Music

The new film “Respect” is one of three recent attempts to understand the artist. Only the one that focuses solely on her music comes close.Early on in “Respect,” the latest onscreen retelling of Aretha Franklin’s story, the aging jazz and R&B star Dinah Washington asks her protégée, “Child, are you ever going to tell us who the daddy is?”Otherwise timid or thankful, Franklin (Jennifer Hudson) responds to Washington’s probing about the paternity of her sons, the first born when she was only 12, with a mix of incredulity and imposing silence. Suddenly what starts off as one of the film’s main mysteries and perhaps Franklin’s biggest childhood trauma ends up as a throwaway line, never to be revisited again.Instead, “Respect,” the debut film by the renowned theater director Liesl Tommy, ends up heeding the advice Washington gives Franklin about her music: “Honey, find the songs that move you.” The biopic is less a movie about Franklin’s interior life or the origins of what her character insists are the “demons” that haunt her, and more about how she as a prodigious vocalist and brilliant pianist and songwriter channeled her pain into songs that moved not just her, but the entire world. In the end, those gaps in the plot are distracting and keep Franklin at arm’s length, rendering her as elusive on the screen as she was in public in real life.A musical moment from “Respect,” with, from left, Henry Riggs, Jennifer Hudson, Hailey Kilgore, Saycon Sengbloh, Alec Barnes, John Giorgio, Marc Maron and Joe Knezevich.Quantrell D. Colbert/MGM“Respect” is part of a larger trend of films and TV series — including the National Geographic mini-series “Genius: Aretha,” starring Cynthia Erivo, and the Sydney Pollack documentary “Amazing Grace” (filmed in 1972 but released in 2018) — that all try to capture Franklin’s virtuosity. In their own way and to varying degrees of success, each struggles with how best to showcase her as a singular artist while expanding our understanding of a woman so intent on privacy.The upside of “Respect” is that it truly focuses on the intricacies of her music-making. The most riveting scenes are when we see her really play: in a recording studio turned jam session with the all-white Muscle Shoals band in Alabama, turning a sleepy “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” into a sultry, soulful confession. Or when she wakes up her sisters, Erma (Saycon Sengbloh) and Carolyn (Hailey Kilgore) in the middle of the night to rearrange the Otis Redding classic “Respect,” with her siblings adding the famous “Re-re-re” riff and forever transforming the song into a Black woman’s anthem.Given how electrifying those moments were, I found myself wanting more and more music, a feat achieved by Hudson’s own riveting take on Franklin’s classics as well as my memory of hearing Franklin’s powerhouse voice for the first time. In this sense, “Respect” gives us the biopic I always thought I was looking for — a portrait of a Black woman whose musical genius remains front and center without being sidelined or overshadowed by her personal struggle with trauma. Though the movie does show Aretha battling depression or her husband, Ted White, such agony never overtakes the story or our sense of her musicality the way it does in other biopics about iconic Black women performers, like Billie Holiday or Tina Turner. Instead, “Respect” treats trauma as a string of unresolved secrets, the source of which neither the film nor Franklin herself ever felt compelled to share with her audience.Hudson with Forest Whitaker as Franklin’s father in “Respect.”Quantrell D. Colbert/MGMThe result is a movie that skews too closely to Franklin’s own self-image, a narrative that she tightly controlled during her lifetime as a matter of privacy and as a way to assert her own power in an industry, and country, dominated by sexist and racist stereotypes about Black women’s sexuality and intelligence.The biographer David Ritz wrote of this distance in “Respect,” his second book on Franklin, saying, “In spite of my determination to be a compassionate listener, someone whose gentle persistence would allow her to reveal all her sacred secrets, my technique ultimately did not work. In the end, I didn’t make a dent in her armor.”Further reflecting on his first biography, “Aretha: From These Roots,” which he wrote based on interviews with Franklin, and which thus had her blessing, he said, “She got the book she wanted. To this day, Aretha considers her book an accurate portrait.”Franklin’s imprint is all over the film “Respect” as well. She handpicked Hudson, a move that set music as the center of the movie but risked the appearance that Hudson’s depiction might be too dependent on Franklin’s own self-image. In other words, as good as the music sounds (and it sounds soooooo very, very good), the plot holes about her past, which seemed to inform much of her character’s decision-making, kept nagging at me as I watched.Why did her mother, Barbara (Audra McDonald), leave her children behind with her domineering husband, the Rev. C.L. Franklin (Forest Whitaker), only to show up, after her death, as an angelic force in Aretha’s life?Why doesn’t Aretha remember having to rush to the roof and sing loudly with her sisters as children in order to drown out her parents fighting?And what is the shame the film keeps hinting at, but, like Aretha, never wants to confront?What does she need music to save her from?In one notable scene in “Respect,” her friend the Rev. James Cleveland says to Aretha, “There are no demons. Just the pain you’ve been running from your whole life.” Reassuring her more, Cleveland notes, “He knows it wasn’t your fault.”Cynthia Erivo as the singer in “Genius: Aretha.”Richard Ducree/National GeographicAnd because we aren’t quite sure if he is referring to her pregnancy, her mother’s departure or something else, we applaud Aretha’s catharsis while wondering about the cause.The mini-series “Genius: Aretha,” written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, however, is more forthcoming. By showing a young Aretha as the victim of sexual assault and attributing her parents’ breakup to her father’s own impregnating of a 12-year-old girl in his congregation, potential explanations of her childhood trauma are revealed but do not dominate its depiction.But even in this version, Aretha is a somewhat muted presence, and Erivo (a powerhouse vocalist herself) sometimes seems constrained by the need to toggle back and forth between Franklin’s introverted nature at home and her iconic status onstage.A scene from the documentary “Amazing Grace,” which the singer didn’t want released.Amazing Grace Film, LLCMaybe this is why I still find myself obsessed with the one movie that she never wanted to be seen onscreen: the documentary “Amazing Grace.” Filmed ​​by Pollack over two nights in a Los Angeles Baptist church in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Watts, “Amazing Grace” is all gospel, a cinematic capturing of spiritual ecstasy and religious exaltation, and a Franklin who surrenders her voice to God, and is at her most sublime.Dismissing the documentary in 1999 in her memoir, she told Ritz, “When I saw what had been done in one section of the film, I was appalled.” She went on, referring to the gospel singer Clara Ward, “One of the cameramen kept shooting straight up underneath Clara’s dress. She was in the front row. Talk about bad taste!” (Franklin would later say her aversion to its release had nothing to do with its content, which she claimed to have “loved.”) Her disdain for the project led her to sue repeatedly to block its release, though it finally found its way to theaters a few months after her death in 2018.This is perhaps why both “Respect” and “Genius: Aretha” felt compelled to include Pollack’s shoot in their narratives. For “Amazing Grace” had the privilege of giving us Franklin on her own musical terms without having to contend with the singer’s self-portrait. And in that freedom, it was able to share itself as one of Franklin’s best kept secrets. More

The singer and songwriter trades the sonic dynamism and moodiness of her 2017 album “Melodrama” for sun-soaked self-assurance on an LP that doesn’t always come into focus.Eight years ago, the New Zealand pop singer-songwriter Lorde’s breakout hit “Royals” arrived with a seismic rumble and an observational critique: “Every song’s like ‘gold teeth, Grey Goose, trippin’ in the bathroom, blood stains, ball gowns, trashin’ the hotel room.’”For all its eye-rolling, refusenik attitude, the implicit joke was that “Royals” was in some sense one of those everysongs, too, lip-syncing along to the same sentiment it was rejecting. After all, that hook was one of the catchiest parts of the song, underlined by Lorde’s signature, soon-to-be-ubiquitous multitracked self-harmonies.Eventual accusations that “Royals” was moralizing about hip-hop culture did not necessarily take into account the fact that it was paying studied homage to it — woven into the sonic DNA of the song’s low-blood-pressure, 808-heartbeat. Lorde’s music is often idiosyncratically personal, but it also speaks from the perspective of the royal “We.” Something that has always kept her point of view from feeling didactic — even if it has occasionally made her intentions feel a little muddled — is the way her music blurs the line between social commentary and self-own.In a similar spirit, on the third track of her provocatively subdued third album, “Solar Power,” Lorde declares in her looping, vocal cursive, “Don’t want that California love” — this on a song that explicitly references Laurel Canyon folk, the most well-known Joan Didion essay and Quentin Tarantino’s Los Angeles pastiche “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.” Once again, it takes one to know one. “It’s all just a dream,” Lorde gently chides the Coachella-era flower children, on a weightless, twinkling song that sounds suspiciously like one.Earlier this summer, when Lorde first released the album’s breezy title track, some listeners who had expected a sound similar to her bruising, resilient 2017 triumph, “Melodrama,” were left wondering if the 24-year-old known in civilian life as Ella Yelich-O’Connor was kidding. Was this a sendup of influencer culture or a music video explicitly designed as a carousel of Instagram screenshots? How could someone who’d previously made an emotionally operatic 11-song concept album about running into an ex at a party suddenly toss off a line as carefree as “Forget all of the tears that you’ve cried, it’s over”?“Solar Power” and its subsequent singles, “Stoned at the Nail Salon” and “Mood Ring,” make more sense within the context of the album, thanks largely to the vivid scene-setting opener, “The Path.” Atop a murky guitar, Lorde presents a series of impressionistic snapshots of her post-“Royals” life: Attending the 2016 Met Gala in a cast, swiping a fork as a souvenir for her mother, “supermodels all dancing ’round a pharaoh’s tomb.” Elsewhere, she recalls the life-changing moment “when Carole called my name” (as in, Carole King announcing “Royals” as song of the year at the 2014 Grammys) and admits, “I’ve got hundreds of gowns, I’ve got paintings in frames and a throat that fills with panic every festival day.”With the plunging swoop of chorus on “The Path,” though, Lorde suddenly rejects the notion that anyone present for such surreal, celebrity-studded scenes — including herself — can tell the average person how to live their life. “If you’re looking for a savior, well, that’s not me,” she sings, her lush stacked vocals this time highlighting the line’s unapologetic defiance.Lorde, though, is hardly alone in this sentiment. It is somewhat remarkable to consider how many pop albums of the past year have taken up the sometimes-debilitating stress associated with modern-day fame as their main theme: Billie Eilish’s “Happier Than Ever,” Clairo’s “Sling,” and Lana Del Rey’s “Chemtrails Over the Country Club” all chronicle their creators’ burnout and consider, to varying degrees, packing it in and quitting the pop game forever. (A similar conversation has been happening with young women in the sports world, too.) It is perhaps not such a coincidence that three of these four albums, including “Solar Power,” were produced mostly by the seemingly busiest producer in the music industry, the girl-pop-Zelig Jack Antonoff.What keeps much of “Solar Power” from really taking root, though, is that most of these songs are written from the perspective of an enviably serene person snugly on the other side of that struggle. “Dancing with my girls, only having two drinks, then leaving/It’s a funny thing, thought you’d never gain self control,” Lorde sings blithely on one of the album’s more cloying numbers, “Secrets From a Girl (Who’s Seen It All).” At times, “Stoned” and the otherwise incisive “The Man With the Axe” depict personal growth and maturity as a universal footbridge that one decisively crosses once and for all around age 21, rather than a messy, ongoing, lifelong process of stops and false starts. “I thought I was a genius,” she reflects on “Axe,” “but now I’m 22.” At least wait until Saturn returns, Lorde!Make no mistake, amber is the color of her energy, at least at the moment. The mood board of her career peak, “Melodrama,” though, contained a whole kaleidoscope of color, and it’s that wonderful album’s sense of contrast and sonic dynamism that’s missing the most here. Every song on “Solar Power” pulls from a similar and finely curated aesthetic — early 2000s “CW”-theme-song pop; sun-drenched ’70s folk; just a pinch of Kabbalah-era Madonna — and rarely draws outside those lines, let alone picks up differently hued crayons. Name-dropped proper nouns too often feel like a pile of signifiers one step away from being shaped into sharper observations. Even the songs that most directly skewer modern-day wellness culture (the spiritual satire “Mood Ring,” the devilishly emasculating “Dominoes”) would not exactly be offensive to the ears if they were played during a yoga class’s savasana.Perhaps the most stirring moments on the album come toward the very end, at the conclusion of the loose, winding six-minute closer, “Oceanic Feeling.” It’s partially a showcase of the striking, near-photographic clarity Lorde can sometimes achieve with her lyrics (“I see your silver chain levitate when you’re kickflipping”) and a kind of guided visualization of an eventual life after pop stardom. The girl who just eight years ago was asking, however playfully, to be your ruler is now singing with a stirring serenity, “I’ll know when it’s time to take off my robes and step into the choir.”Even as it has billowed to consider such lofty elements as water, sun and air, Lorde’s close-miked music has retained such a careful intimacy that, at times, you can still actually hear her smiling. But like a beaming Instagram photo selectively chosen from a vast camera roll of outtakes, “Solar Power” stops just short of offering a full, varied range of expressions.Lorde“Solar Power”(Republic) More

In a band that defined debauched rock ’n’ roll, he was a quiet, dapper jazz fan. But their unusual chemistry defined the rhythm of the Stones, and of rock.On some superficial level, Charlie Watts had always seemed the oddest Rolling Stone, the one who never quite fit as a member of rock’s most Dionysian force.While his bandmates cultivated an attitude of debauched insouciance, Watts, the band’s drummer since 1963, kept a quiet, even glum, public persona. He avoided the limelight, wore bespoke suits from Savile Row tailors and remained married to the same woman for more than 50 years.Watts even seemed barely interested in rock ’n’ roll itself. He claimed that it had little influence on him, preferring — and long championing — the jazz heritage of Charlie Parker, Buddy Rich and Max Roach. “I never liked Elvis until I met Keith Richards,” Watts told Mojo, a British music magazine, in 1994. “The only rock ’n’ roll player I ever liked when I was young was Fats Domino.”Even the Stones’ celebrated longevity represented less of a life’s mission to Watts than a tedious job punctuated by brief moments of excitement. In the 1989 documentary “25×5: The Continuing Adventures of the Rolling Stones,” he summed up what was then a quarter-century on the clock with one of the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll bands: “Work five years, and 20 years hanging around.”And yet Watts, who died on Tuesday at 80 as the Stones’ longest-serving member outside of Richards and Mick Jagger, was a vital part of the band’s sound, with a rhythmic approach that was as much a part of the Stones’ musical fingerprint as Richards’s sharp-edged guitar or Jagger’s sneering vocals.“To me, Charlie Watts was the secret essence of the whole thing,” Richards wrote in his 2010 memoir, “Life.”Watts’s backbeat gave early hits like “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” a steady testosterone drive, and later tracks like “Tumbling Dice” and “Beast of Burden” a languid strut.His distinctive drumming style — playing with a minimum of motion, often slightly behind the beat — gave the group’s sound a barely perceptible but inimitable rhythmic drag. Bill Wyman, the Stones’ longtime bassist, described that as a byproduct of the group’s unusual chemistry. While in most rock bands the guitarist follows the lead of the drummer, the Stones flipped that relationship — Richards, the guitarist, led the attack, with Watts (and all others) following along.“It’s probably a matter of personality,” Wyman was quoted as saying in Victor Bockris’s book “Keith Richards: The Biography.” “Keith is a very confident and stubborn player. Immediately you’ve got something like a hundredth-of-a-second delay between the guitar and Charlie’s lovely drumming, and that will change the sound completely. That’s why people find it hard to copy us.”Watts’s technique involved idiosyncratic use of the hi-hat, the sandwiched cymbals that rock drummers usually whomp with metronomic regularity. Watts tended to pull his right hand away on the upbeat, giving his left a clear path to the snare drum — lending the beat a strong but slightly off-kilter momentum.Even Watts was not sure where he picked up that quirk. He may have gotten it from his friend Jim Keltner, one of rock’s most well-traveled studio drummers. But the move became a Watts signature, and musicians marveled at his hi-hat choreography. “It’ll give you a heart arrhythmia if you look at it,” Richards wrote.To Watts, it was just an efficient way to land a hard hit on the snare.“I was never conscious I did it,” he said in a 2018 video interview. “I think the reason I did it is to get the hand out of the way to do a bigger backbeat.”Watts’s technique involved idiosyncratic use of the hi-hat. He tended to pull his right hand away on the upbeat, giving his left a clear path to the snare drum.Jeff Hochberg/Getty ImagesWatts’s musical style could be traced to mid-1950s London, the period just before rock took hold among the postwar generation that would dominate pop music a decade later. As a young man he was infatuated with jazz, often jamming with a bass-playing neighbor, Dave Green. In 1962, after stints in local jazz bands, he joined the guitarist Alexis Korner’s group Blues Incorporated, which was influenced by electric Chicago blues and R&B.“I went into rhythm and blues,” Watts recalled in a 2012 interview in The New Yorker. “When they asked me to play, I didn’t know what it was. I thought it meant Charlie Parker, played slow.”While Watts was in Blues Incorporated, Jagger, Richards and Brian Jones — the other founding guitar player of the Rolling Stones — all passed through, playing with the group. Watts joined the Stones at the start of 1963, and that June the band released its first single, a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Come On.”The Stones quickly took their place as leaders in rock’s British Invasion, the rowdy complement to the Beatles. But Watts never quite matched that profile. On the band’s early tours of the United States, he behaved like a middle-aged tourist, making pilgrimages to jazz clubs.As the lifestyle of the Rolling Stones became more extravagant, Watts grew more solitary and eccentric. He became an expert in Georgian silver; he collected vintage cars but never learned to drive. The journalist Stanley Booth, in his book “The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones,” about the glory and the depravity of the band’s 1969 American tour, described Watts as “the world’s politest man.”From left: Mick Jagger, Watts, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Ronnie Wood. While his bandmates cultivated an attitude of debauched insouciance, Watts kept a quiet public persona.Robin Platzer/Getty ImagesAt the same time, Watts often functioned as a kind of ironic mascot for the band. He was a focal point on the covers of “Between the Buttons” (1967) and “Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!” (1970), on which a smiling, leaping Watts posed with a donkey.When members of the Stones relocated to France in 1971 to escape onerous British tax rates, Richards’s rented villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer became the band’s hub of creativity and decadence. Watts and Wyman largely abstained, and as a result were absent for some of the ad hoc recording sessions that resulted in the band’s next album, “Exile on Main St.”“They weren’t very debauched for me,” Watts later said of the sessions. “I mean, I lived with Keith, but I used to sit and play and then I’d go to bed.”While around the Rolling Stones, he was invariably laconic, usually lingering in the background during public appearances. But later in life, as Watts indulged his love for jazz in the long stretches between Stones projects — his groups included Charlie Watts Orchestra and two with Green, the Charlie Watts Quintet and the ABC&D of Boogie Woogie — he opened up, giving occasional interviews.His go-to subjects were his love of jazz and how strange it was to be a member of the Rolling Stones.“I used to play with loads of bands, and the Stones were just another one,” he told The Observer, a British newspaper, in 2000. “I thought they’d last three months, then a year, then three years, then I stopped counting.” More

The musician, who died on Friday, was a true originator of the genre. An outsider, he lived a Latin music life by immersing himself in Afro-Caribbean culture.In many ways, Larry Harlow — one of the central figures of salsa and its defining label, Fania Records — was a master at mixing the diverse musical connections between New York and the Caribbean. In a career that spanned six decades, he stitched together overlapping genres like rock, jazz and R&B and various Cuban genres like rumba, son and guaracha through intimate, soulful knowledge of both musical traditions.Harlow grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and studied classical piano. His father, Buddy Kahn, was a Jewish mambo musician who led the house band at New York’s Latin Quarter club. The musician and scholar Benjamin Lapidus writes in his new book that Jews were sponsoring Latin dances with live bands as early as the 1930s in New York City. Harlow came out of a tradition of mamboniks, Jews who danced mambo at spaces like Midtown’s Palladium, various spots in Brooklyn and the Catskills hotel circuit. Jewish musicians like Marty Sheller often wrote arrangements, and radio D.J.s like “Symphony” Sid Torin and Dick “Ricardo” Sugar promoted the music. Immortal Latin band leaders like Tito Puente regularly played the Catskills, a space where young musicians like Alfredo “Chocolate” Armenteros, who became a Harlow collaborator, cut their teeth.Yet Harlow, who died on Friday at 82, wanted to go beyond the Europeanized mambo performance styles heard in the Catskills and be true to the music’s African roots. He traveled to pre-Castro Cuba in the 1950s and returned determined to combine what he learned with what was happening in New York, creating a modern synthesis of the traditional and the avant-garde. Seeking acceptance among core post-mambo musicians, he even went so far as to become initiated to the Afro-Caribbean religion of Santería to stake his claim to authenticity and earn respect from the music community.“Here was a Jewish guy hanging out with all these Cubans and Afro-Caribbeans,” he told me in a 2004 interview. “I figured when in Rome, do like the Romans do.”Harlow never tried to pretend he was not who he was. Even after achieving insider status in the Santería community, he was often photographed wearing a Star of David around his neck. He was affectionately known by Spanish-speaking audiences as El Judío Maravilloso (the Marvelous Jew), a sobriquet given to him because of his devotion to the music of the blind Afro-Cuban bandleader and mambo progenitor Arsenio Rodríguez, known as El Ciego Maravilloso (the Marvelous Blind Man). When he chose, in the early 1980s, to release an album called “Yo Soy Latino” (“I Am Latino”), the lead vocalist who delivered the lyrics was the much-loved Puerto Rican singer Tito Allen.Beyond immersing himself in Afro-Carribean spirituality, Harlow was directly involved in the evolution of salsa music, collaborating with Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci, the founders of Fania. According to Alex Masucci, Jerry’s surviving brother, Harlow was the first artist contracted to record for Fania. His first few albums, “Bajándote: Gettin’ Off,” “El Exigente” and “Me and My Monkey,” which includes a version of the Beatles song “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” traded on the bilingual, R&B-influenced bugalú sound, which united Black and Latino listeners.Harlow’s move away from búgalu to a jazz-influenced update on Rodríguez’s more Africanized conjunto sound — which added more trumpets and percussion like conga and cowbell — was crucial for salsa’s gestation. His blend of jazz, mambo and conjunto would become one of the primary influences on the emerging idea of salsa. While Eddie Palmieri and Willie Colón’s innovative use of trombone gave the horn sections a more aggressive, urban sound, Harlow and Pacheco’s influence was also decisive. Harlow’s early ’70s releases, “A Tribute to Arsenio Rodríguez,” “Abran Paso” and “Salsa,” crystallized his new aesthetic. He pioneered recording with both trumpets and trombone. He gave the Cuban charanga sound, which featured flutes and violins, new life. And he incorporated the batá drum, used in religious ceremonies, into his decidedly secular project.Harlow exulted in the spirit of the late 1960s — Rubén Blades told me he was the “Frank Zappa of salsa” — and was a voracious collaborator. His bilingual Beatles cover and the album artwork for “Electric Harlow” flaunted psychedelic style. He played piano for Steven Stills and Janis Ian, and had a rock-jazz project with the Blood, Sweat & Tears keyboardist Jerry Weiss. In 1972, after Miranda left his band temporarily, he painstakingly adapted the Who’s “Tommy” as the salsa opera “Hommy,” transferring the original British characters to New York’s Latino barrios.Although salsa’s burst in popularity during the mid- to late 1970s was organic, feeding off the hip young Latino audiences from the Bronx and Uptown, Harlow helped it blow up by taking a major producing role in Leon Gast’s vérité concert film “Our Latin Thing.” The film was a breakout party for the Fania All-Stars, a supergroup featuring Ray Barretto, Colón, Cheo Feliciano, Pacheco and many others, with Harlow on piano. Last week Masucci told me that Harlow was the connection to both Gast’s involvement and the appearance of authentic Santería devotees that appear late in the film. In 1976, he recorded a celebratory musical history, “La Raza Latina Suite,” with Blades singing in English.Though Harlow wasn’t born into the traditions that birthed salsa, throughout his career he was widely accepted as a pillar of the music. He was one in a long line of Jewish musicians who have played a key role in Afro-Caribbean music, going all the way back to Augusto Coén, a Jewish Afro-Puerto Rican who led a Latin big band in 1934 that was a predecessor to the mambo kings Puente, Machito and Tito Rodríguez. (The exchange went both ways: Even the Queen of Salsa, Celia Cruz, recorded the Jewish folk song “Hava Nagila” with her band La Sonora Matancera.)For Harlow, blending cultures and genres was simply second nature. In 2005, he contributed a wide-open keyboard solo to “L’Via L’Viaquez,” on the Texas psychedelic punk band the Mars Volta’s album “Frances the Mute” — a choice that shouldn’t be considered out of the ordinary. Several musicologists and writers have recognized the influence of Cuban bass patterns, called tumbaos, as well as cha cha cha patterns, on early rock hits like “Twist and Shout,” and “Louie Louie.” To Harlow, the connection between rock and Latin, funk and salsa was natural, a product of the era when he came of age.“It was revolution time,” he once told me. “People were writing songs about protest, and me and Eddie and Barretto were changing the harmonic concept of Latin music. I was the one who psychedelicized them a little bit.” More

Mr. Watts, who had no taste for the life of a pop idol, was an unflashy but essential presence with the band and brought to it a swinging style.Charlie Watts, whose strong but unflashy drumming powered the Rolling Stones for over 50 years, died on Tuesday in London. He was 80.His death, in a hospital, was announced by his publicist, Bernard Doherty. No other details were immediately provided.The Rolling Stones announced earlier this month that Mr. Watts would not be a part of the band’s forthcoming “No Filter” tour of the United States after he had undergone an unspecified emergency medical procedure, which the band’s representatives said had been successful.Reserved, dignified and dapper, Mr. Watts was never as flamboyant, either onstage or off, as most of his rock-star peers, let alone the Stones’ lead singer, Mick Jagger. He was content to be one of the finest rock drummers of his generation, playing with a jazz-inflected swing that made the band’s titanic success possible. As the Stones guitarist Keith Richards said in his 2010 autobiography, “Life,” “Charlie Watts has always been the bed that I lie on musically.”While some rock drummers chased after volume and bombast, Mr. Watts defined his playing with subtlety, swing and a solid groove.“As much as Mick’s voice and Keith’s guitar, Charlie Watts’s snare sound is the Rolling Stones,” Bruce Springsteen wrote in an introduction to the 1991 edition of the drummer Max Weinberg’s book “The Big Beat.” “When Mick sings, ‘It’s only rock ’n’ roll but I like it,’ Charlie’s in back showing you why!”Charles Robert Watts was born in London on June 2, 1941. His mother, the former Lillian Charlotte Eaves, was a homemaker; his father, Charles Richard Watts, was in the Royal Air Force and, after World War II, became a truck driver for British Railways.Charlie’s first instrument was a banjo, but, baffled by the fingerings required to play it, he removed the neck and converted its body into a snare drum. He discovered jazz when he was 12 and soon became a fan of Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus.By 1960, Mr. Watts had graduated from the Harrow School of Art and found work as a graphic artist for a London advertising agency. He wrote and illustrated “Ode to a Highflying Bird,” a children’s book about the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker (although it was not published until 1965). In the evenings, he played drums with a variety of groups.Most of them were jazz combos, but he was also invited to join Alexis Korner’s raucous rhythm-and-blues collective, Blues Incorporated. Mr. Watts declined the invitation because he was leaving England to work as a graphic designer in Scandinavia, but he joined the group when he returned a few months later.The Rolling Stones in 1967. From left: Mr. Watts, Bill Wyman, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones.Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis, via Getty ImagesThe newly formed Rolling Stones (then called the Rollin’ Stones) knew they needed a good drummer but could not afford Mr. Watts, who was already drawing a regular salary from his various gigs. “We starved ourselves to pay for him!” Mr. Richards wrote. “Literally. We went shoplifting to get Charlie Watts.”In early 1963, when they could finally guarantee five pounds a week, Mr. Watts joined the band, completing the canonical lineup of Mr. Richards, Mr. Jagger, the guitarist Brian Jones, the bassist Bill Wyman and the pianist Ian Stewart. He moved in with his bandmates and immersed himself in Chicago blues records.In the wake of the Beatles’ success, the Rolling Stones quickly climbed from being an electric-blues specialty act to one of the biggest bands in the British Invasion of the 1960s. While Mr. Richards’s guitar riff defined the band’s most famous single, the 1965 chart-topper “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” Mr. Watts’s drum pattern was just as essential. He was relentless on “Paint It Black” (No. 1 in 1966), supple on “Ruby Tuesday” (No. 1 in 1967) and the master of a funky groove on “Honky Tonk Women” (No. 1 in 1969).The Rolling Stones performing at Madison Square Garden in New York in November 1969.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Watts was ambivalent about the fame that he achieved as a member of the group that has often been called “the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band.” As he said in the 2003 book “According to the Rolling Stones”: “I loved playing with Keith and the band — I still do — but I wasn’t interested in being a pop idol sitting there with girls screaming. It’s not the world I come from. It’s not what I wanted to be, and I still think it’s silly.”As the Stones rolled through the years, Mr. Watts drew on his graphic-arts background to contribute to the design of the band’s stage sets, merchandise and album covers — he even contributed a comic strip to the back cover of their 1967 album “Between the Buttons.” While the Stones cultivated bad-boy images and indulged a collective appetite for debauchery, Mr. Watts mostly eschewed the sex and drugs. He clandestinely married Shirley Ann Shepherd, an art-school student and sculptor, in 1964.Mr. Watts appeared second from right on the cover of the Rolling Stones’ album “Between the Buttons,” released in 1967.He had the cover to himself when the Stones released this concert album in 1970.On tour, he would go back to his hotel room alone; every night, he sketched his lodgings. “I’ve drawn every bed I’ve slept in on tour since 1967,” he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1996. “It’s a fantastic nonbook.”Similarly, while other members of the Stones battled for control of the band, Mr. Watts largely stayed out of the internal politics. As he told The Weekend Australian in 2014, “I’m usually mumbling in the background.”Mr. Jones, who considered himself the leader, was fired from the Stones in 1969 (and found dead in his swimming pool soon after). Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards spent decades at loggerheads, sometimes making albums without being in the studio at the same time. Mr. Watts was happy to work with either, or both.There was one time, however, when Mr. Watts famously chafed at being treated like a hired hand rather than an equal member of the group. In 1984, Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards went out for a night of drinking in Amsterdam. When they returned to their hotel around 5 a.m., Mr. Jagger called Mr. Watts, waking him up, and asked, “Where’s my drummer?” Twenty minutes later, Mr. Watts showed up at Mr. Jagger’s room, coldly furious, but shaved and elegantly dressed in a Savile Row suit and tie.The Rolling Stones on tour in Atlantic City, N.J., in 1989: From left, Ron Wood, Mr. Jagger, Mr. Watts, Mr. Richards and Mr. Wyman.Paul Natkin/Getty Images“Never call me your drummer again,” he told Mr. Jagger, before grabbing him by the lapel and delivering a right hook. Mr. Richards said he narrowly saved Mr. Jagger from falling out a window into an Amsterdam canal.“It’s not something I’m proud of doing, and if I hadn’t been drinking I would never have done it,” Mr. Watts said in 2003. “The bottom line is, don’t annoy me.”At the time, Mr. Watts was in the early stages of a midlife crisis that manifested itself as a two-year bender. Just as the other Stones were settling into moderation in their 40s, he got hooked on amphetamines and heroin, nearly destroying his marriage. After passing out in a recording studio and breaking his ankle when he fell down a staircase, he quit, cold turkey.Mr. Watts and his wife had a daughter, Seraphina, in 1968 and, after spending some time in France as tax exiles, relocated to a farm in southwestern England. There they bred prizewinning Arabian horses, gradually expanding their stud farm to over 250 horses on 700 acres of land. Information on his survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Doherty, the publicist, said Mr. Watts had “passed away peacefully” in the hospital “surrounded by his family.”The Rolling Stones made 30 studio albums, nine of them topping the American charts and 10 topping the British charts. The band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1989 — a ceremony Mr. Watts skipped.Performing with the Rolling Stones in Berlin in 2018. In his later years, Mr. Watts and his wife lived on a farm in southwestern England, where they bred Arabian horses.Hayoung Jeon/EPA, via ShutterstockEventually the Stones settled into a cycle of releasing an album every four years, followed by an extremely lucrative world tour. (They grossed over a half-billion dollars between 2005 and 2007 on their “Bigger Bang” tour.)But Mr. Watts’s true love remained jazz, and he would fill the time between those tours with jazz groups of various sizes — the Charlie Watts Quintet, the Charlie Watts Tentet, the Charlie Watts Orchestra. Soon enough, though, he would be back on the road with the Stones, playing in sold-out arenas and sketching beds in empty hotel rooms.He was not slowed down by old age, or by a bout with throat cancer in 2004. In 2016, the drummer Lars Ulrich of Metallica told Billboard that since he wanted to keep playing into his 70s, he looked to Mr. Watts as his role model. “The only road map is Charlie Watts,” he said.Through it all, Mr. Watts kept on keeping time on a simple four-piece drum kit, anchoring the spectacle of the Rolling Stones.“I’ve always wanted to be a drummer,” he told Rolling Stone in 1996, adding that during arena rock shows, he imagined a more intimate setting. “I’ve always had this illusion of being in the Blue Note or Birdland with Charlie Parker in front of me. It didn’t sound like that, but that was the illusion I had.” More

Watts no quería ser ídolo pop y nunca fue tan extravagante como la mayoría de sus colegas estrellas, pero con su poderosa y sutil batería marcó el ritmo de una de las grandes bandas de rock.Charlie Watts, cuya batería poderosa pero poco ostentosa marcó el ritmo a los Rolling Stones durante más de 50 años, murió el martes en Londres. Tenía 80 años.Su muerte, en un hospital, fue anunciada por su publicista, Bernard Doherty. No se facilitaron inmediatamente más detalles.Los Rolling Stones anunciaron a principios de este mes que Watts no formaría parte de la próxima gira “No Filter” de la banda por Estados Unidos después de que se sometió a un procedimiento médico de emergencia no especificado, que los representantes de la banda dijeron que había sido exitoso.Reservado, digno y elegante, Watts nunca fue tan extravagante, ni en el escenario ni fuera de él, como la mayoría de sus colegas estrellas del rock, y mucho menos como el cantante principal de los Stones, Mick Jagger; se contentaba con ser uno de los mejores bateristas de rock de su generación, tocando con un swing influenciado por el jazz que hizo posible el éxito titánico de la banda. Como dijo el guitarrista de los Stones, Keith Richards, en su autobiografía de 2010, Vida, “Charlie Watts siempre ha sido la cama en la que me acuesto musicalmente”.Mientras algunos bateristas de rock perseguían el volumen y la ampulosidad, Watts definió su forma de tocar con sutileza, swing y un sólido groove.“Tanto como la voz de Mick y la guitarra de Keith, el sonido de la caja de Charlie Watts es el de los Rolling Stones”, escribió Bruce Springsteen en una introducción a la edición de 1991 del libro del baterista Max Weinberg, The Big Beat. “Cuando Mick canta: ‘It’s only rock ’n’ roll but I like it’ [Es solo rock ‘n’ roll pero me gusta], ¡Charlie está detrás mostrándote por qué!”.Charles Robert Watts nació en Londres el 2 de junio de 1941. Su madre, Lillian Charlotte Eaves, era ama de casa; su padre, Charles Richard Watts, estuvo en la Real Fuerza Aérea y, tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial, se convirtió en conductor de camiones para los Ferrocarriles Británicos.El primer instrumento de Charlie fue un banjo, pero, perplejo por los movimientos de los dedos necesarios para tocarlo, le quitó el cuello y convirtió su cuerpo en una caja clara. Descubrió el jazz a los 12 años y pronto se hizo fan de Miles Davis, Duke Ellington y Charles Mingus.Para 1960, Watts se había graduado en la Harrow School of Art y encontró trabajo como artista gráfico en una agencia de publicidad de Londres. Escribió e ilustró Ode to a Highflying Bird, un libro infantil sobre el saxofonista de jazz Charlie Parker (aunque no fue publicado hasta 1965). Por las noches, tocaba la batería con diversos grupos.La mayoría eran combos de jazz, pero también fue invitado a unirse al estridente colectivo de rhythm-and-blues de Alexis Korner, Blues Incorporated. Watts declinó la invitación porque iba a dejar Inglaterra para trabajar como diseñador gráfico en Escandinavia, pero se unió al grupo cuando regresó unos meses después.Los recién formados Rolling Stones (entonces llamados Rollin’ Stones) sabían que necesitaban un buen baterista, pero no podían darse el lujo de pagarle a Watts, quien ya cobraba un sueldo regular de sus varios conciertos. “¡Nos morimos de hambre para pagarle!”, escribió Richards. “Literalmente. Anduvimos robando en tiendas para conseguir a Charlie Watts”.A principios de 1963, cuando por fin pudieron garantizar cinco libras a la semana, Watts se unió a la banda, completando la alineación canónica de Richards, Jagger, el guitarrista Brian Jones, el bajista Bill Wyman y el pianista Ian Stewart. Se instaló con sus compañeros de banda y se sumergió en los discos de blues de Chicago.Los Rolling Stones en 1967. De izquierda a derecha: Watts, Bill Wyman, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards y Brian Jones.Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis vía Getty ImagesTras el éxito de los Beatles, los Rolling Stones pasaron rápidamente de ser un grupo especializado en blues eléctrico a ser una de las bandas más importantes de la Invasión británica de la década de 1960. Aunque el riff de guitarra de Richards definió el sencillo más famoso de la banda, el éxito de las listas de 1965 “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”, el patrón de batería de Watts fue igual de esencial. Fue implacable en “Paint It, Black” (Número uno en 1966), flexible en “Ruby Tuesday” (Número uno en 1967) y el maestro del groove de cencerro con algo de funk en “Honky Tonk Women” (Número uno en 1969).Los Rolling Stones se presentaron en el escenario del Madison Square Garden de Nueva York en noviembre de 1969.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesWatts era ambivalente respecto a la fama que alcanzó como miembro del grupo que a menudo ha sido llamado “la mejor banda de rock’ n’ roll del mundo”. Como dijo en el libro de 2003 According to the Rolling Stones: “Me encantaba tocar con Keith y la banda —todavía lo hago— pero no me interesaba ser un ídolo del pop sentado allí, con chicas gritando. No es el mundo del que vengo. No es lo que quería ser, y sigo pensando que es tonto”.A lo largo de los años, Watts aprovechó su formación en artes gráficas para contribuir al diseño de las escenografías, la mercadería y las portadas de los álbumes de la banda; incluso aportó una tira cómica a la contraportada de Between the Buttons, álbum de 1967. Mientras los Stones cultivaban su imagen de chicos malos y se entregaban a un apetito colectivo de libertinaje, Watts evitaba el sexo y las drogas. Se casó clandestinamente con Shirley Anne Shepherd, una estudiante de arte y escultora, en 1964.Watts es el segundo desde la derecha en la portada del álbum de los Rolling Stones “Between the Buttons”, lanzado en 1967.Tuvo la portada para él solo cuando los Stones lanzaron este álbum de conciertos en 1970.Durante las giras, volvía solo a su habitación de hotel; cada noche, dibujaba su cuarto. “He dibujado todas las camas en las que he dormido durante las giras desde 1967”, dijo a la revista Rolling Stone en 1996. “Es un no-libro fantástico”.Del mismo modo, mientras otros miembros de los Stones luchaban por el control de la banda, Watts se mantuvo en gran medida al margen de la política interna. Como dijo a The Weekend Australian en 2014, “por lo general estoy murmurando en el fondo”.Jones, quien se consideraba el líder, fue despedido de los Stones en 1969 (y encontrado muerto en su piscina poco después). Jagger y Richards pasaron décadas en malos términos, a veces haciendo álbumes sin estar en el estudio al mismo tiempo. Watts estaba contento de trabajar con cualquiera de los dos, o con ambos.Sin embargo, hubo una ocasión en la que Watts se quejó de que lo trataran como un empleado en lugar de como un miembro del grupo en igualdad de condiciones. En 1984, Jagger y Richards salieron a beber una noche en Ámsterdam. Cuando regresaron a su hotel a eso de las 5 a. m., Jagger llamó a Watts, despertándolo, y le preguntó: “¿Dónde está mi baterista?”. Veinte minutos después, Watts apareció en la habitación de Jagger, fríamente furioso, pero afeitado y elegantemente vestido con un traje de Savile Row y corbata.Los Rolling Stones de gira por Atlantic City en 1989. De izquierda a derecha: Ron Wood, Jagger, Watts, Richards y Wyman.Paul Natkin/Getty Images“Nunca vuelvas a llamarme tu baterista”, le dijo a Jagger, antes de agarrarlo por la solapa y darle un gancho de derecha. Richards dijo que salvó por poco a Jagger de caer por una ventana a un canal de Ámsterdam.“No es algo de lo que esté orgulloso de haber hecho, y si no hubiera estado bebiendo nunca lo habría hecho”, dijo Watts en 2003. “La conclusión es: no me molestes”.En ese momento, Watts estaba en las primeras etapas de una crisis de mediana edad que se manifestó como una juerga de dos años. Justo cuando los otros Stones se estaban asentando en la moderación a sus 40 años, él se hizo adicto a las anfetaminas y la heroína, casi destruyendo su matrimonio. Tras desmayarse en un estudio de grabación y romperse el tobillo al caer por una escalera, lo dejó de golpe.Watts y su mujer tuvieron una hija, Seraphina, en 1968 y, tras pasar un tiempo en Francia como exiliados fiscales, se trasladaron a una granja en el suroeste de Inglaterra. Allí criaron caballos árabes ganadores de premios, ampliando gradualmente su criadero a más de 250 caballos en 280 hectáreas de tierra. No se dispuso inmediatamente de información sobre quienes le sobreviven. Su publicista, Doherty, dijo que Watts había “fallecido en paz” en el hospital, “rodeado de su familia”.Los Rolling Stones grabaron 30 álbumes de estudio, nueve de los cuales ocuparon los primeros puestos en las listas estadounidenses y diez en las británicas. La banda fue incluida en el Salón de la Fama del Rock & Roll en 1989, ceremonia a la que Watts no asistió.Charlie Watts con los Rolling Stones en Berlín en 2018Hayoung Jeon/EPA vía ShutterstockCon el tiempo, los Stones se establecieron en un ciclo de publicar un álbum cada cuatro años, seguido de una gira mundial extremadamente lucrativa. (Recaudaron más de 500 millones de dólares entre 2005 y 2007 con su gira “Bigger Bang”).Pero el verdadero amor de Watts seguía siendo el jazz, y llenaba el tiempo entre esas giras con grupos de jazz de diversos tamaños: el Charlie Watts Quintet, el Charlie Watts Tentet, la Charlie Watts Orchestra. Sin embargo, pronto volvería a la carretera con los Stones, tocando en estadios con las entradas agotadas y dibujando camas en habitaciones de hotel vacías.No lo frenó la vejez, ni un ataque de cáncer de garganta en 2004. En 2016, el baterista Lars Ulrich, de Metallica, le dijo a Billboard que, como quería seguir tocando hasta los 70 años, miraba a Watts como su modelo a seguir. “La única hoja de ruta es Charlie Watts”, dijo.A pesar de todo, Watts siguió manteniendo el tempo en una sencilla batería de cuatro piezas, anclando el espectáculo de los Rolling Stones.“Siempre quise ser baterista”, dijo a Rolling Stone en 1996, y añadió que durante los espectáculos de rock en estadios, imaginaba un ambiente más íntimo. “Siempre he tenido la ilusión de estar en el Blue Note o en Birdland con Charlie Parker delante. No sonaba así, pero esa era la ilusión que tenía”. More

The labor deal means that the company, the largest performing arts organization in the nation, is on track to reopen next month after the pandemic kept it closed for more than a year.The Metropolitan Opera has struck a labor deal with its orchestra, officials announced Tuesday, paving the way for its musicians to return to work and for the company, the largest performing arts organization in the nation, to resume performances next month after being shut down for more than a year by the pandemic.After months of uncertainty, and talks that grew contentious at times, the Met said that the players had ratified a labor deal reached with the union representing the orchestra, Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians. The musicians were scheduled to return to work on Monday for their first official rehearsal since the pandemic closed the opera house in March 2020.The agreement concludes several months of tension over how significant future pay cuts would be for musicians, who went for nearly a year without pay during the pandemic.“The members of the Met’s great orchestra have been through Herculean challenges during the 16 months of the shutdown, as we struggled to keep the company intact,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in a statement. “Now, we look forward to rebuilding and returning to action.”The group was the last of the three major Met unions to come to an agreement; without a deal on a new contract for the orchestra, the Met would have likely had to postpone its reopening. Several smaller unions have yet to reach deals.In a joint statement, Adam Krauthamer, the president of Local 802, and the members of the Met’s orchestra committee said that they were “thrilled to be returning to regular performances very soon, and look forward to reconnecting with our audiences.”The four-year deal with the musicians institutes pay cuts of 3.7 percent, with provisions to begin restoring some of that pay after the Met’s box office revenues return to 90 percent of their prepandemic levels, according to a copy of the memorandum of understanding that was obtained by The New York Times and confirmed by participants.A significant amount of the savings in the deal appears to come from reducing the minimum size of the Met’s full-time orchestra to 83 players through attrition, according to the memorandum, down from its current minimum of 90. Many players retired during the pandemic; by not filling all those positions, the Met will save money and rely more on extra players.In recent years, symphony orchestras around the country have sought to save money by cutting back the number of regular full-time players.The Met had been seeking deep cuts. Citing the staggering revenue losses resulting from the pandemic, and the uncertainty over when its box office and donations would rebound, the Met had been seeking to cut the payroll costs for its highest-paid unions by 30 percent, saying that the change in take-home pay would be more like 20 percent. It had offered to restore half of the cuts when ticket revenues and core donations returned to their prepandemic levels.The first of the unions to reach an agreement, the American Guild of Musical Artists — which represents chorus members, soloists, dancers and stage managers, among others — secured salary cuts that fell far short of the management proposal; under the agreement, most types of employees in the union will initially see 3.7 percent cuts to their pay. But that deal saved the Met money, moving the members from the Met’s health insurance plan to the union’s, and by reducing the size of the full-time regular chorus.That contract had been expected to set the pattern for the level of savings expected in deals with the other two major unions, which represent the Met’s stagehands and its orchestra. A provision in the guild’s deal stated that if the other unions struck more favorable deals, the guild’s contract would be adjusted to be brought in line with them.Along with the news of the deal with the orchestra, the Met announced that the orchestra and chorus would give two free performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” in Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center on Sept. 4 and 5, conducted by the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and featuring the soprano Ying Fang and mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves as soloists. (It also announced a new annual chamber music series of six concerts at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall.)The Met will give its first performance back at the opera house on Sept. 11 with a special concert of Verdi’s Requiem to mark the 20th anniversary of the attacks. The concert will be broadcast live on PBS, hosted by the ballet star Misty Copeland.The Met’s season is scheduled to open on Sept. 27 with Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first time the Met is mounting an opera by a Black composer. More

He delved into the relationship between sound and the environment. Many of his compositions incorporated the music of the natural world.R. Murray Schafer, a Canadian composer and writer who brought the concept of the “soundscape” to widespread recognition and pioneered the field of acoustic ecology — the relationship between sound, people and the environment — died on Aug. 14 at his home near Peterborough, Ontario. He was 88. The cause was dementia, his wife and collaborator, the mezzo-soprano Eleanor James, said.Mr. Schafer was already an inventive avant-garde composer when he began researching the relationship between sound and the environment in the late 1960s. He had joined a noise abatement society but disagreed with its treatment of noise as a negative phenomenon.“The sounds of the environment were changing rapidly, and it seemed that no one was documenting the changes,” he recalled in his 2012 memoir, “My Life on Earth and Elsewhere.” “Where were the museums for disappearing sounds? What was the effect of new sounds on human behavior and health?”With funding from UNESCO and the Donner Canadian Foundation, Mr. Schafer formed the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. His team of researchers compiled information about noise bylaws, conducted interviews about sounds of the past and tallied car horns honking at street intersections around the world.“It’s quite the task for people to understand that listening can be a very active and inspiring activity,” the composer Hildegard Westerkamp, who was a researcher for the project, said in an interview. “A socially conscious ear, and a culturally conscious ear, and a politically conscious ear — that’s all the legacy that he has given to us.”In 1977, Mr. Schafer published “The Tuning of the World,” a treatise on acoustic ecology, which has influenced generations of scholars and musicians. Drawing on poetry, biology and myth, the book provides a history of the world through its soundscapes while offering instructions in “ear cleaning” and sound walks to reconnect readers with their sonic environments.His immersion in environmental listening changed his compositional interests. In 1979, he composed “Music for Wilderness Lake,” in which 12 trombonists played around the shore of a small lake at dusk and dawn; floating on a raft, Mr. Schafer conducted them with colored flags.Such experiments formed the basis for “Patria,” a cycle of 12 theatrical works composed over 40 years that mingles world mythologies. In one installment, audience “initiates” chant in ancient Egyptian as part of an overnight performance; another of the works unfolds as a carnival.For the cycle’s epilogue, a “co-opera,” several dozen participants have for more than 30 years made a weeklong pilgrimage each August to Ontario’s Haliburton Forest and divided into clans to create collaborative theatrical rituals.Mr. Schafer at the Haliburton Wilderness Reserve in Canada, the site of a performance in 2005. “The world is a huge musical composition that’s going on all the time,” he said, “without a beginning and presumably without an ending.” Steve Payne for The New York TimesRaymond Murray Schafer was born July 18, 1933, in the Lake Huron city of Sarnia, Ontario, to Harold Schafer, an accountant for an oil company, and Belle Anderson Rose. He was born blind in one eye and, following a pair of operations at age 8, was given a glass eye, for which he was bullied in school in Toronto. He took piano lessons starting at 6 but was intent on being a painter.Discouraged by others from pursuing a career in art because of his eye condition and failing out of high school, Mr. Schafer ended up at the University of Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music, where he studied with the composer John Weinzweig and attended classes taught by the media theorist Marshall McLuhan.Already a keen intellectual, he preferred reading Rousseau to practicing piano; he angered one choir director by perusing art books during rehearsal. After several such incidents, he was thrown out of the school (though it later awarded him an honorary doctorate).Intent on studying composition in Vienna, Mr. Schafer worked as a deckhand on an oil tanker to raise travel funds. He roamed Europe — interviewing British composers for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, learning medieval German, attending a folk music conference in Romania — without a clear plan for his musical future.In Italy, Mr. Schafer convinced Ezra Pound to allow him to revive the poet’s little-known opera, “Le Testament de Villon,” which became a major BBC broadcast in 1962. (Pound gave him an envelope containing his final series of “Cantos” and asked him to deliver it to T.S. Eliot in London.)On his return to Toronto, Mr. Schafer in 1962 co-founded the innovative concert series Ten Centuries, which presented new and rarely heard music.As his career picked up, he answered requests for new works with irreverence, composing “Son of Heldenleben,” a parodic riff on the tone poem by Richard Strauss, and “No Longer Than Ten (10) Minutes,” in which an orchestra tunes up, a conductor walks on and offstage, and the players crescendo each time the audience tries to applaud. His 1966 “Requiems for the Party-Girl,” written for the mezzo-soprano Phyllis Mailing, is a darkly virtuosic monodrama in which a woman sings of her impending suicide.Mr. Schafer married Ms. Mailing in 1960, and they divorced in 1971. His second marriage, to Jean Reed, from 1975 to about 1999, also ended in divorce. He married Ms. James in 2011 after a long partnership. Along with her, he is survived by his brother, Paul.Mr. Schafer began his research on soundscapes after joining the faculty at Simon Fraser University in 1965. He also invented a radical approach to teaching, calling it “creative music education.” In a series of influential booklets, he provided exercises to encourage children’s creativity, asking them to “bring an interesting sound to school” or hum along with a tune that they had heard on a street corner.Alongside the mythic theater of “Patria,” Mr. Schafer composed more conventional scores, among them 13 string quartets and “Letters from Mignon,” a neo-Romantic song setting of love letters written to him by Ms. James. His genre-spanning oratorio “Apocalypsis” was first performed with a cast of more than 500 in 1980; it received a triumphant, career-capping revival at the Luminato Festival in Toronto in 2015.In a 2009 short film directed by David New, Mr. Schafer offers philosophical musings on listening amid the snowy soundscape outside his home, a remote farmhouse in the Indian River area in southern Ontario.“The world is a huge musical composition that’s going on all the time, without a beginning and presumably without an ending,” he said.“We are the composers of this huge, miraculous composition that’s going on around us. We can improve it, or we can destroy it. We can add more noises, or we can add more beautiful sounds. It’s all up to us.” More