of African masks.But in the second act, the meaning of the masking changes, as the uptown artists grow more popular among the downtown, mostly white crowds cartooned in “Lounging at the Waldorf.” (“They like jazz but in small doses,” goes a Maltby lyric for a Waller instrumental. “Bop and you could cause thrombosis.”) Soon the trade-off of authenticity for popularity becomes more disfiguring, as songs like “Your Feet’s Too Big,” “Find Out What They Like,” “The Viper’s Drag” and the devastating “Mean to Me” offer a performative version of Blackness that exaggerates stereotypes of belligerence, concupiscence, addiction and abandonment.Eventually, after an egregious bit of minstrelsy called “Fat and Greasy,” when the high spirits become impossible to maintain, the show takes a silent, sour pause. This puts “Black and Blue,” the climactic number, in a new context, or perhaps a clearer version of the original one. Its lover’s complaint of a lyric — “Browns and yellers, all have fellers/Gentlemen prefer them light” — moves outward to a consideration of injustice, in which the value of Black skin (“my only sin”) is set by white beholders.You wouldn’t think a show that trades in virtuosic swing could drop so deep and keep its balance, but then an ambivalence about appropriation is clearly part of Waller’s blueprint. (The tricky piano runs aren’t running from nothing.) Yet Page never goes so far as to strip the songs of their ticklish pleasures while stripping them of their varnish. More varnish might actually help; opening after just three days of previews, the production needs more shine. The sound is still muddy and the lighting still awkward. The performers, at first, are a bit of both, acting the lyrics too insistently, with a gesture for every word.Soon, though, they settle down, each delivering a specialty number that recalls (and then lets you put aside) the stellar original cast. Maiesha McQueen, singing Nell Carter’s songs, delivers a heartbreaking “Mean to Me”; Jarvis B. Manning Jr., taking on André De Shields’s track, is especially compelling in “The Viper’s Drag,” a song about smoking weed in which his body seems to become smoke itself. The others — Allison Blackwell, Arnold Harper II and Anastacia McClesky — all have great moments; the seven-person band, led by Kwinton Gray, has nothing but.Back in 1978, “Ain’t Misbehavin’” celebrated songs and performers from an era — the 1920s and ’30s — within many people’s living memory. Now, more than 40 years later, it’s important to replenish the context that time has drained. Even a show so universally admired benefits from thoughtful reconsideration. I don’t mean updating but something more like what happens in this production when we hear Luther Henderson’s stunning arrangement of “Black and Blue,” largely unchanged. It’s then that a deco drop flies up to reveal the back wall of the theater, as if what Waller swung and sang the blues about were happening now. It is.Ain’t Misbehavin’: The Fats Waller Musical ShowThrough July 9 at the Boyd-Quinson Stage, Pittsfield, Mass.; barringtonstageco.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

The group lost its lead singer just as it was gaining widespread acclaim. Its members have come up with an unusual solution.MANCHESTER, England — Last month, the six members of Black Country, New Road were joking around in a cramped rehearsal room about to try something new: everyone singing lead vocals.First, Tyler Hyde, the group’s bassist, sat forward and sang — her voice jumping between a smooth pop cry and a raucous shout. Next May Kershaw, usually on piano, took over, her voice gentle and brittle like a folk singer’s. Then Lewis Evans, the saxophonist, crooned two songs.“Dope as hell,” Charlie Wayne, the band’s drummer, said as Evans finished. Evans didn’t seem too sure. “I was a bit too slow!” he said, sounding frustrated.Just six months ago, Black Country, New Road, one of Britain’s rising rock acts, was a very different proposition. Back then, lead vocals were the domain of just one frontman: Isaac Wood, an intense and sometimes anxious-sounding singer, whose lovelorn lyrics helped Black Country, New Road win fan and critical devotion. The group’s debut album, “For the First Time,” was nominated last year for a Mercury Prize, Britain’s most important music award. Its second, “Ants From Up There,” was named a New York Times Critic’s Pick.But just before New Year’s Eve, Wood sent his bandmates a Facebook message. He couldn’t be in the public eye anymore, he said. The stress of pouring his heart out onstage was too much. He was leaving.Wayne said that when that message arrived, the band’s first thought was “the safety of our friend.” But once that was assured — Wood is in a much better place now, Evans said, happily working in a cake shop — the remaining members had to decide what to do next.Several of the bandmates gathered to discuss that moment in a sunny yard after the rehearsal last month. Splitting up was never an option, Kershaw said, since “playing together is so important to us.”The bandmates seemed to disagree on how hard restarting had been, though. When Evans said that beginning again after Wood’s departure “didn’t feel like a big deal,” Hyde and Kershaw gave each other confused looks, and laughed nervously. But his departure did make everyone appreciate more fully just how much pressure a band’s lead singer can be under. So they found a solution: share the load.A crowd gathers for Black Country, New Road’s first Manchester gig with its new lineup.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesThe bassist Hyde’s vocals fall between a smooth pop cry and a raucous shout.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesWhen Evans, center, opened a song with a jaunty saxophone melody, he was greeted by whoops from the audience. Alex Ingram for The New York TimesAt Wood’s urging, they kept the band name but decided to stop playing the tracks he had sung (Wood did not respond to requests for comment for this story). This meant that, before the rehearsal, the musicians had spent five intense, fun, but occasionally stressful, months writing nine songs to fulfill European festival dates this summer. Without the income from those appearances, Evans said, they would have had to get jobs, so they would have hardly been able to play together at all.The growing financial and emotional pressures on musicians have long been the focus of media attention in Britain. In 2017, Help Musicians, a nonprofit, set up a 24-hour help line to offer support for those with mental health issues or financial anxieties. Such worries only grew when the pandemic shut live venues, while the cost of living crisis has caused further concerns.Wood’s departure illustrated those pressures, said John Doran, a music journalist who has long championed Black Country, New Road. Being in a successful indie band could once lead to a good lifestyle. Now, Doran said in a telephone interview, acts exhaust themselves “to maybe one day have a mortgage and not need a side job.” It’s “no wonder musicians are under so much stress,” Doran added. “I do not envy them that at all.”This is, in fact, the second time the members of Black Country, New Road — all still in their early 20s — have had to restart.Four years ago, almost all of them were playing in another act, called Nervous Conditions, which was on the verge of breaking through in Britain’s competitive indie music scene. With only a couple of tracks online, taste-making websites declared the group one of the country’s “most exciting propositions,” and representatives from record labels flocked to its shows. But then its frontman, Connor Browne, facing anonymous accusations of sexual assault, issued a statement apologizing for the hurt caused, and the group disbanded.Hyde said that the bandmates had learned lessons from that moment. After the split, “the whole ethos became, ‘We’re doing this for us and because we want to,’” she said. Since then, the band has rewritten songs and changed lyrics whenever they’ve become bored of them, she added.When asked how they managed to keep reinventing themselves, the musicians said that having so many band members with different interests helped. But for the group’s fans, other factors were more important. Geordie Greep of black midi, a London-based band that is touring the United States with Black Country, New Road in September, said in a telephone interview that the group’s members were virtuosic musicians. That gave them the ingenuity to keep changing their style, he said.The members of Black Country, New Road — most of whom have known each other since they were in high school — also clearly had a strong communal bond, Greep added. “These guys genuinely go out of their way to just hang out as friends,” he said, sounding a little bemused. Most bands, including his own, don’t do that, he noted.Splitting up was never an option, said Kershaw, second from left, since “playing together is so important to us.”Alex Ingram for The New York TimesEven for such a close group of musicians, the process of stepping up to lead vocals has not always been easy. Evans said that he “got shakes” the first time he sang a track he’d written to his bandmates. Kershaw said that she had found it “nerve-racking,” and told everyone “not to worry” if they thought her tracks weren’t “the right vibe.” She squirmed on her seat as she recalled the memory.But with shows looming, the band members had to overcome their nerves again to sing in front of paying audiences. A few days later, the band walked onstage at the Pink Room, a music venue in Manchester, northern England, filled with 250 people (the group canceled a sold-out 1,800-capacity show in the city shortly after Wood left).If Evans was still nervous, he did not need to be. As soon as he started playing a jaunty saxophone melody to open the track “Up Song,” he was greeted by whoops from the audience. When the band got to the raucous chorus, the crowd started jumping up and down and chanting along, as if they’d heard the song hundreds of times. “Look at what we did together,” the band sang in unison, “BC, NR/Friends forever.”A few tracks later, even the bar staff fell silent as Kershaw sang “Turbines/Pigs,” an eight-minute song in which she plays a gentle piano melody while singing, “Don’t waste your pearls on me/I’m only a pig.”After 45 minutes, the band walked offstage with a few polite waves goodbye. Some fans shouted for more, until they realized that Black Country, New Road couldn’t come back for an encore even if they wanted to. The new incarnation had played all the songs it had. More

The boy band’s new compilation marks its sixth time atop the Billboard 200 chart. The group’s seven members will focus on solo projects.On June 10, the K-pop powerhouse BTS released a three-disc compilation album, “Proof.” It was sure to be a hit, and this week it opens at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart, with the equivalent of 314,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate.But BTS’s importance to Hybe, the South Korean entertainment company behind the group, was underscored when BTS announced four days later that it was taking a break to let its seven members focus on solo projects. The next day, Hybe’s stock price dropped 28 percent, trimming $1.7 billion market value from the company; since then the share price has improved only slightly.BTS accounts for nearly a third of Hybe’s sales in the United States, according to company disclosures, and as recently as 2020, nearly 90 percent of Hybe’s revenues were related to BTS and its music. (That was before Hybe bought Ithaca Holdings, the company led by the American music executive Scooter Braun, the manager of Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, in a deal that was reported be worth as much as $1 billion.)But BTS’s impact is not limited to its management company’s account books. This month, the group spoke at the White House against anti-Asian hate crimes, and was hosted by President Biden in the Oval Office. Fans worldwide, who act as indomitable cheerleaders under the collective name Army, swarmed social media to commiserate and discuss the announcement.The success of “Proof” followed a marketing playbook that has become standard for K-pop groups, with fans rushing to buy collectible releases in physical formats. Of the 314,000 “equivalent” sales for the album — a figure that incorporates physical sales, downloads and streams — 259,000 were for CD versions sold for as high as $70. The 48-track CD iteration includes 13 songs not available for streaming or download. In addition to the CD sales, the album sold 6,500 copies as digital downloads and had 53 million streams. It is the group’s sixth album to top the Billboard chart.Also this week, Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” falls to No. 2 and Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” is No. 3. Post Malone’s new “Twelve Carat Toothache” drops two spots to No. 4 in its second week out, and Future’s “I Never Liked You” is No. 5.Next week, Drake’s surprise new LP, “Honestly, Nevermind,” released on Friday, is likely to open at No. 1. More

As a Kentucky farm kid, the singer and songwriter made music to have a voice in her troubled home. On her new album, “The Spur,” her songs finally process those times.SKYLIGHT, Ky. — The second week of November 2016: Donald Trump was president-elect, and Leonard Cohen was dead. The songwriter Joan Shelley and the guitarist Nathan Salsburg — her collaborator for the better part of a decade and boyfriend for the better part of a year — were the opening act on a tour that suddenly seemed meaningless. They listened to Cohen’s haunted farewell, “You Want It Darker,” on repeat and bickered about the news.“It was so masochistic: ‘Start it over, and let’s feel horrible,’” Shelley, now 36, remembered recently by phone from Kentucky during one of several interviews, laughing through a sigh. “Talk about bad reverb, the worst echo box.”But, Shelley recalled, as the sun sank to the couple’s west along the Indiana plains during that 2016 drive, she marveled at the outlines of homes scattered on the horizon, how they seemed to resist the tug of inevitable darkness. “It made a really beautiful point — the hopefulness of someone building a house out here, despite all the …” she said, pausing for words that never came. “It was lonely, but it was resilient. Everything became part of the sunset.”Standing in the kitchen of their bungalow three years later, Shelley played her newest tune for Salsburg — “When the Light Is Dying,” a snapshot of that gloomy scene and a portrait of hope through shared perseverance. “Oh God, I felt emptied out,” Salsburg, 43, remembered in a phone interview. “That was a desperate, desolate moment, but she turned it into something profoundly beautiful, this whole cocktail of being human.”The graceful song’s quiet redemption is the centerpiece of “The Spur,” Shelley’s sixth solo album, due Friday. Written largely during the pandemic while Shelley was pregnant with their daughter, Talya, its dozen songs deal not with her expectations for motherhood but instead with her difficulties as a daughter and sister, as an attentive observer of the cycles around her lifelong home and her worries about the place’s future, both politically and environmentally. There is death and renewal, romance and retreat, self-doubt and societal hope, all rendered with elegant restraint in her fireside alto.“I had to clean out this junk I’d been dragging around,” Shelley said on another interview day. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a mom, but doing this made that possible. I was scared of hurting a new human, of perpetuating the pain inflicted on me.”Shelley and Salsburg live on a 40-acre former tree farm 30 minutes northeast of Louisville, tucked at the end of a long driveway in the community of Skylight. She grew up on her mother’s nearby farm for Saddlebred horses, a world apart from Louisville and “punk kids that looked so hard.”“I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a mom, but doing this made that possible,” Shelley said, of writing her new album. “I was scared of hurting a new human, of perpetuating the pain inflicted on me.”Stacy Kranitz for The New York TimesHer parents split when she was 3. After her mother remarried, Shelley, quiet and pensive, struggled for space among four other children. She began mimicking songs of heartache from the radio, using the borrowed language of romance to explore adolescent anxiety. She won a songwriting contest at 9, then joined any chorus she could find, rehearsals providing trips to the big city. As high school began, she learned chords on a guitar salvaged from the attic.“I didn’t have a voice in that family, but I found one through music,” she said. “That’s 100 percent why I sing now. I was the only one in my family that had this expression, so I made a quiet corner in a noisy world in this very isolated family.”Shelley headed south to the University of Georgia, hoping Athens’s fabled music scene would motivate her when coursework didn’t. She majored in anthropology, dreaming of archaeological digs in exotic places. But after graduating, she fell into a small traditional music crew back in Louisville, starting the old-time trio Maiden Radio alongside two music therapists, Cheyenne Marie Mize and Julia Purcell.“We didn’t want to go play around the world as ‘Kentucky’s Appalachian band,’ because that’s not who we were,” said Mize, who stayed up until dawn singing with Shelley when they met while camping in the state’s Red River Gorge. “Joan was writing in an old-time vein as an exercise; she started finding her style.”Shelley has steadily refined that style — a braid of folk immediacy and poetic insight, much like the writing of fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry — for a dozen years. The tree sanctuary has become another quiet corner, allowing her to “recoil into solitude” to raise chickens and goats, grow collards and kale, bake sourdough bread and write songs alone at the kitchen table. (When Salsburg walks in for a snack but finds her with a guitar, he disappears; she plays him songs only when they’re finished.)Birds, rivers, leaves and ridgelines animate her writing; images wrested from her surroundings offer unexpected lenses for self-reflection. “There is no facade that is useful out here,” Shelley said of life on a farm. “This privacy is a way to let go of the things you’ve said and try to say something else.”To write “The Spur,” however, Shelley opened her usually hermetic process. She joined a new group of local songwriters who met weekly to share their responses to a prompt. The time constraint inspired her to be satisfied with pieces she would have once considered unfinished, like “Fawn,” a playful but frank ode to safeguarding privacy. “I’ve been worried since the beginning,” she sings, tone gentle but clinched. “Am I safe in my skin?”And when she stalled on a tune that reflected all the birth, life and death she’d seen as a country kid, she emailed the sketch to Bill Callahan, a singer-songwriter she’s long admired. They’ve become pen pals in recent years, having met only once. “She writes songs that don’t feel like they’re trying to do something,” Callahan said from Austin by phone. “You’re never really sure if the tide is going in or going out.”“Music made me a whole person — it allowed for the survival of the softer parts of me,” Shelley said.Stacy Kranitz for The New York TimesKnowing of her rural circumstances, he supplied images of cows killed for hides or crops planted for harvest on “Amberlit Morning,” his trademark baritone the doomy inverse of her tender awakening. “When I was a child, I didn’t see the tragedy of, like, a colt dying. ‘A snake ate the ducks’ — that’s just what happened,’” Shelley said. “Only later did I learn to cry about the loss or ugliness or violence.”As new parents, married for a year now, Shelley and Salsburg talk about leaving the farm or even Kentucky, of finding some place where their elected officials reflect their values. “We have this community rich with really wonderful people, but is that enough to insulate Talya from the insidious stuff?” Salsburg asked, squinting in the sunlight outside the barn where he works remotely as the curator of the Alan Lomax Archive. “For this child, we could use a different place, a different path.”Shelley, though, waffles with the seasons. The new song “Why Not Live Here” squares up to the troubles of making home in challenging places. Strolling toward Harrods Creek on the afternoon of an in-person interview, her billowing pants swishing against thick grass, she pointed out the culvert where she sits to read and stood over a possum’s carcass, unfazed as she contemplated its end.“As soon as all the trees leaved out, I was like, ‘I’m staying forever,’” she said of spring’s recent start, singing those last few words in a soprano vibrato. “But it’s still hard to imagine planting a child in this.”For now, the songwriting coterie that prompted much of “The Spur” has morphed into the Marigold Collective, an upstart group organizing letter-writing campaigns to conservative Kentucky politicians and a parade along an old bison trail to, as Shelley put it, “celebrate life on the edge of extinction.” These actions are small, she said, like writing new songs to process old wounds. But maybe they prove more meaningful than submitting to darkness.“Music made me a whole person — it allowed for the survival of the softer parts of me,” she said on a FaceTime call, walking through the yard as birds chirped. “It’s a way to be unstuck about it all.” More

The Harlem Chamber Players presented R. Nathaniel Dett’s 1937 oratorio in honor of the centennial of the Harlem Renaissance, for the Juneteenth weekend.The Harlem Chamber Players offered a rare, heartfelt performance of R. Nathaniel Dett’s 1937 oratorio “The Ordering of Moses” at Riverside Church on Friday, as part of a centennial celebration of the Harlem Renaissance that had been delayed by the pandemic.Timed to coincide with the Juneteenth weekend, the event felt like a broad community gathering, as though a sampling of city dwellers stepped off a subway train and headed to the same place. New Yorkers across ages and races, including a crying baby or two, filled the pews. Some dressed in natty suits, others in picnic shorts. The only thing stuffy about the evening was the weather outside.With the concert running behind schedule, Terrance McKnight, a host for WQXR and artistic adviser for the ensemble, was on hand to M.C. Noting that the performance was being recorded for his radio station, he encouraged the audience to make some noise: “What’s a Juneteenth celebration in New York City sound like?” The reply: jubilant shouts and applause.That energy continued into a stirring rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” arranged for chorus and soprano soloist (a hard-to-hear Janinah Burnett) by the evening’s conductor, Damien Sneed. Known as the Black National Anthem, it brought the congregation to its feet. Sneed’s harmonization gave it a discordant underbelly reflective of struggle — a reminder that it has been only two years since protests for George Floyd swept the globe, and one year since Juneteenth, an annual observation of Emancipation dating to 1866, was consecrated as a federal holiday.Damien Sneed, conducting the pieces on Friday.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe evening’s centerpiece, “The Ordering of Moses,” tells the story of Exodus: Moses, inspired by God’s call, overcomes his hesitation and leads the Israelites out of Egypt with his sister Miriam.Dett ingeniously wove spirituals into the typical oratorio structure of soloists and chorus expounding a biblical story with orchestra. In a letter around the time of the premiere, he wrote of the synergy between folk lyrics and scripture, calling it “striking” and “natural.”The score elides musical styles, as well. The emotional restraint of the soloists’ parts suits the solemn subject, and when their voices intermingle, the lines move perhaps too neatly. But the orchestration admits richer, Romantic influences, and a call-and-response with the chorus gives the music the sway of a spiritual.Central to the structure is one spiritual in particular, “Go Down, Moses,” and Dett’s bracing fugue on its melody honors its august history. Harriet Tubman sang its promise of deliverance from oppression on the Underground Railroad, and Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson popularized it across a segregated country.At Riverside Church, the bass section of the Chorale Le Chateau strongly anchored the fugue, and the altos lent it clarity. The tenors and sopranos shied away from the swiftly moving harmonies, reflecting a general timidity among all the choristers when they didn’t have a clear melody to sing.The tenor Chauncey Parker (Moses) let his voice ring and popped out triumphant high notes. The soprano Brandie Sutton (Miriam) phrased her music with confident individuality, echoing the style of the evening’s dedicatee, the legendary Jessye Norman. The baritone Kenneth Overton (the Word and the Voice of God) sang authoritatively, and the mezzo-soprano Krysty Swann (the Voice of Israel) offered glimmers of radiance in the taxing contralto writing.The Harlem School of the arts alumni, teen and junior ensembles, in “The Ordering of Moses.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIn her opening remarks, Liz Player, the Harlem Chamber Players’ executive and artistic director, noted that “The Ordering of Moses” was the ensemble’s largest-ever undertaking. It showed sometimes in the careful tempos and less-than-sure-footed ensemble.But moments shone. As the story opens up, moving from Moses’ self-doubt to an affirmation of his purpose, so does the music: A lonely cello (touchingly played by Wayne Smith) begins the piece, and an orchestra in full cry ends it, with Parker and Sutton declaiming their lines on high as the chorus cushioned them with long, held notes. The effect was resplendent.Juneteenth, asserted McKnight, is “a celebration of liberty for all Americans,” and in those final moments, as the music bathed the diverse assemblage in its glow, it seemed he was right. More

On his seventh album, “Honestly, Nevermind,” the pop disrupter who rethought rap’s relationship with melody opts for a new direction: nightclub abandon.For more than a decade, the Drake factory has been operating at full capacity — recalibrating the relationship between hip-hop, R&B and pop; balancing grand-scale ambition with granular experimentation; embracing the meme-ification of his celebrity. But in recent years, for the first time, it’s felt like the machines might be grinding to a pause. Maintaining the throne is hard work, and the wear and tear were beginning to show.What Drake has needed is an opportunity to refresh, a chance to be unburdened of old assumptions. It’s the sort of renewal you only really find after-hours.“Honestly, Nevermind,” Drake’s seventh solo studio album, which was released on Friday just a few hours after it was announced, is a small marvel of bodily exuberance — appealingly weightless, escapist and zealously free. An album of entrancing club music, it’s a pointed evolution toward a new era for one of music’s most influential stars. It is also a Drake album made up almost wholly of the parts of Drake albums that send hip-hop purists into conniptions.The expectations Drake is seeking to upend here, though, are his own. For almost the entire 2010s, hip-hop — and most of the rest of popular music — molded itself around his innovations. Blending singing and rapping together, making music that was unselfconsciously pop without kowtowing to the old way of making pop, Drake has long understood that he could build a new kind of global consensus both because he understood the limitations of older approaches, and because the globe is changing.Nevertheless, the bloated “Certified Lover Boy,” released last year, was his least focused album, and also his least imaginative — he sounded enervated, fatigued with his own ideas. What’s more, the people who have come up behind him may have exhausted them, too.Those conditions force innovation, though, and “Honestly, Nevermind” is a clear pivot, an increasingly rare thing for a pop icon. Drake fully embraces the dance floor here, making house music that also touches on Jersey club, Baltimore club, ballroom and Amapiano. Each of these styles has trickled up from regional phenomenon to tastemaker attention in recent years, and like the skilled scavenger he is, Drake has harvested bits and pieces for his own constructions.Part of why this is so striking is that Drake has made a career out of caress. His productions — always led by his longtime collaborator, Noah Shebib, known as 40 — were emphatically soothing. But the beats here have sharp corners, they kick and punch. “Currents” features both the squeaky-bed sample that’s a staple of Jersey club, and a familiar vocal ad-lib that’s a staple of Baltimore club. “Texts Go Green” is driven by jittery percussion, and the piano-drizzled soulful house buildup toward the end of “A Keeper” is an invitation to liberation.This approach turns out to be well-suited to Drake’s singing style, which is lean and doesn’t apply overt pressure. It’s conspiratorial, romantic, sometimes erotic — he’s never singing at you so much as he’s singing about you, in your ear.Most of the songs are about romantic intrigue, and often Drake is the victim. In places, this is a return to Instagram-caption-era Drake. “I know my funeral gonna be lit ’cause of how I treated people” he intones on the hard-stomping “Massive.” On the slurry “Liability,” he moans, “You’re too busy dancing in the club to our songs.”But part of the trade-off of this album is in lyrical vividness — on most songs Drake is alluding to things more than describing them. The words are prompts, suggestions, light abstractions that aim to emulate the mood of the production. (Also, social media moves too fast now, and doesn’t reward the same kinds of patient emotional poignancy that he excels at.)There is recent precedent for Drake’s choices here: Kanye West’s “808s & Heartbreak” and the more fleet parts of “Yeezus”; Frank Ocean’s flirtations with dance music.But music like this has always been a part of Drake’s grammar: think “Take Care” with Rihanna from 2011, with its Gil Scott-Heron/Jamie xx breakdown. Or the serene sunrise anthem “Passionfruit” from 2017 (which also had a Moodymann sample); “Fountains,” from “Certified Lover Boy,” a blissed-out duet with the Nigerian star Tems, was in this vein, too, but seemed to portend that the next hard Drake pivot would be toward Afrobeats, which he’s long engaged with, including collaborations with Wizkid.But Drake opted for club music — the average b.p.m. here is over 100 — building an explicit musical bridge to Black and queer musical subcultures. That said, the sweaty, countercultural house music that he’s taking influence from has also in recent years become a template for music of privilege — it is the soundtrack of the global moneyed elite, the same in Dubai and Ibiza as Miami and Mykonos. It’s music that’s inviting but also innocuous; it’s filled with meaning and reference, but also smooth to the touch.Drake is in an unenviable position only a handful of pop superstars have been in before — he is one of the most famous musicians on the planet, and his fame is premised upon being something of a chameleon. But it’s hard for a juggernaut to be nimble. Nevertheless, “Honestly, Nevermind” is the work of someone unbothered by the potential for alienating old allies. The last two years have been unmooring, and the pandemic has freed artists to do the unexpected simply by removing the old reward structures. (Structurally, “Honestly, Nevermind” is a similar turn to the Weeknd’s electro-pop experiment “Dawn FM,” released in January.)The coronavirus era has also nurtured the rise of hip-hop scenes that thrive in the virtual chaos of social media. That’s been most evident in the rise of drill, which has been recentering hip-hop in grit and nerve. Even though Drake has toyed with drill before, collaborating with Fivio Foreign and Lil Durk, among others, “Honestly, Nevermind” is an anti-drill record. Drake is 35 now, and undoubtedly reckoning with how to live alongside his children’s children.He only truly raps on two songs here: “Sticky,” which verges on hip-house (“Two sprinters to Quebec/Chérie, où est mon bec?”), and “Jimmy Cooks,” the final song, which features 21 Savage, samples Playa Fly and feels like a pointed coda of bluster after 45 minutes of sheer ecstatic release.That’s the sort of hip-hop insider wink that Drake albums have long flaunted, but as he and his fans age, they may not be the stuff of his future. Whether “Honestly, Nevermind” proves to be a head fake or a permanent new direction, it’s maybe an indication that he’s leaving the old Drake — and everyone who followed him — in the rear view. Like a great quarterback, he’s throwing the ball where his receivers are already heading, not where they’ve been.Drake“Honestly, Nevermind”(OVO/Republic) More

In Martha Clarke’s piece about St. Francis of Assisi, at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater, the song carries the dance.The life of St. Francis of Assisi was a dramatic one. The child of a wealthy Italian merchant, he had a 12th-century playboy youth, went to war and spent a year in captivity. He had mystical visions, stole from his disapproving father to give to the church and devoted himself to a life of poverty in imitation of Christ, founding a religious order. He saw God in nature, thanking the sun, preaching to birds — setting an example of equality and ecology followed by many, including the current Pope.Very little of this drama registers in “God’s Fool,” the dance theater work about Francis that opened at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater on Thursday. And despite being conceived and directed by Martha Clarke, the creator of many acclaimed dance theater pieces, “God’s Fool” contains very little dance theater.Instead, Francis (Patrick Andrews) and his followers mostly wander around a gravel-strewn stage in friars’ robes, talking about God and faith. When in doubt, they sing.That’s not a problem in itself, since the singing, mostly unaccompanied, is excellent. Arranged and directed by Arthur Solari, it helps establish the world from the start, as the cloaked cast enters intoning an Easter vigil. And the frequent retreat into song gives a sense of a confused flock clinging to fellowship.But the singing does contribute to some of the show’s confusion of time and genre. The selections stray from Francis’s time into an African American spiritual and some Gustav Mahler. When Francis breaks into a Broadway-style duet of the American folk song “Wayfaring Stranger” with Clare, the female member of his flock, we’re definitely not in Assisi anymore.Andrews’s Francis is wholly American, a lost boy. In manner, he wouldn’t seem out of place in a David Mamet play or maybe “Rent.” He does big swings of mood, laughing hysterically, weeping when necessary, mooning over nature like a Beat poet. The saint must have been disruptive, bewildering figure, but when Francis’s exasperated father calls him a bum and a brat, it feels all-too accurate.This central performance is at odds with Fanny Howe’s poetic text. The script is spare, alternating between soliloquies and scenes that aren’t naturalistic dialogue but exchanges of fragments. A representative one goes like this:Francis: Beat me Leo.Leo: I can’t beat you Francis.Luca: You should join the circus, Francis.Francis: I should die.The delivery makes this and many similar exchanges unintentionally comic. The veteran performance artist John Kelly, playing a red-horned devil who accompanies Francis and his followers, contributes some intentional comedy and commedia dell’arte flavor. But neither Kelly nor oversize animal heads (masks by Margie Jervis) nor between-scenes bits of movement (everyone blown by the wind or carrying Francis aloft) compensate enough to give the production the strangeness and wonder it needs.And so, while some of the dramatic incidents in Francis’s life are covered — abuse from his father, the preaching to birds, the appearance of stigmata and, more boldly, kissing Clare and the devil — almost nothing comes across convincingly or illuminatingly.What resonates, along with the singing, is something unsung but latent in Howe’s words: “revelations of a world just an inch from our senses, like perfumes you can’t see, perfumes you catch from a May tree.” What “God’s Fool” might have revealed.God’s FoolThrough July 2 at Ellen Stewart Theater; lamama.org. More