Music

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

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 [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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

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

Michel van der Aa’s work, a seamless interweaving of opera, film and motion-capture performance, arrives at the Park Avenue Armory.“I am certain that you exist,” a daughter tells her father, only to reconsider: “I am certain that you do not exist.”Her ambivalence is understandable. The question of what it means to be human — to exist — is an old one, and, arguing with her father, this woman is not about to find an answer. Only more questions, which accumulate at a breakneck pace in Michel van der Aa’s “Upload,” a seamless interweaving of opera, film and high technology that had its American premiere at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday.This work would seem to contain more than it possibly could in its 85 minutes: a tutorial-like explanation of how a clinic offers immortality by backing up consciousness to the cloud, one man’s journey through that process and his daughter’s conflicted response as he returns to her — no longer alive but, well, not dead. Throughout, the score shifts among electronic and acoustic sounds, just as the production moves between — and occasionally collides — live performance, prerecorded scenes and motion-capture technology.But van der Aa, an artist of big swings, operates here as composer, librettist and director with the restraint of a confident master. In a way that hasn’t always been the case with his works marrying novelty and tradition, there is no dazzle in “Upload” that isn’t closely tied to the dramaturgy.Bullock plays a daughter coping with her father’s new life as consciousness uploaded to the cloud, over scenes that shift between film and live performance.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThis is the third version I’ve seen, starting with a solely cinematic one that premiered online last summer. European audiences can stream it at medici.tv; Americans will be able to do the same starting April 1.The “Upload” film made trims to the score that focused its storytelling and had editing that more clearly separated the piece’s use of different media. It’s effective, though much less affecting than the proscenium presentation at the Dutch National Opera last fall, which restored the introduction — poetic fragments of phrases about the body, sung like plainchant in the dark — and an intimate coup de théâtre at the climax.Van der Aa’s creative team has been a constant, among them the dramaturgs Madelon Kooijman and Niels Nuijten, and Theun Mosk, who designed the smoothly integrated set and lighting; Tom Gelissen and Paul Jeukendrup, the nimble sound; and Darien Brito and Julius Horsthuis, the Hollywood-level special effects.Further tweaks have been made for the Armory’s capacious drill hall. Particularly striking now is that climactic move, an audience-spanning screen that was closer than in Amsterdam — a low ceiling — and more immersive. (But from Row G, it also made my craning neck hurt.)Williams, left, in a scene that blends live performance with film, featuring Ashley Zukerman as a Silicon Valley-like chief executive.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThat moment delivers a wash of patient quiet and humanity after 80 minutes of brisk drama. “Upload” has elements of the darkly speculative series “Black Mirror” and the comparatively hopeful “Years and Years,” but its preoccupations are as timeless as they are the finest genre fiction.Not that “uploading” is fully fictional. It is our future and present: an already stated ambition to upload consciousness to a decentralized blockchain, prefigured by the traces of ourselves we already deposit throughout the internet — our images and inner thoughts slowly building what the clinic of “Upload” (shot at the modernist Zonnestraal sanitarium in the Netherlands) would call a Mind File for our digital afterlife.How that file is created is detailed in filmed sequences starring Ashley Zukerman (“Succession”) as a stereotypical Silicon Valley type, hubristically enthusiastic and uninterested in waiting for government regulation, and Katja Herbers (“Evil”), as an empathetic psychiatrist who also has a streak of overconfidence. The technology is available only to a privileged few, the kind of people who would fly to space recreationally. Or, here, buy eternal life at the cost of death — to avoid the complications, both ethical and ecological, of multiple uploads.For these scenes, van der Aa writes less of an opera score and more of a soundtrack, uneasy yet excited, with jittery strings, chaotic percussion and electronics that warp into crackling white noise — all played, with propulsive momentum, by Ensemble Musikfabrik, under Otto Tausk’s committed and commanding baton. Van der Aa’s music takes on a different style, though, for scenes featuring the work’s two singing roles: the unnamed father and daughter.We meet them — the baritone Roderick Williams, delicate and ever sympathetic, and the soprano Julia Bullock, silvery at the top of her range, equally at ease in pop directness and lush lyricism — after he has been uploaded, without her knowledge. Their interactions have the naturally rhythmic vocal writing of Janacek or Debussy. Left alone, she tends to be accompanied by more traditional sounds, such as a piano or strings, while the father’s musical vocabulary is firmly, irreversibly electronic.Bullock with Williams, who, as an uploaded consciousness, is shown onstage through motion-capture technology.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTheir thread of the plot has a short story’s simplicity: She scrutinizes his new self, with constantly changing feelings, then has to decide whether to terminate him, to let him die again. That is because something went wrong in the upload process, which ordinarily buries trauma — in this father’s case, the recent, debilitating, loss of his wife.Briefly paused for the first time as an Upload, the father realizes that his grief is still agonizingly present, and that he’s doomed to endure it forever unless he is, well, deleted, which only his daughter can do. The opera leaves them on the night before her fateful decision. When that curtain shoots out over the audience, it shows them in split-screen projection — as if lying together while on separate planes of existence, singing the poetic fragments of the opening, now more pained.The curtain then lifts, revealing a stage from which the orchestra is gone, but electronic music lingers. A video shows the father’s memory anchor, meant to keep an Upload from drifting, unmoored, into digital space. It’s a virtual rendering of a childhood scene, chasing lizards around a stone wall in the countryside, that begins to glitch and degrade, leaving only a white expanse.Is the continuing score, in the absence of an orchestra, a triumph of technology? Does the conclusion depict the father’s deletion — or even the inevitable decay of all digital files? There are no answers here. If van der Aa offers anything, it is a guarantee of death, and of the unavoidably human response: to grieve.UploadThrough March 30 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More

As she was preparing to release “Crash,” the glossiest album of her career as a solo pop artist, Charli XCX was in the doldrums. In December, the British singer and songwriter landed a high-stakes “Saturday Night Live” performance that would feature two of her friends and collaborators, Caroline Polachek and Christine and the Queens.After a labyrinth of planning, rehearsal and boomerang travel, the whole thing was scrapped hours before air because of the Omicron surge. Navigating this disruption and other big questions about what might come next, Charli XCX spun out. “I actually felt really, really low in January,” she said, “and really sad, and was crying a lot and questioning a lot of things.”Eventually, the fog lifted; her public bravado kicked in. “My album is so good,” she tweeted last week. “It’s just true, I can’t help it.” “Crash,” which arrived on Friday, is the fifth and final LP released under the major label contract that Charli XCX, 29, signed as a 16-year-old. After she broke through in 2014 with the single “Boom Clap,” and earned a reputation as a hooky, hit-making writer for other artists, she grew more experimental, veering into hyperpop with Sophie and A.G. Cook, like her 2017 mixtape “Pop 2.” But she never lost her taste for collaborating.“She’s the queen of features,” said Polachek, a longtime friend. She and Christine and the Queens, the French artist Hélöise Letissier, who goes by Chris, are, indeed, featured on “New Shapes,” a synthy single from “Crash,” in which each wrote a verse about relationships — a subject they have long discussed in DMs and on podcasts. “I think we all fall in love quite differently,” Charli said.The relationship songs on “Crash” could double as a narrative about Charli XCX’s up-and-down time in the music industry, she added. She wanted the album to be her last, most packaged push for pop stardom — just to see if she could do it. “For me, there’s always been this eternal question of, like, could I be the biggest artist in the world,” she said, “or am I not made for it? Am I too weird, too left, too opinionated, too unlikable, too different looking, whatever, whatever, whatever?”Charli XCX got a rescheduled shot on “S.N.L.” this month, albeit without her pals. Now she’s wondering what the next phase of her career could be. “Who will I become? What will I look like? What will I wear? What will it sound like?” she said.Transformation and evolution were recurring topics when Charli XCX, Polachek and Chris got together in December, to discuss recording and performing together across continents. They each approach music from different lanes, as Polachek, formerly of the Brooklyn indie band Chairlift, put it: Charli on the social media-fueled pop front (she started on Myspace); Chris, who has lately been holed up in Los Angeles at work on a new Christine and the Queens album, arriving with a headier theatrical and performance background. “I love making music on my own, but I really find I come alive more when I share a space with them,” Charli said.In joint interviews and separately, they spoke about their careers and friendships, and why they work well as collaborators. “We’re feelers, you know,” Polachek said. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.“I roll my eyes when people point to female pop vocalists as an example of change in music,” Polachek said.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesHow They MetPOLACHEK Charli and I met 12 years ago in Australia. I was playing double-decker synths, singing from behind the band — I wasn’t even really the lead singer of that band. And Charli was wearing platform sneakers that were like a foot high, with rainbow stripes, and she was just singing over an iPod and stomping onstage. The paradigms were so different. She was like, Caroline, I want you to produce music for me. At the time I’d never produced music for anyone, let alone myself.CHARLI XCX I remember watching Chairlift perform and Caroline’s vocals being incredible, and I think I was just really in awe of her. And I still am. I felt intimidated by her coolness, not that she was an intimidating person. She was really kind. I was maybe 18, and still traveling back and forth on trips from my parents’ house.POLACHEK I did a mega-story Instagram post when Chris put out the “Girlfriend” video, I was just blown away by it, and I think you responded to that story and said, “I’m a fan” and I was like, “I’m a fan.” We had a pen pal relationship for about a year and a half, and quite a deep one, before we actually met. Just on Instagram DM. We were talking about love and pain.CHRIS I can go deep with you in conversation, and I appreciate that in our friendship.“The truth is, I’m allowed to be whoever I want, because the reason I’m an interesting artist is because I evolve and change,” Charli XCX said.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesOn Gender in the Music IndustryCHARLI XCX Now, and for the past however many years, I’ve loved co-writing. I see it as a real skill to be able to hone multiple people’s ideas into one sensical thing. But what I did experience [from outsiders] was a sense of disbelief that I could possibly write a song. Maybe that’s a lack of education in the minutiae of the music industry and the different roles — the songwriter; the producer; the artist who sometimes doubles as both. I think there’s still a narrative of people being like, oh, did Olivia Rodrigo really write that song? Or did Taylor Swift?Like, it seems that there needs to be this question around women’s validity and whether they’re worth their space, whereas it just doesn’t really seem to be a question for men.POLACHEK I roll my eyes when people point to female pop vocalists as an example of change in music. No. Women’s faces and women’s voices have been prominent since the beginning of pop music. It’s who has their hand on the dial. That’s what’s changing.CHARLI XCX There are more ways to be an artist because there are more platforms — there’s TikTok, there’s SoundCloud. There’s being that girl in your bedroom, releasing songs and organically building a fan base via your own memes. Those things are all true, but unfortunately, and maybe call me a pessimist, I do feel like there are still boxes that women are supposed to fit in.And there are definitely moments that break that mold — Billie Eilish becoming the biggest artist in the world. A great artist creates an amazing world for people to access. I feel like people sometimes are not willing to accept that women artists evolve. Billie did a performance using Auto-Tune, and the world imploded. And it’s like, that’s an artistic choice.I’m the weird girl on the fringes who made “Pop 2” and people loved me for that, and I’m eternally grateful for that support. That helped me sustain a career that, post-2014 to 2015, wasn’t very commercially successful. I found a new lease on life playing closer to the underground, more avant-garde sounds. Maybe this is just the Twitter discourse, which I probably need to get my head out of, but sometimes it feels like I’m being told, no, you’re not allowed to be anyone other than that. And really, the truth is, I’m allowed to be whoever I want, because the reason I’m an interesting artist is because I evolve and change.CHRIS I’m off social, stopped in July. My mental health is better. My connection to the present is better. I think social sometimes — when it’s hyper-filtered and it needs to be punchy, catchy, immediately digestible — it’s encouraging something that I’m not always understanding myself, as an artist. Sometimes I want to take more time to express an idea.My journey with gender has always been tumultuous. It’s raging right now, as I’m just exploring what is beyond this. A way to express it could be switching between they and she. I kind of want to tear down that system that made us label genders in such a strict way. I remember talking about being pansexual in France in 2014 — it was a conversation that few opened up, and I was advised in, like, offices to maybe tone it down. I’m really trying to address it the right way now, and I’ve been sometimes pressured to give an answer. But I think the answer is to be flickery, fluid, escaping.I don’t want to rush that conversation, and I might never answer again. But in my work I’m finding ways to make that journey joyful. I believe the real gestures are artistic, because the real discussion on queerness is also a discussion about the society we live in, about capitalism, about social justice. It’s not just about me every morning wondering, am I masculine or feminine? It’s all-encompassing.“My journey with gender has always been tumultuous,” Chris said. “It’s raging right now, as I’m just exploring what is beyond this.”Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesOn What They Value in Each Other as ArtistsPOLACHEK Chris has a sense of velocity and total commitment. Most people when they’re in rehearsal mode, they do things at 50 percent energy because you don’t want to wear yourself out, you’re just doing it for your brain. Chris is at like 100 percent, 150 percent, every single time, and just raises the level of commitment and energy flow for everyone around.CHRIS I’ve been a fan of Caroline forever. I like how artistic everything is, how intentional everything is. There is an elegance, it’s demanding, but also super melodic.CHARLI XCX I think Caroline sees the potential for pop music to be anything that she can mold. She can create and make it sound or look or do anything that she wants, because she has all the skill set to do that.With Caroline and Chris sometimes, honestly, I’m just envious of their music. When I heard “Girlfriend,” I was like, God, I want to work with [Christine’s collaborator] Dâm-Funk. And I did and I was like, I don’t have this magical connection with this person, even though he’s amazing. Like, I wish Chris was here to figure this out for me.CHRIS Charli, I relate very deeply to you writing the song. I can tell that you’re making music with what you experienced and the feeling you go through. There is something very earnest about your writing.CHARLI XCX Well, you were sort of my therapist for a while. You give good advice.Especially over the past couple of years, I’ve been able to turn to both of them for a lot of personal things outside of music, and also, personal things that connect to music. Sometimes I think it’s hard, being an artist, to vocalize that you’re having a hard time, because obviously, we’re so lucky to be able sustain ourselves from the things that we create. But also, everyone has struggles. It’s nice to speak with others who are in the same kind of situation as you, to confide in them about things that they get. I’m really, really grateful for that. More

The musician, nominated for five awards, was told he will not be able to perform at the ceremony on April 3. The decision came after weeks of erratic and troubling public behavior.When the latest Grammy nominations were announced in November, Kanye West picked up five nods, including album of the year, teeing up a potential reconciliation between one of pop music’s most mercurial stars and the institution he has spent much of the last two decades criticizing, challenging and sometimes outright insulting — even as West has yearned for its affirmation.But last Friday, a little more than two weeks before the 64th annual Grammy Awards ceremony, set for April 3 in Las Vegas — and weeks into negotiations over a planned performance at the show — organizers told West’s team that he would not be allowed to perform, according to a representative of the rapper and producer.The organizers cited West’s erratic and troubling public behavior in recent weeks, according to a person with knowledge of the decision, who was granted anonymity to discuss an internal matter.That behavior included the release of an animated music video that portrayed the kidnapping and burial of a figure who looked a lot like Pete Davidson — the comedian who has been dating Kim Kardashian, West’s former wife — and an Instagram post taunting Trevor Noah of “The Daily Show,” who is hosting this year’s Grammys, with a racial slur that resulted in West being banned from Instagram for 24 hours. (Noah said on Twitter that he had not called for West to be cut. “I said counsel Kanye not cancel Kanye,” he wrote.)For West, music’s perennial chaos agent, the episode may have been just the latest blur of sensational headlines. But for the Grammys, it is also a setback in a campaign to lure West back to the fold. He is perhaps the most vocal of a circle of high-profile Black creators — also including Jay-Z, Drake, the Weeknd and Frank Ocean — who have condemned the Grammys for often failing to recognize the work of creators of color, particularly in hip-hop, in its most high-profile categories.A Guide to the 2022 Grammy AwardsThe ceremony, originally scheduled for Jan. 31, was postponed for a second year in a row due to Covid and is now scheduled for April 3.Jon Batiste Leads the Way: The jazz pianist earned the most nominations with 11, including album and record of the year. Here’s his reaction.The Full List: Pop stars like Justin Bieber, Doja Cat and Billie Eilish were recognized in several categories. See all the nominees.Snubs and Surprises: From a big shock to smaller slights, The Times music team breaks it all down.Performers: Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, BTS and Lil Nas X are among the first performers announced for the April 3 show, which will be available on CBS and Paramount+.A Major Change: The awards will be the first since the Recording Academy ended its heavily criticized anonymous nominating committees.The Recording Academy, which presents the awards, has made extraordinary efforts to accommodate West, who has won 22 Grammys in his career. For the latest show, a last-minute rule change resulted in West being added to the ballot for album of the year.In an interview with Billboard, Harvey Mason Jr., the academy’s chief executive, said that when the initial slate of nominees was prepared with eight contenders in the major competitions, he noticed a dearth of rap in the top categories. Within days, a proposal to expand the ballot to 10 slots in those categories was approved by the academy’s board, bringing “Donda,” along with Taylor Swift’s “Evermore,” into consideration for best album.Since becoming the academy’s chief last year, Mason has made personal appeals to dissenting artists, including West. That outreach, and the album of the year nomination, stirred frustration and anger among some members of the academy, who have been appalled by West’s past antics, such as posting a video on social media in 2020 that shows a Grammy trophy apparently being defiled in a toilet bowl.“How vile and disrespectful,” Diane Warren, the Grammy-winning songwriter of hits like “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” said at the time.West’s recent behavior on social media has made mending fences even riskier for the Recording Academy. Always an oversharer, West has lately used his Instagram account to air grievances over custody and child care issues amid his divorce from Kardashian. That dispute has coincided with West’s attacks on Davidson, as well as figures like Noah who have criticized the musician’s posts as verging on threats and harassment.Still, for the Recording Academy, reconciling with West could have symbolic power, suggesting that the institution’s efforts to revamp its voting membership and adapt to a faster-moving music business with a younger, more diverse listenership were working.West’s complaints about the Grammys go back at least 17 years. In 2005, even before that year’s nominations were announced, West was telling Grammy voters that if he did not win album of the year for “Late Registration,” his second LP, he would attribute the loss to a judgment on his personal behavior rather than his artistry.“I don’t care if I jumped up and down right now on the couch like Tom Cruise,” he told MTV News at the time. “I don’t care how much I stunt — you can never take away from the amount of work I put into it.” (He lost to U2’s “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.”)Since then, West’s criticisms of the Grammys have been sporadic but unrelenting. In 2015, for example, after Beck won album of the year for “Morning Phase,” West demanded that the alt-rock musician give the award to Beyoncé instead, in an echo of his infamous moment with Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. He warned that such choices by Grammy voters would alienate “real artists.”“Because what happens is,” West said, “when you keep on diminishing art and not respecting the craft and smacking people in the face after they deliver monumental feats of music — it’s disrespectful to inspiration.”While West will not perform at this year’s Grammys, he is still invited to attend as a nominee — which presents a tricky problem for the academy if West wins a major award like album of the year. Would he use the opportunity of a speech on live television to make more inflammatory comments, either about his personal life or about the Grammys itself?As a safeguard for producers of the show, and for CBS, the Grammys’ longtime broadcast network, standard editing delays are built into the show. In 2017, for example, the Grammy audience heard Adele blurt out a frustrated profanity after she flubbed the opening of a George Michael tribute; people watching at home just heard bleeps.Joe Coscarelli contributed reporting. More

The New York Philharmonic announced its 2022-23 season, a celebratory slate of about 150 concerts to inaugurate its renovated home.For the past two years, the only sound coming out of David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, has been the clamor of construction. That will change in October, when it reopens after a $550 million renovation.And the Philharmonic will announce its return there with fanfare: Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” which is the first work of the orchestra’s 2022-23 season, a celebratory slate of about 150 concerts and events unveiled on Monday.Among the season’s highlights are a monthlong festival to inaugurate the hall; a series of premieres by composers, including Julia Wolfe and Caroline Shaw; concerts exploring issues like racism and climate change; and appearances by conductors who could replace the Philharmonic’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, after he steps down in 2024.After losing more than $27 million in anticipated ticket revenue during the pandemic lockdown, and spending much of the past year without a permanent home during the Geffen Hall renovation, the Philharmonic hopes the coming season will restore a sense of normalcy and rebuild its audience.The renovated Geffen Hall will feature wavy beech wood walls and vineyard-style seats that wrap around the stage.Diamond Schmitt Architects“It’s a moment for us not only to reunite with people who have come before, but as we look to the future, to develop and nurture new audiences,” Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. “We can’t just expect people to come. We have to invite them.”The Philharmonic recently announced that the renovation is fully funded and on track to finish in October, a year and a half ahead of schedule, after construction was accelerated during the pandemic. The new space will bring both aesthetic and acoustic improvements, with wavy beech wood walls and vineyard-style seats that wrap around the stage.There will also be additions meant to draw people in, including a 50-foot digital screen in the lobby that can broadcast concerts to the public, and a studio looking out onto Broadway. The goal, Borda said, is for the hall to be a “home for music and a home for New Yorkers.”The season begins Oct. 7 with a program called “Thank You Concert,” led by van Zweden, for an audience of emergency medical workers and construction workers who took part in the hall’s renovation. Two galas, and an open house weekend, will follow later that month.Opening festivities include the world premiere, performed at two free concerts, of “San Juan Hill,” a work by the trumpeter Etienne Charles, who is known for blending jazz with the music of his native Trinidad. Several other contemporary works will be featured, including the American premiere of a piece by Shaw; and the world premiere of “Oyá,” a work for light, electronics and orchestra by the Brazilian composer Marcos Balter.Some of the new works were written specifically for the renovated hall. “The early weeks are designed to be an exploration,” Borda said.Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said that the renovated hall should be a “home for music and a home for New Yorkers.”Tod Williams Billie Tsien ArchitectsAs the Philharmonic continues its search for a new music director, guest conductors will get more attention than usual.Several familiar names will take the podium, including Gustavo Dudamel, the music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who will lead Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. In March, another prominent contender, Susanna Mälkki, the outgoing chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, will conduct the New York premiere of a double concerto by Felipe Lara, featuring the flutist Claire Chase and the bassist Esperanza Spalding, in their Philharmonic debuts.Santtu-Matias Rouvali, the Philharmonia Orchestra’s young principal conductor, is the only guest who will get two weeks of concerts, leading the New York premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3, featuring Yuja Wang, in January. The following week, he will shepherd the American premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Catamorphosis,” in a program that also includes Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”Given the dearth of female conductors among the largest American orchestras, some have argued that the Philharmonic should choose a woman as its next music director. Several rising conductors, many of them women, will make their debuts with the ensemble next season, including Karina Canellakis, the chief conductor of Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra; Ruth Reinhardt, a former assistant conductor of the Dallas Symphony; and Nathalie Stutzmann, who takes the podium of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra next season.Borda declined to comment on the music director search, except to say that the upcoming season was “obviously an opportunity to see some returning talent and some wonderful new talent as well.”Soloists appearing for the first time with the orchestra include the Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson, who will play Ravel’s piano concerto in November, and Cynthia Millar, playing the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument, in Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-Sinfonie,” alongside the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, in March.The season includes concert series designed to address modern issues, including “Liberation,” about social injustice; “Spirit,” about “humanity’s place in the cosmos”; and “Earth,” about the climate crisis.As part of “Liberation” in March, the Philharmonic will premiere a work by Courtney Bryan and Tazewell Thompson. “Spirit,” that same month, will include Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” which the Philharmonic has not performed since 2008.“Earth” will close out the season in June, with the world premiere of Wolfe’s “unEarth,” a multimedia oratorio that explores forced migration, loss of nature and adaptation. John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert,” the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Become Ocean,” will get its New York premiere.Borda said that throughout the new season, the Philharmonic wants people to feel that “their lives have been touched and changed.”“If we accomplish that,” she added, “we could all be very proud.” More