Music

His albums and performances with Apollo Sound brought new complexity to the genre in the 1970s. His group was still getting the crowds dancing decades later.Roberto Roena, a dancer who became a bongo player who then became a bandleader, along the way establishing himself as a leading figure in salsa and some of its best-known bands, died on Sept. 23 in Puerto Rico. He was 81.Andrés Waldemar, a singer in Mr. Roena’s orchestra, announced his death on social media but did not specify a cause. Local news reports said he died at a hospital in Carolina, outside San Juan.Mr. Roena was best known as the founder of Roberto Roena y Su Apollo Sound, which released a string of well-regarded albums in the 1970s, salsa’s heyday. He was also a member of the Fania All-Stars, a group formed about the same time to showcase stars of the Fania record label, which was often described as the Motown of salsa.Onstage Mr. Roena was a whirlwind, dancing out front while banging a cowbell when he wasn’t playing bongos. Apollo Sound was still getting crowds dancing decades later.“The music always darted forward, driven by the sound of metal being struck by wood,” Peter Watrous wrote in The New York Times in 1998, reviewing an Apollo Sound show at the Copacabana in Manhattan. “Mr. Roena’s placement of notes, the way they fit into patterns, brought the audience and the musicians together in a form of personal rhythmic transcendence. Mr. Roena has that kind of power.”Pedro Pierluisi, the governor of Puerto Rico, where Mr. Roena was born, declared last Saturday to be a day of mourning in Mr. Roena’s honor. He called the death “an irreparable loss for Puerto Rico and the whole world, but especially for salsa lovers.”“Iconic songs like ‘El Escapulario,’ ‘Cui Cui,’ ‘Mi Desengano,’ ‘Marejada Feliz’ and many more transcended generations,” the governor said in a statement. “His musical legacy of more than 60 years will remain with us.”Mr. Roena started Roberto Roena y Su Apollo Sound, which released a string of well-regarded albums in the 1970s, salsa’s heyday.FaniaRoberto Roena was born on Jan. 16, 1940, in Mayagüez, on the island’s west coast. His family later moved to the Santurce district of San Juan, where as a boy he and a brother worked up some cha-cha and mambo dance routines that garnered enough acclaim to get them onto a local television show.After catching the act, the Puerto Rican musician and bandleader Rafael Cortijo invited Mr. Roena, who was only 15 or 16, to join his orchestra, Cortijo y Su Combo, as a dancer and chorus member. Mr. Cortijo, a percussionist, began schooling him on the bongos, and soon Roberto was part of the band.When Mr. Cortijo’s group dissolved, Mr. Roena became part of the salsa orchestra El Gran Combo, recording and touring internationally. It was in 1969 that he formed Apollo Sound — named, some versions of the tale go, because its first rehearsal coincided with the launch of Apollo 11, the first mission to land astronauts on the moon. The group almost had a different name.“First I wanted to put Apollo 12, because we were 12 musicians,” he told La Opinión in 1996, “but then I thought, if the United States launches Apollo 13, we are obsolete.”With Apollo Sound, Mr. Roena took salsa to a new level of sophistication, working in two or even three trumpets and a complex rhythm section to create a propulsive sound that drew on the music of jazz-rock groups like Chicago and Blood, Sweat & Tears. Its live shows were wild, with Mr. Roena setting the tone, and its albums for Fania were steady sellers.In an interview with The Times in 2014, when he was part of the lineup for a Fania Records tribute concert in Central Park, Mr. Roena credited the label’s founders, Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci, with creating the salsa phenomenon.“Jerry and Johnny gave you the freedom to do your own thing,” he said. “They allowed the musicians to express themselves the way we wanted, and that led to a lot of hit records.”His survivors include his wife, Antonia María Nieves Santos, and four children, Brenda, Gladys, Ivan and Francisco.Mr. Roena was still performing well into his 70s. He had a minor heart attack in 1995, but, he said in the 1996 interview, that wasn’t going to keep him off the stage.“I get tired,” he said, “but when I climb onto a platform, I am a different person.” More

The singer and songwriter’s seventh album, “In These Silent Days,” realizes and polishes her ambitions.The quarantine and isolation of 2020 didn’t subdue Brandi Carlile. Just the opposite. Her seventh album, “In These Silent Days,” braves the extremes of Carlile’s songwriting. She empathizes, apologizes and lays out accusations. She’s righteous and she’s self-doubting. She proffers fond lullabies and she unleashes full-throated screams. The album reaffirms her ambitions and polishes them, too. The music Carlile makes with her songwriting partners and bandmates, Tim and Phil Hanseroth (on bass and guitar), harks back to the handmade sounds of 1970s rock. Songs on “In These Silent Days” pay clear tribute to Joni Mitchell (“You and Me on the Rock”) and the Who (“Broken Horses”). Yet Carlile is unmistakably a 21st-century figure: a gay married mother of two daughters who bypassed the country-music establishment to reach her own fervent audience.From the beginning — Carlile released her debut album, “Brandi Carlile,” in 2005 — her gifts have been obvious. She writes melodies that gather drama as they unfold, carrying lyrics filled with compassion, close observation and sometimes heroic metaphors. Her voice can be limpid and confiding or fiercely torn as she strategically reveals its startling range. As early as 2007, with the title song of her second album, “The Story,” Carlile proved she could sound confessional while belting to the rafters. There was no denying her emotional power, even though at times, on her early albums, it shaded into melodrama.“In These Silent Days” follows through on the long-deserved recognition that Carlile found with her 2018 album, “By the Way, I Forgive You,” and its flagship single, “The Joke,” a grandly crescendoing ballad that tells sensitive misfits that their time will come. It was nominated for the Grammy for song of the year in 2019, and Carlile’s showstopping prime-time performance introduced her to a new swath of fans.Carlile chose to share the added attention. She collaborated on writing and producing a Grammy-winning comeback album, “While I’m Livin’,” for the country singer Tanya Tucker, and she formed an Americana alliance, the Highwomen, with Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris and Amanda Shires. She also performed the entirety of Joni Mitchell’s album “Blue” in Los Angeles, a concert she’ll bring to Carnegie Hall on Nov. 6.When the pandemic curtailed her years of touring in 2020, Carlile completed her memoir, “Broken Horses,” and wrote songs with her band members in the compound they share in Washington state. They recorded the new album in Nashville with Dave Cobb and Shooter Jennings, who had also produced “By the Way, I Forgive You.”“In These Silent Days” consolidates Carlile’s strengths: musical, writerly, maternal, political. It opens with her latest ballad showpiece, “Right on Time,” which pleads for a reunion and a second chance: “You might be angry now — of course you are,” Carlile admits with breathy hesitation at the beginning, before the song starts its big climb in the chorus. “It wasn’t right, but it was right on time,” Carlile declares, rising to an operatic peak and, in the final iteration, leaping up from there, perfectly poised between personal heartache and stagy flamboyance. In a few seconds of sound, she makes herself both larger than life and achingly human.“Broken Horses” doesn’t wait for its buildup. It’s an imagistic, nonlinear song full of defiance — “I’m a tried and weathered woman but I won’t be tried again,” Carlile vows — and from the start, Carlile’s voice is on the verge of breaking into a shriek, riding hard-strummed guitars and rumbling drums directly out of “Who’s Next.” There are moments of respite in paused, sustained harmonies, but Carlile is all scars and fury, as elemental as she has ever been.She makes a more measured ascent in “Sinners, Saints and Fools,” with electric guitars and orchestral strings mustering behind her for a final surge. The song is a parable about legalism, fundamentalism and immigration; a “God-fearing man” declares “You can’t break the law” and turns away “desperate souls who washed up on the sand” undocumented, only to find himself turned away from heaven.Carlile is equally telling in quieter songs. She sings to her children in “Stay Gentle,” a lilting compendium of advice — “To find joy in the darkness is wise/Although they will think you are naïve” — and, more moodily, in “Mama Werewolf,” which calls on them to hold her to account if she turns destructive: “Be the one, my silver bullet in the gun.”She neatly twists a knife in “Throwing Good After Bad,” a stately, pensive but resentful piano ballad about being left behind by someone who would always be “Addicted to the rush, the chase, the new.” And in “When You’re Wrong,” she sings to an aging friend — “The creases on your forehead run like treads on a tire” — who’s trapped in a relationship that “pulls you down while you slowly waste your days.” In Carlile’s songs, she sees human flaws clearly and unsparingly, including her own. More often than not, her music finds ways to forgive.Brandi Carlile“In These Silent Days”(Low Country Sound/Elektra) More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherLast week, the R&B superstar R. Kelly — one of the most popular musicians of the 1990s and 2000s — was convicted in federal court for his role in an enterprise that recruited women and underage girls for sexual exploitation. He was found guilty on nine counts: racketeering, and eight violations of the Mann Act, a sex trafficking statute.For well over two decades, allegations about Kelly’s inappropriate sexual behavior had been sometimes covered in the press, and sometimes discussed by fans. He was even tried, unsuccessfully, on child pornography charges in 2008. But in recent years, new reporting about his coercive behavior and a documentary giving voice to his victims reframed the public narrative around Kelly. Several victims testified against him, as did several people who worked for the star.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the specifics of Kelly’s trial, the meaning of his conviction, and the long — and ongoing — quest for proper recompense for his victims.Guests:Troy Closson, The New York Times metro reporter covering law enforcement and criminal justiceJim DeRogatis, who for more than two decades has covered allegations of wrongdoing against R. Kelly for several outlets including the Chicago Sun-Times, Buzzfeed and The New YorkerConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

Two critics discuss Terence Blanchard’s “Fire,” the Metropolitan Opera’s first work by a Black composer.“Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the Metropolitan Opera’s season last week, was a milestone: the company’s first work by a Black composer. The music, by Terence Blanchard —  a jazz trumpeter also known for his scores for Spike Lee films — has earned praise from both classical and jazz critics.The New York Times’s chief classical critic Anthony Tommasini described “a compositional voice dominated by lushly chromatic and modal harmonic writing, spiked with jagged rhythms and tart dissonance.” The jazz writer Nate Chinen wrote for NPR that “the smooth deployment of extended jazz harmony, often in breathing, fleeting passages, marks the piece as modern — as does the work of a rhythm section nestled within the orchestra.”The Times sent two more critics to the second performance on Friday. Seth Colter Walls, based on the classical desk, and Giovanni Russonello, who specializes in jazz, have both covered figures who cross with ease between concert halls and jazz clubs. But “Fire,” based on a 2014 memoir by the Times columnist Charles M. Blow, was their first night at the opera together, the spur to an extended discussion.SETH COLTER WALLS As we walked into the Met, you described yourself as an opera neophyte. But as Duke Ellington said, good music is good music. And from our intermission chats, I know we agree that this was a richly enjoyable work. How do you place it within Blanchard’s career?GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO We knew going in that Blanchard’s body of work is one of the broadest and most imposing of any living jazz musician. But I was struck by how many aspects of his past output seemed to come together in “Fire.” He’s one of the rare jazz composers who can load up a piece with rich harmony and real rhythmic pleasure, without feeling the need to tie things up neatly or deliver a clean payoff. That style fed perfectly into the emotional ambivalence that gives this opera its power.WALLS I find that quality to be one of the weapons he offers Spike Lee, who in his films tends to delight in keeping alive ambiguous tension. Blanchard can suture small wings of hope to what otherwise seems a rock of despair, and keep you wondering whether the whole assemblage will rise or fall.Will Liverman, left, and Angel Blue star in “Fire” at the Met.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRUSSONELLO From the opening scene of “Fire,” his diverse palette was put in the service of narrative nuance. As Charles, the main character, speeds down the highway, holding a pistol and a fatal decision in his hands, a distant swing feel wafted up from the pit, propelled by the bassist Matt Brewer and the drummer Jeff Watts, who’s known in jazz circles as Tain. It had the same restless, pushing-forward feeling as many of Blanchard’s small-group jazz compositions. But a drape of violins also hung above, moving in unison with the baritone Will Liverman’s vocal lines — and calling to mind some of those sweeping film scores.WALLS True, though Liverman also sounded a bit swamped by some of that opening brass-and-percussion-heavy writing. But soon after, the subtlety of his singing impressed me. Flintier aspects of his tone dominated during the first act, but then fell away as the night wore on. Even by the time of the “golden buttons” melody in the first act, I think we both were moved by the warmth in his voice.RUSSONELLO And by the gravitas of his duet on that melody with the soprano Angel Blue, who plays three characters: the half-menacing Destiny; the all-too-sympathetic Loneliness; and Greta, with whom he falls in love.Which leads me to another successful element of “Fire” that reflects Blanchard’s roots in the Black musical tradition: the interplay between vocalists, in duets and ensembles. Some of the most rousing moments were not solos but shared performances: When Charles’s mother, Billie (Latonia Moore), sings about her frustrated dreams early in the opera, the chorus is behind her describing the tough conditions of their town, giving her struggles texture and weight. Charles’s brothers’s recurring taunt — “Charles baby, youngest of five” — becomes one of the opera’s most memorable refrains.From left, Blue, Walter Russell III, Latonia Moore and Liverman. One of the opera’s strengths is in the interplay between vocalists in duets and ensembles.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWALLS Following Billie to her job at the meat-preparation plant also turns into a fine group number. And, crucially, there are laugh lines in these and other scenes.RUSSONELLO Group dance performances stood out, too. Act II’s opening ballet sequence and the step-team number in Act III were probably the clearest examples of African diasporic tradition meeting opera convention; in both moments, something sparked.Blanchard has said that, like his first opera, “Champion” (2013), “Fire” is an “opera in jazz.” But like any postmodernist, his understanding of what constitutes jazz is quite open. It can mean wildly extended harmony, blues inflections, odd-metered cadences, unconventional instrumental pairings. With “Fire,” the blueprint was classic Italian opera, but the furniture was these other elements. And magnetic rhythm was a constant throughout.WALLS The cast clearly loved sliding bluesy figurations between passages delivered with operatic vibrato.At the start of Act III, when Charles pledges the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, the step routine drew the night’s longest and most vigorous applause.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRUSSONELLO Blanchard has such a knack for counterintuition: A consequential scene at a blues club begins with the orchestra playing some straightforward blues in the background, but when the bandleader character (Spinner, Charles’s scalawag father, played by Chauncey Packer) gets onstage, he sings something more operatic and complex.WALLS I loved that head-fake from Blanchard. (I also wanted to attend a full set of Spinner’s at that club.)RUSSONELLO Spinner’s “Lord Love the Sinner” is a rapscallion anthem that harks back to Sportin’ Life’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” in “Porgy and Bess.” Which brings up the question of how “Fire” relates to other works in the American canon that toe the line between blues, jazz and opera — including works by William Grant Still (a favorite composer of yours, Seth) or Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. (What powerful work might they have made with a Met commission?) Were there any major touchstones that jumped out as we took in “Fire”?WALLS Blanchard sounds like Blanchard, which is key. He’s coming out of a folk tradition, like Still. He’s adding ringers from his jazz career to the opera pit, like Anthony Davis and Leroy Jenkins have done. But he’s his own composer. Some piano-led moments made me think of what Jelly Roll Morton, known to riff on Verdi’s “Il Trovatore,” would have done if given a chance to let his New Orleans aesthetic shine forth from the Met stage.Blanchard, holding up his finger, rehearses the jazz ensemble that is embedded in the “Fire” orchestra.Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesRUSSONELLO It bears noting that New Orleans — Blanchard’s hometown, too — has its own rich (though badly forgotten) history of Black opera. The first opera in the United States was staged there, and in the years between Reconstruction and Jim Crow a number of opera houses featured casts of color. Blanchard’s father, an amateur opera singer, was an inheritor of that tradition; this, in turn, became part of his son’s musical DNA.WALLS That second-act dream-ballet music — perfect for the languid, suggestive dancing that it was paired with — was but one passage suggesting Blanchard’s love for the standard repertory. Yet we haven’t had anything quite like “Fire.” Leonard Bernstein looked at intergenerational trauma amid a distinctly American sound world in “A Quiet Place” — and while I love it, it’s also a notorious problem piece. And “Porgy and Bess” has never really worked as an evening of theater for me. (Great tunes, though.)So my response to this big-budget production was: Finally! Real classical music resources are being used here, for a real exploration of American musical culture. I feel like there’s a huge potential audience for this material — even for people who may not think of themselves as operagoers. (“Fire” will be simulcast to movie theaters on Oct. 23 as part of the Met’s Live in HD program.)RUSSONELLO At the start of Act III, when Charles pledges the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, the step routine drew the night’s longest and most vigorous applause. It tapped into a dance tradition that’s basically unrelated to opera, but was accorded a different kind of power appearing at the Met.WALLS One of the virtues of Kasi Lemmons’s libretto — and what Blanchard does with it — is that we get these sequences that are at are both encomiums to bulwarks of Black life and critiques. Charles’s extended family, his church and his fraternity each play a part in keeping him from telling the truth about being molested by his cousin. The drama and the music keep braiding together pride and frustration, in a way that makes the opera’s conclusion and Charles’s self-acceptance feel truly momentous. More

Sometimes you need an overwrought antidote to the overwhelming events of daily life.When I receive disappointing news, I allow myself to wallow for exactly four minutes and 22 seconds: the length of the 2004 Green Day hit “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” I focus on nothing but my feelings for the duration of the song, which expresses emotion in such cartoonish terms that, listening to it, I can indulge in maudlin self-pity.Green Day was my world’s soundtrack in the early aughts, providing pop-punk angst at mall food courts, graduations and birthday parties. “Boulevard,” from the album “American Idiot,” is an emo power ballad, full of mixed metaphors expressing the privileged blah of being bored and misunderstood in the suburbs of a morally compromised nation. Conceived of as a sort of rock opera, “American Idiot” follows the ups and downs of its protagonist, “Jesus of Suburbia.” As the character’s name might suggest, the entire album operates at a melodramatic pitch, with Jesus encountering adversaries and feeling misunderstood everywhere he turns. “Boulevard” narrates a low point in the hero’s journey. The singer, Billie Joe Armstrong, resembles a musical-theater protagonist when he sings lines like “I’m walking down the line/That divides me somewhere in my mind/On the borderline/Of the edge, and where I walk alone.”When “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” came out, I was 9. It made me feel like a kid from “School of Rock.” I appreciated its intelligibility and, from where I stood, its edge. I was not really into cool music back then. My prized album, which I listened to on my red CD Walkman from Radio Shack, was the soundtrack to the movie “Holes.” I was too cautious to participate when my classmates passed around burned copies of Green Day CDs on the playground at school. One weekend, though, I was delighted to be invited to a slumber party by classmates who did things like get pink streaks in their hair and wear little mesh gloves from Hot Topic. (I myself stuck to a uniform of “Life Is Good” shirts with black stretchy pants in this period; I sometimes wore foam earrings shaped like wedges of cheese to school.) But that night, I felt transgressive. We sang karaoke. We looked at pictures of Pink on the computer. We screamed the lyrics to “Sk8er Boi.” And, ecstatically, we listened to Green Day and Good Charlotte. High on rocking out and being included, I let another girl write the name of one of those two pop-punk bands — I can’t remember which — in huge letters on my arms in black Sharpie. It comforts me to face an operatic version of emotional reality, then to just shake it off and move on.Then I came crashing down. The party was over. I hid my arms in my hoodie when my mom came over to get me. I was embarrassed to reveal that, for a few minutes, I had escaped into a high-velocity version of reality. “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” mimicked the intensity I felt in my angstiest moments; it mirrored a heightened version of my emotional reality back to me. Now, years later, I look back with amusement and even jealousy at the purity of those feelings. So recently, I have found myself drawn anew to the earnest drama of this song. The central premise of “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” is that the character is walking around feeling isolated and bummed for reasons the band leaves vague — the better for the listener to insert her own experience. “I walk alone,” Armstrong sings in overwrought fashion. “My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me.” The lyrics are repetitive, as if trying to blow up the character’s suffering to widescreen proportions. At points, Armstrong sounds so swollen with emotion that he cuts himself off in the middle of a line. The dour F minor key and abrasive strumming give the gift of broad, atmospheric ennui to those who want to stew. Such dramatic displays of emotion are, of course, frowned upon in daily life. But overwhelming events continue apace even as the range of acceptable ways to react shrinks. In that context, it is validating to access and embrace high drama, even if only for a few minutes, in response to even minor provocations. I am not walking along the song’s proverbial boulevard of broken dreams, I realize. No — someone just failed to text me back. It comforts me to face an operatic version of emotional reality, then to just shake it off and move on. Listening to the song, I enter a world where people scream what they mean and am transported back to the simpler emotional state of my stretchy-pants days. This summer, I was standing on a subway platform heading uptown when I received an expected but still deflating rejection email from an editor. I had worked hard on my pitch and secretly nursed the fantasy that my story idea would be accepted. So when she very kindly told me it could not be, I felt my face get hot and my stomach sink in disappointment. But instead of bursting into tears, I popped in my AirPods and played “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” When the train pulled up, I sat down. I tapped into the childhood bluntness of feeling misunderstood, and by the time the fourth minute rolled around, I laughed. When I got to 96th Street, I felt fine. I met my parents for dinner.Much of my youthful angst has dissolved as I’ve aged, and that has been on the whole a positive and appropriate development. But in times when I feel swells of disquietude, I don’t try to suppress them. I honor them, ever so briefly. For just over four minutes, I walk alone on a lonely road. Then when it’s over, I remember the people around me and move on. More

“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

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

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