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      glaive and Hyperpop’s Breakthrough Moment

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherThe singer glaive, just 16 years old, has become the biggest breakout star from the world of hyperpop. An intuitive songwriter with a springy voice and a direct line to a wellspring of raw emotion, he’s a true talent looming in a scene that isn’t anti-pop so much as meta-pop, chaotic and a little indifferent.Hyperpop is a loose scene at best — it has a home on the Spotify playlist that de facto gave it its name, but many of its performers are ambivalent about the moniker, and the music lumped under the umbrella varies widely. But with the recent success of 100 gecs, the duo that is something like the genre’s spiritual elders, and the long shadow of the PC Music collective, the style is inching closer to widespread embrace.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about glaive’s rapid ascent, how hyperpop is and isn’t a traditional scene, and what the future might hold for a singer and sound that are figuring it out in real time.Guest:Alex Robert Ross, editorial director of The FaderConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      A Spy Opera (or Is It?) Returns to the Stage

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      Robert Ashley’s enigmatic “eL/Aficionado” is being revived to prove it can live on beyond his close collaborators.It was February 2020, and Mimi Johnson was pouring afternoon tea in the TriBeCa loft she once shared with her husband, the composer Robert Ashley.Johnson was reflecting on what was then the recent revival of “Improvement (Don Leaves Linda),” by Ashley, who died in 2014 and whose innovative operas generally involved the blurry boundary of speech and singing, smooth electronic accompaniment, and enigmatic, witty storytelling.Another revival, of Ashley’s early 1990s work “eL/Aficionado,” was supposed to follow shortly after. But because of the pandemic, Johnson was forced to shelf the nearly completed project, until Roulette in Brooklyn, on whose board she sits, approached her this year about reviving the revival; “eL/Aficionado” will run for three performances at Roulette, Thursday through Saturday.Mimi Johnson, left, and Tom Hamilton have been integral in recent revival of Ashley’s innovative, enigmatic operas.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesThese Ashley productions are designed not only to allow New Yorkers to see these rarely presented works again, but also to ensure they can live on once their composer’s close circle of collaborators has passed. For “Improvement,” Johnson and Tom Hamilton, a longtime creative partner of Ashley, painstakingly combed through Ashley’s archives to produce a new electronic score for the work, which was conceived as a recording and whose existing version thus contained vocals inextricable from the accompaniment.“If we don’t get these scores organized and the tapes updated and available, Tom or I might die,” Johnson said. “And it would be a whole lot harder for someone else to do these operas.”A simple way to convey their belief that the works can and should be performed more widely is to put them on with new talent. The original “eL/Aficionado” featured the baritone Thomas Buckner, a veteran Ashley performer, in the central role of the Agent. But Hamilton, the revival’s music director, was curious to hear the role sung by a mezzo-soprano.He and Johnson sought out Kayleigh Butcher, who has performed in opera companies and with new-music ensembles but has never before done Ashley. She is joined by another newcomer, Bonnie Lander, as well as Paul Pinto and Brian McCorkle, who have both performed in numerous Ashley works, including “Improvement,” “Perfect Lives” and “Crash.”Johnson still lives in the TriBeCa loft she once shared with Ashley, her husband, who died in 2014.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesHamilton, who collaborated often with Ashley, is the revival’s music director.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAs with that 2019 production of “Improvement,” the revival of “eL/Aficionado” accompanies a new recording, to be released on Friday by Lovely Music, the influential new-music label that Johnson has run since the late 1970s. Hamilton, who also produced the album, believes that having two recorded versions available will serve both to guide future performers and to illustrate the potential for expressive freedom.“I think Kayleigh’s performance speaks to the viability of the work itself, and how it can change and grow in someone else’s hands,” he said. “And I suspect that in the future, groups will rely more on the recorded material than on the score to catch the style of the piece.”The opera features a spy, named simply the Agent, who has done a career’s worth of work for an unnamed organization and is now on trial facing three interrogators, one superior and two more junior. Through a series of obscure responses to them, sometimes resembling personal or real estate advertisements and sometimes psychoanalytic sessions, the Agent relates four stages of her biography in reverse chronological order, seemingly revealing what led her to a life of espionage.The taut braiding of speech and singing in “eL/Aficionado,” often performed in double time over the 72-beats-per-minute pulse of the accompaniment, would seem to allow for little creative variation. But while Thomas Buckner portrayed the Agent as a sullen figure expressing an almost ghostly contrition for his deeds, Butcher’s interpretation adds a defiant tone, as if the Agent is as confused as the audience as to why her work should be subject to scrutiny. A line like “Can you blame me for being skeptical? A mere boy. I don’t think he was 10 years old” turns from Buckner’s desperate appeal into a confident avowal.From left, Robert Ashley, Humbert, Sam Ashley and Buckner performing “eL/Aficionado” in Berlin in 1992.Giacomo OteriAshley was a fan of spy novels, particularly those of John le Carré, but he notes in the libretto that “eL/Aficionado” is “not a spy story” and that the audience should be aware that, as the Agent’s story unfolds, the events acquire an increasing air of unreality.Even so, the espionage trappings are significant in a work that makes up a quarter of Ashley’s tetralogy “Now Eleanor’s Idea,” which in its entirety is an allegory for American westward expansion. Johnson recalled that when she first came to know him, in the mid-1970s, Ashley was fascinated and troubled by the C.I.A.-orchestrated Chilean coup of 1973, which brought about the installation of Augusto Pinochet. She believes that the Spanish title of “eL/Aficionado,” which translates to “amateur” or “hobbyist,” is a nod to those events.One of the work’s four sections, “My Brother Called” — “brother” is a tradecraft term for a dependable operative — is an extension of an installation piece that Ashley had produced for a 1977 show at New York University. It consisted of stacks of Spanish-language newspapers arranged in a grid resembling city blocks, with a spot-lit telephone in the center. Ashley periodically called the phone, which filled the room with a mixture of his own indecipherable speech, Latin American music and sounds from a television.In “eL/Aficionado,” the Agent describes that piece and claims that “the meaning of the scene is impossible to describe” — as if to suggest that Ashley himself was unsure exactly what role he and other artists played in the country’s broader Cold War project.That ambiguity is one of many; the enveloping aura of mystery is the opera’s real achievement. Devoid of chase scenes, dead drops, tidy resolutions and most other familiar tropes of espionage narrative, the Agent’s swirling relation of images and memories — whose relevance even she is unable to gauge — creates an atmosphere of pure paranoia. In our age of fractured reality, mass surveillance and shocking regime changes, that quintessential 20th-century feeling, and the opera that makes use of it, are ripe for reappraisal. More

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      The War on Drugs Can’t Stop Searching for Answers in the Music

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      Fatherhood reshaped the frontman Adam Granduciel’s world, and a collaborative spirit animated the band on its fifth album, “I Don’t Live Here Anymore.”The first time Adam Granduciel hinted at a possible career change, he tossed it off as a humorous aside. “Basically my whole family are educators,” he said in a video interview last month from his Los Angeles home. “Perhaps it is also my destiny. Who knows?”The second time — a week later, calling from a parked car outside the warehouse where he had been rehearsing with his bandmates — he dug deeper. Casually dressed in a black tee and backward cap, squinting into the California sunshine, he wearily, ambivalently talked through some recent misgivings about his life as a working musician: “I just wonder, how many more records am I going to make? Like, is this the last record?” It was a thought exercise more than a declaration of intent, but striking to hear from a presumed lifer at the top of his game.By conventional measures, Granduciel — the 42-year-old frontman and primary creative force behind the War on Drugs, a once-scrappy indie band that he started in Philadelphia in 2005 — is a modern-day rock star. During a period in which rock has shifted toward the margins of popular music, his group has reached improbable heights with meticulously crafted, guitar-forward songs, over time trading their textural, rootsy soundscapes for something more structured and straight-ahead. In the process, it’s landed multiple records in the top quarter of the Billboard 200, signed to a major label and won a Grammy, for the 2017 album “A Deeper Understanding.” Come January, the band will headline Madison Square Garden — these days, a privilege largely reserved for pop singers and legacy acts.Considering that upcoming notch in his belt, a bemused Granduciel invoked fate: “Even from early on, people would always say that our music belonged in bigger places. So that’s like, the ultimate big place.”But for all his achievements, Granduciel remains far more motivated by his craft than by external validation. A notoriously obsessive creative, he’s keener to tinker in the privacy of the studio than to bask in the spotlight. And lately, he’s been preoccupied by something even more important than music-making: his 2-year-old son, Bruce.Hence, the misgivings. “My dad was pretty much home every day. He’d go to work and come home, and I would like to deliver that same consistency,” Granduciel said. He’s been thinking about how to balance the obligations of parenting with the demands of making records and touring. Bruce’s car seat was visible in the Zoom frame as his father wondered aloud, “What am I going to pass down?”The topic of inheritance surfaces on the War on Drugs’ fifth album, “I Don’t Live Here Anymore,” due Oct. 29. “Workin’ my whole life/To follow my father’s dream/Then watch it fade away,” Granduciel sings on “Old Skin,” a somber piano ballad that U-turns into a full-band stomper, adding oomph to the singer’s existential musings. He picks the thread back up on the winding “Rings Around My Father’s Eyes,” singing about filial bonds and the passage of time.Like his previous albums, “I Don’t Live Here Anymore” makes legible Granduciel’s love for 1970s and ’80s rock — the searching, synth-varnished sort made by his heroes Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan — though his ambitions are far bigger than merely evoking his influences, and he chafes at the suggestion that his music is “retro.”“He’s using elements of nostalgia to create a very emotional type of music,” said Shawn Everett, who co-produced the record alongside Granduciel after earning his trust as a recording engineer on “A Deeper Understanding.”“I think I need this life to actually be content,” Granduciel said.Magdalena Wosinska for The New York TimesThe emotional contours of Granduciel’s music have become clearer as his songwriting, over the years, has grown more direct and accessible. As on previous records, strife is etched into the lyrics — but now, with Granduciel’s voice summoned to the front of the mix, it’s more resonant. He still leans heavily on a few preferred signifiers — roads, rivers, wind, darkness — but deploys a more conspicuous first person and draws more readily from personal experience than he did early on in the band’s career.“I tend to write from the place that gives me the most inspiration, which is just feeling melancholy,” Granduciel said, noting his lifelong struggle with depression. “For the most part, I’m still in the process of learning how to be happy.”“I Don’t Live Here Anymore” is not, however, an album of downers. “Harmonia’s Dream,” named for the cult-favorite krautrock group, hurtles like a flat-out race against self-doubt (“Am I losing my faith?/We’re gonna lose it in time!”). And with its seismic chorus, booming percussion, gospel-y harmonies and life-affirming thesis, the title track has the makings of one achievement that the band has not yet nabbed: a hit single.“It’s kind of a pop song,” noted Jess Wolfe of the folk-pop group Lucius in a phone call from Nashville. Along with her bandmate Holly Laessig, she sang backup on the track. “I remember feeling like it was ringing in my head for days” after leaving the studio, she added.Baby Bruce (named for Springsteen) had a profound impact on “I Don’t Live Here Anymore,” logistically as well as thematically. While working on previous records, Granduciel sometimes languished in the studio into the small hours of the morning. During sessions after his son was born, he made a point of being home for 5 p.m. bath time, and tried to wrap up work by 9 or 10 to be fresh for the morning parenting shift. He grinned while describing his daily routine with Bruce: They sit together on the stoop, he drinks coffee and Bruce has his breakfast.If that sounds like the antithesis of a rock-star lifestyle, Granduciel doesn’t mind. He feels “zero connection” to fame, and emphasized the normalcy and anonymity of his day-to-day life. Still, Granduciel’s proximity to celebrity was apparent when, in the week in between our conversations, he briefly became a tabloid item amid reports that he and Bruce’s mother, the actress Krysten Ritter, had split. (He denied these and declined to elaborate.)Cutting back on studio time made Granduciel fear that he wasn’t “going deep” enough on the record. It helped that he could compare notes with Everett, also a new father, and a fellow workhorse whom he initially sought out after reading about the “extreme recording techniques” (Everett’s description) that he used while making “Sound & Color,” Alabama Shakes’ album from 2015.Throughout our conversations, Granduciel — seemingly aware of his reputation as a sovereign bandleader, and perhaps eager to decenter himself — pointedly called out the contributions of his various collaborators. Robbie Bennett, who has played piano with the band since 2010, wrote the hook for “I Don’t Live Here Anymore”; Anthony LaMarca, who plays guitar in the touring lineup, was responsible for “iconic drum fills” that gave the record’s earliest demos body. Remote recording, necessitated by the pandemic, allowed Granduciel’s bandmates to work and brainstorm on their own schedules, producing what he called “spirited” results.Though increasingly comfortable with his leadership skills, Granduciel seems uninterested in climbing past middle management. He has a record label of his own — Super High Quality Records, on which he released a live album last year — but no plans to use it for anything other than one-off side projects. “I Don’t Live Here Anymore” fulfills his two-record contract with Atlantic, and while he hasn’t re-signed with the label yet, he would if asked. “I’ve always been a good employee,” he said. “I don’t really have an interest in being the record-maker and the business all in one.”And despite Granduciel’s musings on setting his guitar down and walking away, he said he feels called to the music: “I think I need this life to actually be content.”He turned, as he often does, to one of his rock forebears. “It’s like Robbie Robertson said,” he said, quoting the Band’s frontman. “‘It’s a goddamn impossible way of life.’” More

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      How ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’ Brought Step to the Met

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      The opera’s choreographer and co-director, Camille A. Brown, talks about the legacy of the African diaspora and influence of “School Daze” in her dances.Camille A. Brown had a lot of catching up to do. She wasn’t part of the original creative team behind Terence Blanchard’s opera “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” when it was presented in 2019 in St. Louis. But at the Metropolitan Opera, where the production runs through Saturday — the first time a work by a Black composer has been presented there in its 138-year history — her touch is palpable.Clearly, she caught up. And she’s making history, too: Brown, who shares directorial duties with James Robinson, is the first Black artist to direct a Met production. She is also the opera’s choreographer, and as such has brought social dance — step, the percussive form popular at historically Black colleges and universities (H.B.C.U.) — to the Met stage.Opening Act III is a step number that stops the show in its tracks. On opening night, the dancers held their final pose, one foot crossed over the other as sweat poured down their faces. Frozen in a line facing the audience, they tried to control their breathing as the audience clapped and roared. And clapped and roared some more. It lasted for more than a minute, and it was spectacular.When was the last time a dance stopped an opera in its tracks? Brown, a Tony-nominated dance-maker who choreographed “Porgy and Bess” under Robinson’s direction at the Met, has never experienced anything like it.Brown at opening night last month.Krista Schlueter for The New York Times“I was just thrilled,” she said. “I was thrilled for the moment. I was thrilled for social dance. I was thrilled for the dancers onstage that had been working for six weeks to put this show together.”She added: “I feel like the audience — to me — was clapping for several reasons. It was about the dance, but it was about what it meant to see that on the stage. And legacy.”Step and its use of the body as a percussive instrument speaks to the Black experience: When their drums were taken away, enslaved people created rhythm with their bodies. In the opera, step enters the picture when the protagonist, Charles (Will Liverman), is a college student and pledges at the fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi. He also continues to grapple with the experience of having been molested by his older cousin when he was a young boy, seen in flashbacks. (The opera is based on the 2014 memoir by The New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow.)While Act I contains no actual dance, the characters roam the stage with vibrant texture — their everyday, pedestrian movement, both rich and real, is recognizably Brown. Along with the step number, Brown choreographed another major dance, which opens Act II and shows Charles surrounded by dancers slipping in and out of erotic moments. Full of tension and longing, it reveals the character’s state of mind: confused and anguished, yet also intrigued.The baritone Will Liverman surrounded opens surrounded by dancers slipping in and out of erotic moments. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBrown is adept at baring emotion through the body. The dancers, their arms reaching imploringly, move vividly and broadly as if washing the stage with brushstrokes. Later, they transform into trees as Charles sings: “We draw our strength from underneath. We bend, we don’t break. We sway!”As he sings, Charles rounds his body forward in a powerful contraction and opens his arms as he stands straight and ultimately rises above his suffering.In “Fire,” which will be broadcast theatrically on Oct. 23 as part of the Met Live in HD series, Brown displays her choreographic range. “There was the more contemporary dance side, and then there’s the more rhythmical side,” she said. “You don’t get to feel those extremes in one place very often.”And her directorial prowess is only growing. Up next? She directs the Broadway revivalof Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” Recently Brown spoke about her work on “Fire” and honoring her ancestors. What follows are edited excerpts from that conversation.Brown with her co-director, James Robinson, during a rehearsal in August.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesHow did you, as a choreographer and director, envision the opera?When I’m working on a show, and as a director of my company, I always try to find, what is my entry point to the story? I thought about some of my dear friends that had very similar stories, so I entered it in that way.When I first heard about the opera and I found out that there was a fraternity section, I was so excited. There’s an opportunity to do a step dance inside of an opera?Why is it so important to put social dance on the Met stage?We talk about Terence being the first Black composer on the Met stage. And so along with that comes the Black lens and along with that comes Black culture spoken through or danced through the Black lens. And knowing that, at one point in the Met’s history, Black people weren’t allowed to perform on that stage.So you go from that to now: We are doing something that is so rooted in African tradition on the Met stage. That is so powerful. You see the fraternity-sorority, you see the H.B.C.U., but you also see the Juba dance [the African-American percussive form that uses the feet and the hands]. And you see the African diaspora onstage.“We are doing something that is so rooted in African tradition on the Met stage,” Brown said of the fraternity scenes.Jackie Molloy for The New York TimesHow did you put the number together?I was inspired by two movies: “Drumline” and “School Daze.” I’ve always loved “School Daze,” and when this opportunity came about to create the fraternity scene, I thought this needs to be a moment. Yes, Charles is pledging, and he’s going through that experience, but it’s also important, especially being on the Met stage, to show as much as we can of what that whole entire experience is. I want to talk about the dream ballet. Is it OK if I call it that?[Laughs] Yeah, yeah, that’s totally fine.What were you thinking?In any show that I’ve done, there’s always one piece that is really, really hard for me. And that was what you call the dream ballet. The first two weeks of working on it, I was freaking out a little bit because I wasn’t liking what I was doing.What happened?I was talking to my co-director, James Robinson, about the movie “Moonlight” and about how Charles was wrestling with what we are calling phantoms in his dreams — and how they haunted him, but they also enticed him. And so I gave myself a break and eased back on criticizing myself and said, You know what? Just play. Give yourself the space to figure it out.How did “Moonlight” influence you?Just by the beautiful imagery. Just wanting to talk about relationships and the sensitivity, and how does it feel to touch someone for the first time? Feeling like it’s wrong, but wanting to trust that it’s OK.“We talk about Terence being the first Black composer on the Met stage. And so along with that comes the Black lens.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow involved were you in the first act?It may be easy for someone to come in and go, Oh, well, she just did the choreography. But that really wasn’t the case. James and I were both thinking about the molestation scene and how the chorus interacts.Most of the chorus members were also in “Porgy,” so I’d already worked with them. We were talking about how they move because even though they’re technically not dancing, they still are moving. And it’s the 1970s. We looked at some videos and talked: What were the small ways that people walked to indicate the time period?Was Katherine Dunham in your mind throughout this experience?Oh! Why do you ask?Because of your use of social dance and the fact that she choreographed at the Met. And because so much of this opera, at its root, is about the body as a force. It’s urgent. It made me think of your lineage.I always carry her and Pearl Primus and Dianne McIntyre and Marlies Yearby in the space with me. This is a historical moment, but this is also about people who have paved the way for you. It is coming from a deep place — it is coming from the social dance. How can I contribute to that legacy of Black choreographers delving into the African diasporic space? It’s about contributing to the space. When we do what we know, and we show how honest we are with our decisions, that is honoring our ancestors. More

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      Drake’s ‘Certified Lover Boy’ Spends a Fourth Week at No. 1

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      The Houston rapper Don Toliver opens at No. 2, while the music industry turns its attention to the numbers for Adele’s comeback single.Drake returns to No. 1 on this week’s Billboard album chart, while the Houston rapper Don Toliver opens at No. 2 and the music industry keeps a close eye on the numbers for a song that will impact next week’s chart: Adele’s comeback single.Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy,” which arrived at No. 1 last month with blockbuster streaming numbers after nearly a year of teases and false starts, notched its fourth week at the top. In its sixth week out, “Certified” had the equivalent of 94,000 sales in the United States, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. Virtually all of that number is attributed to streaming, with nearly 126 million clicks online.After six weeks out, Drake’s album has racked up nearly 1.4 million equivalent sales, including 1.7 billion streams — a huge showing, but cooler than the release of the rapper’s last studio album, “Scorpion,” in 2018, which in its first six weeks had 1.8 million sales and 1.9 billion streams.Toliver, a protégé of Travis Scott, opened in second place with “Life of a Don,” his second studio album. It had the equivalent of 68,000 sales, including 64 million streams.YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s “Sincerely, Kentrell” is in third place, Meek Mill’s “Expensive Pain” is No. 4 and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour” is No. 5. Last week’s No. 1, Taylor Swift’s “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” fell to No. 35.Attention is now shifting to the data rolling in for next week’s singles chart, with Adele’s song “Easy on Me” expected to arrive with huge numbers. Released late last week — in an unusual move, Adele tied its worldwide arrival to midnight British time, making it available in the United States on Thursday — it quickly attracted big streaming numbers. Spotify announced that the song had broken its record for the most-streamed track in a single day, and Amazon Music said it had gotten “the most first-day Alexa song requests” in that service’s history.On Monday, CBS announced “Adele One Night Only,” a two-hour special featuring a concert performance and an interview with Oprah Winfrey, coming on Nov. 14, five days before the release of “30,” Adele’s first album in six years. More

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      Review: Sphinx Virtuosi Bring an Intriguing Vision to Carnegie Hall

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      An ensemble of 18 string players who are Black and Latino set a reflective and spirited tone on Friday, with solos by the charismatic bass-baritone Davóne Tines.“Tracing Visions” was the intriguing title of the program Sphinx Virtuosi, an ensemble of 18 top-notch string players who are Black and Latino, presented at Carnegie Hall on Friday. As Afa S. Dworkin, the president of Sphinx, explained in comments to the audience, that phrase spoke both to the organization’s mission and the music played so impressively on this night.You have to have a vision, to conceive one carefully, before you can write it out and realize it, Dworkin suggested. Sphinx began in 1997 as a “social justice organization dedicated to transforming lives through the power of diversity in the arts,” an ambitious mission statement more essential at this moment than ever. Based in Detroit but with nationwide reach to some 100,000 students and artists, Sphinx puts string instruments in the hands of children and provides them training; sponsors a national competition that awards stipends, scholarships and performance opportunities; and has a development project for emerging artists, among other initiatives.Sphinx Virtuosi, which is in the midst of a national tour, is the most prestigious outlet of the organization; and the splendid performances showed why. A beguiling account of the opening work, Xavier Foley’s “Ev’ry Voice,” set a reflective tone. The music is like an episodic rumination on “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often called the “Black national anthem.” At first, segments of the melody are played in tentative, harmonically rich strands. Then, while violins ascend to high, softly tender lines, in lower registers other strings begin stirring, as if to get this piece up and running. There are passages of bustling riffs, hard-edge chords, a burst of swing and, finally, a fanfare. This led to Florence Price’s wistfully lyrical Andante cantabile movement from her 1935 String Quartet No. 2, which came across with glowing richness in this version for string ensemble.Various players took turns introducing works. One member explained that the Brazilian violinist and composer Ricardo Herz had adapted “Mourinho,” a bracing dance song in the Brazilian forró style, especially for Sphinx. Since the original was alive with percussion, the string players here slap and tap their instruments to evoke the rhythms that capture the festive vibe of the music, as indeed they did in this arresting performance.The cellist Thomas Mesa performed a searching, intense and elegiac tribute to essential workers.Jennifer TaylorThe Cuban American cellist Thomas Mesa spoke at some length before playing Andrea Casarrubios’s “Seven” for solo cello, a searching, intense and elegiac tribute to essential workers during the pandemic. The title alludes to the communal ritual of applauding, shouting and banging pots and pans every night at 7 p.m. for those heroes. Mesa played it magnificently.Jessie Montgomery’s “Banner,” which received its New York premiere by Sphinx Virtuosi at Carnegie in 2014, has become almost her signature piece. The music takes “The Star-Spangled Banner” and explores, fractures, transforms and comments upon the tune and its complex associations. Scored for a solo string quartet both with and against a background string ensemble, the piece received a vibrant, assured performance here.The charismatic bass-baritone Davóne Tines was the soloist in the two next pieces: The British composer Gerald Finzi’s “Come away, come away, death,” a sternly beautiful musical setting of a Shakespeare poem (from the song cycle “Let Us Garlands Bring”); and Carlos Simon’s “Angels in Heaven,” an arrangement of a spiritual sung during baptisms (“I know I’ve been changed”). Tines invited the audience to join in the final refrains of the church song. Many members of this audience clearly knew it well, judging from the vigor of the response.The program ended with the breathless, wild and wailing “Finale furioso” from Alberto Ginastera’s Concerto for Strings. The prolonged ovation that followed was no surprise. More

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      Bringing Attention to the Maori Language, One Song at a Time

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      “Waiata/Anthems,” Lorde’s “Te Ao Marama” EP and a host of other projects are aimed at revitalizing the Indigenous language of New Zealand via music.In August, Lorde released her third album, “Solar Power.” Three weeks later, she put out an EP called “Te Ao Marama,” with five songs from the record translated into Maori, the Indigenous language of New Zealand. The second release was no mere afterthought — it was part of longtime conversations in her native country about boosting a language that not long ago experts feared could die out.“Pakeha artists have been lending their support to the language revitalization movement for years, and as someone with global recognition, I knew at some stage I would do the same,” Lorde wrote in an email, referring to non-Maori New Zealanders. “But ‘Te Ao Marama’ didn’t come from a place of duty. I am richer for having sung in te reo” — which means “the language” in Maori — “and also for having made the connections that made doing so possible.”When the musician and producer Dame Hinewehi Mohi, one of the primary engines behind the musical Maori revival, performed the New Zealand national anthem at the 1999 Rugby World Cup in Maori rather than English, she got “such an adverse reaction from a minority of people,” she recalled in a recent interview. Twenty years later, she assembled “Waiata/Anthems” (waiata means “song”), an album of English tracks performed in Maori that includes a translation of Benee’s “Soaked” and Kings’s “Don’t Worry ’Bout It.”“Before this,” Mohi said, “there were only a handful of artists recording in te reo Maori.”The public’s response to the album astounded her: “Waiata/Anthems” debuted at No. 1 on the New Zealand charts in 2019. The work, and interest in Maori music, has not subsided. This year, the public broadcaster TVNZ released a documentary series that followed different artists translating and recording their songs in Maori for a second installment of the project. More than 30 tracks in Maori were released as a playlist, eight of which made it into the local Top 40, and two in the Top 10.Awareness and celebration of Maori music is mirroring a shift in attitudes toward the language across New Zealand. The country’s European settler government suppressed Maori beginning in the mid-1850s, punishing children who spoke their language at school and deliberately dispersing Maori families in white neighborhoods to assimilate them, creating far-reaching whakama, or shame, around it. By 1987, when Maori was finally declared an official language, the vast majority of its remaining speakers were older.In recent years, there has been a resurgence of supporters, including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who said in 2018 that her newborn daughter would learn both Maori and English. Newscasters now greet in Maori; weather reporters call places by their original, Maori names; supermarket signs tell you where the “chicken/heihei” is. Kotahi Rau Pukapuka, an endeavor that aims to publish 100 books in Maori over the next 25 years, is already far ahead of schedule. Mohi’s idea to bring attention to the language via contemporary music was pragmatic: More than half of the Maori population, which make up nearly 17 percent of the total population, is under 30 years old.But who sings in Maori, and how, has also become a flash point. Lorde was criticized in the wake of her EP’s release by those who argued that white speakers are privileged to do so without having to address the trauma of the Maori people; or said that the EP is a painful reminder of how many Maori haven’t had access to their own language. Other observers called her project “a pop culture landmark we should welcome” and “a very powerful international statement about the currency of the language.” Mohi had approached Lorde about working on the original “Waiata/Anthems” because “you want the biggest audience” exposed to Maori, she said.Singing has always been a large part of Maori culture: In formal meetings, it is compulsory to sing after your speech (these “songs” are more like chants). Songs are used to pass on information, including “telling the grandchild what deaths he needs to avenge, what things he needs to remember, the important features of tribe history,” said Sir Timoti Karetu, an expert on Maori language and culture.Maori people sing other songs — love songs, naughty songs, insulting songs — in everyday life, too. “We sing no matter where we are,” Karetu said. Music helped keep the language alive even when the government’s restrictions were in place. Maori people adapted with the times, writing new tunes highly influenced by Pakeha melodies. “We’ve borrowed the tune and done our own thing,” Karetu said.“It’s very easy to do a literal translation, but that’s meaningless to both cultures — it’s just words,” said Sir Timoti Karetu, an expert on Maori language and culture.Cameron James McLaren for The New York TimesBic Runga, a Maori singer involved in both “Waiata/Anthems” releases, said, “There’s a really big shift in awareness here.” She was in the process of reconnecting with her roots when Mohi approached her for the first album, which included her song “Sway,” made famous by the movie “American Pie.” Though Runga had only absorbed little bits of Maori in elementary school, as a result of doing “Waiata/Anthems,” she’s been connected to more fluent speakers and is trying to incorporate Maori into her emails, like opening with “tena koe” instead of “hi.”Runga has tried writing a song in Maori, although it’s not as simple as translating the text directly. “It was kind of spooky — it was about talking to death,” she said. When the lyrics were getting checked, she found out she’d been using the literal translation for death instead of the personified word — Maori is a very metaphorical language associated with a worldview that is more connected with nature, and doesn’t necessarily follow Western assumptions.“It’s very easy to do a literal translation, but that’s meaningless to both cultures — it’s just words,” Karetu said.“There’s a really big shift in awareness here,” the musician Bic Runga said.Dave Simpson/WireImage, via Getty ImagesAn example of its nuance can be found in Lorde’s “Hine-i-te-Awatea,” or “Oceanic Feeling.” Hana Mereraiha, who translated it, said she was granted creative license for the three songs she worked on; the album “Solar Power,” with its dedication to the sun and everything living under it, was quite Maori in spirit already.“There’s a really beautiful concept in te ao Maori, that of kaitiakitanga,” Lorde wrote. “It refers to an understanding that people and environment are interconnected and dependent on each other’s care to thrive.”The final line of the third verse of “Hine-i-te-Awatea” refers to the Maori idioms “paki o Hewa” and “paki o Ruhi,” which both mean fine weather, referencing the deities Hewa and Ruhi — “paki o Ruhi” is associated specifically with summer. Its last part, “te ao marama,” is a translation of the equivalent line in the English version, “I can make anything real,” as it refers to when the god Tane separated his father (Rangi-nui, the sky) from his mother (Papatuanuku, the earth), and brought light into the world.Mereraiha “broadened the universe of the song so that all the spiritual presences I could always feel but could never articulate were there,” Lorde wrote. “The Maori version feels like the original to me now.”Hana Mereraiha is a translator who worked on Lorde’s EP project, among others.Cameron James McLaren for The New York TimesSince Mereraiha started translating, she has worked with around 12 artists, and is writing and singing as well. “Dame Hinewehi has opened up many pathways into the music industry,” she said.The Maori singer Marlon Williams, who made a brief appearance in “A Star is Born” in 2018, decided to write his next album completely in Maori. Like Runga, Williams didn’t really speak Maori until a few years ago — he attended a kohanga reo, a total immersion preschool, and took some Maori at high school, but none of it stuck.For Williams, learning the language fresh has helped his songwriting. “I’m not aware of the errors I’m making,” he said, so he’s “not weighed down by them.” He relies on a collaborator, Kommi Tamati-Elliffe, a hip-hop artist and Maori lecturer at the University of Canterbury, to check over his work and find solutions when phrases aren’t working.“We’re on another awkward step on the globalization ladder where everything is mixing and melding,” Williams said. But he believes listeners don’t need to understand the lyrics for the songs to become big hits. “I don’t know any more Spanish after listening to ‘Despacito,’” Williams said. “Things that exist in the pop realm sometimes are their own thing.”Language revitalization is “a never-ending battle,” Karetu said. “All of us who have been colonized by somebody else are struggling for our languages to survive.” But, when it comes to songs, he’s more positive. “Waiata will never die. I think waiata will go on forever and ever.” More

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      Andrea Martin, R&B Songwriter, Dies at 49

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      She co-wrote hits for En Vogue, Toni Braxton and other artists in the 1990s and 2000s and was also a singer, releasing an album.Andrea Martin, a songwriter behind a string of R&B hits, including Monica’s “Before You Walk Out of My Life” and Toni Braxton’s “I Love Me Some Him,” died on Sept. 27 in a hospital in New York City. She was 49.Her songwriting partner, Ivan Matias, confirmed her death but said the cause was undetermined.Ms. Martin’s first major songwriting credits, which she shared with Mr. Matias and other co-writers, came in 1995. Along with Carsten Schack and Kenneth Karlin, she wrote “Before You Walk Out of My Life,” which peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and established Ms. Martin as an in-demand writer.Ms. Martin, Mr. Matias and Marqueze Etheridge together wrote En Vogue’s “Don’t Let Go (Love),” which reached No. 1 on the Billboard R&B chart and was nominated for best R&B performance by a duo or group with vocal at the 1996 Grammy Awards.Ms. Martin was also a talented vocalist, initially finding work as a backup singer, and Drew Dixon, a vice president at Arista Records in the 1990s, took notice. She signed Ms. Martin to her label as a solo artist, and Arista released her album “The Best of Me” in 1998. The record was not a commercial success, though one of its tracks, “Let Me Return the Favor,” charted on the Billboard Hot 100 as a single.“Hearing people sing my songs was the greatest feeling ever, but it wasn’t a chance for me to express how I felt,” Ms. Martin said in a 1999 interview with The Daily News of New York about the release of her album. “The songs were about my life, but somebody else was singing it. I just wanted people to know this is me and present an album that represents me.”Ms. Dixon cited racism and colorism in the recording industry as possible reasons that Ms. Martin’s solo career did not take off. Had she been lighter-skinned, Ms. Dixon said, her career might have gained more traction.“Andrea was, without a doubt, one of the best singers I ever encountered in my career, and I’m including Whitney, Aretha, Lauryn and Deborah Cox when I say that,” Ms. Dixon said.Andrea Martin was born April 14, 1972, in Brooklyn to Reginald Martin Sr. and Mavis Martin. Her family lived in the East New York neighborhood.She told The Daily News that her biggest inspiration as a child was Michael Jackson. “I’d try to imitate him all day,” she said.She attended the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan, graduating in 1990, and jumped right into writing songs and performing locally — even resorting to singing in the lobbies of buildings housing music publishing companies to attract the attention of executives. Her big break came when Rondor Music, a major publisher, signed her to a contract in the early 1990s.She is survived by two children, Eresha and Amaya; her parents; her sisters, Audrey and Wendy Martin; and her brothers, Reginald Jr., Michael and Shane.Ms. Martin continued to work steadily through the 2000s, writing for Leona Lewis, Melanie Fiona and Sean Kingston and appearing as a featured artist and backup singer for other acts. Mr. Matias said he expected to see unreleased projects featuring Ms. Martin emerge in the coming years.“She had a very specific sound to her writing,” Mr. Matias said. “And it didn’t matter who she worked with. She was infused into the melody.” More