Music

Mathew Rosengart, a former federal prosecutor, plans to attend a hearing on Wednesday and make the case that the singer should be permitted to hire him for her conservatorship battle.A prominent Hollywood lawyer has had discussions in recent days with Britney Spears about representing her in her conservatorship battle, and he plans to attend a hearing in Los Angeles on Wednesday to begin the process of taking over as her counsel, according to a person briefed on the matter.For the past 13 years, under a strict legal arrangement that curbs many of her rights, Ms. Spears has been represented by a court-appointed lawyer whom she criticized at a hearing last month as she urged the court to let her hire her own counsel.Ms. Spears has told others she wanted to take a far more aggressive legal approach. In recent days she began having discussions with Mathew S. Rosengart, a former federal prosecutor who has represented several celebrities in recent years, about having him and his firm take over and push for an end to the conservatorship, according to the person.The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because Ms. Spears has not retained Mr. Rosengart and a judge will need to sign off on any such arrangement. TMZ first reported that Ms. Spears was interested in having Mr. Rosengart represent her.If allowed by the court, Ms. Spears’s retaining of Mr. Rosengart would signal a drastic change in the handling of the case. Confidential court documents recently obtained by The New York Times revealed that Ms. Spears had expressed strong objections to the conservatorship over several years and questioned her father’s fitness as conservator. Mr. Rosengart would be expected to aggressively pursue a path to ending the arrangement..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The feud has escalated in recent months as scrutiny of the unusual conservatorship has intensified and Ms. Spears has publicly questioned its legitimacy. The guardianship was instituted in 2008, when concerns about her mental health and potential substance abuse led her father, James P. Spears, to petition for legal authority over his daughter. Since her June 23 statement to the court, several pillars of the conservatorship have fallen: Bessemer Trust, the wealth-management firm that was set to take over as the co-conservator of her estate, requested to withdraw; Ms. Spears’s longtime manager, Larry Rudolph, resigned; and Samuel D. Ingham III, the lawyer appointed by the court in 2008 to represent her when she was deemed unfit to hire her own counsel, asked the court if he could step down.Mr. Ingham said in a court filing that he would serve until the court had appointed new counsel for Ms. Spears, but it is not clear how a new lawyer would be selected or whether Judge Brenda Penny, who is overseeing the case, would allow Ms. Spears to have a say in the matter.Mr. Rosengart, 58, a partner at the law firm Greenberg Traurig, once served as a law clerk for the former New Hampshire state judge David Souter, shortly before he was nominated to the Supreme Court. Mr. Rosengart worked at the Justice Department as an assistant United States Attorney in the 1990s.After leaving the Justice Department, he worked as a white-collar defense attorney and civil litigator. In recent years, he has represented several high profile Hollywood personalities, including Sean Penn, Steven Spielberg and Kenneth Lonergan.In Mr. Penn’s case, Mr. Rosengart helped him win a defamation case against a director who made claims about Mr. Penn’s past behavior. The lawyer produced an affidavit from Madonna, the actor’s ex-wife, that refuted the director’s assertions. Mr. Penn said in a statement on Sunday that Mr. Rosengart “is a tough as nails streetfighter with a big brain and bigger principles.”At a hearing on June 23, Ms. Spears vehemently criticized the conservatorship, claiming she had been forced to perform, take debilitating medication and remain on birth control.She also raised questions about Mr. Ingham’s advocacy on her behalf. She said in court that she had been unaware of how to terminate the arrangement.“I didn’t know I could petition the conservatorship to be ended,” Ms. Spears, 39, said in court. “I’m sorry for my ignorance, but I honestly didn’t know that.” She added, “My attorney says I can’t — it’s not good, I can’t let the public know anything they did to me.”“He told me I should keep it to myself, really,” the singer said.It is unknown what private discussions Mr. Ingham and Ms. Spears have had about whether or how she could ask to end the conservatorship. Last year, Mr. Ingham began seeking substantial changes to the setup on behalf of Ms. Spears, including attempts to strip power from her father, who remains in control of the singer’s nearly $60 million fortune.Mr. Ingham’s request to withdraw also included the resignation letter of the law firm Loeb & Loeb, which Mr. Ingham had brought on last year to assist him in preparation for litigation.A lawyer for Lynne Spears, Ms. Spears’s mother and an interested party in the conservatorship, has asked the court to allow Ms. Spears to hire her own private legal counsel.Ms. Spears’s personal conservator, Jodi Montgomery, recently filed an urgent request for the court to appoint a guardian ad litem who would be assigned solely to help Ms. Spears choose her own lawyer. The filing stated that Ms. Spears had been “repeatedly and consistently” asking for Ms. Montgomery’s assistance in finding a new lawyer and that Ms. Spears deserved to be represented by a top-tier firm. More

Fewer industries felt a more specific and intense economic burden during the pandemic than live music. Venues went quiet. Musicians were stuck at home, with an occasional livestream to leaven the boredom (and financial strain). Though the federal government recently passed relief measures intended to stem the financial pain felt by performance venues, the rollout of the programs has been chaotic, leaving the industry not much better off than it was 16 months ago.Still, tours are being announced for the fall, and concerts are starting up again, even as new variants of the coronavirus threaten the fragile balance between freedom and safety afforded by vaccines.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the challenges faced by the live music business over the last year, and how the industry is adjusting to the new normal.Guest:Ben Sisario, The New York Times’s music business reporter More

In this billionaire space race, slipping the surly bonds of Earth apparently isn’t enough — not without some glitz and a bevy of celebrities.Richard Branson combined private spaceflight with show business on Sunday as he completed his highly-anticipated Virgin Galactic flight high above the New Mexico desert. He enlisted “The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert to introduce segments of a live streamed production, which was delayed around 90 minutes by the weather.Mr. Colbert played up a humorous rivalry he has cultivated with the entrepreneur on his talk shows over the years, and joked about some of Mr. Branson’s failed business ventures, like Virgin Cola.“Seriously, he lost money selling sugar water,” Mr. Colbert quipped. “All aboard.”Later in the production, the Grammy-winning artist Khalid gave a performance in front of a small crowd on an outdoor stage at Spaceport America, which featured the release of his new song, “New Normal.” The musician, appearing in a sequined jacket as machines sprayed mist on a stage, performed three songs.“Look how far we’ve came just as humanity,” he said during the live steam.Around two hours before lifting off, Mr. Branson shared a photo of himself with a shoeless Elon Musk, a billionaire rival in the private conquest of space.“Great to start the morning with a friend,” Mr. Branson said on Twitter.Even Mr. Branson’s arrival at Spaceport America wasn’t lacking for showmanship. Flanked by two white Range Rovers, the British mogul pedaled to the site at daybreak on a bicycle, a video posted by Mr. Branson showed. Once there, other members of the flight’s crew greeted him and joked that he was late.In England, where he was knighted by Prince Charles in 2000, the spotlight did not entirely belong to Mr. Branson, however. Mr. Branson’s space odyssey coincided with the men’s tennis final at Wimbledon on Sunday — historically billed for U.S. television audiences as “breakfast at Wimbledon.”The flight also came just hours before England was set to take on Italy in the soccer finals of Euro 2020, which has drawn the collective attention of many people in Britain. Some on social media suggested that Mr. Branson’s timing was less than ideal.The live stream production was not without its hiccups. The show’s hosts tried to interview Mr. Branson when the plane reached space, but the audio feed wasn’t working. After re-entry, many of his words were garbled as he tried to describe what it was like to visit space. More

At Wembley Stadium, where London has been following in the footsteps of Belfast and Boston, good times never seemed so good (so good, so good, so good).After a tough year for London — and a tough 55 years for fans of England’s men’s soccer team — the city’s Wembley Stadium is roaring again, and the fans are singing an American song. More

Hear tracks by Little Simz, Nathy Peluso, Courtney Barnett,Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at [email protected] and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.The Kid Laroi featuring Justin Bieber, ‘Stay’Bracingly effective, hyper-slick new wave/pop-punk hybridization from the Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber, “Stay” is about expecting more from a partner than you’re capable of giving. They both sound aptly desperate and defensive, a familiar approach from Laroi and a sneaky stretch from Bieber, who still injects some falsetto tenderness into his icy pleas. “Stay” is a more effective pairing than the two had on “Unstable,” from Bieber’s most recent album, on which he sounded as if he was jogging while Laroi sprinted. JON CARAMANICAThe Kondi Band featuring Mariama, ‘She Doesn’t Love You’Kondi Band is an electronic concoction rooted in Sierra Leone. The kondi is a 15-pronged thumb piano played by the Sierra Leonean musician Sorie Kondi, with production by DJ Chief Boima (an American whose family is from Sierra Leone), the English producer Will LV (a.k.a. Will Horrocks) and, on this song, the voice of a songwriter from Sierra Leone, Mariama Jalloh. The song is propelled by multiple layers of Sorie Kondi’s plinking thumb-piano riffs and grainy call-and-response vocals in Krio (Sierra Leonean Creole); midway through, Mariama airily delivers a reminder about consent: “It’s her mind, her body, her rules/If she doesn’t love you there’s nothing you can do.” JON PARELESLittle Simz, ‘I Love You, I Hate You’The Nigerian-English rapper Lil Simz keeps her voice calm and steely as she grapples with her relationship with her biological father, who’s “in my DNA” — she’s seen Polaroid photos — but whom she barely knows: “Is you a sperm donor or a dad to me?” The emotions that buffet her are in the track, produced by Inflo, with orchestral and choral swells, a sputtering funk beat and a male voice singing the title. She’s wrestling with her own feelings, trying to empathize and reaching for forgiveness; it’s complicated. PARELESBLK presents Juvenile, Mannie Fresh and Mia X, ‘Vax That Thang Up’Ah yes, you remember this classic, from the album “400 Degreez (Is What Your Temperature Will Be if You Get Covid-19 So Please Get Vaccinated).” CARAMANICAZuchu, ‘Nyumba Ndogo’What will happen when African musicians latch onto hyperpop? “Nyumba Ndogo,” from the Tanzanian singer and songwriter Zuchu, hints at the possibilities. It’s thin, speedy, synthetic, Auto-Tuned — and irresistible. PARELESmazie, ‘Dumb Dumb’The songwriter who lowercases herself as mazie folds multiple levels of ironic self-consciousness into her songs. She sings in a little-girl voice, and she starts “Dumb Dumb” with the sounds of kiddie instruments — ukulele, toy piano — before surreally stacking up keyboards, voices and harps and declaring, “Everyone is dumb, la la la la la la la.” It’s a song about misinformation, gullibility and incredulity; she wrote it the day after the insurrection at the Capitol. PARELESCourtney Barnett, ‘Rae Street’Courtney Barnett previews an album due in November — “Things Take Time, Take Time” — with another of her deadpan, steady-strummed songs that find large lessons in mundane observations. In “Rae Street” she chronicles her neighbors: parents, children, repair people and dogs, having an ordinary day. Behind the normalcy, there’s a wary undercurrent: “Time is money, and money is no man’s friend,” she sings, and, later, “You seem so stable, but you’re just hanging on.” Calm doesn’t mean contentment. PARELESAngel Olsen, ‘Gloria’There’s no point in a cover version that doesn’t transform the original song. Angel Olsen does just that with her version of the Laura Branigan hit “Gloria,” the first track from her coming album of 1980s songs, “Aisles.” While Branigan’s 1982 “Gloria” had pumping synthesizers and a perky vocal, Olsen paid attention to the lyrics. It’s a song about a desolate, lonely woman on the verge of a breakdown, or perhaps already having one: “Are the voices in your head calling, Gloria?” Olsen’s version is blearily slow, thickened with distorted keyboard chords and grunting cellos; this “Gloria” is mired, not triumphal. PARELESgglum. ‘Glad Ur Gone’Clouds of vocal harmonies float prettily; a beat bustles; keyboards throb in warm major chords. None of it quite conceals the rancor of “Glad Ur Gone,” as gglum — the songwriter Ella Smoker — sings about how clingy and manipulative an ex can be. PARELESJ.D. Allen, ‘Mother’Jon Irabagon, ‘KC Blues’J.D. Allen and Jon Irabagon, two standard-bearing tenor saxophonists, have new solo-sax albums that were forged in the solitude of lockdown. Irabagon, 41, spent much of 2020 living with extended family in South Dakota, and he often slipped off to the outskirts of Black Hills National Forest, where he spent hours revisiting the Charlie Parker songbook en plein-air with a recorder on. He’s released those recordings as “Bird With Streams” (yes, it’s a pun). Playful as ever but also luxuriously patient, his take on “K.C. Blues” is a feast of smeared tones and little open spaces. Allen, 48, went into a Cincinnati studio to capture the 13 tracks on “Queen City,” but he kept things spare, treating the process as an extension of the soul-searching he’d done in the early days of lockdown. “Mother,” an Allen original, starts with a three-note pattern that spins almost into a drone before he leaps off into free improvisation, zagging and curling and, later, painfully scraping his notes, as if to pry them open. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLONathy Peluso, ‘Mafiosa’The Argentine songwriter Nathy Peluso is ready to seize power as a woman in “Mafiosa,” vowing (in Spanish), “May bad men fear me.” She’s backed by a sinewy, old-school salsa groove with horn-section muscle: playful and teasing, but not to be crossed. PARELESMaluma, ‘Sobrio’A gentle song befitting Maluma’s gentle voice, “Sobrio” is an unhurried and lovely tale of a man only able to declare his heart after a few drinks. There’s nothing anguished about Maluma’s meanderings, though — rather, the slackness of the rhythm, and of his lightly slurry anguish, makes for a compellingly smooth confessional. CARAMANICASufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine, ‘Reach Out’Sufjan Stevens has been mightily productive during the pandemic year, with songs, instrumentals and now a collaboration. Acoustic picking defines “Reach Out,” from the album “A Beginner’s Mind” by Stevens and the songwriter Angelo De Augustine, which is due in September — and based, they say, on watching movies. Fans of Stevens’s largely acoustic album “Carrie and Lowell” will appreciate “Reach Out,” which doesn’t hide the squeaks of hands moving up strings. In close harmony, they sing about memory and healing, insisting, “the pain restores you.” PARELESSamara Joy, ‘It Only Happens Once’At 21, the vocalist Samara Joy has been approaching the jazz spotlight since she won the 2019 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition. The close precision and frothy power of her voice stand out immediately, and on her self-titled debut album, so does the depth of her comfort within the jazz tradition. “It Only Happens Once” is a rarely played tune, best known for Nat King Cole’s dreamy 1943 version, but she tucks right into it, as if she’s been singing the song her whole life. RUSSONELLO More

His new album, “Call Me if You Get Lost,” is both an embrace of hip-hop tradition and a swerve into new emotional terrain.In January of last year, Tyler, the Creator’s “Igor” won the Grammy Award for best rap album. Speaking to the press backstage, he expressed frustration at the narrow ways in which Black artists are celebrated at the Grammys, calling his nomination in the rap category, for a deeply musically diverse album, “a backhanded compliment.”But the attention focused on that comment overshadowed what he’d said onstage when he received the award, which was that he was grateful for his fans’ support, because, he confessed, “I never fully felt accepted in rap.”Blockaded on both sides, Tyler nevertheless emerged victorious, an acknowledgment of the sheer force of the vision he’d built for a decade as the de facto macher of the Odd Future crew. It was also a testament to the way he harnessed the power of the internet and built a vision from whole cloth, selling it to millions without much intersecting with the systems constructed to do that.Still, the exclusions sting a little. And the boisterous, sometimes scabrous, and persistently energetic “Call Me if You Get Lost” — currently the No. 1 album in the country — is the logical rejoinder to both of those obstacles. It’s as thoroughgoing a rap album as Tyler has released — rarely has he been this keen to flaunt his bona fides. But it also demonstrates the pop potential of Tyler’s now-signature approach to hip-hop, the way his post-Pharrell embrace of chords and melody is in fact in conversation with 1960s pop, French chanson, and acoustic soul and funk. A tauntingly good hip-hop album, or a rewiring of pop DNA: “Call Me if You Get Lost” has it both ways.First, the bars. Part of the chasm separating Tyler from the rest of the genre (in perception, at least) is how he has in the past sometimes downplayed his lyrical skill in favor of musical experimentation. When he leans in to rapping, as he does on this album, it’s still a refreshing jolt.“Call Me if You Get Lost” is Tyler’s sixth album.Mostly, he’s preoccupied with the lifestyle that success has afforded him, but even though the subject matter can be repetitive — there’s lots of Rolls-Royce mentions, lots of discussions of passports — he delivers them with the shock of the new. “Y’all don’t understand, fish so fresh that you could taste the sand,” he boasts on the lush “Hot Wind Blows.” On the gloomy and stomping “Lumberjack,” he emphasizes the depth of his independence: “I own my companies full, told ’em to keep the loan.”The album is structured in the manner of one of DJ Drama’s essential mid-2000s Gangsta Grillz mixtapes, with Drama himself barking over each track, weaving in between Tyler boasts. Tyler’s resuscitation of an aesthetic that was likely formative to him is both a calculated nod to the hip-hop community that couldn’t quite place him early in his career, and also a tweak to the puffed-chest energy of that era. The frictive juxtaposition of Drama shrieking “Gangsta Grizzzzillzzzz” while Tyler is speaking about keeping picnic blankets in the car — it’s both homage and disruption.That’s how Tyler approaches his production here, too. “Lumberjack” is built on an ominous sample from the horrorcore pioneers Gravediggaz, and “Wusyaname” flirts with 1990s R&B with a sample from H-Town’s “Back Seat (Wit No Sheets).” Tyler is also eager to display how seamlessly he can integrate some of contemporary hip-hop’s signature vocalists, whether it’s the unrelentingly grimy 42 Dugg (“Lemonhead”) or the sweetly tragic YoungBoy Never Broke Again (“Wusyaname”). And he extracts startlingly good guest verses from his elders: Pharrell Williams (“Juggernaut”) and Lil Wayne (“Hot Wind Blows”).A tauntingly good hip-hop album, or a rewiring of pop DNA: “Call Me if You Get Lost” has it both ways.Mario Anzuoni/ReutersThere’s a second, parallel narrative at play, too, on “Call Me if You Get Lost,” which in places reads like two separate albums born of the same circumstances tugging at each other — one about how carefree and privileged Tyler’s success has made him, and the other about how all of those spoils don’t add up to much without love.The eight-and-a-half minute long “Wilshire” is where the two collide. It’s a startling narrative about coveting a person who you can’t have (because they’re in a relationship with one of your friends) that reads as many things: an elegantly drawn story, a gut-kick emotional excavation, a track with boom-bap urgency tempered by wandering-in-space effects. Tyler lingers over feeling here, and it’s affecting and surprising: “They say, ‘Bros over hoes,’ I’m like, ‘Mm, nah, hey’/I would rather hold your hand than have a cool handshake.”He picks up the theme on the far tougher and more frenetic “Corso”: “My heart broken/Remembered I was rich so I bought me some new emotions/And a new boat ’cause I’d rather cry in the ocean.”These intersections of cocksureness and anxiety are this album at its best. (Fittingly, the title “Call Me if You Get Lost” reads either as a statement of generosity or a plea, depending on your lens.) Songs like the less emotionally ambiguous “Sweet / I Thought You Wanted to Dance” are generally less impactful — Tyler thrives on discord.A decade ago, discord was the fullness of his message. He was, by turns, a troll, an antagonist and at points outright offensive. He revisits that era on the raucous “Manifesto,” the most unexpected turn on this album: “I was canceled before canceled was with Twitter fingers/Protesting outside my shows, I gave them the middle finger.”But Tyler is older now (30, to be precise). On the back of those controversies, he built an idiosyncratic empire that belonged to no scene (maybe because no scene would have him). “Manifesto” is the rare moment in his catalog where Tyler expresses anxiety or regret about how he once presented to the world. But he also remains obstinate. Rapping about how the expectations of speaking out politically leave him vexed, he reverts to his old perspective.“I feel like anything I say, dog, I’m screwing [expletive] up,” he says, “So I just tell these Black babies, they should do what they want.” The lesson is that there was no lesson.Tyler, the Creator“Call Me if You Get Lost”(Columbia) More

At an international competition called the A.I. Song Contest, tracks exploring the technology as a tool for music making revealed the potential — and the limitations.LONDON — For its first 30 seconds, the song “Listen to Your Body Choir” is a lilting pop tune, with a female voice singing over gentle piano. Then, everything starts to fracture, as twitchy beats and samples fuse with bizarre lyrics like “Do the cars come with push-ups?” and a robotic voice intertwines with the human sound.The transition is intended to evoke the song’s co-writer: artificial intelligence.“Listen to Your Body Choir,” which won this year’s A.I. Song Contest, was produced by M.O.G.I.I.7.E.D., a California-based team of musicians, scholars and A.I. experts. They instructed machines to “continue” the melody and lyrics of “Daisy Bell,” Harry Dacre’s tune from 1892 that became, in 1961, the first to be sung using computer speech synthesis. The result in “Listen to Your Body Choir” is a track that sounds both human and machine-made.The A.I. Song Contest, which started last year and uses the Eurovision Song Contest’s format for inspiration, is an international competition exploring the use of A.I. in songwriting. After an online ceremony broadcast on Tuesday from Liège in Belgium, a judging panel led by the musician Imogen Heap and including academics, scientists and songwriters praised “Listen to Your Body Choir” for its “rich and creative use of A.I. throughout the song.”In a message for viewers of the online broadcast, read out by a member of M.O.G.I.I.7.E.D., the A.I. used to produce the song said that it was “super stoked” to have been part of the winning team.The contest welcomed 38 entries from teams and individuals around the world working at the nexus of music and A.I., whether in music production, data science or both. They used deep-learning neural networks — computing systems that mimic the operations of a human brain — to analyze massive amounts of music data, identify patterns and generate drumbeats, melodies, chord sequences, lyrics and even vocals.The resulting songs included Dadabots’ unnerving 90-second sludgy punk thrash and Battery-operated’s vaporous electronic dance instrumental, made by a machine fed 13 years of trance music over 17 days. The lyrics to STHLM’s bleak Swedish folk lament for a dead dog were written using a text generator known for being able to create convincing fake news.While none of the songs are likely to break the Billboard Hot 100, the contest’s lineup offered an intriguing, wildly varied and oftentimes strange glimpse into the results of experimental human-A.I. collaboration in songwriting, and the potential for the technology to further influence the music industry.Karen van Dijk, who founded the A.I. Song Contest with the Dutch public broadcaster VPRO, said that since artificial intelligence was already integrated into many aspects of daily life, the contest could start conversations about the technology and music, in her words, “to talk about what we want, what we don’t want, and how musicians feel about it.”Many millions of dollars in research is invested in artificial intelligence in the music industry, by niche start-ups and by branches of behemoth companies such as Google, Sony and Spotify. A.I. is already heavily influencing the way we discover music by curating streaming playlists based on a listener’s behavior, for example, while record labels use algorithms studying social media to identify rising stars.Using artificial intelligence to create music, however, is yet to fully hit the mainstream, and the song contest also demonstrated the technology’s limitations.While M.O.G.I.I.7.E.D. said that they had tried to capture the “soul” of their A.I. machines in “Listen to Your Body Choir,” only some of the audible sounds, and none of the vocals, were generated directly by artificial intelligence.“Robots can’t sing,” said Justin Shave, the creative director of the Australian music and technology company Uncanny Valley, which won last year’s A.I. Song Contest with their dance-pop song “Beautiful the World.”“I mean, they can,” he added, “but at the end of the day, it just sounds like a super-Auto-Tuned robotic voice.”Only a handful of entries to the A.I. Song Contest comprised purely of raw A.I. output, which has a distinctly misshapen, garbled sound, like a glitchy remix dunked underwater. In most cases, A.I. — informed by selected musical “data sets” — merely proposed song components that were then chosen from and performed, or at least finessed, by musicians. Many of the results wouldn’t sound out of place on a playlist among wholly human-made songs, like AIMCAT’s “I Feel the Wires,” which won the contest’s public vote.A.I. comes into its own when churning out an infinite stream of ideas, some of which a human may never have considered, for better or for worse. In a document accompanying their song in the competition, M.O.G.I.I.7.E.D. described how they worked with the technology both as a tool and as a collaborator with its own creative agency.That approach is what Shave called “the happy accident theorem.”“You can feed some things into an A.I. or machine-learning system and then what comes out actually sparks your own creativity,” he said. “You go, ‘Oh my god, I would never have thought of that!’ And then you riff on that idea.”“We’re raging with the machine,” he added, “not against it.”The musician Imogen Heap, left, who led the A.I. Song Contest’s judging panel, and Max Savage, a member of M.O.G.I.I.7.E.D, the team that won this year’s competition.via AI Song ContestHendrik Vincent Koops is a co-organizer of the A.I. Song Contest and a researcher and composer based in the Netherlands. In a video interview, he also talked of using the technology as an “idea generator” in his work. Even more exciting to him was the prospect of enabling people with little or no prior experience to write songs, leading to a much greater “democratization” of music making.“For some of the teams, it was their first time writing music,” Koops said, “and they told us the only way they could have done it was with A.I.”The A.I. composition company Amper already lets users of any ability quickly create and purchase royalty-free bespoke instrumentals as a kind of 21st-century music library. Another service, Jukebox, created by a company co-founded by Elon Musk, has used the technology to create multiple songs in the style of performers such as Frank Sinatra, Katy Perry and Elvis Presley that, while messy and nonsensical, are spookily evocative of the real thing.Songwriters can feel reassured that nobody interviewed for this article said that they believed A.I. would ever be able to fully replicate, much less replace, their work. Instead, the technology’s future in music lies in human hands, they said, as a tool perhaps as revolutionary as the electric guitar, synthesizer or sampler have been previously.Whether artificial intelligence can reflect the complex human emotions central to good songwriting is another question.One standout entry for Rujing Huang, an ethnomusicologist and member of the jury panel for the A.I. Song Contest, was by the South Korean team H:Ai:N, whose track is the ballad “Han,” named after a melancholic emotion closely associated with the history of the Korean Peninsula. Trained on influences as diverse as ancient poetry and K-pop, A.I. helped H:Ai:N craft a song intended to make listeners hear and understand a feeling.“Do I hear it?” said Huang. “I think I hear it. Which is very interesting. You hear very real emotions. But that’s kind of scary, too, at the same time.” More

Kaija Saariaho’s grand yet restrained new opera about a tragedy and its reverberations is the most powerful work of her five-decade career.AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — “Innocence,” the new opera by Kaija Saariaho, begins in soft, somber gloom. A shadowy mist of cymbal rises off long, sepulchral tones down in the basses and contrabassoon, before a keening fragment of bassoon pierces the quiet with melancholy song.It’s just a few seconds of music, but a mood has been established — comprehensively, unforgettably, yet subtly. Before we know the plot of “Innocence,” we feel it: Something dark and deep has happened, from which memory vibrates into an uncertain future, etched with mourning.We keep feeling it over the hundred minutes that follow, as we come to know intimately a tragedy and its reverberations. Grand yet restrained, a thriller that is also a meditation, “Innocence” is the most powerful work Saariaho has written in a career now in its fifth decade.Appearing through July 12 here at the Aix-en-Provence Festival (and streaming on arte.tv on Saturday) after its planned debut in 2020 was canceled, it would be the premiere of the year even in a normal season — even if its audience were not so hungry for real, big, important, live opera after so many months largely without. It deserves to travel far beyond an already global itinerary: Helsinki, Amsterdam, London, San Francisco, the Metropolitan Opera in New York.Magdalena Kozena, standing at left next to Jukka Rasilainen, with Pursio at right, is a waitress at the wedding with a connection to the family.Jean-Louis Fernandez/Festival d’Aix-en-ProvenceThis is undoubtedly the work of a mature master, in such full command of her resources that she can focus simply on telling a story and illuminating characters. Unlike so many contemporary operas, “Innocence” — featuring the mighty London Symphony Orchestra, conducted with sensitivity and control by Susanna Malkki — doesn’t feel like a sung play with a more or less disconnected, elaborately self-regarding orchestral soundtrack.In fact, during the performance I attended, on Tuesday, I periodically tried to listen exclusively to the instrumental lines and their interplay, but despite the obvious virtuosity and density of the score, my ears kept lifting back up to the stage, to the lucid, inexorable action, the integrated theatrical whole. Porous and agile; simmering beneath and around the voices; and only occasionally, briefly exploding, this is music as a vehicle for exploring and intensifying drama. It is complex, yet confident enough to exist not merely for its own sake.With a libretto by the Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen, and translation work on more than a half-dozen languages by Aleksi Barrière, “Innocence” is set in 21st-century Helsinki, where there has been a deadly shooting at an international school. The action continually shifts back and forth between a recollection of the disaster, by six students and a teacher who went through it, and a wedding party happening 10 years later.It quickly becomes obvious that the two events are linked. The groom is the shooter’s brother, and his family, which has been ostracized and is desperate to move beyond what happened, has kept the whole thing from the bride. (If that wasn’t enough, there’s a reason a waitress has been skulking around, jaw clenched, on the nuptial sidelines: She is the mother of one of the victims.)There is ample operatic precedent for an innocent young woman guided blindly by her lover into a world of violence and deception: Think of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande.” “Innocence” recalls those, as well as the ferocious economy of Berg’s “Wozzeck” and Strauss’s “Elektra” in its relatively modest, intermissionless length.Lucy Shelton, at top, as a teacher, and, from left at bottom, Beate Mordal, Julie Hega, Simon Kluth, Camilo Delgado Díaz and Marina Dumont as students affected by a school shooting.Jean-Louis Fernandez/Festival d’Aix-en-ProvenceBut “Innocence” is very much of our time, and — in its play of multiple languages and registers of speaking and singing — very much itself. Saariaho gave it the working title “Fresco”; it was inspired, she has said, by “The Last Supper,” from which she derived the size of the cast (13 soloists) and the piece’s broader questions of culpability and the linked yet separate experiences of people who have shared a trauma.Members of the wedding party sing: the groom, a tenor, in boisterous exhortations; the bride, a soprano, with sweet lyricism. A priest, the only friend the family has left, murmurs ominously about the faith he has lost.The surviving students and teacher, on the other hand, speak — though in precise rhythms artfully tailored to their respective languages of Czech, Swedish, French, German, Spanish, Greek and English. The waitress’s daughter, Marketa (a memorably rapt Vilma Jaa), appears as a kind of phantom, singing in the eerily plain style of Finnish folk music. The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir chants offstage, a hint of a world beyond the fevered hothouse of the plot. All these disparate vocal worlds are linked by the orchestra, which wraps around the singers lightly and sleekly — never explicitly underlining them, never competing.The cast matches Saariaho’s score in its commitment and discipline, its refusal to fall into overplaying or Grand Guignol. As the waitress, Magdalena Kozena is a laser beam of pain; as the mother of the groom, Sandrine Piau conjures the uncanny effect of a voice thinned to a thread by suffering.Saariaho’s past operas — starting with the stylized medieval parable “L’Amour de Loin” (2000) — were mostly collaborations with the director Peter Sellars, who lends even canonical works the abstraction of ritual. Here, though, she benefits from a hypernaturalistic staging by Simon Stone, whose style anchors “Innocence” in reality without stinting its surreal fluidity. (Chloe Lamford’s rotating, ever-mutating two-story set, an anxiety-inducing amalgam of school and restaurant, is a crucial player in the drama.)The story unfolds with the crushing inevitability — and sickening surprises — of ancient Greek drama. Varying degrees of guilt slowly seep outward from the shooter to encompass even seemingly blameless characters. A gun was inadvertently provided; suspicious behavior went unreported; a boy was mercilessly teased and assaulted.This is not an unfamiliar plot, and like any superb opera, “Innocence” would seem flat if its text were delivered as a play. That it instead has brooding nuance is thanks to the music; the varieties of vocalization; Saariaho’s intimation, even as she delivers a clear story, that there is much beyond what is enunciated. Opera, as it always has been, is here a home for emotions that could come across as flatly, implausibly extreme, but which are rendered newly mysterious and natural.Kozena and Farahani in the opera. The story unfolds with the crushing inevitability — and sickening surprises — of ancient Greek drama. Jean-Louis Fernandez/Festival d’Aix-en-Provence“Innocence” also gains depth from the politics and history from which it has emerged. Watching events of this kind, in this period, unfold in and around an international school, it is hard not to think of Europe itself, and of its formation as a union in the wake of unspeakable violence. There was a dream that trauma would prove unifying; we have witnessed the gradual realization that the opposite is true. In transitioning from the before times — native languages and folk song — into the lingua franca of English and musical modernism, this onstage society seems to have gained little. Certainly not the ability to fully integrate new members, to function.Yet the opera’s final moments are not without a certain hopeless hopefulness. The students describe small steps they’ve taken to move beyond the tragedy; the vision of the daughter asks the waitress to stop buying her birthday presents, to let her go. The music seethes sadly at this, but the dissonance passes through a sublime moment of consonance — courting sunshine — before drifting back into tension, then transpiring upward into pure shimmer, almost toneless. It is both through and beyond music, then, that Saariaho arrives at an ending that is, if not happy, strangely, completely exhilarating.InnocenceThrough July 12 at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, France; and livestreamed on arte.tv July 10; festival-aix.com. More