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    Elvis Costello & the Imposters Are Still Blasting Away

    With his longtime bandmates, the English songwriter noisily demolishes illusions on “The Boy Named If.”During the pandemic, plenty of musicians have unveiled their quieter, scaled-down, more reflective sides. Elvis Costello, typically, had other ideas.His 2020 album, “Hey Clockface,” was a high-contrast miscellany: urbanely retro acoustic pop, bruising rockers, otherworldly electronics. For “Spanish Model” in 2021, he gathered Spanish-speaking rockers to translate lyrics and replace his own vocals on the tracks from “This Year’s Model,” his fierce, punky 1978 album with the Attractions. Apparently revisiting the Attractions at their most aggressive sparked something. On “The Boy Named If,” Costello is rejoined by his perennial band the Imposters — the original Attractions with a replacement bassist — for songs that kick hard and deep. It’s anything but quiet.“The Boy Named If” has an elaborate superstructure. Its deluxe version adds an 88-page book written and illustrated by Costello: “The Boy Named If and Other Children’s Tales.”It’s not made for children, though. Each song gets a prose vignette — sometimes fleshing out the lyrics, sometimes sketching alternate scenarios — alongside bright, blocky, big-eyed drawings. The vignettes, like the songs, are full of Costello’s jumpy wordplay, and they involve lust, infidelity, violence, predation, betrayal, deception, self-deception and other grown-up pastimes.The situations and wordplay are knotty; often, they crash youthful illusions into adult disillusion. The album’s stomping title track posits a lucky, seductive, elusive imaginary friend, “the boy named If,” who always escapes consequences. In “What if I Can’t Give You Anything But Love?,” over a swaggering beat, a cheating husband struggles to figure out where he actually stands with his paramour: “Don’t fix me with that deadly gaze/It’s a little close to pity,” he chokes out. And in “My Most Beautiful Mistake,” a duet with Nicole Atkins, a screenwriter in a diner tells the waitress about envisioning her in movie scenes; she’s skeptical. “I’ve seen your kind before,” she observes, “in courtroom sketches.”While the lyrics are convoluted, the music simply charges ahead. Like so many pandemic albums, “The Boy Named If” was pieced together remotely. Costello, on guitar, worked together with the drummer Pete Thomas; then he and the co-producer Sebastian Krys layered on parts by Davey Faragher on bass and Steve Nieve on keyboards.Yet the Imposters sound gleefully, brutally unified, every bit as bristling as the Attractions on “This Year’s Model” or the Imposters on “When I Was Cruel” in 2002. “Farewell, OK” opens the album with Costello shouting through a distorted rockabilly boogie. “Death of Magic Thinking” meshes a pummeling march with a Bo Diddley beat and multiple jabbing, scrabbling guitars, steamrollering through a skewed chord progression and a tale of adolescent bewilderment.“The Difference” — based, Costello has revealed, on the bleak love story in Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2018 film “Cold War” — has Costello’s guitars and Nieve’s organ tossing bits of dissonance back and forth in the verses, then veers into a poppy major-key chorus that asks, “Do you by chance know wrong from right?”Over more than 30 studio albums, Costello has regularly tested himself against new genres and new collaborators: classical, country, R&B, hip-hop, jazz. But some of his strongest albums, like this one, have been his reunions with the Attractions/Imposters. Inevitably, there are echoes of Costello’s past on the new album.“Magnificent Hurt” harks back to the pounding garage-rock and nagging organ of old Costello songs like “Pump It Up.” But the guitar solos are untamed, and there’s a smart Costello twist in the chorus, using just a pause: “It’s the way you make me feel magnificent/Hurt.” With Costello and the Imposters, familiarity breeds audacity, not routine. Some youthful pleasures weren’t illusions at all.Elvis Costello & the Imposters“The Boy Named If”(Capitol) More

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    He Was an Important Conductor. Also a Great One.

    Hans Rosbaud was renowned as a modern-music specialist. But newly released archival recordings demonstrate his gifts were far broader.There is precisely one famous story about Hans Rosbaud — though, like its subject, it is not quite as famous as it ought to be.This Austrian conductor was asleep at his home in March 1954 when the telephone rang. On the line was a producer at Hamburg Radio, a little desperate. Could Rosbaud come to cover for the injured Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, and oversee the premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron,” a gargantuan opera unperformed since being left unfinished in 1932?Rosbaud had never seen the score. His mind likely drifted to the 1930s: Back then Schoenberg had told Rosbaud forebodingly that he had “not imposed at all any reserve concerning difficulties of execution” in writing the opera. He clearly assumed no one would dare perform it.When was the premiere scheduled, Rosbaud asked the radio producer, fearfully? In exactly one week.This was a difficult prospect, but not the impossible one it would have been for almost anyone else. “One is almost forced to apply the word genius to Hans Rosbaud’s masterful control of the work,” The New York Times later reported of the performance. Genius enough, indeed, that the broadcast was released on record in 1957, the year Rosbaud led the staged premiere of “Moses und Aron” in Zurich — surpassing “even himself,” as a critic wrote.The recording still holds up, a fire coruscating through its lucidity. Had Schoenberg lived to hear it, he might have repeated the thanks he had offered Rosbaud in 1931 for a performance of his “Variations for Orchestra,” when he wrote in awe at having heard his work performed “with clarity, with love, with design.”Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron”NDR Symphony Orchestra, 1954 (Sony)No musician of Rosbaud’s generation did more to canonize its avant-garde. Igor Stravinsky offered a letter of recommendation for “this high-minded musician, this aristocrat among conductors.” Paul Hindemith was a classmate and lifelong friend. Anton Webern was a house guest.“When a composer speaks of Rosbaud the conductor,” Pierre Boulez wrote of the man to whom his masterpiece, “Le Marteau Sans Maître,” is dedicated, “he is speaking in the first place of a friend.”Joan Evans, a musicologist and Rosbaud biographer, has listed 173 premieres that he gave from 1923 until his death in 1962, the beneficiaries running from Fritz Adam to Bernd Alois Zimmermann by way of Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Gyorgy Ligeti and Luigi Nono. The Musical Times of London eulogized him simply as “the greatest conductor of contemporary music.”Webern’s “Sechs Stücke” (Op.6, No. 4)SWF Orchestra Baden-Baden, 1957 (Universal Music France)But this “dream figure” who would “always give the future the benefit of the doubt,” as Boulez wrote, chafed at his formidable reputation.“I am not a modern music specialist,” Rosbaud told a German newspaper in 1956. “In Aix-en-Provence I am characterized as a Mozart expert; in Munich, I am regarded as a specialist of Bruckner. It is dangerous to classify musicians in this manner.”Particularly so, for Rosbaud’s own fate. His public stature has never approached the private respect in which musicians held him, in part because of his advocacy for music that has never really caught on. Quiet and scholarly, this “grim, Lincolnesque” man, as a writer once described him, seemed to be the antithesis of a celebrity maestro. His major positions were not with big-name symphonies, but less-prominent radio ensembles. He made few commercial records, superb though those few were. He had no interest in fame.Few conductors, then, have more to gain from an opening of the vaults. More than 700 of Rosbaud’s performances have been languishing in archives, most of them at SWR, the successor to Southwest German Radio in Baden-Baden, his artistic home after 1948.Rosbaud leading his radio orchestra in Baden-Baden, his artistic home after 1948.SWRSince 2017, SWR has released 59 CDs from those tapes, in a project that covers Rosbaud’s work in composers from Mozart to Sibelius. Much remains still to materialize, not least what should be essential boxes of 20th-century music. But despite variable, usually mono sound, what has already emerged is plenty to prove he was far more than his legend. Without question one of the most important conductors of his century, Rosbaud was also one of the finest.He saw his task as primarily to help composers state their own case. But unlike others who have aimed for a similar interpretive modesty, Rosbaud’s approach was never clinical or didactic. It always had at its core that love that moved Schoenberg. His Bruckner had humanity as well as structure; he took Haydn seriously, early and late alike; his Schoenberg, Berg and Webern were not just intelligible, but blazed with intensity.Claudia Cassidy put her pen on Rosbaud’s typical style in 1962. “Rosbaud gave us a blueprint,” this ordinarily truculent Chicago Tribune critic wrote after hearing him lead Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” “Not the kind that lies inert on the drafting table, but the kind that sets skyscrapers soaring, flings bridges into space and sends imagination spinning into orbit.”Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7SWF Orchestra Baden-Baden, 1957 (SWR)Rosbaud had music in his blood. He was born in Graz, Austria, on July 22, 1895, to Anna Rosbaud, a piano teacher who had taken lessons from Clara Schumann. A single mother who died in 1913, Anna never told her four children who their father was; Arnold Kramish, the biographer of Hans’s brother, Paul, traced their paternity to Franz Heinnisser, at one point the choirmaster of the Graz cathedral.Growing up in a musical family, if a destitute one, Hans played at least four instruments. He attended the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, and his first appointment as a conductor came in 1921. He later recalled getting used to “the whistling, ranting and raging” with which audiences would greet his Hindemith, Stravinsky and Schoenberg with the Mainz Symphony in Germany.Rosbaud’s main task in Mainz was to run its music school, and he continued this educational approach to his career after 1929, as conductor of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. Rosbaud gave talks on the orchestral instruments, writing pieces like a fughetta for three bassoons as illustrations, and he lectured on Wagner before giving act-by-act broadcasts of the “Ring.” Bartok, Stravinsky and other composers came to perform; Schoenberg spoke on his “Variations,” with Rosbaud giving examples, and also sent in thoughts on “Brahms the Progressive.”Stravinsky, left, and Rosbaud, who was one of that composer’s most devoted interpreters in the Germany of his era.SWREven before Hitler took power in 1933, Rosbaud’s tastes were drawing the attention of what he told Stravinsky was a “chauvinistic movement.” Forced to enlist a family friend in Graz as a fake father to demonstrate his Aryan ancestry, Rosbaud found his once-lauded support for a certain strand of new music now brought him trouble, not least when a disgruntled subordinate reported him to the Gestapo in 1936 for seeing music “in a Jewish sense.” He reassured banished composers that he remained on their side, and tried, without success, to find a job in the United States. He left Frankfurt in 1937 for Münster.Rosbaud despised Nazism, and he likely knew that Paul, his brother, was spying on the German nuclear program for Britain. Still, Hans put his abilities to work for the Nazis, reconciling himself to that service with small acts of resistance. To Berlin, he seemed sound enough to be appointed general music director of occupied Strasbourg, a city that the Nazis sought to turn into a colony for their idea of German art, in 1941. But Rosbaud endeared himself to the Alsatians, speaking French, protecting the musicians and acting with sufficient decency that even Charles Munch, the fiercely antifascist Strasbourgian conductor, thought him beyond reproach.Despite Rosbaud’s work in occupied territory, the American military rushed to clear him in denazification proceedings. Shorn of any unfortunate ideological associations in either his politics or his aesthetics, he was general music director in Munich before 1945 was over: a brief, frantic tenure that saw him give Beethoven and Bruckner cycles in bombed-out halls, and reconnect German musical life to its international context, with Schoenberg, Shostakovich and Stravinsky given pride of place.That work would go on, but not primarily in Munich. An offer in 1948 from Baden-Baden could not be refused, coming as it did with the opportunity to imagine an ensemble from scratch and to fulfill a special mandate for new music, which after 1950 included the Donaueschingen Festival, a hotbed of the avant-garde. An energetic Beethoven Violin Concerto with Ginette Neveu from 1949, as well as a lacerating Hartmann Second and a courageous Messiaen “Turangalîla” shortly after, show that Rosbaud quickly brought the orchestra to a high standard.Haydn’s Symphony No. 104SWF Orchestra Baden-Baden, 1952 (SWR)But he never aspired to the ensemble virtuosity of the more commercially-driven orchestras of the day. His vivacious 1957 account of Haydn’s “London” Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic might be crisper than his 1952 and 1962 efforts in Baden-Baden, but what matters about them all is how their warmth and drive enliven Haydn’s structures, without drawing attention to themselves.The joys of what SWR has unearthed are subtle, not sensational. Those who need grand statements in their Beethoven might be disappointed, whatever the grinding insistence of his Fifth Symphony, the liquid flow of his Sixth, the effervescence of his Eighth. Those who want bombast in their Tchaikovsky will doubt his unmissable Fifth, so full of dark psychological shadows that it is almost redolent of Mahler. And in Mahler, Rosbaud’s early advocacy for whom was characteristic of a conductor so often half a beat ahead of his time, he comes close to ideal.“Mr. Rosbaud does not cut it to pieces or disguise it by ‘interpretation,’” Cassidy wrote of a Mahler Ninth in Chicago in December 1962, in words that also apply to Rosbaud’s Baden-Baden recording from 1954. “He gives it clarity, precision and understanding, which is to shed light on it without blinding its mysteries.”Mahler’s Symphony No. 9SWF Orchestra Baden-Baden, 1954 (SWR)The Chicago Symphony, where Rosbaud had long spells as a guest conductor between 1959 and 1962, considered him to succeed Fritz Reiner as music director. This offered American recognition for the first time, and a chance to develop a craft honed not just in Baden-Baden, but also in Zurich, where he held positions with the Tonhalle Orchestra, and in Aix-en-Provence. There he directed the annual summer festival from 1948, leading operatic Mozart that Virgil Thomson once called “perfection” in its “animation and orchestral delicacy,” and venturing into Gluck and Rameau.But Chicago was not to be. Rosbaud had been weakening since kidney surgery several years before, and after that Mahler Ninth and a brief stop in Baden-Baden, where he gave a serene farewell with Brahms’s Second, he died on Dec. 29, 1962, near Lugano, Switzerland. He was 67. More

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    Into the Belly of the Whale With Sjón

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Some years back, an earthquake broke the chimney off the novelist Sjón’s writing hut. He was in the bathtub when it hit — he clung to the tub’s edges as it bucked and jerked, sloshing water onto the floor. This was unpleasant but not terribly strange. Iceland is one of the most geologically volatile patches of land on Earth — it sits (like Hawaii) on top of a geothermal hot spot but also (unlike Hawaii) on top of a seam where two tectonic plates are pulling apart. The threshold between inside and outside is very thin. You never know when some mysterious force — earthquake, geyser, volcano — will come bursting out of the middle of the planet into your everyday life.What made this earthquake unusual, in Sjón’s experience, were the whales. In the weeks following the tremors, whales started beaching themselves all over Iceland’s South Coast. The shock waves, he speculates, might have thrown off the animals’ navigation systems. One day, on a writing break, Sjón wandered down to the ocean and discovered that a whale had beached itself just a few minutes from his front door.“What kind of whale?” I asked.“I don’t know the species,” he said. “A medium-sized whale?”“How big is medium? Like the size of a car?”“No no no,” Sjón said.“The size of a dolphin?”“Much bigger!” he said. “The size of a bus.”Well, the bus-size whale died on the beach. The smell, Sjón says, was incredible. Day after day, week after week, he would take writing breaks to stand by the ocean and watch the flocks of seabirds working on the carcass. The biggest birds ate first. Then the smaller birds moved in. Finally, Sjón went in, too. He entered that rotten world — bone, blubber, organs, gristle — and saw, sticking up from the mess, like an elegant carving, a whole rib, tapered and curving, roughly the length of his arm. He grabbed the bone with both hands. It was rank and slippery. He yanked and twisted until, with much difficulty, he was able to wrestle it free.Elsewhere in the carcass, Sjón noticed a shoulder blade — a gorgeous flat half-disc that looked like the head of an ancient ax. With a little more work, he managed to extract that too. By the time Sjón made it back to his writing hut, he was covered in death-slime. He had to strip off his clothes before he went inside. He left the whale bones out in the garden. It took the harshness of Iceland three full years to scrub them clean.Sjón was telling me this story in the little cottage where he writes his books: an old fisherman’s house plated with black corrugated steel. (Icelandic houses tend to wear armor to survive the winters.) In person, Sjón is a perfect avatar of the International Man of Letters: thick black glasses, tweed hat, faint graying goatee. His manner is gentle, thoughtful and unfailingly polite. He speaks fluent English with a strong Icelandic accent. That afternoon, he appeared to be wearing, over his button-up shirt, two sweaters — a cardigan over another cardigan. Trying to imagine this man wrestling bones out of a whale carcass was absurd.But Sjón had proof. He pointed to the wall behind us. “This is the rib,” he said.It hung there, like the back end of a set of parentheses.He pointed to the opposite wall. “And this is the shoulder.”There it was, hovering like a spaceship over the bookshelf.“So if you’re here” — now Sjón gestured to the table itself — “then you’re in the belly of the whale. So I sit here and write.”He smiled, in a way that his books sometimes seem to smile — a way that suggests something funny might have happened, but also possibly not, and anyway let’s move on to whatever story is coming next.The belly of the whale, in traditional storytelling, is a place of divine transformation, a cave filled with dark magic. This makes it the perfect place for Sjón to do his writing. His wide-ranging work — nine novels, two films, numerous poetry collections, dozens of song lyrics for his close friend Björk — carries a whiff of the unreal. The novels often feature bizarre events, usually involving sudden transformations: One fox becomes four foxes, a stamp collector turns into a werewolf, a young man morphs into a black butterfly. Like Iceland itself, Sjón’s books are simultaneously tiny and huge, weird and normal, ancient and modern. Reading them feels like listening to that story of the beached whale: a wild invention that is actually a straight-faced confession. His books dance — with light, quick steps, never breaking eye contact — all over the line between the mythic and the mundane.‘His fiction never seems to break into a sweat, yet it takes you a long, long way.’Sjón’s fiction has long been celebrated in Europe. The books started appearing in English in 2011, and soon they were drawing high-profile raves. “Every now and then a writer changes the whole map of literature inside my head,” A.S. Byatt wrote in The New York Review of Books. Although Sjón has not quite become an international literary Nordic megabrand, à la Karl Ove Knausgaard or Stieg Larsson, he has amassed a deep and passionate following, especially among other novelists.“I am amazed he’s not better known than he is,” Hari Kunzru told me. “I thought he was going to turn into something like the Bolaño cult.” Kunzru said that he admires both Sjón’s erudition — his novels cover such diverse subjects as whaling, alchemy and the history of cinema — and the way he folds that deep knowledge into swift, effortless stories.David Mitchell, another fan, told me via email that he admires Sjón for his “ticklish, full-moon sense of humor” and the poetic simplicity of his style: “spaciousness and absence” that make him think of Taoism. What Sjón leaves out of his work, Mitchell wrote, is as powerful as what he puts in. “His fiction never seems to break into a sweat, yet it takes you a long, long way.”The type of wild transformation Sjón loves to write about — all these creatures unpredictably changing states — also applies to his own work. From book to book, he radically varies his style, setting and subject matter. He can write a slim fable about a 19th-century fox hunt (“The Blue Fox”) or a rolling monologue by a 17th-century alchemist (“From the Mouth of the Whale”) or a multigenre epic about the Holocaust, nuclear explosions and DNA (“CoDex 1962”). Sjón’s new novel, “Red Milk,” is a clinically realistic portrait of a young neo-Nazi. And yet, despite its range, the writing is always recognizably Sjón.When talking about his work, Sjón rejects the word “fantastic.” Fantastic, he says, implies unreality. Even the most improbable events in his books, he argues, are not unreal — they grow from the soil of Icelandic history, and they are real for his characters, even if they happen only in their minds, as misperceptions or hallucinations. Instead, Sjón prefers the word “marvelous.” His work, and his country, are full of marvels: strange things that emerge and flow, all the time, over the bedrock of reality. The marvelous is all around us, he insists. We just need the vision to see it.Sjón’s full name is Sigurjón Birgir Sigurdsson — a cascade of soft G’s and rolling R’s that sounds, when he says it, like a secret liquid song, sung deep in his throat, to a shy baby horse. He was born in 1962, into a Reykjavík that was, in many ways, still a village: small, dull, remote, conservative, homogeneous. Iceland felt like the edge of the world, and Sjón grew up on the edge of that edge. He was the only child of a single mother, and they moved, when he was 10, into a freshly poured neighborhood on the outskirts of the city called Breidholt. (By the miniature standards of Reykjavík, outskirts means about a 10-minute drive from downtown.) Breidholt was planned housing: a big complex of Brutalist concrete apartment blocks standing alone in a muddy wasteland. Every time it rained, the parking lot turned into a brown lake. And yet that wasteland was surrounded by ancient Icelandic beauty: moors, trees, birds, a river full of leaping salmon. Sjón often thinks about this juxtaposition: those two vastly different worlds, which he toggled between at will. The fluidity of the landscape, he says, helped create a similar fluidity in his imagination.As a boy, Sjón was precocious, hungry for world culture. He remembers watching “Mary Poppins” at age 4 and being shocked by an uncanny moment at the end when her umbrella handle, shaped like a parrot, suddenly opens its beak and speaks. (“I still haven’t recovered,” he says.) As a teenager, Sjón fell in love with David Bowie, and for years he studied Bowie’s interviews like syllabuses, tracking down all the artists he mentioned, educating himself about international books and music. Finally, he discovered Surrealism. It felt exactly right: discordant realities stacked on top of each other without explanation or transition or apology. Sjón became obsessed — a Surrealist evangelist. This is when he adopted the pen name Sjón. It was a perfect bit of literary branding: his given name, Sigurjón, with the middle extracted. In Icelandic, sjón means “vision.”Iceland, in the 1970s, was a strange place to be a teenager, especially one with artistic ambitions. Reykjavík, the country’s only real city, had two coffee shops and two hotels. Sjón told me that the most exciting event, for young people, was a ritual known as “Hallaerisplanid” — a word that translates, roughly, as “Hardship Square” or, more colorfully, “the Cringe Zone.” Every weekend, huge masses of teenagers would mob the city’s shabby little central plaza, then walk around for hours in loud, rowdy packs, looping over and over through the narrow downtown streets. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, on a visit to Reykjavík, watched these thousands of kids from their hotel window with fascination. It would have been a perfectly existentialist spectacle — restless hordes, in the face of a vast nothingness, creating meaning by fiat, through an absurd, defiant, repetitive, arbitrary ritual.For Sjón, the bleakness of Reykjavík was both impossible and ideal. He didn’t have much help, but he was free to become whatever he wanted. So he did. At 16, he self-published his first book of poetry, then sold it to captive audiences on the bus. From his Brutalist apartment building, he wrote grandiose letters to Surrealists all over the world, declaring a new Icelandic front of the movement. His mailbox filled with responses from Japan, Portugal, Brazil, France. Eventually, Sjón got himself invited to visit old Surrealists in Europe. On a stay with André Breton’s widow, in France, he swam in a river and had a visionary experience with a dragonfly: It sat on his shoulder, vibrating its wings, then took off — and in that moment he felt he had been baptized into a new existence.Back in Reykjavík, Sjón helped found a Surrealist group called Medúsa, into which he recruited other ambitious teenagers. One of these recruits was a girl from his neighborhood — a singer who would go on to become, by the end of the 20th century, probably the most famous Icelander in the world. Björk was a musical prodigy; she got her first record deal at age 11, after a song she performed for a school recital was broadcast on Iceland’s only radio station. She met Sjón when she was 17, when he came into the French hot-chocolate shop where she worked downtown. Björk told me in an email that she was, at the time, a “super introvert.” She and Sjón formed a loud, stunty two-person band called Rocka Rocka Drum — “a liberating alter ego thing” for each of them, she remembers.The members of Medúsa made noise all over Reykjavík. They argued about literature and put on art shows in a garage and flung themselves into bohemian high jinks. One time, all the Surrealists got drunk on absinthe and proceeded to walk around Reykjavík entirely on the roofs of parked cars — a night that ended at a popular club, where Sjón bit a bouncer on the thigh, then recited André Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism” while lying face down in a police car. The Surrealists considered it a great victory when they were denounced, in newspapers, by Iceland’s conservative literary establishment. In one of the great thrills of his life, Sjón once heard himself attacked personally, on the radio, while he was riding the bus. Björk found all of this exhilarating. “It was,” she told me, “like being absorbed into a gorgeous D.I.Y. organic university: extreme fertility!”This wild artistic ferment yielded not only Sjón’s literary career but also the Sugarcubes — the alternative-rock group, fronted by Björk, that became Iceland’s first international breakout success. Although Sjón was not an official member, he sometimes joined the group on tour, dancing wildly onstage under the name Johnny Triumph. (This was another play on his name: Sigurjón can be translated as “Victory John.”) In the 1990s, when Björk began her solo career, she turned to Sjón for help writing lyrics. And so his words, set to her music, began to circle the world. “I’m a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl,” Björk sings at the beginning of her 1997 song “Bachelorette” — an image that would work equally well in one of Sjón’s novels. In 2001, Björk and Sjón were nominated for an Oscar for a song they wrote for the Lars von Trier film “Dancer in the Dark.” (Björk showed up to the ceremony wearing her famous swan dress.) In 2004, Björk performed their song “Oceania” at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Athens.Sjón (left) performing as Johnny Triumph with the Sugarcubes in November 1987.Sigurdur Mar Halldórsson/Reykjavík Museum of PhotographySjón’s lyrics, Björk told me, have a poetic quality that is very different from her own. Certain lines, she said, feel incredible in her mouth, even after decades of performing them. Many of his sentences, as she put it, “feel like a whole universe every time I say them.”Today Sjón lives in central Reykjavík, just a couple of minutes away from Björk, in a leafy neighborhood famous for its cats. (Sjón has a cat named Reverend Markus — please trust me that I do not have nearly the space or time to tell you its full story here.) At 59, he lives a quiet life with his wife, an opera singer named Ásgerdur. They have two grown children, a photographer and a producer of Icelandic rap.One afternoon, I met Sjón near his house. A big orange cat happened to be sprawling in the middle of the sidewalk. Sjón stopped to pet it, and as he did so, he poured out a soft stream of affectionate Icelandic — vowels stretching and plunging and leaping, R’s rolling like creekwater over stones. The cat flopped onto its back, meowing. I listened, fascinated, understanding nothing.The Icelandic language, in which Sjón writes, is notoriously difficult. It is spoken by just over 350,000 people — something like the population of Anaheim, Calif. (French, by comparison, is spoken fluently by around 300 million, English by 1.35 billion.) The language has long been a point of pride for Icelanders — a kind of sacred national heritage site that lives in their mouths. In many ways, the language is the culture. Modern Icelandic is often spoken of as a linguistic time capsule — a cryogenically frozen version of the language the first settlers of Iceland spoke 1,200 years ago, when they landed on this island populated by only birds and arctic foxes. Without too much trouble, Icelanders can still read the great sagas written 800 years ago. Much energy and political capital has gone into freezing the language in place, trying to keep it pure: rejecting loan words, mandating public signage, upholding traditional naming conventions. I tried, before my trip, to teach myself Icelandic using an app on my phone. But I gave up almost immediately.Sjón’s longtime English translator, Victoria Cribb, told me that Icelandic is difficult for many reasons. Its words combine easily, playfully, to become new words; its nouns shift form depending on their position in a sentence. “It means you can get every single word slightly wrong,” Cribb told me. “The chances for social embarrassment are enormous.”Sjón, however, tends to cheerfully play all of this down. Throughout our two days together, he insisted, again and again, that his native language was not so special. Like much about Iceland, he says, the uniqueness of Icelandic has been fetishized, exaggerated.We sat outside at a small cafe. Sjón pointed across the street to a bus stop, one side of which was covered by an ad for Honey Nut Cheerios. I recognized the imagery — cartoon bee, wooden dipper drenched in honey — but the text was completely alien. Letters, hatched with odd lines, clustered together into incomprehensible shapes.Sjón read the ad copy aloud: “Hafdu pad gott alla vikuna!” “Hafdu,” he said. “ ‘Have.’ Pad — OK, ‘that,’ you know.” He went on like this, word by word, with the patience of a kindergarten teacher, until he had decoded the whole message for me. “Have that good all week.” The Honey Nut Cheerios ad, Sjón said, may as well have been written in English. “You should say to your friends in the States, ‘Go to Iceland — you speak the language anyway,’” he said.Over the course of our time together, Sjón would do this many times. He translated the Icelandic on road signs and billboards and menus and credit-card machines — always pointing out that much of what struck me as strange was, in fact, secretly familiar.This, I came to understand, is typical Sjón. He insists, always, on interconnections, cross-pollinations, porous borders between overlapping worlds. He is an enthusiastic mixer. The impulse, for him, goes far beyond language. It applies to every aspect of human culture: art, food, dance, film, music, literary genres.And even beyond all that, it is a moral position, a deliberate challenge to one of the great historical pillars of Icelandic identity: the notion that Iceland is a pure nation — culturally, ecologically, linguistically, genetically.Or, as Sjón refers to it, “this purity nonsense.”“It’s quite ingrained in Icelandic culture,” he told me. As a child, Sjon says, he was taught to revere Iceland’s unique and glorious history, its people’s inherent goodness, the ancient sanctity of its language and the special native genius of the sagas — the 13th-century texts that helped preserve Scandinavian lore (including Norse mythology) that otherwise would have been lost forever.Most of this, Sjón says, was a historical fantasy — at best an exaggeration. “So much of what is good in this society is things that were brought here from abroad,” he told me. Iceland, from its inception, was multicultural. It was founded, 1,200 years ago, by a wave of immigrant Scandinavian farmers, along with people from Ireland and the British islands. As skilled sea people, early Icelanders worked hard to maintain contact with the rest of the world. Culture, inevitably, flowed both ways.“Right from the beginning, when the Icelanders start telling stories and writing stories, they are always about this contact with the continent and with world history,” Sjón says. “They’re always connecting themselves with the Norwegian kings, with events taking place in Ireland, with someone going all the way down to Istanbul, or Constantinople, as it was called then — or Mikligardur, as it was called in Icelandic. They had names for all these places, because they had visited them. Moorish Spain. The Mediterranean. They’re everywhere. So when they tell stories, their stories always leave this place and go out into the big world. And they do not only go out into the big physical world, they connect with the big cosmological world of the myths.”The idea of Icelandic purity, Sjón says, is a relatively modern invention: It dates back only about 200 years, to a group of German intellectuals who, obsessed with racial origins, fixated on a category of whiteness that stretched up to Scandinavia. Iceland, in its supposed isolation, was cast as a direct link to that deep ancestral history. (Later, for obvious reasons, the Nazis would be crazy about Iceland.) Although this was largely a pseudoscientific fantasy, it was flattering to Icelanders. Purity, after all, is an excellent brand: It can sell everything from bottled water to dog food to fish oil to nation-states. The purity myth helped to infuse this poor, beleaguered, neglected island — a tiny nation harassed by volcanoes and famines, dominated by its powerful Scandinavian neighbors — with a sense of national pride. In the late 19th century, Icelandic nationalists wielded the purity myth as a weapon against Denmark in the fight for independence. (Iceland officially became a republic, finally, in 1944.)The Iceland Sjón grew up in, he says, was stiflingly bigoted. In the middle of the 20th century, when the United States established a permanent military base near Reykjavík, Iceland allowed it only on the condition that no Black troops would be stationed there. (This ban was not lifted until the 1960s.) During his childhood, Sjón remembers, there were exactly two Black children in the city, and everyone knew who they were. A famous gay musician — the first Icelandic celebrity to come out of the closet — was pelted with snowballs and eventually driven from the country.Things are better now, Sjón says, but not entirely. Iceland’s immigration and citizenship laws remain extremely strict, and resistance to outsiders can be strong. Sjón gets passionate when he talks about this. His gentle demeanor swells with outrage. It angers him on many levels at once.‘I think at the core of the human being, there is an enjoyment of complexity. I think we enjoy things being complex and marvelous.’Kunzru told me that he can still feel, sometimes, the younger version of Sjón lurking — the anarchist surrealist bohemian rebel. “The Sjón we meet now is this urbane gentleman,” he said. “He’s got this tweedy Edwardian thing going on. But he’s still there underneath. There’s a punk.”Sjón’s books — sometimes explicitly, sometimes with playful indirection — are always fighting off the forces of constriction, narrowness, Icelandic exceptionalism. They tend to center outcasts and exiles, characters who don’t fit into dominant norms and are punished accordingly. “Moonstone” tells the story of a queer, dyslexic teenage boy in 1918 Reykjavík. “From the Mouth of the Whale” channels the wild mind of a blasphemous 16th-century scholar sent off to a freezing rock in the middle of the North Atlantic.“One of the things I appreciate about him is that, along with the playfulness, and the lightness of touch, there is a deep moral seriousness,” Cribb told me. “A great anger. It’s decently hidden, but it’s very much there: a moral anger.”When Sjón was a teenager, he learned a shameful family secret. His mother, he writes, “grew up knowing only that her father had been in the news when she was 7 years old because of something so bad that no one in her small fishing village would tell her what it was.” It turned out to be this: During World War II, Sjón’s grandfather lived in Germany, where he was trained as a Nazi spy; he came back to Iceland on a U-boat in 1944 and was arrested for treason. He served a year in prison. Sjón’s uncles, too, were card-carrying members of the Nazi Party.Although Sjón was not close to any of these relatives, he has grappled with that legacy throughout his career. The narrator of his novel “The Whispering Muse,” for instance, is in part a satire of his grandfather: a tedious man who opines, endlessly, about how the Nordic race’s fish-based diet has made it superior to the rest of the world. Sjón shows us that bigotry is, in addition to all its other faults, a crime against storytelling. The narrator is a gasbag, and no one has any interest in his speeches: “I was becoming used to the crew members’ tendency to behave as if everything I said was incomprehensible, to remain silent for just as long as I was speaking, then carry on from where they had left off, treating me like some guano-covered rock that one must steer a course around.”Unlike ancient myths or actual history, nationalist fantasies tend to be flat and static and dull. This is why fascist movements, Sjón says, always have a shelf life. Cultural richness will not be constrained.“I think at the core of the human being, there is an enjoyment of complexity,” he told me. “I think we enjoy things being complex and marvelous. Wherever you go in human culture, at whatever point in history, you can see that culture means complexity.”Sjón’s new novel, “Red Milk,” is his most direct engagement with Nazism. It started when he discovered that a neo-Nazi cell thrived in Reykjavík around the time of his birth. One member, in particular, caught his attention: a young organizer who died of cancer.This was, for Sjón, an irresistible storytelling challenge. “Red Milk” imagines this mysterious neo-Nazi as an ordinary boy named Gunnar Kampen. It follows him from his first memory (a family car trip that buzzes, like all human experiences, with color and life) to his radicalization (“Only white people let the light into themselves,” a woman tells him, holding his hand up to a lamp) to his lonely death on a train. The novel isn’t a satire or a screed. Its style is clinical, provocatively spare — it resists, almost completely, the hallmarks of Sjón’s previous work: the marvelous, the bizarre, the mystical.Too often, Sjón says, we think about fascism and Nazism as extraordinary. In fact, they are the most ordinary things in the world. “Red Milk” captures the pathetic human reality of a boy who, by attaching himself to a poisonous ideology, hopes to make his own small life feel important. (He calls his group the Sovereign Power Movement and names his newsletter, in good Icelandic style, after Thor’s hammer.) The boy’s cancer and his Nazism advance in tandem. Sjón makes us watch, pitilessly, as the richness of a human life gets reduced and reduced and reduced until it finally disappears. As he writes in an afterword: “We must start with what we have in common with such people. Not that I think a proper conversation can ever be had with someone whose ultimate goal is to get rid of you for good. But we can at least show them that we see them for what they are, that we know they come from childhoods fundamentally similar to our own … that a neo-Nazi is no more special than that.”One of the strangest things about Sjón’s fiction is its power of prediction. He seems to be able to summon things, magnetically, across the threshold between reality and imagination. The summer that the earthquake hit, when that whale washed up outside his door, Sjón was about to finish a novel that ends with its narrator in the belly of a whale. Not long after the publication of “Red Milk,” neo-Nazis demonstrated in downtown Reykjavík for the first time in decades. “Moonstone,” maybe my favorite novel, is set in Reykjavík in 1918, during the unlikely confluence of a global pandemic and a volcanic eruption — a situation that recurred, to Sjón’s disbelief, in 2021.In the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, a volcano called Fagradalsfjall unexpectedly erupted — the first eruption in that region in 800 years. It launched spectacular spurts of lava more than 1,000 feet high. People in Sjón’s neighborhood lined up, at night, to watch it like a fireworks show.“It was crazy,” Sjón says. “I thought, OK, now I’m living in the times I described in my novel. For that to happen to an ordinary novelist, not someone who’s working in science fiction — it’s amazing. The novel has completely changed in nature.”Before I left Iceland, I drove over to see the volcano. It was erupting, conveniently, right near the airport. As I walked the hiking trail, alongside the rest of the tourists, I prepared myself to witness, in real life, something sublime — a level of pure natural power I had only ever imagined or watched on screens. My spirit was trembling with a sort of Viking sublime, a Wagner aria of the soul.After about 20 minutes, the path turned — and I stopped, shocked. What I saw was nothing like what I had been expecting. The volcano was no longer visibly erupting. This was the aftermath. The whole valley was filled with, absolutely choking on, a huge black mass of dried lava: a hardened flood. It was brutal and vast and blunt and ugly — majestic, somehow, in its ugliness. It filled the valley the way a tongue fills a mouth. The black rock still steamed in spots, and everything smelled like sulfur, and if you looked in certain crannies you could see an orange glow that made me think of charcoal in a barbecue. It was, in other words, an absolute mess — the biggest mess I have ever seen in my life. There was something slightly embarrassing about it. I had never thought of a volcano like this before. It felt like walking into a ballroom the morning after a decadent party.Some of the tourists were audibly disappointed. They couldn’t believe their bad luck. As a Google review would put it: “No red-hot and flowing lava = not 5 stars.”As I stood there, I couldn’t help thinking of Sjón’s distinction between the fantastic and the marvelous. This volcano was that distinction made real. It was not anything like the fantasy of a volcano we all imagined when we flew to Iceland. It was weirder, dirtier, more complicated. It was a marvel. I put my ear down to the black stone. It was making noise: a hiss, a crackle. Somewhere deep, a force began to click.Sam Anderson is a staff writer for the magazine. His last feature was about the artist Laurie Anderson. Matthieu Gafsou is a Swiss photographer based in Lausanne. In September 2022, he will have a midcareer retrospective at the Pully Museum of Art in the suburbs of Lausanne, along with an exhibition of new work, titled “Vivants.” More

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    Alex Ebert, a Neo-Hippie Pop Star, Becomes a Guru

    Alex Ebert, the lead troubadour of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, flips to the B side of his career: philosopher.“No matter what any rock star tells you, they’re all conscious of the cult of personality,” Alex Ebert said, looking like a tenured musicology professor with his tan button-down shirt, shaggy beard and horn-rimmed glasses, while seated amid grand pianos and organs. “For a lot of them, that’s their primary occupation.”Mr. Ebert, 43, would know. In 2009, the founder of the Los Angeles folk-rock band Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros led a 12-member troupe of neo-hippie troubadours into rock n’ roll satori with the seismic single “Home.”Maybe you’ve heard the ebullient chorus, “Home is wherever I’m with you!” Or perhaps you can recall the almost revival-choir hook, “Laugh until we think we’ll die, barefoot on a summer night, never could be sweeter than with you,” set to accordions, trumpets, and Seven Dwarfs-style whistling.The band got big overnight, hitting the late-night talk show circuit and leading giant singalongs at festivals, to adoring fans with actual flowers in their hair. “Home” was such a runaway hit that it even popped up in commercials, including one for the N.F.L.The band cut four studio albums and toured for a decade. But it wasn’t enough for Mr. Ebert.“A few years back, I knew I was dying inside,” he said in a videoconference call from his recording studio in New Orleans. “I told the band I had to stop touring. I just had to allow for some space to jump.”He felt like he couldn’t do it anymore. “Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, out,” he said. “How many times can you do that? How many times must I force myself to rhyme bed with head?”And now the pop star has taken a leap indeed. A decade after his breakout musical success, he’s aiming for an unlikely second act: public intellectual.“Is avoiding death killing life on earth?”Mr. Ebert, who takes private lessons in theoretical astrophysics from a former Massachusetts Institute of Technology instructor for fun, has been producing a cerebral Substack newsletter, Bad Guru. It explores, well, um, how to define?When asked for an elevator pitch on the newsletter’s focus, he launched into a minutes-long exegesis about the “commodification of spiritualism” and “the religion of self” that name-checked Descartes, Norman Vincent Peale, Galileo and Kellyanne Conway.Broadly speaking, Bad Guru is a blend of philosophy and cultural analysis, with a smattering of self-help. Reading like a series of manifestoes from a highly caffeinated cultural omnivore, the newsletter takes aim at Silicon Valley self-empowerment mantras, for-profit spins on Eastern religion by wellness gurus, and sugar-high promises from reality-denying politicians.“Is avoiding death killing life on earth?” he asked in an essay called “A Void Dance” last June. Expanding on the familiar humans-as-a-cancer-on-the-planet idea, he noted how cancer cells avoid programmed cell death — apoptosis — and thereby kill the host, much like humans, who try to deny death by spending trillions on plastic surgery, wellness products and private space rockets, all at a cost to Earth. “What a tremendous irony it would be if avoiding our mortality posed the gravest threat to our collective survival,” he wrote.While unflinching in its views, Bad Guru steers clear of the hyper-partisanship and self-righteous vitriol seen across Twitter, and offers Mr. Ebert’s take on human folly from a distance, like a scientist peering into a Petri dish.He acknowledges that he has his own philosophical contradictions to deal with. “My ideology is more anarcho-communist than anything else,” he said of his political leanings. “But I’m also sitting here eating Whole Foods popcorn.”Mr. Ebert in his studio in the Bywater district of New Orleans. Giancarlo D’Agostaro for The New York TimesMr. Ebert owns a quaint Victorian house in the Bywater district of New Orleans. In 2014, he bought Piety Street Recording Studio, a studio in an abandoned post office next door where U2 and Arcade Fire have recorded, for $750,000.“New Orleans feels slightly removed from the capitalist hustle,” said Mr. Ebert, who moved to the city from his native Los Angeles in 2012. “The rungs of the ladder only go so high here, so you’re forced to find other kinds of meaning in life.”Unlike some Substack writers who have turned their self-published missives into a source of subscription income, Mr. Ebert does not charge for Bad Guru, saying that he is “pretty much set” financially from his music. “Otherwise, people are going to be like, ‘What, this rich musician is going to charge me $10 a month?’” he said.Mr. Ebert draws inspiration from other newsletters blending culture, technology and philosophy such as Astral Codex Ten, by Scott Alexander, the psychiatrist who ran the popular but controversial Silicon Valley blog Slate Star Codex, and The Stoa, by the writer and podcaster Peter Limberg, a devotee of Stoic thought.His audience includes seekers, armchair philosophers, Big Tech skeptics and New Age types looking for meaning beyond wellness-industry platitudes, he said. Others are lured in through Instagram, where he posts heady photo carousels on topics like “the story of the spiritualization of capitalism.” And some, he acknowledged, are Edward Sharpe fans who are “just putting up with me for the moment and waiting for more music.”“We are in a time when what some call ‘sense-making’ has become a fraught, ambiguous enterprise,” said the writer Daniel Pinchbeck, an admirer of Bad Guru. “We need more people like Alex using their voice and intellect to define a level of coherence that is beyond the current dichotomies of left and right, spiritual or atheist.”A year in, the Bad Guru audience is still small but growing; the most popular essays attract around 5,000 views on Substack.But again, profit is not the point. Mr. Ebert had been writing for years — the name “Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros” is taken from an unfinished novel he was writing in his early 20s (the “magnetic zeros” themselves were a phrase from a mathematical theory he devised). The 2020 lockdown finally gave him an opportunity to cut out music-industry distractions and focus on the ideas themselves, without trying to cram them into song lyrics and come up with a head-turning stage concept that will work on Colbert.“I’ve never felt more alive than I do right now,” he said. “For years, I kept all of my intellectual pursuits private. I was afraid of letting my ideas speak, without the window dressing of melody or flash and spectacle.”“Completions themselves are deaths.”His intellectual tendencies have landed him in awkward spots. In 2014, for example, he won a Golden Globe for best original score for the Robert Redford sailing film “All Is Lost.” After the ceremony, he found himself chatting with Mr. Redford and Bono when the former declared, “You know who really understands silence? This guy,” in reference to Mr. Ebert’s hauntingly spare soundtrack.“Immediately I launch into this theory about interstitial space in poetry, the negation between objects and Eisenstein’s theory of montage,” he said. “They just kind of looked at me. I realized I have no understanding of silence.”His obsessions themselves are obsessions, to the point that he recently asked his sister, Gaby Ebert, who is a psychotherapist, if he might be diagnosed with narcissism or some other condition.Mr. Ebert released a solo album, “I vs I,” in 2020, and is working on another. Giancarlo D’Agostaro for The New York Times“If there’s anyone on the planet who would take a potshot at me — in a sisterly way — it’s her,” he said. But to my surprise, she said, ‘No, Alex, you’re just different. You get turned on by starting over.”This is not to say he has abandoned music. Mr. Ebert released a solo album, “I vs I,” in 2020, and has two more in the works. And he is proud of his band’s legacy.“People get married to ‘Home,’” he said. “It’s been the soundtrack to peoples’ lives. Every time someone has come up to me on the street, their overt expression is ‘thank you.’ It’s beautiful to think that I’ve contributed to making life more magical for people.”But Mr. Ebert never intended that moment to last. Nothing does. Nothing should. “The Magnetic Zeros was really no fun once it was completed, because it’s dead,” he said. “Completions themselves are deaths.”Having killed off that persona, Mr. Ebert has little interest in forging a new one.“If the Bad Guru thing does end up accidentally with some cult of personality,” he said, “I’ll burn that too.” More

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    Coachella Lineup: Kanye West, Billie Eilish, Harry Styles

    The California festival and Bonnaroo, in Tennessee, both announced lineups this week as the live-music industry looks ahead after two years of events scuttled by the pandemic.Billie Eilish, Harry Styles and Kanye West will headline the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in April, as the music industry takes hopeful steps toward the return of festivals and touring in 2022.Coachella, set for its usual two-weekend format, April 15-17 and April 22-24, at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, Calif., will be returning after two years mothballed by the pandemic. On Wednesday, after weeks of speculation and leaks in the music press, the festival announced its complete 2022 lineup, which will also feature performances by Megan Thee Stallion, Lil Baby, Doja Cat, Phoebe Bridgers, the reunited electronic dance group Swedish House Mafia and dozens of others. (West is billed on the official festival poster as simply Ye.)The event is expected to run at its full capacity of up to 125,000 concertgoers a day.Coachella has long been the country’s most influential festival, hosting viral moments like Tupac Shakur’s hologram in 2012 and Beyoncé’s 2018 tribute to the marching bands of historically Black colleges and universities.It has usually been the first big festival to announce its lineup each year, ushering in the touring season. But this week Coachella was scooped by the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Manchester, Tenn., which on Tuesday said that it would return in June with Tool, J. Cole, Stevie Nicks, the Chicks, Machine Gun Kelly, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, and others.Coachella was one of entertainment’s first major casualties of the coronavirus. Its 2020 edition — which was to have featured Rage Against the Machine, Travis Scott and Frank Ocean — was shut down by health officials on March 10 of that year, two days before Broadway and the concert business at large went dark.Goldenvoice, the promoter that puts on Coachella in partnership with the corporate concert giant AEG Presents, had hoped to bring the festival back that fall, then in spring 2021. But each time the pandemic forced the plans to be kicked further down the road. Bonnaroo, which is presented by Live Nation, AEG’s corporate rival, had scheduled a full-scale return last September, but it was canceled after heavy rains flooded the festival grounds.About half of the ticket holders to Coachella’s 2020 edition requested refunds, Paul Tollett, one of the festival’s founders, said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in August. Tickets cost $449 and up, not counting fees.Despite a slew of recent cancellations related to the coronavirus, like Dead & Company’s Playing in the Sand festival in Cancún, Mexico, the music world is viewing Coachella with hope as a bellwether for the full-throttle return of the multibillion-dollar touring industry. Major tours by Dua Lipa, the Weeknd, Elton John, Bon Jovi and Justin Bieber are expected this year.As recently as last summer, Goldenvoice had hoped to bring back most of the headliners planned for 2020. But while Rage Against the Machine has an extensive tour planned this year — with five dates booked at Madison Square Garden in August — it is not playing Coachella. Ocean will return to Coachella in 2023.And since the disaster at Scott’s Astroworld festival in Houston in November that left 10 people dead, the rapper has largely withdrawn from public appearances, canceling his performance as a headliner at the Day N Vegas festival, which is also presented by Goldenvoice. More

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    Maria Ewing, Dramatically Daring Opera Star, Dies at 71

    She sought to incorporate acting techniques in her singing rather than settle for predictable staging. Uncertainty about her heritage inspired her daughter, the actress Rebecca Hall, to make the film “Passing.”Maria Ewing, who sang notable soprano and mezzo-soprano roles at leading houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, beginning in the mid-1970s and whose ambiguity about her racial heritage helped drive her daughter, the actress and director Rebecca Hall, to make the recent movie “Passing,” died on Sunday at her home near Detroit. She was 71.A family spokeswoman said the cause was cancer.Ms. Ewing was a striking presence on opera stages, where she strove to bring an actor’s skills and sensibilities to her roles rather than simply stand and sing.“I’ve watched how actors work and work at it,” Ms. Ewing, who was once married to the director Peter Hall, told The Orange County Register of California in 1997, when she was appearing in L.A. Opera’s production of Umberto Giordano’s “Fedora.”“I don’t mean to criticize or underestimate the importance of beautiful vocalism, which alone can move people,” she added. “But why is it that opera so often becomes predictable in terms of staging?”There was certainly nothing staid about her performance, under the direction of Mr. Hall, in the title role of “Salome,” first seen in Los Angeles in 1986 and restaged in other cities, included London. In the initial production she ended the Dance of the Seven Veils wearing only a G-string; in later ones she dispensed with even that. (She is not the only Salome to have ended the dance in the all-together; Karita Mattila did so at the Met this century.)“Sometimes you have to put yourself on the edge,” she told The Register. “You go to the precipice and lean over it. You have to. A role like Salome, you are completely on the edge. You’re over it, in fact.”Though critics had sometimes frowned on her leading roles — her attempt at the title role in “Carmen,” also under Mr. Hall, at about the same time drew some harsh notices — her “Salome” was generally acclaimed. John Rockwell, reviewing a return engagement in Los Angeles in 1989 for The New York Times, called it “the most arresting, convincing overall account of this impossible part that I have ever encountered.”Ms. Ewing as Poppea in Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” at the Glyndebourne Festival in 1984. The production was by the noted director Peter Hall, Ms. Ewing’s husband. Dennis Bailey performed the part of Nerone.Guy Cravett/ThornEMIWhenever Ms. Ewing performed, critics almost invariably commented on her exotic looks. Those were in part a product of a mixed racial heritage that Ms. Ewing tended not to dwell on, even with her daughter, who was raised in England.“When I was growing up, my mother would say things to me like, ‘Well, you know we’re Black,’ and then another day she’d say, ‘I don’t really know that,’” Ms. Hall recounted in an episode of “Finding Your Roots,” the PBS genealogy program, filmed last year and broadcast just last week.“She was always extraordinarily beautiful,” Ms. Hall told Henry Louis Gates Jr., the host of the program, “but she didn’t look like everyone else’s mother in the English countryside.”Her mother identified as white, she told Professor Gates, but in interviews over the years Ms. Ewing also alluded to possible Black and American Indian ancestry. Ms. Ewing’s father, Norman, for years presented himself as an American Indian, but the researchers on “Finding Your Roots” determined that this was a fabrication; a DNA test of Ms. Hall done for the program showed that she had no Indian background. Her grandfather had in fact been Black.“You, my dear, are indeed a person of African descent,” Professor Gates told Ms. Hall.This was more than a curiosity for Ms. Hall. She had for some time been developing a film based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, “Passing,” about two light-skinned Black women, one of whom passes as white. Part of what interested her about the novel, she said in interviews, was the nagging suspicion that the story was relevant to her own family.“When I asked questions to my mother about her background in Detroit and her family,” Ms. Hall told The New York Times last year, “she left it with an, ‘I don’t want to dwell on the past.’”The film, Ms. Hall’s first feature as a director, premiered in November and has been widely praised as one of the year’s best.Maria Louise Ewing was born on March 27, 1950, in Detroit. Her father was an engineer at a steel company and her mother, Hermina Maria (Veraar) Ewing, was a homemaker.Ms. Ewing studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music. About 1975 she made her debut at the Cologne Opera, and in October 1976 she made her Met debut as Cherubino in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.”“At the moment some combination of nerves and artistic immaturity holds her Cherubino short of the very best,” Mr. Rockwell wrote in his review. “But she is a singer of enormous potential.”That same month found her on the Carnegie Hall stage, one of two singers in a Mahler program by the New York Philharmonic conducted by James Levine.“The voice is one with a good deal of color, and of course Miss Ewing will grow into the music,” Harold C. Schonberg wrote in The Times.Among her early Met roles was Blanche in John Dexter’s 1977 staging of Poulenc’s “Dialogues der Carmelites.” She was slated for a road production of that opera in Boston in 1979 when fog grounded the plane that was supposed to deliver her from New York to Boston for an 8 p.m. curtain. At 4:30 p.m. she climbed into a cab, which delivered her to the Hynes Auditorium at 8:55; the curtain went up at 9:05. The fare: $337.50, not including a $47.50 tip.In addition to her dramatic roles, Ms. Ewing stood out in comedies like Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte.”Ms. Ewing’s daughter Rebecca Hall, left, is a noted stage and film actress. They attended the funeral of Ms. Ewing’s former husband, Peter Hall, in 2017. Also pictured is Leslie Caron, who was also married to Mr. Hall.Daniel Leal-Olivas/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Give any ‘Così’ Kiri Te Kanawa’s patrician Fiordiligi, Maria Ewing’s lovably dopey Dorabella and Donald Gramm’s subtly understated Don Alfonso and you will have yourself a night at the opera,” Donal Henahan wrote of the Met’s production in 1982.In 1987 a dispute with Mr. Levine over a revival and telecast of “Carmen” led her to withdraw from Met performances.“I cannot work with a man I cannot trust, and I cannot work in a house that he is running in this fashion,” she said at the time.But she would eventually return; her final Met performance was in 1997 as Marie in Berg’s “Wozzeck.”She and Mr. Hall married in 1982 and divorced in 1990. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by three sisters, Norma Koleta, Carol Pancratz and Francis Ewing; and a granddaughter.In 1996, when she was singing a concert with the Philharmonic, The Times asked Ms. Ewing about that famous dance in “Salome.”“It was my own idea to do the dance naked,” she said. “I felt that it was somehow essential to express the truth of that moment — a moment of frustration, longing and self-discovery for Salome. For me, the scene wouldn’t work any other way.” More

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    7 Ways to Remember Martin Luther King in New York

    From in-person and virtual performances to exhibitions and tours, the city offers plenty of options for honoring the civil rights leader this year.Since 1983, just 15 years after his death, the third Monday in January has been designated as a federal holiday in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. This year, on Jan. 17, cultural institutions all over New York have planned concerts, exhibitions, service opportunities and tours, both in person and online. (Bring your vaccination card, and check mask-wearing and ticketing policies online beforehand.)Here are seven ways to commemorate the legacy of the civil rights leader and learn more about Black history in New York.An Annual Bash in Brooklynbam.org.The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 36th annual tribute to King, held in person and streaming live at 10:30 a.m. on Monday, will feature a dance piece by Kyle Marshall, set to the oratory of King’s final speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” and performances by the singer Nona Hendryx with Craig Harris & Tailgaters Tales and the Sing Harlem choir. A keynote address will also be delivered by Imani Perry, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University. Following the event, visitors can view a display of digital billboards inspired by the writings of bell hooks or attend a free screening at 1 p.m. of the documentary “Attica,” about the violent 1971 prison uprising.The choreographer Kyle Marshall, who created a dance piece set to the oratory of King’s final speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”Steven SpeliotisActivism and the Artsapollotheater.org.The Apollo Theater and WNYC’s 16th annual celebration will hold two virtual broadcasts on Monday, at 11 a.m. and 7 p.m., engaging WNYC radio hosts, scholars and community leaders in a discussion about how the struggle for social justice has affected artists like Nina Simone and John Legend. Guests include the Rev. Al Sharpton, the sports journalist William C. Rhoden and Trazana Beverley, who won a Tony Award for her role in “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” The free event can be streamed through the Apollo’s Digital Stage.Learn More About the Metropolitan Museum of Art$125 Million Donation: The largest capital gift in the Met’s history will help reinvigorate a long-delayed rebuild of the Modern wing.Recent Exhibits: Our critics review a masterpiece “African Origin” show, an Afrofuturist period room and a round-the-world tour of Surrealism.Behind the Scenes: A documentary goes inside the Met to chronicle one of the most challenging years of its history.A Guide to the Met: From the must-see galleries to the lesser-known treasures, here’s how to make the most of your visit.Discover Seneca Villagecentralparknyc.org; metmuseum.org.Take a tour of Central Park that conjures Seneca Village, the largest community of free African American property owners in early-19th-century New York. Beginning at Mariners’ Gate near the West 85th Street entrance at 2 p.m. on Saturday, your guide will share how the area, once home to around 1,600 residents, provided a respite from the racial discrimination and crowded conditions of downtown Manhattan — until residents were forcibly displaced in 1857 to make way for Central Park. That history is also the subject of a new, vibrant installation across the park, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where “Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room” imagines the home of a Village resident as it might still exist if the family had been left to live undisturbed.Make a Craftwavehill.org.Just before leading the marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965, King passed through the hamlet of Gee’s Bend and encouraged its 900 residents to vote. They would go on to establish the Freedom Quilting Bee, a group that allowed women of the town to earn an income by making quilts that were sold at Saks and Sears; some textiles have entered the permanent collection of the Met. You can put your own sewing skills to the test on Saturday or Sunday at Wave Hill House in the Bronx, where plentiful squares of fabric will be on hand.Quiltmaking at Wave Hill House in the Bronx. Joshua BrightChoose a Causeamericorps.govSince King’s birthday was first observed, it’s been a tradition for volunteers across the country to devote the day to service. Whether you commit to a few hours or a whole month, the website of the federal public-service organization AmeriCorps has a directory where you can search for volunteer opportunities (including ones specific to the holiday). There are virtual options, too, like tutoring or transcription for the Smithsonian Institution and National Archives.A Streaming Sermontheaterofwar.com“The Drum Major Instinct,” a sermon King delivered in 1968 at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, will be presented on Zoom on Monday at 7 p.m. by Theater of War Productions and the office of Jumaane Williams, the New York City public advocate. Along with the New York State attorney general, Letitia James, and the city police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, Williams will take part in a dramatic reading of the text, which challenges people to channel justice, righteousness and peace into acts of service and love. Accompanying them will be performances of music composed in honor of Michael Brown Jr., the 18-year-old Black man who was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.‘Activist New York’mcny.orgAn ongoing exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York chronicles 350 years of social activism in the city, including civil rights, immigration, transgender activism and women’s rights. It begins with the struggle for religious tolerance during the Dutch colonial period, encompasses debates over nudity, prostitution and contraception in New York, from 1870 to 1930, and ends more recently, with the Movement for Black Lives. New material is added regularly, so it’s one to revisit. More

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    Dale Clevenger, Chicago Symphony’s Fearless Horn Master, Dies at 81

    Mr. Clevenger, who played his notoriously treacherous instrument with daring, was an anchor of the Chicago orchestra’s famed brass section for 47 years.Dale Clevenger, whose expressive, daring playing as the solo French horn of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for 47 years made him one of the most respected orchestral instrumentalists of his generation, died on Jan. 5 at a hospital near his home in Brescia, Italy. He was 81.The cause was complications of Waldenstrom’s disease, a form of lymphoma, his family said.Mr. Clevenger was a pillar of the famed Chicago brass section, which has long been renowned as an unrivaled force for its clean, majestic sound, fearless attacks and sheer might. Working with his equally enduring fellow principals, Adolph Herseth on trumpet, Jay Friedman on trombone and Arnold Jacobs on tuba, Mr. Clevenger helped shape that section into the envy of the orchestra world, and the joy of its conductors.In a statement, Riccardo Muti, the orchestra’s music director, called him “one of the best and most famous horn players of our time and one of the glories of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.”Mr. Clevenger’s willingness to take risks on his notoriously treacherous instrument, and his ability to surmount those risks seemingly with ease, were symbols of the brash quality of his orchestra. He was a technical virtuoso, but he was also capable of producing an enormous range of colors on his instrument, Mr. Muti’s predecessor, Daniel Barenboim, said. He was also a frequent chamber music partner and soloist.The Chicago ensemble was already full of idols when Mr. Clevenger joined in 1966, but Mr. Herseth and Mr. Jacobs were inspirations for him, both for their excellence and for their longevity.When the Boston Symphony offered Mr. Clevenger a post in the mid-1970s, he asked his mentors if they intended to perform in Chicago for as long as they physically could. They said yes. He resolved, he later recalled, that “as long as they were in the orchestra, there is nothing that would lure me away from Chicago.” Mr. Herseth went on to be principal for 53 years, Mr. Jacobs for 44.Mr. Clevenger was, however, a more versatile musician than that might imply. For 17 years he had a regular Tuesday-night date playing jazz with a group called Ears, which he said made him a stronger orchestral player. “Within the confines of symphonic structure,” he said in 1978 about the lessons he learned from improvising, “I can make music in a more relaxed, freer way.”Jazz was a side gig, but Mr. Clevenger was serious about leaving his seat on the stage to stand on the podium. “My dream is eventually to become a respected conductor of a major orchestra anywhere in the world,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 1986. That was not to be, but he did direct the Elmhurst Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble in the Chicago suburbs, from 1981 to 1995.The Chicago Symphony’s horn section in the late 1970s. From left, Frank Brouk, Richard Oldberg, Norman Schweikert, Mr. Clevenger and Daniel Gingrich. Robert M. Lightfoot II/Chicago Symphony Orchestra Michael Dale Clevenger was born on July 2, 1940, in Chattanooga, Tenn., the third of four children of Ernest Clevenger, a sawmill manufacturer who was briefly the president of the Chattanooga Opera Association, and Mary Ellen (Fridell) Clevenger, a homemaker. He started learning piano at age 7 and went to concerts with his father.“I kept my eye on this shape of metal, which was the French horn,” Mr. Clevenger recalled of attending those concerts in a video interview for Abilene Christian University in 1984. “I was infatuated with the way they looked. The more I looked, the more I became infatuated with the way they sound. I had a dream, a vision, to play one of those things.”Unable to afford a horn, Ernest Clevenger bought his 11-year-old son a trumpet instead, but Dale persisted. At 14, after making do with a school instrument for a year, he had his own horn, and his life.Mr. Clevenger performed in the Chattanooga Symphony and the Chattanooga High School band, under the bandmaster A.R. Casavant, who played him records of the Chicago Symphony during his lunch hour.He enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1958 to study with Forrest Standley, the principal of the Pittsburgh Symphony.After graduating in 1962, he freelanced in New York, joined Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra and spent a year as principal of the Kansas City Philharmonic.He failed his first audition with the Chicago Symphony, in May 1965, but succeeded at a second, in January 1966. On his first week on the job, he was a soloist in Frank Martin’s Concerto for Seven Wind Instruments, Timpani, Percussion and String Orchestra.“For his initial time out,” The Chicago Tribune reported, “he seems a capable addition to our superb first chair lineup.”The Martin concerto was recorded and later released. As well as appearing countless times on record as an ensemble player, Mr. Clevenger was a soloist on several later Chicago Symphony recordings, including a glowing account of Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings under Carlo Maria Giulini and a disc of Strauss concertos that won a Grammy in 2002. Mr. Clevenger also set down Haydn and Mozart concertos with the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra, and earned a further Grammy for the quintets for piano and winds by Beethoven and Mozart, sharing the bill with the Chicago principal clarinet Larry Combs (a fellow jazz player on Tuesday nights), two members of the Berlin Philharmonic and Mr. Barenboim.The composer John Williams wrote a concerto for Mr. Clevenger. Mr. Williams conducted its premiere with the Chicago Symphony and Mr. Clevenger in 2003. Todd Rosenberg /Chicago Symphony Orchestra In his final years in Chicago, music critics began raising questions about whether Mr. Clevenger was performing up to his usual standards. In 2010 Andrew Patner, writing in The Chicago Sun-Times, called for him to place “a cap on a unique orchestral career that should be noted for its many triumphs and not a late struggle against time.”Mr. Clevenger retired from the orchestra in 2013 and joined the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. He had also taught at Northwestern and Roosevelt Universities.Mr. Clevenger married Nancy Sutherland in 1966; they divorced in 1987. Alice Render, a hornist and sometime section partner in the Chicago Symphony, became his wife that year; she died in 2011. He married Giovanna Grassi in 2012. She survives him, as do a son, Michael, and a daughter, Ami, from his first marriage; two sons, Mac and Jesse, from his second marriage; a sister, Alice Clevenger Cooper; and two grandchildren.Mr. Clevenger, for whom John Williams wrote a concerto in 2003, always maintained that the purpose of his playing was to delight.“I realize that I have been given a gift, by God, to make music, to perform music, and to give people joy,” he said in the 1984 video interview. “I have the pleasure, the privilege, of making people happy — and in doing so, making my own self happy.” More