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      Youngboy Edges Past Drake for Billboard No. 1 Album Slot

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      “Sincerely, Kentrell” narrowly beat Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy” to earn this Louisiana rapper his fourth Billboard chart-topping album in two years.In a close race for No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, the new release by YoungBoy Never Broke Again, a 21-year-old from Baton Rouge, La., narrowly beat fourth-week sales for “Certified Lover Boy,” the streaming smash by Drake, who was dethroned after three straight weeks on top.YoungBoy’s “Sincerely, Kentrell” tallied 137,000 album units in total (including 186 million streams and 10,000 in traditional sales), enough to squeak by the 135,000 overall sales units for “Certified Lover Boy,” according to Billboard.“Sincerely, Kentrell” becomes the fourth No. 1 album in less than two years for YoungBoy, who is incarcerated awaiting trial in Louisiana, where he faces federal charges that he possessed an unlicensed gun as a felon. YoungBoy was among 16 people arrested in Baton Rouge in September 2020 on drug and firearm charges, not long after his album “Top” became his third No. 1 in less than a year.YoungBoy — among the most popular musicians on YouTube — has been dogged by legal problems since signing with Atlantic Records as a teenager in 2016. In the current case, his lawyers have said he did not possess any of the contraband himself and are seeking to suppress evidence they say was unconstitutionally obtained, according to court filings.In its first month out, Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy” earned the equivalent of over 1 million sales in the United States, including more than one billion streams, and it held off a formidable challenger in Lil Nas X’s debut album, “Montero,” last week. This time, “Certified Lover Boy” settled for No. 2, although it is expected to contend for the top spot again next week.The rest of the Top 5 is rounded out by “Montero,” at No. 3; Kanye West’s “Donda,” repeating its position at No. 4; and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour,” which also held steady at No. 5. More

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      National Endowment for the Humanities Awards Covid Relief Grants

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      The American Rescue Plan Act, with its $87.8 million in funding, will support projects at nearly 300 cultural and educational institutions in the country.The New York Public Library, the USS Constitution Museum in Boston and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in Charlottesville, Va., are among more than 300 beneficiaries of new Covid relief grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities that are being announced on Monday.The grants, which total $87.8 million and are supported by $135 million in funding allocated to the endowment under the American Rescue Plan Act that was signed into law in March, will provide emergency relief to help offset pandemic-related financial losses at museums, libraries, universities and historical sites in all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and Northern Marianas. The endowment distributed the first $52.6 million in June.Adam Wolfson, the endowment’s acting chairman, said in a statement that the grants, which can be as much as $500,000 for organizations and $5 million for grant-making programs that distribute funds to organizations, “will save thousands of jobs in the humanities placed at risk by the pandemic and help bring economic recovery to cultural and educational institutions and those they serve.”The cultural and educational institutions will receive a total of $59 million from the endowment, and 13 grant-making organizations will receive $28.8 million to distribute to humanities projects undertaken by organizations or individuals.The funding, designed to allow organizations to retain and rehire staff, as well as rebuild programs and projects disrupted by the pandemic, will enable the Thomas Jefferson Foundation to develop an African-American oral history project at Monticello, the plantation where the former president lived until his death in 1826; allow the New York Public Library to expand its digitized collection of African American, African and African diasporic materials; and support the creation of hands-on experiences and virtual programming about the Navy ship anchored in Boston at the USS Constitution Museum.In New York, 33 of the state’s cultural organizations and three grant-making programs will receive a total of $16.2 million. Funding will support expanded access to materials by historically underrepresented artists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s library collections; the hiring of a videographer at the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation to document the theater’s legacy, with a focus on African and African American culture; and planning for the Museum of the City of New York’s centennial year in 2023. Firelight Media, a nonprofit that supports filmmakers of color, will also receive $2 million for a grant program for 36 Black, Indigenous and people of color filmmakers whose work on documentary projects was disrupted by the pandemic.Elsewhere, the grants will allow both Old North Church in Boston and Christ Church in Philadelphia to investigate their ties to the colonial slave trade, the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana to design an immersive living history experience to introduce visitors to their history and culture, and the Willa Cather Foundation in Red Cloud, Neb., to develop tours about the writer whose novels explore the lives of early pioneers there.Around 90 colleges and universities received funding to support their humanities programs and departments: Adjunct faculty at Seattle Central College will work with local tribal representatives to revise history and literature courses to incorporate Indigenous perspectives, the University of Oklahoma Press will develop a new Native American imprint in collaboration with the university’s Native Nations Center and East Tennessee State University will retain and rehire staff to support free online access to materials documenting the history of Southern Appalachia. More

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      Musicians Flee Afghanistan, Fearing Taliban Rule

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      Dozens of artists and teachers from a prominent music school that promoted girls’ education left the country, but more remain behind. “The mission is not complete,” its founder said.More than 100 young artists, teachers and their relatives affiliated with the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, a celebrated school that became a target of the Taliban in part for its efforts to promote the education of girls, fled the country on Sunday, the school’s leaders said.The musicians, many of whom have been trying to leave for more than a month, boarded a flight from Kabul’s main airport and arrived in Doha, the capital of Qatar, around midday Eastern time, according to Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the head of the school, who is currently in Australia. In the coming days, they plan to resettle in Portugal, where the government has agreed to grant them visas.“It’s already a big step and a very, very big achievement on the way of rescuing Afghan musicians from the cruelty of the Taliban,” Mr. Sarmast, who opened the school in 2010, said in a statement. “You cannot imagine how happy I am.”The musicians join a growing number of Afghans who have fled the country since August, when the Taliban consolidated their control of the country amid the withdrawal of American forces. Among figures in the arts and sports worlds who have escaped are members of a female soccer team who resettled in Portugal and Italy.Still, hundreds of the school’s students, staff and alumni remain in Afghanistan and face an uncertain future amid signs that the Taliban will move to restrict nonreligious music, which they banned outright when they previously led Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001.The school’s supporters, a global network of artists, philanthropists, politicians and educators, plan to continue to work to get the remaining musicians out of Afghanistan. “The mission is not complete,” said Mr. Sarmast, an Afghan music scholar. “It just began.”A girl practiced at the music institute in 2013. Hundreds of the school’s students, staff and alumni remain in Afghanistan and face an uncertain future under the Taliban.Musadeq Sadeq/Associated PressYo-Yo Ma, the renowned cellist, helped raise awareness about the plight of the musicians among politicians and other artists. He said he was “shaking with excitement” by the news that some of them had escaped.“It would be a terrible tragedy to lose this essential group of people who are so deeply motivated to have a living tradition be part of the world tradition,” Mr. Ma said in a telephone interview.Of the musicians who remain stuck in the country, he said, “I am thinking about them every single hour of the day.”The Afghanistan National Institute of Music was a rarity: a coeducational institution devoted to teaching music from both Afghanistan and the West, primarily to students from impoverished backgrounds. The school became known for supporting the education of girls, who make up about a third of the student body. The school’s all-female orchestra, Zohra, toured the world and earned wide acclaim, and became a symbol of Afghanistan’s changing identity.The school has faced threats from the Taliban for years, and in 2014 Mr. Sarmast was wounded by a Taliban suicide bomber.Since the Taliban returned to power, the school has come under renewed scrutiny. Mr. Sarmast and the school’s supporters have worked for weeks to help get students, alumni, staff and their relatives out of the country, fearing for their safety. The government of Qatar helped arrange safe passage for the musicians to Doha, and played a key role in negotiating with the Taliban.An empty room at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music last month. The musicians plan to resettle in Portugal, where the government has agreed to grant them visas.Wakil Kohsar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSeveral students and young artists affiliated with the music institute said in interviews with The Times in recent weeks that they had been staying inside their homes, for fear of being attacked or punished by the Taliban. Many stopped playing music, hid their instruments and tried to conceal their affiliation with the school. They requested anonymity to make comments because of the fear of retribution.In the final days of the American war in Afghanistan, the school’s supporters led a frantic and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to evacuate nearly 300 students, teachers and staff affiliated with the school, along with their relatives. The operation was backed by prominent politicians and security officials in the United States. At one point, the musicians sat in seven buses near an airport gate for 17 hours, hoping to get on a waiting plane. But the plan fell apart at the last minute when the musicians were not able to obtain entry to the airport and as fears of a possible terrorist attack escalated.The Taliban have tried to promote an image of tolerance and moderation since returning to power, vowing not to carry out reprisals against their former enemies and saying that women would be allowed to work and study “within the bounds of Islamic law.”But they have sent signals that they will impose some harsh policies, including on culture. A Taliban spokesman recently said that music would not be allowed in public.“Music is forbidden in Islam,” the spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said in an interview with The Times in August. “But we’re hoping that we can persuade people not to do such things, instead of pressuring them.”John Baily, an ethnomusicologist at the University of London who has studied cultural life in Afghanistan, said it would be difficult for the Taliban to eradicate music in the country entirely, after years in which the arts have been allowed to flourish.“You have got literally thousands of young people who have grown up with music,” he said, “and they’re not going to be just kind of switched off like that.” More

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      Carlisle Floyd: Artists Share Memories of a Composer

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      The writer of “Susannah” and other operas is remembered by a tenor, a conductor and an impresario who worked closely with him.The career of the American composer Carlisle Floyd, who died on Thursday at 95, spanned nearly 70 years and the heydays of a host of musical styles. But through them all, Floyd stayed stubbornly true to himself and his vision: creating operas with clear, strong narratives — often about intolerance and social outcasts — and scores grounded in tonality.While some academics and critics who favored a thornier modernism found Floyd’s works simplistic, artists and audiences embraced his compelling characters and passionate music.Here are edited excerpts from interviews about him with the tenor Anthony Dean Griffey, famed as Lennie in Floyd’s adaptation of “Of Mice and Men”; the conductor Patrick Summers, a frequent collaborator and Houston Grand Opera’s music director since 1998; and David Gockley, who as general director of the Houston company from 1972 to 2005 presented six of Floyd’s works.Anthony Dean Griffey, left, as Lennie, one of his signature roles, and Elizabeth Futral as Curley’s Wife in “Of Mice and Men” at Houston Grand Opera in 2002.George Hixson/Houston Grand OperaAnthony Dean GriffeyWhen I started singing, I had a close connection to outsider characters, because I felt a bit like an outsider when I was growing up in North Carolina. I’m a large guy, and that got pointed out.In 1997, Glimmerglass Opera in upstate New York contacted the Metropolitan Opera, where I was in the young artists program, and said they were auditioning for Lennie in “Of Mice and Men.” I had worked every summer with special needs children and adults, so I really knew the character. The audition was the next day, so I learned the “mice aria” overnight. And I was cast, and my life changed forever. Carlisle’s music gave me a place in the opera world that I didn’t think I could have.After Glimmerglass, it took off and went to New York City Opera, and then I sang it at one opera house after another. I was concerned about being typecast, and maybe I was, but I didn’t mind that. I’d rather at the end of my career and life be known for a role that really made a difference, rather than 120 roles and no one knew what I did.I felt that Carlisle captured Lennie perfectly. The part is quite rangy, and for me the challenge was keeping his innocence while singing a very wide range in terms of the tessitura. Lennie has different emotions, very sporadically. He can turn on a dime. He’s lyrical when he dreams about his future with George and the rabbits and chickens, but his outbursts are dramatic and heavy. I’ve always thought of myself as an actor who sings and a singer who acts. So I made sounds that were not always beautiful tones, but they were what Lennie would have done.Carlisle was hands-off. I’ve done a lot of new music and sometimes composers have very specific ideas and get in the way of your interpretation. But he gave me the license to almost recreate the role. He was always complimentary, kind and generous. And always thanked me. I felt like I should be the one to thank him. I grew up very poor, and being able to buy my mother a house she could call her own — that was like Lennie’s dream. I call my mom’s house The House That Lennie Built.The conductor Patrick Summers, left, Houston Grand Opera’s music director, and Floyd during rehearsals for “Cold Sassy Tree” in 2000.George Hixson/Houston Grand OperaPatrick SummersWhen we did “Of Mice and Men” at the Bregenz Festival in Austria, I was the one — not Carlisle — worried that his musical idiom might not totally translate into the land of Schubert and Strauss and European modernism. He had none of those worries. And the Austrian audiences reacted so well to that opera because it’s great. Audiences don’t care about theory; the idea that musical language has to be somehow dumbed down to be accessible is very much a construct of criticism and academia. And though he was an academician himself his whole life, Carlisle never wrote in that world. He stuck to his guns, and his guns just happened to be in G minor. The subject of a great many of his operas is hypocrisy, and the effect of a crowd on an individual. That was the dominant theme of his life: how to be true to yourself.He never wrote outside his own voice. I had so many conversations with him about various composers — Pierre Boulez and Elliott Carter and John Adams — whom Carlisle loved. But it just wasn’t how he wrote. Most of his subjects were American, but not all. He did a gorgeous “Wuthering Heights,” and his last opera, “Prince of Players,” was British-set. But largely he was attracted to American stories, and writing in the American vernacular was as natural to him as anything, though he didn’t like the term “folk opera,” which he was branded with because of “Susannah.” And that was kind of an anomaly; it’s the only really folkish work that he wrote, even with the Americana, Copland feel in “Of Mice and Men.” In general he assimilated all kinds of traditions and made them his own. That’s what this country does.He thought in terms of big orchestras; he was very much of that era. And the psychological world of his operas is in the orchestra. But he was a story person, a narrative person. If the story required a great and memorable tune, he provided it. If the story needed very thorny dissonance, he provided that. He was a servant of the narrative.Carlisle absolutely loved what he did. He loved going to performances; he loved his fellow composers; he loved their success. This was a great, grand gentleman. He didn’t play all those games that so many people play. And I think one hears that honesty and that geniality in his music.David Gockley, right, the general director of Houston Grand Opera from 1972 to 2005, presented six operas by Floyd, left. They are shown in 1991, during preparations for “The Passion of Jonathan Wade.”Ava Jean Mears/Houston Grand OperaDavid GockleyIn the late 1960s, my wife at the time, a soprano named Patricia Wise, had sheet music for the two arias from “Susannah.” I was really impressed: Here was modern opera that was beautiful, touching and — I hate to say it — listenable.Soon after, I got the job in Houston, and just after I did I went to Cincinnati Opera to hear “Of Mice and Men,” which is when I first met Carlisle. Having heard that opera, I told him that during my first season as general director I was going to program it in Houston, and I offered to commission a work that turned out to be “Bilby’s Doll,” the start of a series of new operas he did there. He was also offered a position at the University of Houston, so he and his wife, Kay, made the move. Our relationship began to flower, and we became tennis buddies. Looking back, he is — was — my best friend.I left the subject of his operas to him, but virtually all of his ideas were brought to life. My favorites, I think, are “Susannah,” “Of Mice and Men” and, I would say, “Cold Sassy Tree.” He brought that book to me as an idea; I read it and I thought it was charming and folksy, bringing forth characters that were familiar from his previous works but taking them further. It came out of a period in his life when he was suffering from serious depression. He always had his demons, but he said my encouragement of “Cold Sassy Tree” brought him through a really terrible period, and got him to the other side. Obviously I was glad to have played that part.We very seldom were at odds. I felt that my job was to facilitate getting the operas from his head to the stage, and getting co-producers involved. That meant that the works would get automatic revivals in different cities. It was a great formula.He and I developed the Houston Grand Opera Studio in the late ’70s because both of us were very interested in providing opportunities for young artists. In the ’50s, rising Americans had to go to Europe, so this was an alternative. We wanted to use the opportunity of Carlisle’s appointment at the University of Houston to bring the university into partnership with us. And they put forward a good deal of money over a period of time to provide fellowships to engage faculty, and we had studio productions that were given on the campus.I think his legacy is probably six significant works that are worthy of the repertoire. I think that if you talk to someone like Jake Heggie, there’s a whole generation of composers who look to Carlisle like a godfather. He and his work gave them the confidence to have their own voices and to have those voices be loved by contemporary audiences. More

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      Review: In ‘Six,’ All the Tudor Ladies Got Talent

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      The exuberant queenhood-is-powerful pageant about the wives of Henry VIII was shut down on opening night by the pandemic. Now it’s back, and it totally rules.Are you an Elsa or an Anna? An Elphaba or a Glinda? Or, for those with more classic tastes, a Vera or a Mame?Musicals typically offer just two prototypes of dynamic womanhood: a twinsie set of dark and light. To hit a real Broadway sister lode you have to time travel further back than “Frozen,” “Wicked” or even “Mame”: half a millennium back, as it happens. In “Six,” the queenhood-is-powerful pageant about the wives of Henry VIII that took a bow — finally! — at the Brooks Atkinson Theater on Sunday evening, Tudor London is the place to be if you’re looking for a sextet of truly empowered, empowering megastars.Of course, you do have to get past the little hitch of “divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived.” But so what if the show’s view of the wives is counterfactual? Their power may have been limited during their lives by men, misogyny and the executioner, and diminished afterward by the dust of time, but hey, it’s still a tale you can dance to.That’s the animating paradox behind the entertainment juggernaut that froze in its tracks when Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered theaters closed in response to the coronavirus outbreak just hours shy of the show’s opening on March 12, 2020. In the ensuing 18 months, a fitter catchphrase for the musical-in-waiting seemed to be “divorced, beheaded, quarantined.”But now it is here, all but exploding with the pent-up energy of its temporary dethroning. And though after seeing a tryout in Chicago I wrote that “Six” was “destined to occupy a top spot in the confetti canon,” two questions nagged at me as I awaited its arrival on Broadway: How can a show formatted as a Tudors Got Talent belt-off among six sassy divas also be a thoughtful experiment in reverse victimology? And how can history be teased, ignored and glorified all at once?Yet somehow “Six,” by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, isn’t a philosophically incoherent jumble; it’s a rollicking, reverberant blast from the past. I don’t just mean that it’s loud, though it is; you may clutch your ears even before the audience, primed by streaming audio and TikTok, starts singing along to the nine inexhaustibly catchy songs.I also mean that though gleefully anachronistic, mixing 16th-century marital politics with 21st-century selfies and shade, it suggests a surprising, disturbing and ultimately hopeful commonality. Which shouldn’t work, but does.True, it sometimes works too well; the brand discipline here is almost punishing. What began as a doodle devised during a poetry class at Cambridge University is now as tightly scripted as a space launch. When the wives emerge in turn to tell their stories after a group introduction — “Remember us from PBS?” — we discover that they are literally color-coded. As if designed by a marketing expert in a spreadsheet frenzy, each is also equipped with a recognizable look, a signature song genre and a pop star “queenspiration.”It only makes sense that Henry’s first and longest-wed wife, Catherine of Aragon (Adrianna Hicks), would be a golden Beyoncé. Her anti-divorce anthem “No Way” could be retitled “Keep a Ring on It”: “My loyalty is to the Vatican/So if you try to dump me, you won’t try that again.”Adrianna Hicks, center, who portrays Catherine of Aragon, with Andrea Macasaet, as Anne Boleyn and Anna Uzele as Catherine Parr.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHenry’s third and best-loved wife, Jane Seymour (Abby Mueller), wears black and white and sings “Heart of Stone,” a torch song that instantly recalls Adele’s “Hello.” Two wives later, Katherine Howard (Samantha Pauly) arrives as a pink, ponytailed Ariana Grande, with a chewy wad of bubble gum pop called “All You Wanna Do.”They and the other wives are supposedly competing not just as singers but also, oddly, as losers. “The queen that was dealt the worst hand,” we are told, “shall be the one to lead the band” — though that’s just a figure of speech; the blazing four-woman group that accompanies the show, in studded black pleather, is led by the musical director, Julia Schade.That’s no accident; the choreographer (Carrie-Anne Ingrouille), scenic designer (Emma Bailey) and costume designer (Gabriella Slade) are also women, and so is the co-author Moss, who with Jamie Armitage serves as director. That “Six” so strongly embodies feminism in its staffing while at the same time building its story on a contest of female degradation is an example of how it sometimes seems, on close inspection, to be at cross-purposes with itself.This would be a more serious problem if the authors were unaware of it. But even when they double down on the Mean Girl catfighting, they do it smartly enough that you trust they are heading somewhere. Thus you enjoy the snarky upspeak of wife No. 2, Anne Boleyn (Andrea Macasaet), insisting that the other women’s woes cannot possibly compare to her decapitation. Her Lily Allen-like number: “Don’t Lose Ur Head.”Likewise, the humblebragging of No. 4, Anne of Cleves, here called Anna (Brittney Mack), is too deliciously on point to cloy. “Get Down,” her funky rap about cushy post-divorce life — 17 years of luxury in exchange for six months of loveless marriage — sounds like Nicki Minaj could sing it tomorrow, tipping her crown to Kanye West: “Now I’m not saying I’m a gold digger, but check my prenup and go figure.”The show’s pop score touches on hip-hop, electronica and more. From left, Samantha Pauly, Andrea Macasaet, Brittney Mack, Anna Uzele, Adrianna Hicks and Abby Mueller.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe wit of the conception and the execution — the songs are a slick blend of pop grooves, tight lyrics and old-fashioned musical theater craft — goes a long way toward keeping the show from sagging. (The almost indecently short 80-minute run time also helps.) The texture is kept sparkly by salvos of puns (“live in consort”) and thematically dense by the threading of themes. Musical themes, too: Though the score samples hip-hop, electronica, house music and soul, one recurrent melody, introduced on harpsichord during the preshow, is “Greensleeves,” supposedly written by Henry as a love token to Anne Boleyn. Her color, obvs, is green.Still, I was grateful when the twist finally came, as it had to, with wife No. 6. In a performance rendered even lovelier by its contrast with the brashness of the previous five, Anna Uzele makes a touching creation of Catherine Parr, who probably did not in real life develop a theory of retroactive regnal sisterhood. But here she does, arguing to her predecessors that history, which has merged them into a monolith defined by the one thing they had in common, must be rewritten to see them as individuals instead.That “Six” puts just such a rewritten history onstage is a great thing for a pop musical to do. Let’s not quibble about its accuracy, or the way it drops its contest framework cold, just in time for the singalong finale. It’s not a treatise but a lark and a provocation — and a work of blatantly commercial theater. That means a fantastic physical production and unimprovable performances by a diverse cast whose singing is arena-ready but also characterful.It also means a certain amount of bullying; those women onstage insisting you have fun are, after all, queens. They may even be queenlier now than they were in 2020; at times I thought they seemed over-primed by the time off.But if the direction by Moss and Armitage comes just up to the edge of too much, then takes two more steps before turning around and winking, their choices are justified by the show’s insistence on finding an accessible, youthful way to talk about women, abuse and power. Call it #MeSix and be prepared: The confetti canon is aimed at you.SixThe Brooks Atkinson Theater, Manhattan; sixonbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Upload,’ Do Blockchains Dream of Electric Lizards?

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      Michel van der Aa’s new opera weaves technology into a traditional form with masterly restraint for a sci-fi spin on a fundamentally human tale.AMSTERDAM — “I’m here, that’s for sure!” the digital facsimile of a father tells his daughter early in Michel van der Aa’s new opera, “Upload.”What exactly it means to be “here” — particularly when someone exists only as consciousness stored on blockchain data spread across thousands of servers — is up for debate, and guides the drama in “Upload,” a masterly weaving of music, film and motion-capture technology that opened at the Dutch National Opera here on Friday, ahead of a run at the Park Avenue Armory in New York next spring.But that sci-fi premise is little more than a veneer. Not for nothing did Mary Shelley give “Frankenstein” the subtitle “The Modern Prometheus”; the finest genre fiction has always examined humanity through allegory. So, too, does van der Aa’s spare yet richly complicated work, which is preoccupied less with futuristic speculation than timeless matters of the heart and mind, whether corporeal or in the cloud.Which is not to say that van der Aa is uninterested in the bleeding edge. Rather, for decades, and with mixed success, he has been at the fore of marrying traditional forms with new media — inventing software and putting his film degree to regular use — through, for example, 3-D technology in the opera “Sunken Garden” and virtual reality in the poetic installation “Eight.”The challenge, always, is in making sure the shiny new thing doesn’t overtake the music, but instead is gracefully incorporated into a balanced whole. Van der Aa achieved something like that in “Eight,” complementing the immersion of VR with a score of poplike directness. And “Upload” is the work of an artist in absolute command of his toolkit, employing a restraint that makes for smooth shifts between acoustic and electric, live performance and film, without any one thing drawing attention to itself throughout the opera’s brisk 80 minutes.Most important, van der Aa — who not only composed “Upload,” but also wrote the libretto, staged it and directed a film version streaming on medici.tv — tightly binds technology and dramaturgy. No deployment of theatrical magic is extraneous. Its transparent presence even enhances the drama, such as when the Father, at one end of the stage, sings into motion-capture cameras while the Daughter interacts with his digital avatar mere feet away in a paradox of proximity and unbridgeable distance.That father, the libretto slowly reveals, recently lost his wife. In a state of unbearable grief, made worse by thoughts of his own mortality and what it would mean for their adult daughter, he secretly undergoes a procedure to upload his consciousness — and in the process end his physical existence. It’s technology so new that, despite its thorny implications, has yet to be regulated. He then returns to his daughter, granted virtual immortality but unable to, say, give her a hug on the way in.We’ve seen this before, in fact and fiction — real-life chatbots imitating departed love ones or, on “Black Mirror,” given android form. “Years and Years,” Russell T Davies’s mini-series of our near future, ends with a terminally ill woman becoming the first person to live on as an uploaded consciousness that can speak through Alexa-like devices. If the technology isn’t inevitable, at least the aspiration to it is. As a scientist says in “Upload”: “Every piece of information in the world has been copied and backed up. Except the human mind. It’s the last analog device in the digital world. Until now.”Van der Aa’s take on this subject is not a cautionary tale — despite his gentle satirizing of the hubris of Silicon Valley culture in his treatment of the upload company’s chief executive (Ashley Zukerman of “Succession”) — but a focused study of an emerging technology and the questions it raises about what constitutes life, through one family’s story.As if to keep the piece rooted in its humanity, van der Aa begins with only a voice in the dark: the Daughter, sung by the soprano Julia Bullock with subtle longing as she lists bodily word associations like “expand — lungs,” “support — bones” and “pull — muscle.” The electronics track slyly enters, atmospheric, and she is joined by the Father (the baritone Roderick Williams, whose warm tone and charisma create a wellspring of sympathy for his character).The Father ends that poetic list with “weight — less,” which cues skittering sounds of the lively and nimble players of Ensemble Musikfabrik, under the assured baton of Otto Tausk. Van der Aa’s score here provides a tense transition, one of many to come, including a glitchy hybrid of acoustic and electronic music that introduces the first filmed sequence, establishing a parallel track to the Father and Daughter’s interactions.These scenes, spoken and performed by actors (among them Katja Herbers of “Westworld” and “Evil”), take place starting three months earlier, at the bucolic facility where uploads take place. They at first seem to tell more than show, explaining the procedure by way of a tour for prospective clients. But in also tracing the Father’s experience there, a complex portrait of him emerges as he undergoes the creation of a so-called Mindfile based on interviews with friends and family — pointedly, not the Daughter. He also develops a Memory Anchor, a crucial tool that keeps a digital brain from, as it’s described, “drifting off into open space like an astronaut”; his is of a place he used to visit with his parents as a child, where birds chirped as he tried to catch lizards along a stone wall that was hot to the touch in the summer sun.Williams in the opera, whose staging employs transparent, moving screens to smoothly incorporate live action, film and motion capture technology.Marco Borggreve/Dutch National OperaOccasionally, the spoken films overlap with live performance. Williams, in one moment, is shown singing words like “sheep” and “ship” into a machine to teach it the contours of his speech. But otherwise the singing is limited to the Father and Daughter’s scenes together; van der Aa’s musical writing for their exchanges follows the natural rhythms of the English language. But in their monologues, melodies take flight: long, lyrical lines — lushly delivered by Bullock with rending emotion — that are amplified, complicated and contradicted by orchestral undercurrents.When briefly in a “paused state,” the Father realizes that something failed in the upload; it should have suppressed the trauma of his wife’s death but didn’t, dooming him to grieve her for eternity. He wants to be terminated, an irreversible action that can only be carried out by his daughter.If that dilemma doesn’t feel entirely compelling or earned, it’s because the Daughter is never properly developed. She is introduced as curious about her father’s new form, but it’s difficult to imagine anyone feeling more than shock or anger in her place. Instead, she is shown only in various states of mourning. (And this might be too New York-centric a fixation, but how on earth can this young woman afford to live in an airy TriBeCa penthouse with a garden terrace?)Maybe it’s for the best, then, that we never see her decision. The parallel stories arrive at parallel endings: the past, the night before the Father’s upload, and the present, the night before his likely termination. In a stunning coup de théâtre, a white curtain springs out, suspended over the audience. On it are the Father and Daughter projected in split screen. Although at opposite ends of the stage, even different planes of existence, they are presented as if lying head-to-head.As they drift into sleep, we are left with the Father’s Memory Anchor, a dream rendered digitally — the green of the earth too green, the blue of the sky too blue. Everything we’ve heard about is there: the stone, hot to the touch, a lizard at rest. But the image occasionally flickers, defaulting to the 3-D line drawings of drafting software, until the resolution degrades into soft fields of color. Only the sounds of breeze and birdsong remain.It’s a mysterious final scene, but not one that requires any answers. Regardless of what happens next, someone will be forced to live with the pain of loss. And no technology, it seems, can spare us that fundamentally human experience.UploadThrough Oct. 8 at the Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam; operaballet.nl. More

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      Richard H. Kirk, Post-Punk Pioneer of Industrial Music, Dies at 65

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      Cabaret Voltaire, of which he was a founder, began as a band of experimental provocateurs and later moved to the dance floor.Richard H. Kirk, a founding member of the English group Cabaret Voltaire and a major figure in the creation of the post-punk style known as industrial music, has died. He was 65.His death was confirmed by his former record label, Mute, in an Instagram post on Sept. 21. The post did not say when or where he died or cite the cause.Mr. Kirk formed Cabaret Voltaire in 1973 in Sheffield, England, with Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson. They borrowed the name from the Zurich nightclub where Dada, an art movement that responded to society’s ills with irrationality, was born in the early years of the 20th century.“When we started, we wanted to do something with sound, but none of us knew how to play an instrument,” Mr. Kirk said in an interview for a 1985 New York Times article about industrial music. “So we started using tape recorders and various pieces of junk and gradually learned to play instruments like guitars and bass.” Despite his claim, Mr. Kirk was initially a clarinetist, and he developed a scratching, slashing style as a guitarist.The members of Cabaret Voltaire created the template for what would become known as industrial music: hectoring vocals, mechanical rhythms, scraps of recorded speech snatched from mass media, conventional instruments rendered alien with electronic effects.On early-1980s recordings like “Three Mantras,” “The Voice of America” and “Red Mecca,” the group embraced the literary cutup techniques of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, the British author J.G. Ballard’s dystopian provocations and punk rock’s abrasive stance. Musical influences included Brian Eno, the German band Can and Jamaican dub.Mr. Watson left the group in 1981, and Mr. Kirk and Mr. Mallinder pursued a more commercial direction that brought them to the cusp of mainstream success. Cabaret Voltaire disbanded in 1994, after which Mr. Kirk pursued a bewildering range of solo projects and collaborations. He revived Cabaret Voltaire as a solo effort in 2009, focusing exclusively on new material, and released three albums in 2020 and 2021.“Three Mantras,” released in 1980, was one of Cabaret Voltaire’s first albums.Mr. Kirk was born on March 21, 1956, and grew up in Sheffield, a steel town. “You looked down into the valley and all you could see was blackened buildings,” he told the author and critic Simon Reynolds in an interview for his book “Rip It Up and Start Again” (2005), an authoritative post-punk history.Sheffield was a bastion for Labour Party and radical-left politics, and as a teenager Mr. Kirk was a member of the Young Communist League. “My dad was a member of the party at one point, and I wore the badge when I went to school,” he told Mr. Reynolds. “But I never took it really seriously.”Mr. Mallinder, in a 2006 interview on the Red Bull Music Academy website, said that he and Mr. Kirk had been drawn to Black American music from an early age. “We used to go to soul clubs from when we were about 13 or 14,” he said. “We were both working-class kids; we grew up with that. And anything else that was in our world at that moment, it didn’t really matter to us.”But local performances by Roxy Music, then an up-and-coming art-rock band that included Mr. Eno on primitive synthesizers and tape effects, suggested new possibilities.“People like Brian Eno were a massive influence on us, because he was actually integrating things that were nonmusical, and that appealed to us,” Mr. Mallinder said. “We didn’t really want to be musicians. The idea of being technically proficient or learning a traditional instrument was kind of anathema to us.”Mr. Kirk attended art school and completed a one-year program in sculpture. He joined Mr. Mallinder and Mr. Watson, a Dada-besotted telephone engineer, in Cabaret Voltaire, which was initially an amorphous, boundary-pushing workshop project based in Mr. Watson’s attic.“We studiously went there Tuesdays and Thursdays every week and experimented for two hours or so, during which time we’d lay down maybe three or four compositions,” Mr. Kirk told Mr. Reynolds. Less musicians than provocateurs at first, the members of Cabaret Voltaire were soon swept up in England’s punk-rock revolution. In 1978, the group established Western Works, a rehearsal and recording studio based in what had previously been the offices of the Sheffield Federation of Young Socialists.“Western Works gave us the freedom to do what we wanted,” Mr. Kirk said. An advance from the independent label Rough Trade helped the band outfit the studio with a four-track recorder and mixing desk. Rough Trade proceeded to issue some of the band’s most influential and enduring work.After Mr. Watson left the group, Mr. Kirk and Mr. Mallinder moved increasingly toward unambiguous dance-floor rhythms, drum machines and lush synthesizer sounds, scoring underground hits like “Sensoria,” “James Brown” and “I Want You.” A major-label contract with EMI resulted in a collaboration with the influential producer Adrian Sherwood on the group’s album “Code” (1987), and a 1990 collaboration with Chicago house-music producers, “Groovy, Laidback and Nasty.” But audience indifference and mounting debt led to the group’s dissolution four years later.Mr. Kirk plunged into an array of pseudonymous side projects and collaborations. Performing with Richard Barratt (a.k.a. DJ Parrot) in a duo called Sweet Exorcist, he was among the earliest artists documented by the fledgling Warp label. He had another potent collaboration, with the Sheffield recording engineer Robert Gordon, as the techno duo XON.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Kirk rejected lucrative offers by festivals like Coachella to revive the original Cabaret Voltaire. “Some people might think I’m daft for not taking the money, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable within myself doing that,” he said in a 2017 interview with Fact magazine. “Cabaret Voltaire was always about breaking new ground and moving forward.”He bolstered that impression by declining to perform any older Cabaret Voltaire material. “I always make it really clear that if you think you’re going to come and hear the greatest hits, then don’t come because you’re not,” he told Fact. “What you might get is the same spirit.” More

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      ‘Britney vs Spears’ Review: When the Intervention Is the Problem

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      A Netflix documentary directed by Erin Lee Carr offers a timely if vexing primer on the pop star’s legal battle, which may finally be coming to an end.If the makers of “Britney vs Spears” could add one more update to the end of the documentary’s already lengthy text crawl of developments following the film’s completion, they’d have fresh material. On Wednesday, a judge agreed to the suspension of the pop star’s father, James P. Spears, as her conservator.If you have managed to ignore the unfolding story of the conservatorship and the solidarity movement #freebritney, the director Erin Lee Carr’s documentary may serve as a timely if vexing primer. The conservatorship, a legal arrangement that gave the star’s father and others a kind of absolute guardianship over her, was put into place 13 years ago. At the time, it was temporary. The pop music phenom is now 39 years old. In the summer, the battle over the situation hit warp speed.“Britney vs Spears” quickly establishes the magnitude of the performer’s reach with images of packed concerts and rapt fans (so many screaming teenage girls), and clips from her music videos, including the one that put her on the map: “… Baby One More Time” (1998), in which she appeared famously in schoolgirl garb.Relying on a great deal of pickup footage — some from news coverage, some seemingly from hounding paparazzi — “Britney vs Spears” can be dizzying and dismaying. More often, the documentary provides an apt example of what it must be like to be a celebrity surrounded by intimates whose agendas appear murky at best. Throughout, the viewer must factor in a good measure of suspicion. Which declarations are accurate? Which are biased? When are they both? Why did this person agree to an interview?Among those who speak on Spears’s behalf but also have their own freighted relationship with her fame and wealth are her sometime manager and friend Sam Lutfi, who rates high on the ick-scale, and an ex-boyfriend Adnan Ghalib, who met Spears when he was part of the pack of paparazzi chasing her. Even the superfan Jordan Miller, who helped start the #freebritney movement, seems a little too pumped for his adjacent fame.A welcome exception to the iffier interviewees is Tony Chicotel, a lawyer and expert on long-term-care rights and California law. The filmmakers call on him to help navigate the ins and outs of the conservatorship. Like guardianship, the court-appointed conservator role exists to protect people who aren’t able — physically, mentally — to make decisions. (The recent comedy “I Care a Lot” made dark sport of the potential for abuse, with Rosamund Pike playing a court-appointed conservator who preyed on older people.)The journalist Jenny Eliscu, who wrote about Spears for Rolling Stone, plays a significant role in the film (she’s an executive producer). In 2020, the film’s makers received a load of leaked documents about the conservatorship. In a framing device that tries a little too hard to put some distance between “Britney vs Spears” and more exploitative celebrity coverage, Eliscu and the director sit in front of those documents, a Woodward and Bernstein for an Instagram age. (In February, “Framing Britney Spears,” a documentary produced by The New York Times, was released, which I haven’t seen. The same goes for a follow-up, “Controlling Britney Spears.”)To her credit, Carr is transparent about where her sympathies lie. Early on, the camera peruses a girl’s bedroom, focusing in on a pink boombox. The director confesses in voice-over that at 10, she was obsessed with Spears and “… Baby One More Time.” So much so her father, David Carr, asked, “Why are you listening to that song over and over?” Later in the film, Eliscu tears up as she tells the story of secreting a legal document to Spears at a hotel.“Britney vs Spears” underscores how tricky it is to make a credible documentary about a celebrity under duress without repeating many of the gestures that treat fame as the sine qua non of American culture. Even the Oscar-winning documentary “Amy,” a far more elegant dive into a tough pop-music story, could not elude fully the sense that the way it told Amy Winehouse’s story also replicated at times a suspect fascination.This documentary doesn’t dodge the fact that at the time the conservatorship was put in place, there was a great deal unspooling in Spears’s life that had her family concerned about her emotional — and financial — welfare. The year before the court granted James Spears control of his daughter, Britney had divorced Kevin Federline. The couple had two very young sons, who were the subject of custody skirmishes. Amid those tensions, Britney Spears’s behavior was erratic.But what happens when the intervention becomes the problem? The Britney Spears factory — and its myriad subsidiaries — remained robust, golden-goosed by her output. There was a cottage industry of lawyers employed by the conservatorship. The concert footage, the music videos and the clips of Spears rehearsing dance steps all appear to attest to a hard-working ethos and seem to challenge the notion that she could not conduct her affairs. The greatest lesson of “Britney vs Spears” might be how exploitable the role of conservator can become.Still, something remarkable happens at the end of the film. In a deft move, Carr uses excerpts from a recording made at a court hearing in June. After all those talking heads speaking about her, speaking for her, Britney speaks. And what she says has a sorrow and a fury, but also a clarity and defiance.Lisa Kennedy writes on popular culture, race and gender. She lives in Denver, Colo.Britney vs SpearsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More