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      Aldous Harding’s Gloriously Peculiar World of Songs

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      On her fourth album, “Warm Chris,” the New Zealand singer and songwriter delivers unpredictable but enchanting vocals and enigmatic lyrics that revel in simplicity.If you are unfamiliar with the weird and wonderful world of the New Zealand folk musician Aldous Harding, the mesmerizing music video for her 2019 single “The Barrel” is probably the place to start.The song is breezy and light — gently strummed acoustic guitar chords, a buoyant piano riff — but as the video proceeds, a disarming sense of the uncanny creeps in. Something is ever so slightly off. Harding wears a billowing blouse with a pilgrim collar and a stovepipe-shaped straw hat, stiffly shimmying her shoulders and making a series of awkwardly expressive faces. It’s not quite obvious at first, but you could swear that with each cut her hat seems to be getting … taller? Then it’s definitely taller, comically so — but right when it becomes bizarre enough to laugh out loud, there’s a sudden cut to Harding wearing a spooky demon mask that takes your breath away. At any point, you might be tempted to ask, why? But that would be the wrong question. In Aldous Harding’s droll, dreamlike work, there’s not a lot of because, just a lot of glorious, deadpan is.Harding is generally reluctant to explain what her songs are “about” and gravitates toward prismatic and evocative lyrics that welcome multiple interpretations. Still, in the middle of her enchanting fourth album, “Warm Chris,” out Friday, she stumbles upon a refrain that sounds, in some sense, like a mantra for her whole joyfully immersive oeuvre: “Passion must play, or passion won’t stay,” she sings on the jaunty, piano-driven “Passion Babe,” in a high, staccato voice that makes her sound like a wise child.Even Harding’s more gloomy-sounding early records, like the sparse and gothic “Party” from 2017, were enlivened by moments of absurdist humor, like incongruous backing vocals that emerged out of nowhere on song titles like “What If Birds Aren’t Singing They’re Screaming.” Since her breakout 2019 album “Designer,” though, Harding’s music has been drifting ever closer to weightlessness. “Warm Chris,” a collection of fractured, airy pop songs and her third album produced by the PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish, continues this progression. It is her nimblest album yet, though it has not sacrificed her signature, surrealist undertow.Harding’s voice is chameleonic, and the way it changes in tone and timbre from song to song is one of her music’s disorienting pleasures. “People say to me, ‘Why don’t you use your real voice?’” she said in a recent Pitchfork interview. “But what people don’t understand is that I don’t know what my normal voice is anymore.” On paper, Harding could be classified as just another “female folk singer/songwriter,” but her music and videos have a spaciousness that makes that descriptor seem unbearably limiting. In her writing process, which she has described as a kind of channeling of various characters’ monologues, she added, “taking identity too seriously is really detrimental to my music.”And so her vocal delivery throughout “Warm Chris” is anything but predictable: On one song, the plangent, plinking “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain,” Harding sings with the reedy keen of “After the Gold Rush” era Neil Young, while on the very next, “Staring at the Henry Moore,” she’s a lilting chanteuse in the style of Vashti Bunyan. The typical Harding song is not a legible narrative so much as a tableau vivant, with strange, unknowable characters posed in the middle of a scene that is fully realized if never entirely explained.Much of this effect comes from Harding’s lyrics, which are succinct, enigmatic and potent. That wasn’t always the case: On her 2014 self-titled debut album, she used often archaic words and knotty diction, as if she were straining to sound serious and poetic. But her writing has greatly improved as she’s come to understand the power of simple, modern words arranged in unexpected ways. “Oh, the dirty of it,” she intones in a gruff voice at the beginning of the “Warm Chris” highlight “Tick Tock” — a line that is somehow both inscrutable and precisely vivid.The excellent single “Fever,” a spiky, stutter-stepping mid-tempo number, contains some of her most stirring lyricism yet. Though too vague and imagistic to be reduced to a linear narrative, the song still loosely, and poignantly, suggests how difficult it can be to make a long-term partnership work: “I still stare at you in the dark,” Harding sings in a low croon, “looking for that thrill in the nothing.”It’s quite a tightrope act to make music this legitimately odd without falling into excessive whimsy, and, every so often, Harding’s legs wobble. (“Of all the ways to eat a cake,” she sings on “Passion Babe,” “this one surely takes the knife.”) But at its core, like David Byrne in his big suit or David Bowie playing harlequin, Harding’s is a grounded eccentricity, rooted in the traditions of avant-garde theater and folk music while still retaining a welcoming sense of play. As with all of Harding’s best work, “Warm Chris” is an offbeat, infectious and ultimately liberating invitation to stop making sense.Aldous Harding“Warm Chris”(4AD) More

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      Music for the Dark at an Experimental Festival

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      British fans gathered to enjoy an overnight program of alternative classical music — a loose, soothing genre that many have discovered during the pandemic.GATESHEAD, England — Early on Saturday evening, the final strains of Gavin Bryars’s looping “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” faded into silence at a vast concert hall here. After some polite applause, several hundred audience members prized themselves out of chunky beanbag chairs and headed off to find their next listening experience.Ambling across the arts complex attached to the hall would have brought them to Kinbrae’s nature-themed synth landscapes. On an expansive concourse, they could have chilled out to Echo Juliet’s gently probing D.J. set, or held on for a sonic barrage from the electro duo Darkstar.All were on offer at the inaugural After Dark Festival, organized by the BBC’s classical music station, Radio 3, in Sage Gateshead, a shiny, undulating arts venue on the banks of the River Tyne in northeast England. The festival’s diverse lineup of music evades an easy collective term: Neo-classical? Experimental? Crossover? Alternative classical?Echo Juliet’s gently probing D.J. set was one of the more chilled out musical experiences at the festival. Mary Turner for The New York TimesDescribing it is a simpler task: United by its commitment to cross-pollination, the program combined approaches from improvisation, pop, jazz, spoken word and electronic music with a variety of traditional classical music signifiers. As well as slower rates of changes, it preferred curves over edges, minimal over maximal. Electronic elements frequently cropped up, as did multimedia collaboration, evident in the evening’s selection of tableaus, projections and animations.This loose genre has offered stress relief and calm to increasing numbers of British music fans during the coronavirus pandemic. Coinciding with the spring equinox, After Dark was also an all-night affair, a continuous thread of sound flowing from Chelsea Carmichael’s fluttering sax lines at dusk to the sitarist Jasdeep Singh Degun’s set at daybreak. The overall effect was of one unbroken sound installation, with washes of sound always surreptitiously present.Elizabeth Alker, whose Radio 3 show “Unclassified” gives a platform to new composers and performers, said that the appeal of such music can be the portal it offers to less turbulent worlds. It has “a lot of space you can naturally escape into, particularly at a time when we don’t have much space in our daily lives — both head space and, during lockdown, physical space,” she said in a telephone interview.Alan Davey, who runs Radio 3, echoed this. “This music has really come into its own during the pandemic,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s possibly an escape inward, but it’s definitely an escape.”Jasdeep Singh Degun closes the festival with a traditional Indian raag, associated with the morning and played on a sitar. Mary Turner for The New York TimesChunky beanbags offer festivalgoers a comfy listening experience.Mary Turner for The New York TimesAndrew Hayes, left, and Matt Brown perform thrashing improvisations as Run Logan Run.Mary Turner for The New York TimesOver the course of the pandemic, a number of long-form performances have offered such escapism. In 2020, Max Richter’s eight-hour “Sleep” was simultaneously broadcast on radio stations across Europe, the United States and Canada during the Easter weekend. Later that year, the pianist Igor Levit streamed a 20-hour rendition of Erik Satie’s beguiling composition “Vexations.” Then this past January, the London Contemporary Orchestra presented a 24-hour program at the Barbican Center, featuring some of the longest pieces ever written.Staging the Gateshead festival’s 12-hour program overnight made sense, Davey said, since this kind of music has a “late-night vibe — it’s music in the dark, for when everything around is quiet.” But as the evening wore on, exiting one performance for another created a series of exciting jolts between worlds: leaving the BBC newsreader Viji Alles’s unnervingly chilled renditions of stormy Shipping Forecasts and meeting Darkstar’s set head-on; popping out of Christian Löffler’s atmospheric techno remixes and into the Bristol duo Run Logan Run’s thrashing improvisations; finding Arnold Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” being piped into a deserted cafe area at 4 a.m.A plurality of experience also existed among the festivalgoers. At 7 a.m., a group of bleary-eyed friends who’d used the second half of the night as an extended after-party to their own event explained the music’s appeal.“It’s the kind of stuff I listen to when I’m overwhelmed,” Kate Bradley, 25 and a visual artist, said of Degun’s sunrise sitar set. Clara Hancock, 25, instead uses ambient and lo-fi music as background sound for work, and prefers to decompress to “super-fast happy music.”Tilly Pitt, 20, a student at nearby Durham University, said she discovered the genre as an escape from studying. “During lockdown, I spent so much time staring at the screen, so it was nice to focus on something else for a while,” Pitt said.And while some listeners plied themselves with coffee, intent on an evening’s hard concentration, others settled in for the night, nestling in sleeping bags and seeking opportunities for a tactical snooze.The Royal Northern Sinfonia, an orchestra local to Gateshead, performs a series of contemporary classical pieces as part of the festival. Mary Turner for The New York TimesHowever listeners approach it, the music’s extended duration actively encourages the mind to wander. During the pandemic, people listened to Radio 3 “for longer, and they were appreciating that chance to reflect,” Davey said. “For me, music is an abstract art form, but it does help you use the space to think and reconsider, and I think ambient classical music is that writ large,” he added.Some of the music at After Dark fits the ambient description, but experimentation also abounds, as it does on Corey Mwamba’s improvisation-focused Radio 3 show “Freeness,” which also hosted artists at the festival. It’s noticeable that, although there’s a growing audience in Britain for this music, its creators often come from places without a dominant classical tradition, like Scotland, Canada and Scandinavian countries. Alker’s Radio 3 show was born after she witnessed groups of talented classical musicians branch out into other disciplines.“There’s a generation of musicians who had this classical training, and they wanted to hold on to making music in a classical idiom, but socially and culturally, they have the same experiences as everybody else, going to clubs and karaoke bars,” Alker said. She cites Nils Frahm and the recent work of Jonny Greenwood, formerly of Radiohead, as examples of music which is, in its essence, classical, and yet stands slightly removed from the usual traditions.Despite the relaxation their music may have brought through lockdowns, it’s been a different story for artists. “During the pandemic, I was just trying to keep things together,” said Degun, the sitarist, in a telephone interview a few days before his performance at the festival. “Music for me during the pandemic was quite stressful,” as he had to adapt quickly to new ways of performing, recording and working.Many fans discovered the escapism of experimental, soothing classical music during the pandemic.Mary Turner for The New York TimesIndependent music-making can be precarious work, and the music on the program at After Dark was made by composers and performers without consistent institutional backing. One of the twins who make up Kinbrae made this point as they began their final track. “There were times when we felt we were never going to be able to do this again,” he told the crowd.Like Kinbrae, Degun relished the return to appreciative audiences, but decided on a more traditional set than the cross-genre compositions for which he’s known. “When Radio 3 contacted me and said they wanted me to play at sunrise, I really wanted to just play Indian classical music,” he said. He rarely gets the opportunity to perform raags — a particular melodic mode linked to times of the day — associated with the morning, he said, since “usually all our concerts are in the evening.”For Davey, the festival’s aim is both to celebrate alternative classical’s existing, late-night audience and to introduce a wider group of listeners to the genre’s soothing affects. As the sun rose slowly over the Newcastle skyline, and the sound of Degun’s expansive raag closed the festival, there was certainly ample space to think. More

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      Booze, Biscuits and Bands: Musical Brunch Is Back in New York

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      Here are six brunches that, after a long pandemic pause, are entertaining and feeding weekend crowds in Manhattan and the Hudson Valley.The room was packed with tipsy party people when the drag queen Ginger Snap suddenly grabbed my wrist and planted my hand on her right falsy — and with exhilarated eyes gave me a look that passionately purred: Brunch is back, girl.That’s how I kicked off an afternoon at Broadway Drag Brunch, one of several live-entertainment brunches that, after a long pause caused by coronavirus restrictions, are feeding music-loving and hungry patrons in New York, where brunch is church.Some of these brunches are like intimate concerts with music as an atmospheric backdrop. At others, the star of the show is the show itself — with performers encouraging hands-in-the-air singalongs and servers nudging you to order pitchers of bottomless cocktails to drink with the prix fixe omelets and pancakes. The music ranges from boy-band ballads to chill jazz and lonesome bluegrass, and the locations include a below-ground club and an idyllic waterfront.Here are six weekend musical brunches that — barring coronavirus restrictions — will quench your thirst for tunes and toe-tapping to go with your booze and biscuits.Christopher Brasfield is part of a rotating cast that performs as the flirty Boy Band Project.Hunter Abrams for The New York TimesBoys Are the BandSweet seduction is on the menu at Boy Band Brunch, held every other Sunday afternoon at one of New York’s new kids on the block: Chelsea Table + Stage, a performance venue that opened in September inside the Hilton New York Fashion District hotel. It stars the Boy Band Project, a flirty quartet with members who belt, dance, thrust their pelvises and sing the “Please don’t go, girl” musical repertoires of ’NSync, Boyz II Men and other crush-inducing boy bands of the 1990s and 2000s.The cast rotates, but at a recent performance, the bandmates were played by Chris Messina (the sporty one), Sam Harvey (the not-that-bad boy), Christopher Brasfield (the boy next door) and Nic Metcalf (the sensitive one). The tables were filled with mostly millennials and Gen Xers brunching on smoked salmon avocado toast and singing along with every lyric, as if Justin Timberlake himself were on one knee pleading for their affections.If the vibe feels like Backstreet Boys meets Broadway, it’s no wonder: The Boy Band Project was created by Travis Nesbitt, a former cast member of “Altar Boyz,” a musical satire of a Christian boy band that had a hit Off Broadway run in the 2000s. (chelseatableandstage.com)Breakfast BebopEye-popping Hudson Valley vistas accompany the vamps at Sunday Jazz Brunch at Cove Castle, a lakeside restaurant in Greenwood Lake, N.Y. Located about a 45-minute drive from the George Washington Bridge (or a 10-minute drive from the Metro-North station in Tuxedo, N.Y.), the town doesn’t have the same weekend bustle and artistic cache as nearby Beacon or Hudson. But that’s a draw for brunchers, especially those who pull up in their boats to dock and dine in an 80-seat room with sweeping views of Greenwood Lake, as well as the hills and woodlands of Sterling Forest State Park.Along with Cove Castle, the Sunday brunch is hosted by the Hudson Valley Jazz Festival, which helps program the mostly local bands. The menu is brunch comfort food, including challah French toast and a trio of sausages served with Brazilian cheese bread. (covecastleny.com)Latin and Cuban are the musical styles you’re likely to hear during jazz brunch at 1803, a corner restaurant in TriBeCa. Named for the year of the Louisiana Purchase, the New Orleans-inspired venue features a rotating schedule of local ensembles. On a recent Saturday, a jazz trio — Eduardo Belo on bass, Rogério Boccato on drums and Vinicius Gomes on guitar — made the airy two-story dining room feel like the French Quarter by way of São Paulo, Brazil.The menu is heavy on bayou fare, including a crawfish-cake benedict, gumbo and jambalaya (a vegan option is made with a crispy tofu); and Southern favorites like chicken and waffles and a rosemary-forward macaroni and cheese. (1803nyc.com)A Glass of TwangBrunches with honest-to-goodness live country music are scarce in New York, and that surely makes country fans madder than a cat getting baptized.Filling that void is Spaghetti Tavern, an Upper West Side bar and restaurant that hosts bluegrass brunches on the weekends. Last Sunday, it was as if the 65-seat dining room were nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, thanks to Pickin’ Parm, a quartet made up of Kris Bauman (banjo), Ross Martin (guitar), Kells Nollenberger (bass) and Cesar Moreno (mandolin). “This is a song about picking up farm girls,” Moreno announced with a smile, to which diners responded with applause and a “yeehaw!” It was a cool spring day so the doors were open, giving passers-by a taste of honky-tonk.The menu features traditional brunch fare with Italian twists, including a spaghetti frittata wedge and baked cannellini beans and eggs. But the house specialty is Spaghetti in a Bag: pasta tossed in a sauce (pick among pesto, cacio e pepe and others) and served piping hot in an oversized parchment satchel. The bottomless mimosas come in a cute refillable ceramic donkey, because why not. (spaghettitavern.com)Curtain Up, Chow DownAnnie, Effie, Mimi: No Broadway diva is safe from sendup at the R-rated Broadway Drag Brunch, a raucous meal-and-a-show that plays twice on Sundays at Lips, a long-running drag club-restaurant that now lives on a quiet stretch of Midtown East, where it moved in 2010 after more than a dozen years at its original home in the West Village.On a recent afternoon, it was mostly young women in the audience, including brides-to-be and birthday revelers who, at one point in the show, lined up to sit on a throne and take a photo with the sharp-tongued Ginger Snap. (“I smell Long Island Railroad,” Miss Snap told one table.) The cast of drag queens lip-synced to numbers from Broadway musicals including “Dreamgirls,” “Rent” and “Jekyll & Hyde,” but the crowd became the most worked up when the D.J. cut show tunes with pop hits.The is the only brunch on this list that doesn’t include live music and singing, but give a queen a break: The performers double as servers (and work hard for tips). Thirty dollars gets you a musical-themed entree, like the Sweeney Todd steak and eggs, or the Mamma Mia mozzarella omelet — and a bloody mary or mimosa. Add $6 and the cocktails are unlimited. (nycdragshow.com)Strawberry Fields: Ultimate Beatles Brunch features songs from the Beatles catalog sung by costumed cast members. Deborah SableA Hard Night’s MorningPaul and Ringo meet pizza and ratatouille every Sunday for the nostalgic Strawberry Fields: Ultimate Beatles Brunch. The meal-meets-concert had an 18-year run at the former B.B. King Blues Club & Grill in Times Square; it’s now a weekend staple at City Winery’s 32,000-square-foot venue, which opened in October 2020 and overlooks the Hudson River at Pier 57 on Manhattan’s West Side. The show features vintage instrumentation and amplification of songs from the Beatles catalog sung by costumed cast members, many of whom performed with the Broadway and touring companies of the long-running musical “Beatlemania.”The $55 ticket includes the show and an unlimited breakfast buffet; bottomless drink packages are also available. It’s a great way to introduce children under 12 to the Fab Four: They get in at no cost, with brunch foods available for purchase. (citywinery.com) More

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      Richness in Stasis: La Monte Young Finally Releases ‘Trio’

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      The breakthrough Minimalist, not known for making albums, has at last put out an authorized recording of his 64-year-old “Trio for Strings.”La Monte Young, now 86, has released a lot of music in the past few years.In 2018, this composer and multi-instrumentalist, famed as a progenitor of Minimalism, reissued a six-hour, 24-minute take on his mammoth work “The Well-Tuned Piano.” Last year, a significant portion of his slender back catalog, some of it long out of print on CD, reached the digital platform Bandcamp.Most recently, Young has at last released a recording of his breakthrough composition, “Trio for Strings,” which he originally wrote in 1958, as he was beginning a period of study at the University of California at Berkeley.All this activity is a bit of a surprise, because the student composer who shocked colleagues with “Trio” — a nearly hourlong piece that almost exclusively used long, sustained tones — has been famous for not putting out albums. For decades, you had to hunt down a bootleg of the piece to experience it.Its streak of official unavailability finally ended late last year, when the Dia Art Foundation released a four-LP boxed set of a 182-minute live performance of “Trio” that was recorded during a concert series in 2015.Over the decades, Young wasn’t merely sitting on the material; he was continually working on it, even designing a new tuning in just intonation, to better express some of its harmonic content. Speaking to William Robin for The New York Times ahead of the live performance captured on the new release, Young said of the newly tuned and lengthened version, “It’s the way it really should have been, and can be, and will be.”By then, “Trio” was devised for an augmented string quartet including two cellists, to prevent the need to hold double-stops in tune for impractically long stretches. The new boxed set lists the dates of composition as “1958-1984-1998-2001-2005-2015,” a 57-year gestation.Young (in 2015) originally wrote “Trio for Strings” in 1958, as he was beginning a period of study at the University of California at Berkeley.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe new release is undeniably pricey, at $196. Aside from the four LPs, the box also includes a download code for a single-track, CD-quality file of the three-hour work, via Bandcamp. (Young’s other digital albums on Bandcamp range between $14 and $49 — the most expensive being the price for an audio version of that six-hour-plus performance of “The Well-Tuned Piano.”)Is this “Trio” worth it? I got my copy for free — but as someone who paid secondhand prices for Young bootlegs and out-of-print discs in my pre-critic days, I can’t imagine not saving up to buy it if I had to.The trip begins with a 33-minute exposition section, in which Young’s organizing 12-tone row is enumerated, very gradually. Compared with the recapitulation of these notes around the two-hour, nine-minute mark, the entry of certain notes during the exposition hits more harshly.But the players — Charles Curtis and Reynard Rott on cellos, with Erik Carlson and Christopher Otto both doubling on viola and violin — have such a precise feel for intonation that the material maintains its blissfully harmonious profile. That’s true even during the exposition’s most hot-to-the-touch passage, a high-flown tetrachord of B, F sharp, F and E that emerges in the 16th minute. (The lack of any discordant acoustic beating is thanks to the just intonation tuning and to these players’ precision.)Approximately two hours later — after the serial-style transformations of the exposition have run their course — this same chord comes back during the recapitulation. But it’s now beautiful in a different way, thanks to changes in voicing.Otto, the violinist, wrote in an email that this is his favorite passage in the performance, citing “how the whole sonority fuses and resonates” and adding, “We also stagger the bow changes in a particular way that becomes a beautifully meditative ritual.”The original score for “Trio,” a nearly hourlong piece that almost exclusively used long, sustained tones.La Monte YoungThis recording of “Trio” is essential in helping us understand not just Young’s growth but also that of Minimalism. Otto, a composer himself, has taken insights gleaned from Young and used them in his own writing practice, as on the recent release on the Greyfade label “rag′sma” and in his vertiginously beating drone composition “Violin Octet.”“I had been interested in just intonation and making connections with mathematical structures, influenced especially by Babbitt and Xenakis,” Otto said, “and Young’s music really made me aware of the richness within apparent stasis.”Let that be a word of warning to anyone impatient. If you try to skip ahead to a supposedly dramatic climax, it won’t pay off. In Young’s work, you can’t feel the peaks of intensity without taking in the whole.And besides, you’ll miss much else that transports. During the long development section of “Trio,” I adore a few briefer groupings of notes that reflect Young’s early enthusiasm for the Second Viennese School — particularly Webern’s epigrammatic style. That you can also hear bluesy Americana in some harmonies speaks to the world’s broad stylistic synthesis.An essay by Young in the accompanying booklet, though, lays out his thoughts on the limitations of serialism. “Composers such as Webern, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote little points distributed in time,” he writes. “The tonal aspects of the system were underplayed and the democratic aspects of the system were emphasized, probably because, within the system of equal temperament, it was so inharmonious to sustain the tones for a long time.”That’s a sharply observed insight about 20th-century music. But while processing this extended new recording of “Trio,” I also found myself thinking about recent long duration works in the world of film. After watching Paul Schrader’s latest movie, “The Card Counter” — a hypnotic slow burner starring Oscar Isaac and Tiffany Haddish — I picked up Schrader’s book “Transcendental Style in Film.”This early 1970s text gives Schrader’s thoughts on directors who move slowly and decisively, yet unpredictably. Even more intriguing is a new preface that he wrote for the book’s latest edition, in 2018. Here Schrader distinguishes the “transcendental” style of Ozu and others from what came afterward, namely, the “slow cinema” movement — think of directors like Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Hou Hsiao-hsien — that is by now familiar to film festival attendees.“They push the viewer away from the ‘experience,’ that is, from immediate emotional involvement,” Schrader writes of slow cinema, adding, “This is different from modernistic distancing devices in the other arts to the same degree that cinema is different from earlier art forms.”I underlined my copy and made a note: “Paul Schrader needs to hear ‘Trio for Strings.’”With this latest just intonation version of “Trio,” Young has perfected his response to the serial tradition. And in doing so, the composer has taken an inverted route from the one Schrader has witnessed in the world of film: Young started out with works that confronted audiences with slow, conceptual provocations, and has since steadily turned his insights toward even more expressive, transcendental ends — whether in his final performance of “The Well-Tuned Piano,” in his droning blues-rock album “Just Stompin’” or in this new “Trio.”Or at least that’s my take. The composer might hold a different analysis. But now that more of Young’s music is in wider circulation, a broader community of listeners can begin comparing our own notes. Now, as I experience the final dyad of G and C in the cellos, I hear an even broader sense of emotional distance traveled over the course of the work. (This conclusion could even work as an alternate soundtrack for the final shot of “The Card Counter.”)La Monte Young’s “Trio for Strings Original Full Length Version” (1958–1998–2015)An excerpt from the composer’s 2015 performance at the “Dia 15 VI 13 545 West 22 Street Dream House” in New York City.To my ear, Young has revisited his student exercise — the original Minimalist big bang when it comes to sustained tones — and made space for greater feeling, and more emotional release. That he’s done this while stretching its length to a newly demanding scope makes his achievement all the more noteworthy. More

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      ‘Olivia Rodrigo: Driving Home 2 U’ Review: Songs on Overdrive

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      The singer-songwriter is in a reflective state in the director Stacey Lee’s film, which documents a trip from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles.Olivia Rodrigo, the pop sensation whose global megahit “Driver’s License” put her career in the fast lane in 2021, is, naturally, driving a car in the first film about her life.She makes the same trip — Salt Lake City to Los Angeles — in the director Stacey Lee’s film on Disney+ as she did to record her wildly popular debut album, “Sour.” It’s a trek that puts Rodrigo in a reflective state, and Lee’s mood-infused film is tailored to appeal to the vintage taste of a Gen Z crowd that loves the grainiest of photo filters. Her subject’s ruminations feel overstated when paired with a retro-chic visual palette, so there are looks of intense longing that would make “Folklore”-era Taylor Swift proud.But the more Lee shows Rodrigo gazing into the distance, whether alone in a hotel room or atop a hill, the more it feels like a director’s cue rather than an organic moment that the camera just happened to catch. In the scenes where Rodrigo is openly sharing parts of her life that led to creating “Sour,” authenticity seems to come more easily.As a performance piece, “Driving Home 2 U” is an exhilarating and intimate showcase for Rodrigo, as commentary about her album’s tracks spills seamlessly, in musical-theater fashion, into “Sour” tunes. Songs are newly arranged and presented in some breathtakingly scenic spots. It’s a film that at least succeeds in making you feel that it really is about the journey, not the destination.Olivia Rodrigo: Driving Home 2 U (a Sour Film)Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      The Many Worlds of Rosalía

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherThe Spanish flamenco prodigy turned multigenre pop innovator Rosalía has just released her third album, “Motomami.” Crucially, it’s her first full-length since the breakthrough she experienced with her 2018 album “El Mal Querer,” which elevated her from local renown to global attention.In the years since, Rosalía has collaborated widely — Travis Scott, Ozuna, Billie Eilish, J Balvin — and leaned into the sounds of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Her success has, for some, underscored how much latitude is afforded white performers working with nonwhite styles and sounds. But also it has marked Rosalía as one of the most sonically ambitious and creative performers in contemporary pop.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Rosalía’s unlikely pop stardom, her avant-garde approach to style blending and the cultural politics of laying claim to a multitude of traditions.Guest:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterConnect 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 popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      William Kraft, Percussionist and Force in New Music, Dies at 98

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      A mainstay of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he also composed music that elevated overlooked instruments like the timpani.Lamenting the abundance of what he called “rat-a-tat, boom-boom” music for drums, William Kraft set out to create more sophisticated offerings that would bring greater respect to instruments he felt were too often taken for granted in orchestras.“The days of percussionists being second-class citizens in the musical society are clearly over,” he wrote in 1968. “The last of orchestral families to be exploited, they have come of age in the 20th century.”Mr. Kraft, who as both a composer and a percussionist became a force in contemporary music, elevating overlooked instruments like the timpani and developing a style that drew on jazz and Impressionism, died on Feb. 12 at a hospital in Glendale, Calif. He was 98.His wife, the composer Joan Huang, said the cause was heart failure.A spirited performer, Mr. Kraft was acclaimed for his work with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he spent 26 years, 18 of them as principal timpanist.But he was perhaps best known as a composer. A frequent collaborator with Igor Stravinsky, Mr. Kraft helped lend legitimacy to contemporary music in the United States, founding ensembles to showcase modern composers at a time when many classical musicians were skeptical of straying too far from the traditional canon.“The days of percussionists being second-class citizens in the musical society are clearly over,” Mr. Kraft wrote.Carlos Chavez/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesPlaying his music — deliberate yet freewheeling, flashy but spiritual — became a rite of passage for percussionists, and his works were heard in band rooms and concert halls alike.William Kraft was born in Chicago on Sept. 6, 1923, the son of Louis and Florence (Rogalsky) Kashareftsky, Jewish immigrants from Russia. (His father changed the family name from Kashareftsky to Kraft upon arriving in the United States.) When William was 3, the family moved to San Diego, where his parents opened a delicatessen and, at his mother’s urging, he began studying piano.While he adored the music of French Impressionist composers like Debussy and Ravel (“my great idols,” friends say he called them), he did not initially anticipate making composition a career.“I just thought they were gods and not to be touched,” he said in a 2020 interview with Ching Juhl, a producer and violist. “They were influences, but I never thought I could write the style.”During World War II, when he worked as a drummer and pianist in American military bands stationed in Europe, he began exploring composition more seriously.His roommate at the time, a trumpet player, asked him to produce an arrangement of the Hoagy Carmichael standard “Stardust.” Mr. Kraft agreed, but he wanted to do it his way, composing an elaborate introduction based on the musical interval of the fourth.Mr. Kraft earned a master’s degree in composition at Columbia University in 1954. He joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic the next year and rose through the ranks, becoming principal timpanist in 1963. On the side, he continued writing his own works, including percussion pieces in the style of Baroque suites and a series of compositions that he called “Encounters,” pairing percussion with a variety of other instruments, including trumpet and harp. He called himself an “American Impressionist.”Mr. Kraft, center, in Los Angeles in 2008 after a concert by the ensemble Southwest Chamber Music honoring him on his 85th birthday. He was joined by the ensemble’s John Schneider, left, and Ricardo Gallardo.Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesZubin Mehta, who served as the Philharmonic’s music director from 1962 to 1978, described Mr. Kraft as a nimble musician. He recalled Mr. Kraft rearranging the timpani part for Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” for one player, rather than two as was standard, making it easier for the Philharmonic to perform while on tour.“He knew the pieces so well,” Mr. Mehta said in an interview. “It just came naturally.”Mr. Mehta elevated Mr. Kraft to the post of assistant conductor, which he held from 1969 to 1972. Mr. Kraft sold his instruments and retired from playing in the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1981 to become the orchestra’s composer in residence.Stravinsky, who moved to California in the 1940s, had a significant influence on Mr. Kraft. (Mr. Kraft once said hearing “The Rite of Spring” for the first time as a teenager “changed my life.”) The two men worked together often. Mr. Kraft played timpani in Stravinsky’s ensembles and helped edit the percussion parts for Stravinsky’s musical play “The Soldier’s Tale.”Mr. Kraft’s music, with its emphasis on rhythmic freedom, often seemed to pay homage to Stravinsky. Mr. Kraft was also fond of virtuosic feats; one of his concertos demands the performer play 15 timpani.“He was one of the few atonal composers who really somehow wrote very uplifting music,” said the composer Paul Polivnick, a friend. “While he had his mathematical formulas, he let his music be based in creating a sense of emotional and dramatic power.”In 1956 he organized the First Percussion Quartet, made up of players from the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The ensemble, which later grew in size and changed its name to the Los Angeles Percussion Ensemble and Chamber Players, promoted works by composers including Stravinsky, Alberto Ginastera and Edgard Varèse.In 1981, Mr. Kraft founded the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group. He also had a busy teaching career, serving as chairman of the composition department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1991 to 2002.“He put Los Angeles on the map as a hot spot for contemporary music,” said Joseph Pereira, the current principal timpanist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “We are still reaping the benefits of Kraft’s impact on the Philharmonic, and on the new music community.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Kraft is survived by a son, Patrick; a daughter, Jennifer; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.He composed until the end of his life, sitting at the piano each day to sketch out ideas. At his death he was working on a piece called “Kaleidoscope” as well as a rearrangement of a piano concerto.The day before he died, Ms. Huang said, Mr. Kraft asked about his unfinished pieces, and she promised to complete them.“He just loved composing,” she said. “It was his language.” More

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      Review: ‘Little Girl Blue’ Revisits Nina Simone in Her Prime

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      Laiona Michelle’s tribute show, now at New World Stages, is more an impressionistic portrait for those familiar with the singer’s life and career.Musicals often rely on familiar patterns — a patter song here, an “I want” number there — and biographical musicals might well be the most predictable of all. The songs are mixed with enough back story to make the audience feel as if they haven’t just paid a lot of money to watch a cover act, and there is traditionally a juicy, awards-baiting tour de force for the lead performer.And so it has gone, successfully so in the case of such hits as “The Boy From Oz” (Hugh Jackman as Peter Allen), “Beautiful” (Jessie Mueller as Carole King) and “Tina” (Adrienne Warren as Tina Turner).Laiona Michelle’s tribute to Nina Simone, “Little Girl Blue,” which recently opened at New World Stages, fits the general format, with some interesting, if not always successfully implemented, idiosyncratic touches. The show’s most distinctive characteristic is its attempt to eschew linear storytelling and its refusal to supply the expected touchstones. This approach befits Simone, who rarely followed predetermined paths, but the resulting impressionistic portrait benefits from a viewer’s familiarity with the basic benchmarks of the subject’s art, personality and life.Each of the evening’s two acts takes place at a concert from a key period in Simone’s career: The first was in Westbury, N.Y., in April 1968, a few days after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; the second was at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, in July 1976. Backed by a snappy onstage trio led by the music director and pianist Mark Fifer, Michelle portrays Simone with a fiery commitment to the musician’s mood swings, prickliness and arch stylings. She emulates some of the banter and the set lists, but not that much. And since the rights to “Mississippi Goddam” could not be secured for this show, she and Fifer wrote the original “Angry Black Woman” as a kind of conceptual homage.Mostly those historical concerts act as springboards for snapshots of an often tormented, always searching artist, just like songs were springboards in Simone’s freewheeling live act. (It is not a coincidence that Justin Vivian Bond and Taylor Mac, whose performances can also go from erratic to brilliant and back again in a second, are both superb Simone interpreters.)If there is a thread, it is the fury of Simone fighting against the expectations placed upon her as a Black female artist. She disliked being labeled jazz, for example. “That is a term invented by white people to identify Black people,” she says in the show. “I. Am. Classical.” But her genius rested in using one to feed the other, leading to some inspired musical juxtapositions by Michelle (who wrote the script with additional material from the director Devanand Janki).At one point, Simone’s piano teacher Muriel Mazzanovich, a.k.a. Miss Mazzy, says, using her young student’s real name: “Eunice Kathleen Waymon, I’d like for you to meet Johann Sebastian Bach.” Michelle’s Simone immediately goes into the line “Ooh-oo child, things are gonna get easier,” from the Five Stairsteps’ “O-o-h Child,” and that beat might well be the most hopeful moment in the show.“Little Girl Blue” loses focus during the Montreux concert, as the push and pull between Simone’s talent and her demons, her activism and the world around her, becomes harder to pin down — it feels as if Michelle was somehow bedeviled by her subject. Then again, she is not the first, nor the last: Liz Garbus’s Oscar-nominated documentary is tellingly titled “What Happened, Miss Simone?”Little Girl BlueAt New World Stages, Manhattan; littlegirlblue.nyc. Running time: 2 hours. More