Music

The classically trained rapper has modeled for Telfar, Burberry and North Face.Name: HawaAge: 21Hometown: Born in Berlin, and grew up in Guinea-Conakry and New York CityNow Lives: In a sunny, two-bedroom apartment in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of BrooklynClaim to Fame: Hawa is a classically trained queer rapper and sometimes fashion model, who is perhaps best known for her 2019 song “My Love,” which was featured in an emotional scene in Michaela Coel’s HBO series “I May Destroy You.” The placement not only brought her exposure, but aligned with her art as a queer Black woman. “I love being a part of things that are impactful in a sense, and things that change people’s perception, so that’s why it’s important to me,” she said.Big Break: Hawa was accepted into the New York Philharmonic Very Young Composers Program at 10 and became its youngest composer. She quit at 15 because she wanted to focus on R&B and indie music as a way of expressing her sexuality. Two years later, she posted a snippet of her music to Instagram, which caught the attention of Keenan MacWilliam, a creative director and artist in New York. Through Ms. MacWilliam, Hawa got signed with the record label 4AD. In 2020, she released her debut EP “The One.”Latest Project: In 2020, Hawa made a splash on the fashion scene when she performed at Telfar Clemens’s show at Pitti Uomo and created an original score for Telfar. TV, its online storytelling platform. She has also been featured in recent advertising campaigns for Burberry and North Face, and walked in Collina Strada’s runway show in 2021.Next Thing: Hawa is finishing up her debut album, “Hadja Bangoura,” set for release this summer. She enlisted the producer Tony Seltzer to help her craft an experimental mélange of R&B, soul, indie, pop, trap and New York drill rap. The album was inspired by her great-grandmother, who died earlier this year. “She’s the person who made all the women in my family the strong, educated people that they are, and turned all of them into amazing human beings,” she said. “So losing her is like losing a part of myself.”Model Moves: For Hawa, fashion and music “go hand in hand, like eggs and bacon,” she said. “When it came to me branching out into the fashion industry, it was really a bunch of designers who were fans of my art before we got to meet,” she said. “Now, they’re fans of not only my art at this point but fans of me as a person.” More

An influential figure in American experimental music, he was part of a group of composers who stripped music down to basic elements and used digital sounds.Ingram Marshall, a minimalist composer known for the mystery and melancholy of his works, which featured sounds as disparate as San Francisco fog horns and Balinese bamboo flutes, died on May 31 in New Haven, Conn. He was 80.His wife, Veronica Tomasic, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Marshall was an influential figure in American experimental music, part of a group of composers who, beginning in the 1960s, stripped music down to basic elements of rhythm and tempo and incorporated digital sounds. A self-described “expressivist,” he was known for haunting, mystical works that fused various traditions, among them European Romanticism, Indonesian gamelan and electronics.“A musical experience should be enveloping,” Mr. Marshall said in a 1996 interview for Yale University’s Oral History of American Music. “Almost in a narcotic way. Not to be zoned out or in a trance exactly, but to be really wrought up in it. If you can do that, I think you’ve done something.”He produced a varied body of work, including chamber pieces for renowned ensembles like the Kronos Quartet, brass sextets, choral works and solo guitar pieces. Much of his music blended conventional instruments with prerecorded, computer-manipulated sounds.“His music was very emotional, but not in a saccharine, neo-Romantic way,” the composer John Adams, a longtime friend, said in an interview. “It was his own very unique, very sentimental style, but sentimental in the very best sense of the word.”An admirer of Romantic-era composers like Sibelius and Bruckner, Mr. Marshall had a deep knowledge of the Western classical canon that informed his style, even as he veered in new directions.“He was not afraid of being very direct and expressive,” said Libby Van Cleve, an oboist who directs the Yale oral history project and for whom Mr. Marshall wrote three pieces. “His biggest impact was just having the courage to write such deeply heartfelt and expressive music in the electronic realm.”Ingram Douglass Marshall was born on May 10, 1942, in Mount Vernon, N.Y., in Westchester County, to Harry Reinhard Marshall Sr., a banker, and Bernice (Douglass) Marshall, an amateur pianist.At the encouragement of his mother, he began singing at a young age and joined a church choir. His interest in music deepened, and in 1964 he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in music from Lake Forest College in Illinois. He later attended Columbia University and then the California Institute of the Arts, where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1971 and taught classes in electronic music.Mr. Marshall in 2005. “A musical experience should be enveloping,” he once said. “Almost in a narcotic way. Not to be zoned out or in a trance exactly, but to be really wrought up in it.”Thomas McDonald for The New York TimesWhile at the California Institute, he met several Indonesian performers and became entranced by their music. Intent on immersing himself in Indonesia’s sounds, he secured a Fulbright grant and traveled to the country for four months in 1971.The visit was a turning point. He soon began incorporating into his music elements of Indonesian culture, including the gambuh, a traditional Balinese flute. He adopted a more unhurried style, a development he attributed to his immersion in Indonesian music.“I realized that the ‘zip-and-zap, bleep-and-blap’ kind of formally organized electronic music I had been trying to do simply wasn’t my way,” Mr. Marshall said in the Yale interview, speaking about his experience in Indonesia. “I needed to find a slower, deeper way of approaching electronic music.”In 1981, he produced one of his best-known works, “Fog Tropes,” a somber meditation that paired field recordings of foghorns in the San Francisco Bay Area with brass instruments.“A lot of people are reminded of San Francisco when they hear this piece, but not I,” Mr. Marshall once said. “To me it is just about fog, and being lost in the fog. The brass players should sound as if they were off in a raft floating in the middle of a mist-enshrouded bay.”Mr. Marshall’s admirers lauded the spiritual quality of his works. Some drew comparisons to the so-called holy minimalists of Eastern Europe, including the prominent Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.“True, he does not write explicitly liturgical music, nor does he cultivate any priestly airs,” Adam Shatz wrote in a 2001 article about on Mr. Marshall in The New York Times. “But his music is some of the most stirring spiritual art to be found in America today.”The composer Steve Reich, another friend, said the mystery in Mr. Marshall’s work made it distinct. He described the music as a mix of American spirituality, “impenetrable, mysterious Northern fog and mist,” and gamelan.“Ingram can’t be pinned down so easily,” Mr. Reich said in an interview. “It’s not just minimalism, or whatever other moniker you want to put onto it, but it’s radiantly intelligent and beautiful.”After more than 15 years in California, Mr. Marshall returned to the East Coast in 1990, settling in Hamden, Conn., outside New Haven. He continued to compose and teach, serving as a part-time lecturer at the Yale School of Music from 2004 to 2014.Along with his wife, Mr. Marshall is survived by a son, Clement; a daughter from a previous relationship, Juliet Simon; and four grandchildren.While he was not religious, Mr. Marshall sometimes spoke about the spiritual power of music. He said he hoped that after disasters, artists could help bring understanding to the world.“Composers, poets and artists always feel useless in the wake of calamity,” he told The Times in 2001. “We are not firemen; we are not philanthropists or inspirational speakers. But I think it is the tragic and calamitous in life that we try to make sense of, and this is the stuff of our lives as artists.” More

The composer and pianist Timo Andres remembers his former teacher, who “gave the impression that all of music was at our feet.”I first came to know the composer Ingram Marshall, who died on May 31 at 80, as a campus personality. Benevolent and slightly spectral, he’d glide into Yale’s music library, where I had a work-study job as an undergraduate student, and I’d help him find scores and recordings. I already knew a few of his pieces, and was a bit awe-struck chatting with their creator. His musical and real-life personalities seemed directly related: unhurried, easygoing, more likely to follow a train of thought than pursue a rigorous argument, but unafraid to let the conversation become serious or philosophical.Our conversations broadened during my time learning with Marshall in graduate school. His teaching style was distinctly unrigorous but discursive and all-encompassing. In a lesson, we were as likely to discuss a Bergman film or the best way to cook wild mushrooms as we were to analyze whatever I was working on. Mostly, he was content to leave my music as I’d written it; on certain occasions, he’d point out a passage and say, “I like that part, it could last longer.” He encouraged me to take my time, focus on my ideas, and see them through.Marshall became a friend — simply a great hang, and endlessly interesting to talk with. We’d drive out to Sleeping Giant State Park north of New Haven, Conn., for hikes along the river, or further into the country to hunt for morels and chanterelles in his secret spots. He consorted easily with composition students; he treated us as colleagues, and as a result we weren’t afraid to speak openly around him.Around the same time, I started to find great pleasure in playing Marshall’s music, particularly the solo piano piece “Authentic Presence” (2002). A grand fantasia in the tradition of Schubert and Chopin, it is full of contradictions and unexplainable things. The rhythmic language vacillates widely between insistent pulse and total freedom. Sometimes, the phrases are like run-on sentences; elsewhere, they are poetic, rhetorical, filled with pauses and hesitations. The music looks simple on the page, spare on indications almost to the point of inscrutability — a challenge to interpreters to form their own ideas, but also a gesture of respect, entrusting the music to its performer’s care. “Authentic Presence” manages to feel weighty while also ephemeral, grand without grandiloquence, understated in its execution yet unafraid of dramatic gesture.These qualities, constants of Marshall’s style over his entire career, made his voice one of the most personal and distinctive of any composer in recent memory. With an unlikely fusion of loose, stream-of-consciousness forms and old-school contrapuntal technique, he constructed monoliths of sound, then obscured them. He wove elaborate textures out of canons, inversions, elongations and diminutions. His gamelan-inspired arpeggios undulate gently in and out of sun and shadow. Frequent quotations and references give the music a sense of porousness and mutability. Everything coexists in what feels like a physical acoustic space — rich and reverberant, but also distant, held at a remove, seen through a dense fog. Above all, there is the emotional flavor of it. For him, music wasn’t just an abstraction, an intellectual game of pitches and forms. It was also about expressing something sincerely.In much the same way, Marshall’s use of technology was never for its own sake. He valued gear only insofar as it allowed him to achieve a musical and expressive result. In the spacious “Gradual Requiem,” composed in the late 1970s, an idiosyncratic ensemble — of piano, mandolin, synthesizer, Balinese flute, prerecorded choirs and eight-channel tape delay — guides the listener through a gently epic musical journey of sound design as composition, with electronic and acoustic elements blending seamlessly, cushioning and enveloping one another. This requiem creates a sacred space without words, using layer upon layer of reverberation and delay to build an infinitely large cathedral around the music.Much of the music closest to Marshall’s heart was sacred: New England shape-note songs, Bruckner motets, the gamelan music of Java and Bali. Though he’d grown up a Methodist choir boy, his own beliefs were similarly varied and idiosyncratic, and a deep sense of spirituality runs through his work. Grief recurs, as does coming to terms with death, even finding a kind of ecstatic joy in its anticipation. “Bright Hour Delayed,” from “Hymnodic Delays” (1997), takes the boisterous Sacred Harp hymn “Northfield” as its theme: “How long, dear savior, O how long / shall this bright hour delay?” Marshall slows it down by a factor of four, splays the voices and leaves its melodies hanging plaintively in the air, echoing into the distance like a musical question mark.In “Kingdom Come” (1997), grieving becomes a kind of ritual, connecting the individual to the universal pool of human grief. The piece opens with a chain of A-minor chords, spiraling upward (a reference to Marshall’s beloved Sibelius) then slowly, painfully, drifts downward in an aching lament. We land in a deep, murky F-major stew, out of which bits of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” emerge. (Charles Ives, another composer who used that hymn tune, is a clear reference point; Marshall and I shared adoration for our fellow New Englander, particularly his ability to combine seemingly disparate elements into a potent emotional salmagundi.) As it gathers momentum, “Kingdom Come” becomes a procession in slow motion, a chorus of mourners gathering. Despite its troubled affect and a couple of jolting outbursts, it is not histrionic music; it always looks inward in its search for associations, allusions and meaning.Marshall’s eclectic approach to composition appealed to me. I felt I’d found a mentor who related to music the way I wanted to: with curiosity, open-mindedness and little regard for historical period or genre. He gave the impression that all of music was at our feet in an enormous pile, fodder for inspiration. That’s not to say he liked everything or was uncritical. He could be bluntly dismissive of composers he considered overly academic, technically flashy or too eager to please. But his default approach to life and music was one of generosity.People who knew him often observed that Marshall seemed to be egoless; he didn’t strive, network or self-promote the way artists of my generation have been trained to do. He did have an ego, of course, as one must to pursue an artistic craft so single-mindedly; he just managed to keep it admirably separate from his personal interactions. Though he didn’t strive for fame and fortune, he certainly wished for wider acclaim. On his blog, Old Man of the Woods, in 2013, he lamented the “minor little” commissions he was getting. “There has been nothing of substance, just a few chamber and solo pieces. Frankly, it’s kind of depressing not to have a major work under way on the drafting table.”The source of the frustration was not always external; he was a slow and painstaking writer, at times laboring over a piece for years before he molded it into a form that satisfied him. But once he had done this, he took great pleasure in hearing his own music and was justly proud of what he felt to be his most successful works. And in his own funny, quiet way, he relished attention and affirmation of his creative struggles. A few months ago, I was interviewed about his work on Joshua Weilerstein’s music podcast, and Marshall was thrilled. “I loved all that adulation,” he wrote to me in an email. (Weilerstein conducted my piano concerto “The Blind Banister,” in 2015.)In 2016, Marshall mentioned that he would like to write something for me — a concerto, perhaps. I immediately called up his old friend and steadfast champion, John Adams, who wrangled a commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The next year, “Flow,” a chamber concerto, emerged, and seemed to capture a little bit of everything from Marshall’s voice. The piece begins in beatific, C-major stasis, as a jaunty hymn gathers momentum in canonic form. Then, a series of escalating ruminations on another hymn, “Shall We Gather at the River?,” first on a solo viola, build up to a fiery orchestral tutti. Then, suddenly, we’re in Indonesia, piano and percussion leaping forward in music as puckish and energetic as anything Marshall ever wrote. Pentatonic arpeggios pile up in multiple keys; a polytonal roar escalates and evaporates. Marshall labored over the final page. When the last revision arrived, days before the premiere, I was moved to find that its closing notes were a quote of my own piano piece “At The River,” which I had dedicated to him in 2011.Of the many obscure, unpublished, unrecorded works from Marshall’s catalog, my favorite is a setting of Emily Dickinson’s “As Imperceptibly as Grief” — particularly because it feels almost secret. Marshall was never quite satisfied with the song, and never got around to revising it. The last line “Our Summer made her light escape / Into the Beautiful” is extended over five repetitions, gently rocking between C and F, the simplest chords imaginable. Over barely a minute, it conveys a sense of timelessness, and also of time drawing to a close. But the song doesn’t end with a fade-out. The final gesture comes as a surprise: a sudden, brilliant cascade from opposite ends of the keyboard toward the center, a carillon from the beyond. That “bright hour,” long delayed, has arrived at last. More

He mixed free jazz and post-bop in notable 1960s and ’70s recordings. But he withdrew from the jazz scene, in part because of a dispute over publishing rights.Grachan Moncur III, a trombonist and composer who came to renown in the 1960s and early ’70s for his deft playing of a hybrid of post-bop and free jazz, but who later receded from the spotlight, died on June 3 — his 85th birthday — in a hospital in Newark.His son Kenya said the cause was cardiac arrest.“Whenever I have a conversation about what’s wrong with the jazz business, I always start out by saying, ‘Where is Grachan Moncur?’” the alto saxophonist Jackie McLean, one of Mr. Moncur’s most important collaborators, told The New York Times in 2003.Long before Mr. McLean asked that question, Mr. Moncur (pronounced mon-KUR) had started his jazz career as a teenager, jamming at the New York nightclub Birdland and sitting in with the drummer Art Blakey’s band, the Jazz Messengers. In 1959, he went on the road with Ray Charles.But after about two years, feeling a need to perform with a smaller ensemble based in New York City, he was recruited to join the Jazztet, a sextet formed by the trumpeter Art Farmer and the saxophonist Benny Golson. He played with that group until it disbanded in 1962, then took that summer off to study the challenging and unconventional music of Thelonious Monk. His goal was to learn how to write his own.“I just wanted to get the sound of his music inside of my body,” Mr. Moncur said in an interview with the website All About Jazz in 2003.On a night when he had written two compositions, he said, he got a call from Mr. McLean, whom he had known since Mr. Moncur was a teenager, asking him to join his ensemble for rehearsals and club dates in advance of recording an album for Blue Note Records.That album, “One Step Beyond,” and “Destination … Out!,”both released in 1963, were critically praised documents of a transitional period in jazz when musicians like Mr. McLean and Mr. Moncur were blending the harmonic advances of the bebop era with the more adventurous spirit of the avant-garde. They contained five of Mr. Moncur’s compositions, among them “Ghost Town,” which conjures up desolation in long passages where little is heard except reverberations on vibes and cymbals.Mr. Moncur then recorded two albums for Blue Note as a leader, “Evolution” (1963) and “Some Other Stuff” (1964), with stellar accompaniment. Both albums featured Bobby Hutcherson on vibraphone and Tony Williams on drums; “Evolution” also featured Lee Morgan on trumpet and Mr. McLean, while the “Some Other Stuff” lineup included Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone.Reviewing “Evolution” in The Pittsburgh Courier, the critic Phyl Garland praised Mr. Moncur’s technique and the album’s title number, which, she wrote, evoked images of “mankind emerging from one murky, primeval mire into another, undergoing one subtle change after another, as does the music.”What might have been a longer relationship with Blue Note ended after two albums in a dispute over publishing rights. In the end, he managed to retain his rights to the music from “Evolution,” but he sensed that he would not last long at the label.“They were very disappointed with that, and they kind of dropped me like a hot potato,” Mr. Moncur told All About Jazz. He believed he was blackballed over his position — a position he later came to regret. In retrospect, he said, he wished he had found a way to compromise with Alfred Lion, Blue Note’s founder.“I think my mind was really going to a revolutionary attitude more on the business trip than it was on a musical trip,” he said, “because I was kind of determined on trying to own my own music.”Grachan Moncur III was born on June 3, 1937, in Manhattan. His father, Grachan II, played bass with the Savoy Sultans, a swing ensemble, at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. His mother, Ella (Wright) Moncur, was a beautician whose clients — and friends — included the singer Sarah Vaughan.Although enamored of the trombone from age 5, Grachan nonetheless received a cello from his father. But the cello did not inspire him, so his father gave him a trombone. Lessons followed. He also had a role model for the trombone: his father, who played the instrument.“I have never, up until today, heard anybody with a sound like my father,” Mr. Moncur told All About Jazz. “He had a timbre that was very dark and clear. That sound, it just kind of stayed with me, and I always wanted to produce that same type of — project that same type of sound that my father had.”He graduated from the Laurinburg Institute, a historically Black prep school in North Carolina that Dizzy Gillespie had attended in the 1930s. Back in New York, he attended the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School, then kick-started his career in nightclubs before joining Ray Charles’s orchestra.In 1964, Mr. Moncur learned that the Actors Studio was looking to cast a musician for its Broadway production of James Baldwin’s civil rights drama “Blues for Mister Charlie.” Mr. Moncur played two roles, one of them a trombonist, and contributed a piece of music.He recorded “Some Other Stuff” three months after the play opened; two of the cuts on the album, “Gnostic” and “Nomadic,” were reflections on his breakup with a girlfriend and his departure from his $27-a-week apartment.“I was a nomad after losing my room, and I was a gnostic because I had to survive by my wits,” he told The Times.He continued to record, releasing two albums in 1969 on the French label BYG Actuel, “New Africa” and “Aco del de Madrugada” (“One Morning I Waked Up Very Early”), and another, “Echoes of Prayer,” with the Jazz Composers Orchestra, in 1974. But he was entering a long, relatively quiet period during which he made almost no records but ran jazz workshops in Harlem in a studio called Space Station; performed in Europe; and taught jazz at the Newark Community School of the Arts.In 1994, Mr. Moncur adapted his four-movement “New Africa” suite into a theatrical piece for the Alternative Museum in Manhattan. The poet Amiri Baraka, a friend, was the producer.In addition to his son Kenya, Mr. Moncur is survived by his wife, Tamam Tracy (Sims) Moncur; two other sons, Grachan IV and Adrien; his daughters, Ella and Vera Moncur; his twin brothers, Lofton and Lonnie; 10 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. His son Toih died in 2016, and his daughter Hilda died in 1992. He lived in Newark.In 2004, the composer and arranger Mark Masters brought together Mr. Moncur and seven other musicians to reprise, with new charts, eight of Mr. Moncur’s pieces for an album, “Exploration,” released on the Capri label.“As a composer, he was original and singular,” Mr. Masters said in a phone interview. “He wasn’t derivative of anyone. I see the Monk influence, but Monk wasn’t hovering over him. His music doesn’t sound like anyone else’s.” More

The honor is part of a slate of changes, including a best score soundtrack award for video games and a merit award for best song for social change.Coming to the Grammy Awards next year: a new prize for songwriter of the year.That award, given in recognition of “the written excellence, profession and art of songwriting,” is one of a handful of tweaks to the Grammy rules for the 65th annual ceremony.Four other new categories are coming, including best alternative music performance, Americana music performance, spoken word poetry album and score soundtrack for video games and other interactive media, the Recording Academy, the organization behind the Grammys, announced Thursday. There will also be a new merit award for best song for social change, as chosen by a special committee.The biggest change is the songwriter award. Since the first Grammy ceremony in 1959, song of the year has been one of the most prestigious prizes, going to the composers of a single song. The first winners were Franco Migliacci and Domenico Modugno, for “Nel Blu, Dipinto di Blu” (better known as “Volare”), and the most recent prize went to Bruno Mars, Anderson .Paak and two collaborators for “Leave the Door Open.”In recent years songwriters have been lobbying the Recording Academy for greater recognition, which has come gradually. At the 60th annual Grammys in 2018, songwriters were added to the ballot for album of the year, though only if they contributed to at least 33 percent of an LP; for the 2022 show, that limit was eliminated, allowing any credited songwriter of new material to be nominated. (Samples don’t count, nor do the writers of old songs — hence Cole Porter’s omission this year for Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett’s album “Love for Sale.”) In 2021, the academy created a Songwriters and Composers Wing for its members.The new category, officially called songwriter of the year (non-classical) — though no classical counterpart exists — will go to a single songwriter or a team of writers for a given body of work. A similar approach has long been taken for producer of the year.“The intent with this new category is to recognize the professional songwriters who write songs for other artists to make a living,” said Harvey Mason Jr., the chief executive of the Recording Academy. “This dedicated award highlights the importance of songwriting’s significant contribution to the musical process, and as a non-performing songwriter myself, I’m thrilled to see this award come to life.”Among the other changes this year is the establishment of “craft committees” in three classical categories. Teams of specialists will have the final say in who makes the ballot for producer of the year (classical), best engineered album (classical) and best contemporary classical composition. The change follows some grumbling in the classical world about last year’s nomination of Jon Batiste — the jazz bandleader and TV personality who won album of the year — for the contemporary composition prize. (The award went to Caroline Shaw.)The change is notable since last year the academy eliminated its controversial nominating committees, which acted as an invisible hand in dozens of categories, though craft committees were kept for categories like engineering and packaging that require special expertise.The new categories arrive after a series of reductions more than a decade ago. In 2011, for example, the academy dropped 31 categories, consolidating many separate male and female awards and cutting some in fields like classical and Latin. Two years earlier, the polka category — where annual submissions had dwindled to as few as 20 titles — was cut after a 24-year run.The latest Grammy ceremony, in April, had 86 categories. At the first one, there were 28. More

His innovations included the first polyphonic, programmable synthesizer and the universal connectivity of MIDI.Dave Smith, a groundbreaking synthesizer designer, died on May 31 in Detroit. He was 72.The cause was complications of a heart attack, said his wife, Denise Smith. Mr. Smith, who lived in St. Helena, Calif., had been in Detroit to attend the Movement Festival of electronic music, which ran from May 28 to 30, and died in a hospital.A statement from Mr. Smith’s company, Sequential, said, “He was on the road doing what he loved best in the company of family, friends and artists.”Mr. Smith introduced the first polyphonic and programmable synthesizer, the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, in 1978. It was used on 1980s hits by Michael Jackson, the Cars, Madonna, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads, a-ha, Duran Duran, Genesis, the Cure and Daryl Hall & John Oates. Over the next decades, instruments designed by Mr. Smith were embraced by Radiohead, Arcade Fire, Dr. Dre, Flying Lotus, Nine Inch Nails and James Blake, among many others.In the early 1980s, Mr. Smith collaborated with Ikutaro Kakehashi, the founder of the Roland instrument company, to create MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), a shared specification that allows computers and instruments from diverse manufacturers to connect and communicate, making for countless sonic possibilities.Justin Vernon, who records as Bon Iver, wrote on Twitter, “Dave Smith made the best keyboards ever … that’s saying it lightly.”Denise Smith said in an interview: “He loved the people who used his instruments. He was very curious about how they used his instruments, how they made them sound.”David Joseph Smith was born in San Francisco on April 2, 1950, the son of Peter and Lucretia Papagni Smith. He played piano as a child and guitar and bass in rock bands, in high school and at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. One of his college projects was working on a program to compose music, printing out the scores on a plotter. After graduating, he worked on what was then a new technology — microprocessors, integrated circuits on a chip — at the aerospace company Lockheed, in the area of California that would become known as Silicon Valley.He was intrigued by the synthesizer sounds on Wendy Carlos’s 1968 album, “Switched-On Bach,” he said in a 2014 interview with the Red Bull Music Academy. “It just had this life in it that was just amazing to hear.”In 1972, his interests in music and electronics converged when he bought a Minimoog, an early Moog synthesizer. He then built his own sequencer, a device to store and play patterns of notes on the Minimoog. In 1974, he started a company to build sequencers, Sequential Circuits — at first as a nights-and-weekends project, then as a full-time job, eventually as a company with 180 employees.Unlike a piano or organ, early synthesizers, like the Moog and ARP, could generate only one note at a time. Shaping a particular tone involved setting multiple knobs, switches or dials, and trying to reproduce that tone afterward meant writing down all the settings and hoping to get similar results the next time.The Prophet-5, which Mr. Smith designed with John Bowen and introduced in 1978, conquered both shortcomings. Controlling synthesizer functions with microprocessors, it could play five notes at once, allowing harmonies. (The company also made a 10-note Prophet-10.) The Prophet also used microprocessors to store settings in memory, providing dependable yet personalized sounds, and it was portable enough to be used onstage.Mr. Smith’s small company was swamped with orders; at times, the Prophet-5 had a two-year backlog.But Mr. Smith’s innovations went much further. “Once you have a microprocessor in an instrument, you realize how easy it is to communicate digitally to another instrument with a microprocessor,” Mr. Smith explained in 2014. Other keyboard manufacturers started to incorporate microprocessors, but each company used a different, incompatible interface, a situation Mr. Smith said he considered “kind of dumb.”In 1981, Mr. Smith and Chet Wood, a Sequential Circuits engineer, presented a paper at the Audio Engineering Society convention to propose “The ‘USI’, or Universal Synthesizer Interface.” The point, he recalled in a 2014 interview with Waveshaper Media, was “Here’s an interface. It doesn’t have to be this, but we all really need to get together and do something.” Otherwise, he said, “This market’s going nowhere.”Four Japanese companies — Roland, Korg, Yamaha, and Kawai — were willing to cooperate with Sequential Circuits on a shared standard, and Mr. Smith and Mr. Kakehashi of Roland worked out the details of what would become MIDI. “If we had done MIDI the usual way, getting a standard made takes years and years and years,” Mr. Smith told the Red Bull Music Academy. “You have committees and documents and da-da-da. We bypassed all of that by just basically doing it and then throwing it out there.”In 2013, Mr. Smith told The St. Helena Star: “We made it low-cost so that it was easy for companies to integrate into their products. It was given away license free because we wanted everyone to use it.”Sequential Circuits made the first MIDI synthesizer, the Prophet-600, in 1982, and MIDI was formally announced in 1983. Nearly four decades later, the MIDI 1.0 standard is still ubiquitous, and MIDI controllers, which specify the parameters of an electronic tone, are available in everything from keyboard, wind and string instruments to cellphone apps.In 2013, 30 years after MIDI was introduced, Mr. Smith and Mr. Kakehashi shared a Technical Grammy Award.Yamaha bought Sequential Circuits in 1987, but by then cheaper digital synthesizers had grown more popular than analog instruments like the Prophet-5, and in 1989 Yamaha shut the company down.Mr. Smith married Denise White in 1989, and they settled in St. Helena, in Northern California. In addition to her, he is survived by their daughter, Haley; their son, Campbell; and four siblings.Mr. Smith worked in synthesizer research for Yamaha and then for Korg, where he was among the designers of the Wavestation, which was used for hits by Depeche Mode and Genesis. In the 1990s, he turned to designing software synthesizers — programs creating sound directly from a computer. He was president of Seer Systems, which in 1997 introduced the first professional software synthesizer, the Windows program Reality.But Mr. Smith decided he preferred using and designing hardware, and he returned to a hands-on experience making music. As analog synthesizers gained a new following in the 21st century, he founded Dave Smith Instruments in 2002. He collaborated with Roger Linn, the inventor of the LM-1 drum machine, on a new analog drum machine, the Tempest, and with another synthesizer inventor, Tom Oberheim, on the OB-6.In 2018, after Yamaha returned the rights, he renamed his company Sequential, and in 2020, when Mr. Smith turned 70, the company introduced a revived, updated Prophet-5.“Ultimately whatever I design is something that I want to be able to play when I’m done,” Mr. Smith told Waveshaper. “Otherwise, what’s the point?” More

Analyses of 17th-century stringed instruments suggest that a young Antonio Stradivari might have apprenticed with a particular craftsman.History is revealed in tree rings. They have been used to determine the ages of historical buildings as well as when Vikings first arrived in the Americas. Now, tree rings have shed light on a longstanding mystery in the rarefied world of multimillion-dollar musical instruments.By analyzing the wood of two 17th-century stringed instruments, a team of researchers has uncovered evidence of how Antonio Stradivari might have honed his craft, developing the skills used in the creation of the rare, namesake Stradivarius violins.Mauro Bernabei, a dendrochronologist at the Italian National Research Council in San Michele all’Adige, and his colleagues published their results last month in the journal Dendrochronologia, and their findings are consistent with the young Stradivari apprenticing with Nicola Amati, a master luthier roughly 40 years his senior. Such a link between the two acclaimed craftsmen has long been hypothesized.In the 17th and early 18th centuries, Stradivari created stringed instruments renowned for their craftsmanship and superior sound. “Stradivari is generally regarded as the best violin maker who ever lived,” said Kevin Kelly, a violin maker in Boston who has handled dozens of Stradivarius instruments.Only about 600 of Stradivari’s masterpieces survive today, all prized by collectors and performers alike. A Stradivarius violin currently on the auction block — the first such sale in decades — is predicted to fetch up to $20 million.An 18th-century depiction of Antonio Stradivari, the Italian crafter of instruments.World History Archive/AlamyStradivari likely learned his craft by apprenticing with an older mentor, as was customary at the time. That could have been Amati, who, by the mid-17th century, was well established and also living in Cremona, a city in what is now Italy.“Some people assume that because Stradivari was Cremonese and he was such a great violin maker, he must have apprenticed with Amati,” said Mr. Kelly, who was not involved in the new study.But evidence of a link between Stradivari and Amati has remained stubbornly tenuous: One violin made by Stradivari bears a label reading “Antonius Stradiuarius Cremonensis Alumnus Nicolaij Amati, Faciebat Anno 1666.” That wording implies that Stradivari was a pupil of Amati, said Mr. Kelly, but it was the only label like it that has surfaced.With the goal of shedding on this musical mystery, Dr. Bernabei and his team visited the Museum of the Conservatory of San Pietro a Majella in Naples and analyzed the wood of a small harp made by Stradivari in 1681. Using a digital camera, the researchers precisely measured the widths of 157 tree rings visible on the instrument’s spruce soundboard.A small harp by Stradivari from 1681.DeAgostini/Getty ImagesThe pattern created by plotting the width of tree rings, one after the other, is like a fingerprint. This is because the amount that a trees grows each year depends on the weather, water conditions and a slew of other factors, Dr. Bernabei said. “Plants record very accurately what happens in their surroundings.”The researchers compared their measurements from the Stradivari harp with other tree ring sequences measured from stringed instruments. Out of more than 600 records, one stood out for being astonishingly similar: a spruce soundboard from a cello made by Nicola Amati in 1679. “All the maximum and minimum values are coincident,” Dr. Bernabei said. “It’s like somebody split a trunk in two different parts.”The same wood was indeed used to make the Stradivari harp and the Amati cello, Dr. Bernabei and his colleagues suggest. This was consistent with the two craftsmen sharing a workshop, with the elder Amati possibly mentoring the younger Stradivari, the team concluded.Perhaps that is true, said Mr. Kelly, but it is not the only possibility. Instead, Mr. Amati and Stradivari might simply have purchased wood from the same person, he said. After all, luthiers in 17th-and 18th-century Cremona belonged to a small community, said Mr. Kelly. “They basically all lived on the same street.” More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherEvery few months, members of The New York Times pop music team gather for the ritual Popcast mailbag.On this week’s episode, we answer questions about the current state of rock music, including recent revivals of emo and hardcore; the status of Adele and Chance the Rapper’s careers; the degree to which critics consider extramusical concerns when assessing work; rising talents including Rina Sawayama and Yeat; and much, much more.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterCaryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorJon Pareles, The New York Times’s chief pop music criticConnect 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