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      Listen to Keyboard Music by Bach (No, Not That One)

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      The extraordinary range of C.P.E. Bach, a son of J.S., is on display in a new album from the pianist Marc-André Hamelin.The subject of the pianist Marc-André Hamelin’s latest album is Bach — no, not that one.Hamelin — ever inquisitive in exploring the outer reaches of the repertoire, with recent releases of music by Sigismond Thalberg, Samuil Feinberg and Erno Dohnanyi — has now turned to the extraordinary range of keyboard works by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Johann Sebastian’s second surviving son.C.P.E. Bach was a prolific composer and an important pedagogue, a significant influence on Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. (Hamelin’s new album is a welcome companion to the three volumes of solo Haydn that he set down, with ideal panache, a decade and more ago on the Hyperion label.) But if he was more widely appreciated than his father well into the 19th century, that has certainly not been the case more recently.In part, that’s because C.P.E.’s category-defying scores challenge preconceptions of the history of music as it has come to be written — coming off as stunningly, even unnervingly, experimental. When did the “Baroque” end, and the “Classical” begin? What constitutes “early music”? The work of C.P.E. Bach invites us to consider these questions anew, suggests the harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, who has recorded some of this music and wrote the booklet notes for Hamelin’s two-disc set.Hamelin is known for delving into rarely played corners of the keyboard repertory.Kayana Szymczak for The New York TimesHamelin takes us from a juvenile march C.P.E. wrote before 1725 to two of the extended, improvisatory fantasies he composed just before his death, in 1788. Asked in an interview to pick a favorite page from the scores, Hamelin chose the “Abschied von meinem Silbermannischen Claviere, in einem Rondo” (“Farewell to My Silbermannischen Clavier, in a Rondo”), a haunting tribute to a favorite clavichord in 1781. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Even for adventurous pianists like yourself, the music of C.P.E. Bach is not exactly common. How did you pick it up?My wife, Cathy Fuller, is one of the hosts at WCRB radio in Boston, and back in either 2008 or 2009 she played one cut from Mikhail Pletnev’s Deutsche Grammophon recording of C.P.E. Bach. It was a little sonata in E minor; it’s three movements, very compact, about seven or eight minutes. The piece ends suddenly, in the middle of a phrase. Bach just decides to end it on a tonic first inversion, which was a total shock to me. You just have to look at Gesualdo to see how far some composers could go even very early in history, but this was really quite a shock.By coincidence, I had just inherited a collection of scores which included six volumes of music that C.P.E. published very late in life, in the 1780s, for “connoisseurs and amateurs.” So I ran to the music, and, sure enough, that’s exactly what C.P.E. was asking for — no diminuendo, no rallentando, nothing. Naturally I wanted to find out more, so I started reading from the six volumes, and then I bought everything I could find. I became very, very enthusiastic; the idea to record some of these things was always in the back of my mind, but it took a while for me to get the wheels in motion.When I started talking about this project, with no recording date in mind, I got a very nice email from Paul Corneilson of the Packard Humanities Institute. He said, “We have an 18-volume set of the complete keyboard works in urtext editions; would you like one?” What had been a project involving one CD became two, because of the embarrassment of riches I was confronted with.Above everything else, I wanted to underline the richness of Bach’s imagination. I would like to plead with pianists to look him up; it’s never been easier.So what distinguishes his music?The element of angularity, and surprise, and constant delight in the unexpected was very much a part of Haydn, and he confessed that he owed a great debt to C.P.E. Bach. There are some extremely daring modulations, and what I mentioned before is not the only time he just decides to end a piece. In the slow movement of the F minor sonata I recorded, the middle section keeps modulating, keeps modulating, keeps modulating — and then suddenly cuts off at a very tense moment, very foreign to the home key. Then there’s three long beats of silence, and he just decides to go back to the beginning, with no clear relationship between the two keys.I’ve seen editions which have “corrected” this to make it more palatable, more normal. One that I found, actually, was by Hans von Bülow, and you wouldn’t believe the butchery job he performed on C.P.E.’s music; it’s unbelievable. For a while, there wasn’t much more than that available.Bach was writing at a time of great technological change, as harpsichords and clavichords were giving way to fortepianos, a shift that allowed composers to develop new means of expression. How would you respond to those who might argue that this music should therefore only be performed on the instruments of its time, rather than a concert grand?I grew up with the modern piano, and it affords me all the pleasure, all the fulfillment, all the musical results I want. So, as much as I appreciate sometimes playing an old instrument — and I have, not necessarily in public — the music survives being played on the modern piano. For me, that’s enough; I don’t need anything else. There are so many possible sonorities on the modern piano that, for me, that’s perfectly fulfilling.Technological change is in fact the subject of your favorite page, the middle page of a rondo that Bach wrote in 1781 as a farewell to his long-serving clavichord.It’s an extremely affecting piece; I remember during the recording session I must have been in a hurry to get to it, because it was the first piece that I put down.In the exact middle of it there is a moment: There’s a fermata, and then suddenly this E major chord. This E major chord is not something really outlandish, because you’re coming out of B minor. But if you leave the right amount of silence before it, and if you pay particular heed to the quality of the attack of this chord, that’s one of the most magical moments that I’m aware of in all of music.I read that C.P.E. apparently said to the gentleman to whom he gave this Silbermann clavichord it’s absolutely impossible even to play the piece on a clavichord other than this one. (C.P.E. had had it for around 35 years, I think, so it was a very sad farewell.) But fortunately I paid no attention to that. It’s interesting to know, and it shows you the power of his convictions, but it’s a denial of the possibilities that are obtainable on something like the modern piano, or any other instrument.Funnily enough, the score repeatedly notates an ornament that simply can’t be achieved on a modern piano: a bebung, which is a form of vibrato. Do you just have to ignore that, and accept that the piano will make amends in other ways?I just tried to compensate elsewhere. What carried me through is the image of C.P.E. possibly improvising this piece, and then later notating it, because it really does sound like an improvisation — like playing for himself. More

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      After ‘Clyde’s,’ Lynn Nottage Just Has Two Shows Onstage. ‘Whew!’

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      With one play closed, Nottage can focus on “MJ” on Broadway and “Intimate Apparel” at Lincoln Center Theater. And maybe even catch her breath.It was just a flute of champagne after Sunday’s final Broadway performance of her play “Clyde’s,” but Lynn Nottage was genuinely happy to have it — not only to toast the end of the limited run with the rest of the company, upstairs at the Hayes Theater, but also to sneak a brief, rare moment of indulgence in a schedule that’s lately been too crammed for a glass of wine.Starring Uzo Aduba as the owner of a sandwich shop staffed with people who have served time, and Ron Cephas Jones as a culinary artist who leads the workers in a quest for the perfect sandwich, “Clyde’s” started a remarkable season for Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. For four days this month, until “Clyde’s” closed, she had three new shows onstage in New York; the others, still in previews, are the Broadway musical “MJ,” about Michael Jackson, and the opera “Intimate Apparel,” adapted from her play of the same name, at Lincoln Center Theater.For months she shuttled among them, dashing back to “Clyde’s” for talkbacks and to catch performances when understudies went on. All while teaching full time at Columbia University and, in October, releasing the short film “Takeover,” produced by her company Market Road Films, for the Op-Docs series of The New York Times.Nottage shares a toast with actors and staff after the final performance of “Clyde’s” at the Hayes Theater.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAfter the champagne toast on Sunday evening, Nottage came downstairs for an interview in a lounge at the theater to talk about her season and about “Clyde’s,” which she called “Floyd’s” when it had its premiere in Minneapolis in 2019, and renamed following the killing of George Floyd in 2020. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.So how are you?I’m very overworked. [laughs] I was just describing this particular moment as like making art in the eye of a hurricane.You’ve decided to make a lot of art in the eye of a hurricane.It’s a lot of art, yeah. It’s the moment in which I was invited to make art, but it’s also the most difficult, fraught, complicated moment in theater history. It would be stressful, you know, making three shows without the added element of Covid. But add that sort of special ingredient, and it’s very complicated.Are you getting the time to savor this?I started rehearsal in October for both shows, “MJ” and “Clyde’s.” From October to December, I was rehearsing and teching and seeing the shows at night, and teaching full time at Columbia. I did not have a single day off. And then in mid-December, we began rehearsals for “Intimate Apparel.” But strangely, in the Covid shutdown, when for 10 days we didn’t have “MJ” going, I suddenly had just a little bit of a pause. I could breathe.Is there joy in it?This is the dream. I feel immensely proud of all three of the works of art that I have created. They’re so different and they represent different aspects of who I am as an artist in different parts of my brain. Part of the joy of making all three of these pieces of art at the same time is that it allows me to leave one space and enter another completely different space and then, you know, leave that space and enter another one. And so I never get bored.A curtain call, from left, with Edmund Donovan, Ron Cephas Jones, Uzo Aduba, Kara Young and Reza Salazar.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“Clyde’s” is a comedy.It is a comedy. It’s also a feel-good play. And particularly at this moment I think that audiences need something that is healing and soothing, and that allows them to open up their hearts and allow laughter in. And that’s what I was hoping to do.It was a long journey with this play, yes?It doesn’t seem like a super long journey to me. This journey was just interrupted because of world circumstances. We’ve been through a lot. The world changed in ways that now seem incomprehensible to me. I mean, I kind of can’t believe that we lived through it. I’ll be an old lady with my grandchildren, like: “Yes, let me tell you about Covid and Donald Trump.” [laughs] You know, it’s sort of similar when I think about my grandmother talking about the Depression and the war, and it just seemed like, “How did you survive?” Now I know.Did you think that when you finally got to do “Clyde’s,” we would be out of the pandemic?I think all of us thought that. There was a moment of incredible optimism. And still, when we began “Clyde’s,” we had all of the Covid protocols in place and the Covid officer, and we wore masks throughout rehearsals and the actors were permitted to take off the masks on the stage. And that felt like a victory, like, OK, we’re moving through this difficult moment. And audiences were coming back and you’d walk through this theater district and it felt vibrant and alive. And you know, there were sprinklings of tourists, and restaurants were packed. You couldn’t get reservations.I think that something like “Clyde’s” in any other climate would have been a hit, and it would have continued to run. We always had a limited run, and we ran through that period of time. But I think that any other time, we could have kept going. It just kind of breaks my heart to make something that I feel is connecting with audiences in a moment in which audiences feel reluctant to come to theater. But for us, I think one of the real positive notes is that we were able to simulcast.Nottage strolls with Kate Whoriskey, right, the director of “Clyde’s.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTell me about that.We became sort of the beta test for Broadway. Like, can this concept work? Can you do live theater that’s projected into people’s living rooms and people actually tune in and have an experience? And what we discovered is, yes. So many people who were either fearful to come to the theater, or had Covid and couldn’t come to the theater, bought tickets and had an experience that wasn’t live in the fact that their bodies were in the theater and they were exchanging energy with the actors, but it still had the kind of spontaneity, because they didn’t know what was going to happen. I think it’s going to be an interesting bonanza for theater.How different is your experience of this season from a normal season?Under normal circumstances, after shows you go out for drinks with people. There’s a real sense of community. You see people from other shows. You feel really very much part of a season. But here, every show is an island because of Covid. People do the show and they go home.Where did you get your work ethic?It’s fear. It’s fear that it may all go away. There was a moment in my life in which my father had an accident which didn’t permit him to work, and my mother, who was a schoolteacher, suddenly had to support the entire family. And I saw how hard she worked and I thought, Oh my God, that could happen to me. You know, that any moment your circumstances can change. And you find yourself in dire straits. And I thought, OK, I’m just not going to let that happen.How old were you then?I was maybe 11 or 12.By now, the fear can’t be about being in dire straits. Can it really?Yeah, I mean, it’s not rational. [laughs] It just is a fact.But I’ve always worked. This is why I think I write about working people — that’s what I do.Nottage leaves a message on the wall at the Hayes Theater.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesSo now that you’ll be slacking with just two shows in previews —With just two shows, it’s like, whew! But teaching begins again next week. And they want us to teach remotely, and I have a class that’s not a remote class. It really is about being immersed in experiences. I’m like, what am I going to do?I have to figure it out, but I don’t have time to figure it out. I’m like, OK, tomorrow morning I will wake up and from 7 to 8:30, I’ll figure it out. More

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      Ralph Emery, the Dick Clark of Country Music, Dies at 88

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      For six decades he promoted country performers on radio and television, earning a place in the Country Music Hall of Fame.NASHVILLE — Ralph Emery, the M.C. widely regarded as the most popular radio and television broadcast personality in the history of country music, died on Saturday at a hospital here. He was 88.His death, after a brief illness, was confirmed by his wife of 54 years, Joy Kott Emery.Heralded by turns as the dean of country music broadcasters and the Dick Clark of country music, Mr. Emery spent more than six decades on the air promoting country music and seeking to broaden its appeal among audiences with no natural affinity with rural Southern culture.He first made his mark in 1957 after signing on to work the graveyard shift at Nashville’s WSM, home of the Grand Ole Opry. A 50,000-watt radio station known as the “Air Castle of the South,” WSM could be heard throughout the Southern and Eastern United States — and, on clear nights, well beyond them.Only 24 at the time, Mr. Emery immediately distinguished himself at WSM as a low-key host with an intimate, easygoing on-air presence. His informal, open-door policy on the show encouraged his guests, both established and aspiring, to drop by the studio unannounced to chat, drink coffee and spin their latest records.“Ralph was more a grand conversationalist than a calculated interviewer, and it was his conversations that revealed the humor and humanity of Tom T. Hall, Barbara Mandrell, Tex Ritter, Marty Robbins and many more,” said Kyle Young, chief executive of the Country Music Hall of Fame, in a statement. “Above all, he believed in music and in the people who make it.”From 1957 to 1972, some of country’s biggest stars, including Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, made impromptu appearances on Mr. Emery’s show, its most devoted followers perhaps being the cross-country truckers it kept awake as they made their all-night runs.Mr. Emery, right, with Reba McEntire in 2007 during a break in his interview show on the RFD-TV cable channel. Over the years, he interviewed country music’s biggest stars.Mark Humphrey/Associated PressMr. Emery’s early success on WSM also led to a concurrent slot as an announcer on the Grand Ole Opry, as well as a role as host of “Opry Almanac,” an Opry-themed television broadcast on WSMV later billed as “The Ralph Emery Show.”One uncharacteristically fraught exception to Mr. Emery’s otherwise affable tenure at WSM came in 1968 when the pioneering country-rock band the Byrds were guests on his show.The group’s new album, “Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” unabashedly expressed their devotion to traditional country music, even to the point of recruiting some of Nashville’s first-call session musicians to play on the record. The Byrds’s performance on the Opry before going on Mr. Emery’s show, though, was greeted with a cool reception from the audience after they decided to perform one of their originals instead of the Merle Haggard song they assured the show’s management they would play.None too impressed with their hippie take on country music, Mr. Emery likewise gave the Byrds the cold shoulder. Gram Parsons and Roger McGuinn of the Byrds responded in kind by writing “Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man,” a merciless sendup in which they characterized the song’s protagonist (a thinly veiled version of Mr. Emery) as a hidebound Southerner.This inauspicious clash with the counterculture notwithstanding, Mr. Emery continued to flourish within country music with “The Ralph Emery Show.” An early morning television broadcast that ran on WSMV from 1972 to 1991, the program featured a live band and earned a reputation for developing unsung talent like Lorrie Morgan and the Judds.A man of unflagging energy, Mr. Emery also hosted the nationally syndicated weekly TV series “Pop Goes the Country” from 1974 to 1980, before reaching what might have been his peak in popularity as the host of “Nashville Now.” A prime-time broadcast that aired weeknights on the Nashville Network from 1983 to 1993, “Nashville Now” for years featured a Muppet-like co-host named Shotgun Red, played by the comedian and voice-over artist Steve Hall.Mr. Emery, right, presented Loretta Lynn and Marty Robbins with plaques proclaiming them WSM’s top female and male vocalists in 1969.Dale Ernsberger/The Tennessean, Nashville Tennessean, via ImagnWalter Ralph Emery was born on March 10, 1933, in McEwen, Tenn., 50 miles or so west of Nashville, the only child of Walter and Maxine (Fuqua) Emery.His father, who suffered from alcoholism, was an accountant. His mother, who struggled with poor mental health, worked as a stenographer and at other jobs to pay the bills. Young Ralph’s happiest childhood moments were spent on his grandparents’ farm.Radio likewise proved an escape from childhood trauma — Mr. Emery’s “surrogate family,” as he put it in the first of two memoirs, “Memories” (written with Tom Carter), if not a career path.After his parents divorced, Mr. Emery worked as an usher in a Nashville movie theater. He also stocked groceries in a local Kroger store, paying his way through the Tennessee School of Broadcasting.“I practiced and practiced, in school and at home, talking and listening real hard to myself to rid my speech of its horrendous regionalism,” Mr. Emery said in an interview for his bio for the Country Music Hall of Fame.Perhaps inevitably, Mr. Emery tried his hand at recording with “Hello Fool,” an answer record to Faron Young’s “Hello Walls” that reached the country Top 10 in 1961. He also made an album, “Songs for Children” (1989), with Shotgun Red, his co-host from “Nashville Now.”Mr. Emery, right, was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2007 with, from left, Mel Tillis and Vince Gill.John Russell/Country Music Hall of Fame, via Associated PressMr. Emery also appeared in several B-movies, including “Nashville Rebel” and the “Girl from Tobacco Row,” both from 1966.Mr. Emery continued to host country-themed programming into the 2000s, perhaps most notably, “Ralph Emery Live,” a TV production, later renamed “Ralph Emery’s Memories,” that aired on cable from 2007 to 2015.Mr. Emery was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2007 and into the National Radio Hall of Fame three years later.Besides his wife, he is survived by three sons, Steve, Michael and Kit, five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. Mr. Emery was married several times, including a brief union with the singer Skeeter Davis from 1960 to 1964.“I’ve always tried to bring respect to country music,” he said in his bio for the Country Music Hall of Fame. “I’ll be very content if people can look on me and say, ‘He brought dignity to his craft,’ or, ‘He brought class to the business.’” More

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      Janis Ian Lets Her Music Speak Her Mind (One Last Time)

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      At 70, the singer-songwriter who has always been unafraid of difficult subjects is releasing a final album, “The Light at the End of the Line.”On a recent morning, Janis Ian spoke expansively from her work space in Florida about a 50-year career marked by literary lyrics, social activism and major hits. Just one subject brought her up short. When pondering younger artists who’ve publicly cited her as an inspiration, she paused and threw up her arms. “I can’t think of one. So many people say, ‘Joni Mitchell is my big influence,’” she said. “And I thought, wait a minute. Didn’t I influence anybody?”She might not get the loudest shout-outs, but there’s no denying that Ian has often served as a cultural clairvoyant.In 1967, she became one of the first fully self-determined female singer-songwriters in pop, having penned every track on her debut album, which was released one month before Laura Nyro’s, a year before Joni Mitchell’s and three before Carole King’s.The subjects she became most famous for writing about, outliers at the time, have since become ubiquitous. Her breakthrough hit, “Society’s Child,” written in 1965 when she was 14, was one of the first charting songs to center on an interracial romance. Her biggest score, “At Seventeen,” which reached No. 2 in 1975, confronted lookism and bullying with a candor that anticipated the work of contemporary artists including Billie Eilish, Demi Lovato and Lizzo. Ian was also one of the first gay pop stars to come out in the early ’90s, and she championed free downloads as a promotional device back when the industry did everything it could to shut them down.Ian had few role models for her self-determined path, citing only Nina Simone and Victoria Spivey, a blues singer and writer who made her first impact in the 1920s. Otherwise, she said, “everything was male-identified.”“Plenty of other artists have a gift for melody and vocals and great lyrics,” Ian said. “The only thing I think I do better is to talk about things that people have a hard time voicing. I give them a safe way to voice them.”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesThe disparity between the world in which she carved her path and today has been on Ian’s mind lately because of a major decision she made in the last year. At 70, she will release her final album, “The Light at the End of the Line,” this Friday, followed by a valedictory tour. “I’m done,” she said, with a mixture of relief and anticipation. Ian said the wear and tear of serving as her own manager and song publisher, along with life as a touring musician, left little time for the thing she loves most.“I’m a writer first,” she said. “I care desperately about writing — any kind of writing.”That includes haiku, short stories and a novel she hopes to finish in her coming life. She’ll work on everything in a nearly completed addition to her home, on an island in Tampa Bay where she lives with her wife of 19 years, Patricia Snyder, a retired criminal defense lawyer.Her final songs have a summary mission. In the title track, an elegant acoustic ballad, she bids adieu to her fans. “Some of them have stuck with me for 56 years,” she said. “That’s longer than I’ve known most of my family.” In “I’m Still Standing,” the stalwart melody underscores lyrics that embrace the physical changes brought by time, which, Ian said, explains the white hair and lack of makeup she proudly sported in our interview. In the classically influenced piano piece “Nina,” she salutes one of the artists she most admires, her friend, Nina Simone, who cut a bracingly rueful version of Ian’s song “Stars” in 1976.“Nina was so complicated,” Ian said. “She could be the most astonishing friend and also the most horrible person. But, as a solo performer, she was the single best I’ve ever seen.”Some of the new songs are more expressly political. “Perfect Little Girl” extends the theme of “At 17,” while in “Resist” she repurposes the social protest of earlier songs with lyrics that, among other things, use raw language to capture the violence of female genital mutilation. As with “Society’s Child,” some radio stations have told her they won’t play it. “They said it’s too suggestive,” Ian said. “Is the song sexual in some way I’m not aware of?”Ian was reared to raise such questions. Her father, a music teacher, and her mother, a secretary at a college, ran a progressive summer camp in upstate New York. Because of her parents’ politics, the FBI tapped the family phone, tracked their activities and discouraged schools from hiring her father, which she wrote about on the 2000 album “God and the FBI.”Ian’s upbringing in the mainly Black area of East Orange, N.J., helped inspire her to write “Society’s Child” in 1965, one year after the Civil Rights Act was passed. Her producer, Shadow Morton, a key shaper of the girl group sound, had a deal with Atlantic Records that financed the recording, but the label declined to release it. Ian was never told why, though she said Jerry Wexler, the Atlantic president at the time, later apologized for the decision. Verve Records picked up the song and released it twice in 1966, without success.A major break came the next year when she was invited to appear on a CBS-TV special, “Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution,” for which the host Leonard Bernstein used his enormous cultural currency to lend legitimacy to the explosive new music of the ’60s. Ian said her song “wouldn’t have gone anywhere without the show.” Yet its focus on race scared off enough radio stations to halt its charge up the Billboard chart at No. 14.After “Society’s Child,” Verve released three more Ian albums that failed, but in 1973, Roberta Flack covered her song “Jesse” and scored a hit, which helped Ian get a contract with Columbia Records. “Janis Ian wrote songs that touch my heart,” Flack wrote in an email. “She tells stories in her songs that many of us can relate to — tender experiences that help us articulate what we feel about how the world treats us in so many ways.”Ian’s second album for the label, “Between the Lines,” featured “At Seventeen,” with lyrics capturing the naked shame Ian felt at being considered “an ugly duckling” with an honesty so brutal, it made some people uncomfortable — including its author. “That song was scary to write and scary to sing,” she said. “I would sing it with my eyes closed because I was so sure the audience would laugh at me. It was astonishing to me to realize, first, that they weren’t laughing. And, second, that it applied to boys too.”The song’s nuanced and erudite lyrics also accounted for the loss of self that can be suffered by women considered the most desirable — the very type who bullied Ian. “Their lives are an eternal beauty contest,” she said.Ian believes her willingness to write about uncomfortable subjects has become her métier. “Plenty of other artists have a gift for melody and vocals and great lyrics,” she said. “The only thing I think I do better is to talk about things that people have a hard time voicing. I give them a safe way to voice them.”Though Ian finds it distressing that the difficult subjects she has written about remain relevant decades later, as she prepares to leave the music business, she believes the world has changed considerably from when she started. “It’s too easy to fall down that rabbit hole of saying ‘nothing has improved,’” she said. “I can no longer be arrested in this country for being gay. That’s a huge difference. I firmly believe that things work out the way they’re supposed to. Whether that will be in my lifetime, I don’t know. But I do believe things will be better.” More

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      A Ban on 19 Singers in Egypt Tests the Old Guard’s Power

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      Leaders of a musicians’ licensing group are trying to curb mahraganat, a bold genre wildly popular with young people. It is not clear if they can.CAIRO — The song starts out like standard fare for Egyptian pop music: A secret infatuation between two young neighbors who, unable to marry, sneak flirtatious glances at each other and commit their hearts in a bittersweet dance of longing and waiting.But then the lyrics take a radical turn.“If you leave me,” blasts the singer, Hassan Shakosh, “I’ll be lost and gone, drinking alcohol and smoking hash.”The song, “The Neighbors’ Daughter,” has become a giant hit, garnering more than a half- billion views of its video on YouTube alone and catapulting Mr. Shakosh to stardom. But the explicit reference to drugs and booze, culturally prohibited substances in Egypt, has made the song, released in 2019, a lightning rod in a culture war over what is an acceptable face and subject matter for popular music and who gets to decide.The battle, which pits Egypt’s cultural establishment against a renegade musical genre embraced by millions of young Egyptians, has heated up recently after the organization that licenses musicians barred at least 19 young artists from singing and performing in Egypt.The organization, the Egyptian Musicians’ Syndicate, accused Mr. Shakosh and other singers of the genre, known as mahraganat, of normalizing, and thus encouraging, decadent behavior, of misrepresenting Egypt and of spoiling public taste.Hassan Shakosh appearing in the video for his song “The Neighbors’ Daughter.” Hassan Shakosh, vis YouTube“They are creating a chaotic movement in the country,” said Tarek Mortada, the spokesman for the syndicate, a professional union that issues permits for artists to perform onstage and that while technically not an arm of the state, is governed by state law and its budget is supervised by the state. “What we’re confronting right now is the face of depravity and regression.”The barred singers have been iced out of clubs, concerts and weddings. Some have continued to perform abroad or at private parties, but they have had to say no to advertising deals and other income opportunities.The syndicate’s stance has also cast a pall over Egypt’s cultural scene, sending a strong message that artists are not free agents and must still toe restrictive lines set by civil and state institutions. The musicians see the syndicate as an outmoded entity desperately clinging to a strictly curated vision and image of Egyptian culture that is smashing against an inevitable wave of youth-driven change.“They can’t get themselves to be convinced that we’re here to stay,” said Ibrahim Soliman, 33, Mr. Shakosh’s manager and childhood friend. “How can you say someone like Shakosh misrepresents Egypt when his songs are being heard and shared by the entire country?”Fans were incensed. One meme depicted the leader of the syndicate, a pop singer of love classics from the 1970s, ordering people to stop singing in the bathroom.The battle mirrors cultural conflicts across the region where autocratic governments in socially conservative countries have tried to censor any expression that challenges traditional mores. For example, Iran has arrested teenage girls who posted videos of themselves dancing, which is a crime there. And in 2020, Northwestern University in Qatar called off a concert by a Lebanese indie rock band whose lead singer is openly gay.But online streaming and social media platforms have poked giant holes in that effort, allowing artists to bypass state-sanctioned media, like television and record companies, and reach a generation of new fans hungry for what they see as more authentic and relevant content.Iran’s draconian restrictions on unacceptable music have produced a flourishing underground rock and hip-hop scene. The question facing Egypt is who now has the power to regulate matters of taste — the 12 men and one woman who run the syndicate, or the millions of fans who have been streaming and downloading mahraganat.Mahraganat first rose out of the dense, rowdy working-class neighborhoods of Cairo more than a decade ago and is still generally made in low-tech home studios, often with no more equipment than a cheap microphone and pirated software.The head of the Egyptian Musicians’ Syndicate, Hany Shaker, center, during voting for the group’s board members in 2019. Mahmoud Ahmed/EPA, via ShutterstockThe raw, straight-talking genre — with blunt lyrics about love, sex, power and poverty — mirrors the experience and culture of a broad section of the disenfranchised youth who live in those districts set to a danceable, throbbing beat.But its catchy rhymes and electronic rhythms quickly went mainstream and now echo from the glamorous wedding ballrooms of Egypt’s French-speaking elite to exclusive nightclubs in Mediterranean resorts to concert halls in oil-rich Qatar and Saudi Arabia.“Mahraganat is a true representation of this moment in time, of globalization and information technology, and of social media in directing our tastes,” said Sayed Mahmoud, a culture writer and former editor of a weekly newspaper called “Alkahera” issued by the Ministry of Culture. “If you remove the reference to drugs and alcohol, does it mean they don’t exist? The songs represent real life and real culture.”They are certainly more direct, avoiding the sanitized euphemisms and poetic hints of sexuality that characterize traditional lyrics.“We use the words that are close to our tongue, without embellishing or beautifying, and it reaches people,” said Islam Ramadan, who goes by the name DJ Saso, the 27-year-old producer of Mr. Shakosh’s blockbuster hit.Many lawyers and experts say the syndicate has no legal right to ban artists, insisting that Egypt’s Constitution explicitly protects creative liberty. But these arguments seem academic in the authoritarian state of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, which has stifled freedom of speech, tightened control on the media and passed laws to help monitor and criminalize so-called immoral behavior on the internet.The syndicate’s executive members have adamantly defended their move, arguing that a key part of their job is to safeguard the profession against inferior work that they say is made by uncultured impostors who tarnish the image of the country.And government authorities have reinforced the message.In 2017, a special division of the police that targets moral crimes arrested the makers of a mahraganat song, and promised to continue searching for work that “presents offensive content for the Egyptian viewer or contains sexual insinuations.”A wedding in 2015 in Salam City, a suburb on the outskirts of Cairo.Mosa’ab Elshamy/Associated PressIn 2020, after a video circulated showing dozens of students at an all-girls high school singing along to “The Neighbors’ Daughter,” the Ministry of Education warned schools against the “noticeable” spread of songs that incite “bad behavior.”A short time later, the minister of youth and sports vowed to “combat depravity” by banning mahraganat music from being played in athletic arenas and sports facilities.The head of the syndicate, Hany Shaker, defended the ban on a late-night television show, saying, “We can’t be in the era of Sisi and allow this to be the leading art.”So far, the syndicate claims to be winning the fight.“We have in fact stopped them because they can’t get onstage in Egypt,” said Mr. Mortada, the organization’s spokesman, adding that it went so far as to ask YouTube to remove videos of the banned singers. It has not received a response from YouTube, he said.But who will win in the long run remains to be seen.The syndicate’s very structure smacks of a bygone era. To be admitted and allowed to sing and perform onstage, an artist must pass a test that includes a classical singing audition. The test is anathema to a genre that relies on autotune and prioritizes rhythm and flow over melody.While the syndicate’s efforts may be keeping mahraganat out of clubs and concert halls, the music has never stopped.Mr. Shakosh’s popularity continues to rise. He has more than six million followers on Facebook and over four million on Instagram and TikTok, and his music videos have exceeded two billion views on YouTube.He is one of the Arab world’s leading performers. Since he was barred, he has performed in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iraq, and “The Neighbors’ Daughter” has become one of the biggest Arabic hits to date.“It’s not the same old love songs,” said Yasmine el-Assal, a 41-year-old bank executive, after attending one of Mr. Shakosh’s concerts before the ban. “His stage presence, the music, the vibe, it’s fresh and it’s all about having fun.”Mr. Shakosh would not agree to be interviewed, preferring to keep a low profile, his manager said, rather than to appear to publicly challenge the authorities. The ban has been harder on other artists, many of whom do not have the wherewithal or the international profile to tour abroad.They have mostly kept quiet, refusing to make statements that they fear could ruffle more feathers.Despite the squeeze, however, many are confident that their music falls beyond the grip of any single authority or government.Kareem Gaber, a 23-year-old experimental music producer known by the stage name El Waili, is still burning tracks, sitting in his bedroom with a twin mattress on the floor, bare walls and his instrument, a personal computer with $100 MIDI keyboard.“Mahraganat taught us that you can do something new,” he said, “and it will be heard.” More

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      Dallas Frazier, Who Wrote Hits for Country Stars, Dies at 82

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      His songs included the novelty number “Alley Oop,” the Oak Ridge Boys’ hit “Elvira” and “Beneath Still Waters” for Emmylou Harris.Dallas Frazier, a songwriter of great emotional range who wrote No. 1 country hits for Charley Pride, Tanya Tucker and the Oak Ridge Boys, died on Friday at a rehabilitation facility in Gallatin, Tenn., near Nashville. He was 82.His death was confirmed by his daughter Melody Morris, who said he had suffered two strokes since August.Although his most enduring success came in country music, Mr. Frazier also wrote pop and R&B hits for artists like the country-soul singer Charlie Rich and the Louisiana bluesman Slim Harpo. Both released versions of Mr. Frazier’s “Mohair Sam,” a swamp-pop homage to a larger-than-life hipster that, in Mr. Rich’s 1965 Top 40 pop version, became one of Elvis Presley’s favorite songs.Mr. Frazier’s big break, though, came five years earlier with “Alley Oop,” a novelty song that reached No. 1 on the pop chart (No. 3 on the R&B chart) for the Hollywood Argyles in 1960. Inspired by the V.T. Hamlin comic strip of the same name, the song has been recorded several times since, including versions by the Beach Boys and the satirical British art-rockers the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.David Bowie also interpolated the line “Look at those cave men go” from “Alley Oop” in his 1973 single “Life on Mars?”“I had country roots, but I had this other thing going on with me,” Mr. Frazier said, alluding to his omnivorous musical appetite in a 2008 interview with the online magazine Perfect Sound Forever. “I wasn’t stuck in this one field of music. I had other things going on inside my soul.”Mr. Frazier’s bread and butter, nevertheless, was country music, where his songs plumbed an array of subjects and emotions, like humor, heartache and his hardscrabble childhood during the Great Depression.Mr. Frazier wrote “There Goes My Everything” for the Grand Ole Opry star Jack Greene, “Beneath Still Waters” for Emmylou Harris and “Elvira,” with its atavistic “oom poppa, oom poppa” chorus, for the Oak Ridge Boys. All three were career-defining records, and each topped the country chart. (“There Goes My Everything” also reached the pop Top 20 for the British crooner Engelbert Humperdinck in 1967.)Mr. Frazier, left, with Marty Stuart and Connie Smith, performing at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville in 2019. Terry Wyatt/Getty Images for Country Music Hall of Fame and MuseumConnie Smith, a 2012 inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame, has recorded more than five dozen songs written by Mr. Frazier.Dallas June Frazier was born on Oct. 27, 1939, in Spiro, Okla. His parents, William Floyd Frazier and Eva Marie Laughlin Frazier, were itinerant laborers who moved the family to Bakersfield, Calif., to work in the cotton fields there. Young Dallas was just 2½ at the time.The Model A was loaded down and California boundA change of luck was just four days awayBut the only change that I remember seeing for my daddyWas when his dark hair turned to silver graySo goes the second half of the last stanza of “California Cottonfields,” an autobiographical original, written by Mr. Frazier and Earl Montgomery, that became a signature song for Merle Haggard, whose childhood privation rivaled Mr. Frazier’s.“We were part of ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’” Mr. Frazier said in 2008, referring to John Steinbeck’s epic novel of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. “We were the Okies who went out to California with mattresses tied to the tops of their Model A Fords. My folks were poor.”The Fraziers lived in tents and boxcars in the California labor camps, suffering not only the indignity of poverty but also the prejudice of native westerners. Dallas began picking cotton at the age of 6.His father exposed him to country music, playing the latest hits by Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell on the jukebox of their local diner. Dallas Frazier commemorated the experience in “Hank and Lefty Raised My Country Soul,” a song that became a Top 40 country hit for his fellow Oklahoman Stoney Edwards in 1973.Mr. Frazier began writing songs and singing as an adolescent, earning an invitation at 12 to tour with the country star Ferlin Husky after winning a West Coast talent contest. At 14, he signed a contract as a recording artist with Mr. Husky’s label, Capitol Records. During the mid-to-late ’50s, he also appeared regularly on Cliffie Stone’s “Hometown Jamboree,” a popular country music television show broadcast from Los Angeles.In 1963, after his singing career began to founder, Mr. Frazier moved to Nashville with his wife, Sharon, to work for country song publishers. He continued to make the occasional record, steeped in New Orleans-style R&B, before eventually giving himself over to songwriting full time.In 1976, shortly after his induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, Mr. Frazier suddenly retired from music to become the pastor of a church outside Nashville. He returned to writing and performing three decades later, emerging as an elder statesman of the music he helped shape.Besides Ms. Morris, Mr. Frazier is survived by his wife of 63 years, Sharon Carpani Frazier; their two other daughters, Robin Proetta and Alison Thompson; four grandchildren; one great-grandson; and a sister, Judy Shults.Despite his success as a songwriter in country music, Mr. Frazier said that at times he felt hampered by Nashville’s unwritten rules, especially when it came to embracing more wide-ranging musical influences like rock and R&B.“Nobody ever said, ‘Dallas, you can’t do this,’” he told Perfect Sound Forever, “but it was common knowledge that you did certain things. I should have had more product in the rock ’n’ roll field, definitely. Had I been living in L.A. or New York, I would have, but less country, you see.” More

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      Rosa Lee Hawkins, Youngest Member of the Dixie Cups, Dies at 76

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      The singing group’s debut single, “Chapel of Love,” rose to the top of the charts in 1964, displacing the Beatles’ “Love Me Do.”Rosa Lee Hawkins, the youngest member of the musical trio the Dixie Cups, whose hit single “Chapel of Love” reached No. 1 on the Billboard 100 in 1964, died on Tuesday in Tampa, Fla. She was 76.The cause was internal bleeding resulting from complications during surgery at Tampa General Hospital, said her sister Barbara Ann Hawkins, who was also a member of the group, along with Joan Marie Johnson, who died in 2016 at 72.The Dixie Cups epitomized the harmonizing sound of the 1960s girl group. “Chapel of Love,” their debut single and most well-known song, quickly replaced the Beatles’ “Love Me Do” as No. 1 on the Billboard charts in 1964. It was later heard on the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Vietnam War film, “Full Metal Jacket.”Rosa Lee Hawkins was born on Oct. 23, 1945, in New Orleans to Hartzell Hawkins, a self-employed carpenter, and Lucille (Merette) Hawkins, a state worker who registered voters.While in high school in 1963, Barbara brought Rosa along to sing with her and Joan Marie in a high school talent show. The trio initially called themselves the Meltones, only to discover later that the name had already been taken. Since they were from the land of Dixie, and “cups are cute,” Barbara said in an interview, they came up with the name Dixie Cups (playing on the name of the popular paper cup).Joan later discovered that the Hawkins sisters were actually her cousins.While they did not win the talent show, a talent scout in the audience, impressed by their rich harmonies, invited the group, along with other Louisiana musicians, to perform for Red Bird Records. The Dixie Cups sang “Iko Iko,” a song that was traditionally sung during Mardi Gras and that was a favorite of the Hawkins sisters’ grandmother. They signed a recording contract soon after.The Dixie Cups received two Gold Records, for “Chapel of Love” and another hit, “People Say.” They were inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2007.The group recorded a total of four albums, their last in 2011. Ms. Johnson, ill with sickle-cell anemia and weary from touring, left the group and was replaced by a number of singers through the years. The Hawkins sisters remained, though, and kept singing just as they did in high school, with harmonies as vibrant as ever.“When the audience smiled and applauded, it made her happy because she knew she put a smile on their faces, if only for that time,” Barbara said of her younger sister.In addition to Barbara, Ms. Hawkins is survived by another sister, Shirley; a son, Eric Blanc; and two grandchildren. More

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      Review: A Pianist Makes Carnegie Hall His Home

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      Igor Levit returned to New York after streaming dozens of concerts from his apartment during the pandemic.When the pianist Igor Levit streamed dozens of performances from his apartment in Berlin during the first pandemic lockdown in 2020, he wore neat but casual clothes: closefitting sweaters, hoodies over T-shirts. He was inviting you to a concert, yes, but also into his home; he offered, in milieu and music, both elevation and comfort.Carnegie Hall, Levit made clear from the moment he walked onstage there Thursday evening, is like home for him, too.Appearing for his first solo recital in the gilded Stern Auditorium, he came on wearing a dark, slouchy collared shirt, left unbuttoned to reveal a crew neck underneath, and black jeans. The impression, as usual with him, was of an artist who dispenses with formalities and fripperies to focus — with relaxation but also intense seriousness — on the music.It was, also as usual for him, an elegantly organized program. A Beethoven sonata that ends in a suite of variations led into the premiere of a new set of variations by Fred Hersch. A transcription of the prelude to Wagner’s opera “Tristan und Isolde” was followed without pause by the B minor Sonata of Liszt, Wagner’s champion and eventual father-in-law — which ends, as “Tristan” does, in the key of B.Building to a mighty climax in a grand account of Liszt’s sprawling sonata, Levit projected a kind of burning patience through the evening. His playing is changeable, but never comes across as improvisatory; there is always a sense of deliberation, sometimes in tempos but always in approach, a palpable sense that everything has been thought out. Yet the results feel confident and fiery, not merely or coolly analytical.From its gently rocking opening — here a mistiness out of which emerged quiet clarity — Beethoven’s Sonata No. 30 in E (Op. 109) received a dreamier, and eventually more explosive, rendition than on the recording Levit released in 2013.He has a gift for gentleness, shaping soft, tender melodies that ache without slackening. In the third movement, he built the final variation to furious, ecstatic runs. But the greatest impact came when those runs dropped out, leaving the remnants of a barely audible trill as the path back to the theme.Hersch is best known as a jazz pianist, but he also writes poised concert works. While Levit has played some of his short pieces, this new Variations on a Folk Song is substantial, a bit more than 20 minutes long.The theme here is the plaintive “Shenandoah,” and Hersch gives sober, subtle, respectful treatment to a song that, as he writes in a program note, “I learned as a child and has so much emotional resonance for me.” One of the 20 variations is slightly skittish; another is slightly robust; the most memorable sprinkles tiny quivers in the pauses of a mild piano line. But the mood is consistent, and kindly.Levit is one of classical music’s most politically outspoken figures, which is one reason that the untroubled sincerity of Hersch’s interpretation of “Shenandoah” is so striking. The song is thought to have its roots among the fur trappers of the early American Midwest and their relations with the Indigenous population; it is a melody that touches the core of our country’s history, in all its complexity. But these unvaried variations are a musical vision of nearly unbroken serenity and benevolence — notably, curiously nostalgic.The “Tristan” prelude was here, in Zoltan Kocsis’s arrangement, far more progressive, its opening almost surreally elongated by Levit so that his eventual landing on flooding chords offered some of the shock this work held for its first listeners. Kocsis’s arrangement ends in shadows, out of which Levit’s Liszt emerged; a rough contemporary to “Tristan,” the sonata was here a stand-in for the opera.It had the time-bending effect “Tristan” often does, its contrasting sections seeming to float alongside one another in a vast expanse. The sense of scale was memorable, as was Levit’s touch: densely liquid low rumbles; charcoal-black stark chords; extremely soft passages that sounded candied, like snow glittering in moonlight.The coherence of his conception of the evening extended to the encore: the actual ending of “Tristan,” the “Liebestod,” in Liszt’s transcription. Its climax — which Liszt achieves by working the extreme ends of the piano simultaneously, to delicately epic effect — spoke for the recital as a whole, judiciously balanced yet thrilling.Igor LevitPerformed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More