Music

Broadway took its first steps back with the return of Bruce Springsteen’s show, and no one is happier than Jim Barry, an usher at the St. James Theater for 20 years.Jim Barry, masked and ready, perched at the top of the theater stairs, cupping his hands around the outstretched smartphones so he could more easily make out the seat numbers.“How you doing? Nice jacket.”“Go this way — it’s an easier walk.”“Do you need help sir? The bathroom’s right there.”It was Saturday night at the St. James Theater.Bruce Springsteen was back on the stage.Fans were back in the seats.And, 15 months after the pandemic had shut down Broadway, Barry, who has worked as an usher at the St. James for 20 years, was back at work, doling out compliments and reassurance as he steered people toward the mezzanine, the restroom, the bar.“Springsteen on Broadway” is essentially a one-man show, but its return has already brought back work for about 75 people at the St. James — not only Barry, but also another 30 ushers and ticket-takers, as well as merch sellers, bar staff, porters, cleaners, stagehands, box office workers, a pair of managers and an engineer.The return of “Springsteen on Broadway” has already brought back work for about 75 people at the St. James Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMore shows, and jobs, will return in August and September as Broadway’s 41 theaters slowly come back to life. Ultimately, a Broadway rebound promises to benefit not just theater workers but hotel clerks and bartenders and taxi drivers and workers in the many industries that rely on theater traffic, which can be considerable: in the last full season before the pandemic, 14.8 million people saw a Broadway show.Barry, a gregarious 65-year-old Staten Island grandfather, loves theater, for sure, but also depends on the job for income and basic health insurance.“This job is not for everybody, but I made it my own,” he said. Barry, a solidly built man with white hair who is often mistaken for a security officer, takes pride at being punctual, and jovial, and polite. “I can tell somebody tapping me on the back where the bathroom is, while telling somebody in front of me where their seats are, and also waving to somebody in the corner. It’s controlled insanity.”As he returned to work following the shutdown, there were a few changes to master. He had to wear a mask — they are required for employees, but not patrons — and struggled to feel comfortable making small talk through the fabric. And tickets were now all digital, which meant his signature move, which involved passing tickets behind his back as he accepted, scrutinized, and handed back the proffered stubs, was no longer useful; instead he needed to figure out how to quickly decipher all those different screen fonts.Still, he was thrilled to be back.“No matter what happens, nothing can make me feel bad, because I’m back at my house, and the Boss is at my house,” he said. “It’s where I want to be.”“No matter what happens, nothing can make me feel bad, because I’m back at my house, and the Boss is at my house,” Barry said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBarry, originally from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, took an unusual path to the theater industry. For 27 years, he had worked in banking, first as a teller, and then as a bank officer in Times Square.He saw theater, occasionally, and loved it. As a teenager he saw Danny Kaye in “Two by Two,” and later he saw “Jesus Christ Superstar.” (“I couldn’t believe it was so fantastic.”) But the production he most excitedly remembers seeing is “Grease,” at the Royale Theater; a friend got him access to walk onto the stage before the show. “It gave me the bug,” he said.So when he decided he needed to earn more money, and began looking for a second job, he reached out to one of his customers at the bank, a woman who worked in payroll at Jujamcyn Theaters, which operates five Broadway theaters, including the St. James. She asked if he’d be open to ushering.That was in 2001. The first shift he worked was at a dress rehearsal for “The Producers,” which was about to open. “You know you belong when your body just gets enveloped in euphoria,” he said.He was hooked. For years, he continued working full-time at the bank, while also working nights and weekends at the theater; in 2016 he left the bank for good, and now he works six days a week at the theater (the shifts are short — a full usher shift is 4.5 hours, but at each show half the staff gets to leave 30 minutes after curtain, which is two hours after their start time).It’s a union job, for which standard pay is $83.78 per show; Barry has the higher rank of director, so he makes about $710 a week, and supplements his income with Social Security and a small bank pension. He was kept afloat during the pandemic by unemployment; although he missed the theater, he also was glad to have more time to spend with his girlfriend.He has a bear of a commute — it can take up to two hours to get to work, depending on whether he drives or takes a bus, and how bad the traffic is. He arrives early, changes into his Jujamcyn uniform (black suit, black shirt, black tie, with a red J on the chest), and sits in a theater doorway on West 44th Street that he calls “my stoop,” enjoying coffee and a roll and greeting passers-by, sometimes posing for a picture with a passing actor.Barry has a long commute — it can take up to two hours to get to work.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlthough he loves the theater, seeing shows other than the ones he’s working is hard — he’s generally on duty when other shows are running. But he usually gets to the big ones.At his own theater, he’s seen a mix of hits and flops. With the latter, he said, “you just feel bad for everybody.” And what if he doesn’t like a show he’s working? “We have the luxury of lobbies.”There are, of course, headaches to manage — intoxicated patrons, and insistent videographers — but he prides himself on doing so with civility. For the cellphone scofflaws, whose ranks have swelled since he began, he will sometimes simply hover, which usually shames people into compliance; other times he will use a flashlight or a headshake to get someone’s attention, and once in a while he’ll say something like, “Please don’t do that. If they see you, I’m going to get in trouble.” (At “Springsteen on Broadway,” no photos or videos are allowed until the bows.)How much does Barry love being part of the business? In March, sad not to be at work for his 20th anniversary at the theater, he and his girlfriend drove into Times Square, and he posed for a photograph in front of each of the 41 Broadway theaters.“There’s that old adage — when you love what you do, you never work a day in your life,” he said. “I am so lucky — I love to make people feel good about coming to our house.” More

Pinchas Zukerman was criticized for invoking ugly stereotypes about Asians during a master class at Juilliard, which called his remarks offensive.A master class by the renowned violinist Pinchas Zukerman was supposed to be the highlight of a recent virtual symposium hosted by the Juilliard School.Instead, Zukerman angered many of the roughly 100 students and teachers in the class on Friday when he invoked racist stereotypes about Asians, leading Juilliard to decide not to share a video of his master class afterward with participants, as it had initially intended.At one point, Zukerman told a pair of students of Asian descent that their playing was too perfect and that they needed to add soy sauce, according to two participants in the class. At another point, in trying to encourage the students to play more lyrically, he said he understood that people in Korea and Japan do not sing, participants said. His comments were reported earlier by Violinist.com, a music site.Zukerman’s remarks were widely denounced by musicians and teachers, with many saying they reinforced ugly stereotypes facing artists of Asian descent in the music industry.Juilliard tried to distance itself from the matter, describing Zukerman as a guest instructor and saying his “insensitive and offensive cultural stereotypes” did not represent the school’s values. Zukerman apologized Monday for what he called his “culturally insensitive” comments.“In Friday’s master class, I was trying to communicate something to these two incredibly talented young musicians, but the words I used were culturally insensitive,” he said in a statement. “I’m writing to the students personally to apologize. I am sorry that I made anyone uncomfortable. I cannot undo that, but I offer a sincere apology. I learned something valuable from this, and I will do better in the future.”Asian and Asian American performers have long dealt with racist tropes that their playing is too technical or unemotional. A wave of anti-Asian hate in the United States in recent months has heightened concerns about the treatment of Asian performers.Zukerman is a celebrated violinist and conductor whose career has spanned five decades. He was the biggest name at the Juilliard event, known as the Starling-DeLay Violin Symposium, which is focused on violin teaching and attracts promising young musicians, many of them teenagers, to take part in master classes.He made the remarks on Friday while offering feedback to a pair of sisters of Japanese descent.After the sisters played a duet, Zukerman told them they should try bringing more of a singing quality to their playing, according to participants in the class. When he said that he knew Koreans did not sing, one of the sisters interrupted to say that they were not Korean, adding that they were partly of Japanese descent. Zukerman replied by saying that people in Japan did not sing either, according to participants.His remarks prompted an outcry among Asian and Asian American musicians, with some sharing stories on social media about their experiences dealing with stereotypes and bias..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 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(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-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 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:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Hyeyung Yoon, a violinist who last year founded Asian Musical Voices of America, an alliance of artists, said Zukerman’s remarks represented a type of thinking that “dehumanizes a group of people without actually getting to know who they are.”“It’s so prevalent in classical music, but also prevalent in the larger society,” she said in an interview.Keiko Tokunaga, a violinist, said she and many other Asian musicians had heard comments similar to Zukerman’s.“We are often described as emotionless or we just have no feelings and we are just technical machines,” she said in an interview. “And that is very offensive, because we are as human as anyone else on the planet.” More

Red-carpet stunners, a surprise make-out session, the reveal of Cardi B’s second pregnancy and so much more.Given everything that happened at Sunday’s BET Awards, one would be forgiven for needing some time to process.First up was the red carpet: a mind-boggling mix of stunners and head scratchers. Zendaya showed up sheathed in a sheer Versace dress worn by Beyoncé for a BET performance in — get ready to feel old — 2003. (We thank Zendaya and her stylist, Law Roach, for pulling the look, but we didn’t need to feel so aged.)Lil’ Kim, left, and Zendaya (whose dress might look familiar to anyone who saw the BET Awards in 2003).Bennett Raglin/Getty Images for BetLil Nas X impressed viewers with a quick on-the-carpet outfit change, from a floral-print suit into a ball gown by the designer Andrea Grossi that included a bolero jacket, suspenders and a full skirt. He tore up the red carpet up and trolled his critics online.Issa Rae, another standout, wore a white blazer dress with exaggerated shoulders; the look screamed Hollywood boss, and appropriately so.Many other attendees left those of us watching from home wondering if the celebrities were, as one writer put it, “social distancing from their stylists.”After the step-and-repeat, things really got started. The show, which had billed itself as a celebration of Black women and the biggest night in culture, was full of surprises — some planned and others clearly unintentional. (As usual, there were plenty of missed cues and technical difficulties.)During a performance by the Migos, Cardi B walked onto the stage in a bedazzled black Dolce & Gabbana jumpsuit that revealed her belly and announced, visually, that she was pregnant with her second child.H.E.R. performs at the BET Awards.Bennett Raglin/Getty Images for BetThe night’s host, Taraji P. Henson, gave us look after look, wig after wig. DaBaby’s locker room-themed performance had chaotic-good energy and a dancer moving around the stage in a giant baby costume, thrusting his hips to the beat.But the funniest part of the night was when the camera panned down to Representative Maxine Waters and her back was facing the stage. (She was probably watching a screen, but it’s funnier to imagine she was just ignoring the action.)There were other memorable moments, including when Megan Thee Stallion — the night’s biggest winner — took the stage in a waist-length blond wig, a patent leather bodysuit and killer shades. She delivered bars, looks, choreo and met all her cues. We stan a rehearsed queen!Megan Thee Stallion took home four trophies at Sunday’s BET Awards — the most of any artist this year.Bennett Raglin/Getty Images for BetTyler, the Creator performed “Lumberjack,” from his latest album, “Call Me if You Get Lost,” giving us Hollywood production to the point where some wondered whether Steven Spielberg was behind the setup; the rapper showed up onstage, seemingly in the middle of a twister, in a vintage blue-green car.R&B showed signs of life when Jazmine Sullivan and Ari Lennox performed “Sit on It,” from Ms. Sullivan’s album “Heaux Tales,” which felt like a strong warm hug, and after the last year and a half we all had, we could use a lot more of those.Jazmine Sullivan and Ari Lennox perform.Mario Anzuoni/ReutersLil Nas X hit the stage in a Michael-Jackson-in-“Remember the Time”-inspired ensemble. In a gold ancient-Egyptian-style costume, complete with a cobra headband, he writhed to his latest single, “Montero (Call Me By Your Name).”Toward the end of his performance, he climbed a set of stairs that resembled ruins while casually twerking. (Yes, he’s a hero.) As the song ended, he turned to the dancer on his right and, in true Madonna-and-Britney fashion, gave him a passionate kiss.On Twitter, viewers applauded Lil Nas X for his fearlessness. (Others were not as excited about the performance, but that was part of the point: to troll them.)At this point in the night, people were losing it on social media, but there were still several surprises to come: Ms. Henson giving an odd lesson on twerking; the cast of Tyler Perry’s “Sistas” presenting the best international award while dragging Monique’s latest take on Black women wearing bonnets in public; and a star-studded memorial for DMX, who died in April, which included Busta Rhymes doing his own rendition of “Up in Here” and a prerecorded prayer by the late rapper.By the time BET honored Queen Latifah with a Lifetime Achievement award, we were worn out.After being celebrated with covers of her music by Lil’ Kim, MC Lyte and Rhapsody, Queen Latifah shed a few tears during her acceptance speech. It ended with her saying “Happy pride!” with a peace sign and a wink. We hear you, girl. More

The performance, by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, felt like normal again, while the music looked back on a year of upheaval.KATONAH, N.Y. — Before a concert by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s on a steamy Sunday afternoon here at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, a jubilant James Roe, the ensemble’s executive director, told the audience that these musicians had not presented a live, in-person performance in 472 days.This return meant more than a mere visit from a Caramoor fixture. In recent months I’ve attended orchestral concerts around New York City. But these events played to very limited, mask-wearing audiences. At Caramoor the capacity wasn’t restricted to a mere 150 or so people. Hardly any of the 400 people in attendance wore masks (only the unvaccinated were asked to do so).It felt like a real return to normal for classical music.With its bucolic grounds and open-air Venetian Theater, where most programs are being presented, Caramoor is an ideal venue for summer concerts, especially during this still-challenging time. And it has planned an adventurous summer season, running through Aug. 8. This Orchestra of St. Luke’s program was conducted by Tito Muñoz, the Queens-born music director of the Phoenix Symphony, and offered works that spoke to the larger social issues of the past year.The afternoon began with the premiere of Valerie Coleman’s “Fanfare for Uncommon Times.” The idea for the piece, as Coleman explained recently in a video interview on the Caramoor site, came from Roe, who invited her to write a piece that grappled not just with the pandemic, but the tumultuous “political landscape,” as she put it.Yet, hanging over every American composer who writes a fanfare, Coleman said, is Aaron Copland’s iconic 1942 “Fanfare for the Common Man.” In an inspired idea, this 75-minute program, after opening with Coleman’s fanfare, ended with Copland’s, and included, in the middle, Joan Tower’s plucky “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman” (1987). In a nod to Copland and Tower, Coleman also scored her piece for brass and percussion.Yet, while writing something that offered affirmation to people emerging from unimaginably “uncommon times,” Coleman said, as a Black woman she wanted to “bring the Black experience in,” the “turmoil, the upheaval,” the complexity of recent conversations about race in America.These threads — and the emotions entwined with them — come through vividly in Coleman’s six-minute piece. It begins not with a typical fanfare salute, but a quizzical, searching line for solo trombone that soon is cushioned by pungent, soft-spoken brass chords. Unrest amid determination stirs as the music shifts into agitated episodes for percussion. The mood seems at once reflective and restless, uplifting and ominous. The elements of the Black experience during a challenging time that Coleman described come through during a passage alive with riffs for mallet percussion instruments, hints of dance and bursts of anxious frenzy. By the end, with spurts of four-note brass motifs, echoes of Coplandesque affirmation arise, but also a breathless flurry that feels bracing yet challenging.The program included a premiere by Valerie Coleman that was put in conversation with Joan Tower’s “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman” and Aaron Copland’s famous “Fanfare for the Common Man.”James Estrin/The New York TimesIt made for a surprisingly good contrast to follow the Coleman with Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “The Lark Ascending,” a “romance,” as the composer described it, for violin and orchestra, with the superb Tai Murray as soloist. This glowing, pastoral, somewhat bittersweet piece is enormously popular, but it doesn’t turn up as often as it should in concerts. Murray’s playing abounded in radiant sound, arching lyricism and delicacy. During moments when the violin writing turns intricate with evocations of fluttering birds, she dispatched the passagework with effortless grace.Tower’s short, feisty “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman,” dedicated to the pioneering female conductor Marin Alsop, the outgoing director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, is the first in a series of six such fanfares she has written. This short but packed, muscular piece is like a respectful retort to Copland.Muñoz then led an elegant account of Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” Suite, capturing the melancholy of the music while letting the players cut loose in dancing, near-frantic episodes. And Copland’s fanfare on this day proved the fitting conclusion: a way to usher in a moment that signals a return in more ways than one.CaramoorThe festival continues through Aug. 8 in Katonah, N.Y.; caramoor.org. More

The Disney star’s debut album circles back to the top of the Billboard 200 with the equivalent of 105,000 sales in the United States.Three weeks ago, a vinyl bonanza from Taylor Swift blocked Olivia Rodrigo from enjoying a second run at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, but now the teenage newcomer is back on top.“Sour,” the debut album by Rodrigo, the 18-year-old pop phenomenon and Disney actress, returns to No. 1 with the equivalent of 105,000 sales in the United States, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. Five weeks into its release, “Sour” has now notched two weeks at the top of the album chart, and two songs from it, “Drivers License” and “Good 4 U,” have topped the Hot 100 singles chart.On the latest Hot 100, BTS’s “Butter” rules for a fifth straight week.Also on this week’s album chart, “Hall of Fame,” the latest from the Chicago rapper Polo G, drops one spot to No. 2. “The Voice of the Heroes,” a joint album by the rappers Lil Baby and Lil Durk that led the chart two weeks ago, is in third place. Migos’s “Culture III” is No. 4, and Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 5 in its 24th week out.Opening at sixth place is H.E.R.’s “Back of My Mind.” Although it is her first official studio album, “Back of My Mind” follows five EPs and two compilations by H.E.R., the singer-songwriter Gabriella Wilson. She has also already won four Grammy Awards, including song of the year (“I Can’t Breathe”), and an Oscar, for best original song (“Fight for You,” from “Judas and the Black Messiah”). More

Known for his anti-establishment views, Mr. Rzewski created works inspired by the Attica prison uprising and a Chilean protest song.Frederic Rzewski, a formidable composer and pianist who wrote and performed music that was at once stylistically eclectic and politically committed, died on Saturday at his summer home in Montiano, Italy. He was 83.The cause was cardiac arrest, the publicist Josephine Hemsing said in an email.Mr. Rzewski’s anti-establishment thinking stood at the center of his music-making throughout his life. It was evident in the experimental, agitprop improvisations he created in the 1960s with the ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva; in “Coming Together,” the Minimalist classic inspired by the Attica prison uprising; and a vast catalog of solo piano works, several of which have become cornerstones of the modern repertoire.His approach was epitomized in his best-known piece, “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!,” an expansive and virtuosic set of 36 variations on a Chilean protest song.Composed for the pianist Ursula Oppens in 1975, the piece, an hour long, is a torrent of inventive and unusual techniques — the pianist whistles, shouts and slams the lid of the instrument — and has been compared to canonic works like Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations” and Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.”“Stylistically, it goes through everything,” Ms. Oppens said in a recent interview. “It’s pointillistic and minimalistic and really quite varied.” At the same time, she noted, Mr. Rzewski’s mastery of traditional counterpoint was a major draw for pianists. “There’s a logic to the relationship of the notes to one another,” she added.“The People United” has captured the imagination of virtuosos including Marc-André Hamelin and, more recently, younger pianists like Igor Levit and Conrad Tao. It is the closest thing to a war horse in the contemporary piano repertory.In 2015, Mr. Rzewski performed the entire work at the Pittsburgh fish market Wholey’s, a fabled event in contemporary music circles.Mr. Rzewski’s musical approach favored intuition over cerebral composition. “The one thing that composers in the 20th century don’t do is to simply write down the tunes that are going through their heads,” he told the magazine NewMusicBox in 2002. “I just write down what’s in my head.”Frederic Anthony Rzewski was born on April 13, 1938, in Westfield, Mass., to Anthony Rzewski, a Polish émigré, and Emma Buynicki, who were both pharmacists. He began playing piano and composing from a young age.Following the advice of a teacher, he checked out albums by Shostakovich and Schoenberg at a record store and began to immerse himself in musical modernism.After graduating from Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, Mr. Rzewski studied music at Harvard with the tonal composers Randall Thompson and Walter Piston. He earned his master’s at Princeton.In 1960 and 1961, he studied with Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence on a Fulbright scholarship. In Europe, he gained renown performing music by luminaries like Karlheinz Stockhausen and, after a stint in Berlin studying with Elliott Carter, settled in Rome.In a rehearsal for the Atonal Music Festival in 1963, Mr. Rzewski plays a typewriter and squeezes a baby doll that says “Mama.”Allyn Baum/The New York TimesThe European avant-garde had fallen under the sway of John Cage’s experimentalism, and Mr. Rzewski wrote heady music like his “Composition for Two Players,” an unconventional score that he once interpreted by placing sheets of glass on the strings of a Steinway.In 1966, he and the composer Alvin Curran assembled a group of musicians, including the electronic composer Richard Teitelbaum, to perform in the crypt of a church in Rome. The collective became Musica Elettronica Viva, an act that used homemade electronics setups for visceral improvisations. Mr. Rzewski, for instance, scraped and drummed on a piece of glass that had been cut into the shape of a piano, to which he had attached a microphone. (“By the grace of God, we didn’t get electrocuted,” he later said.)Rejecting the dense, modernist scores of his previous academic environs, Mr. Rzewski became preoccupied with spontaneity.“The sublime mingled freely with the base,” he once wrote of “Spacecraft,” one of the sets of trippy instructions that guided Musica Elettronica Viva’s performances. “Climaxes of exhausting intensity alternated with Tibetan drones, ecstatic trances gave way to demonic seizures in rapid succession.”The collective gave more than 100 performances across Europe in the late 1960s, and its raucous concerts drew increasingly politicized listeners. As students agitated, the group joined in, inviting audiences to play with them in anarchic improvisations — a kind of avant-garde Summer of Love. The group also performed in factories and prisons.“The most important thing was the connection of community and the political,” the composer and scholar George E. Lewis, who performed in later iterations of the collective, said in a recent interview. “Music gave people choices and options, and collectively creating music together allowed everyone to rethink their situations.”In 1971, Mr. Rzewski moved to New York and resumed a more routine concert life, playing recitals of new music and joining the downtown improvisation scene.And he began to bring his politics to bear on works he created alone. “It is fairly clear that the storms of the ’60s have momentarily subsided, giving way to a period of reflection,” he wrote that year. First was “Les Moutons de Panurge,” which asks an ensemble to play a tricky, ever-shifting 65-note melody. “Stay together as long as you can, but if you get lost, stay lost,” the score impishly indicates.Then came “Coming Together,” in which a speaker recites a letter written by Sam Melville, a leader of the 1971 Attica prison uprising, over a chugging, minimalist bass line as instrumentalists contribute quasi-improvised interjections. Mr. Rzewski would occasionally perform “Coming Together” himself, playing and speaking simultaneously.The music is at once calculated and urgent; Mr. Rzewski described the Attica rebellion, in which 43 people died, as an “atrocity that demanded of every responsible person that had any power to cry out, that he cry out.” Its many interpreters have included the performance artist Steve Ben Israel, the composer-performer Julius Eastman and Angela Davis, the professor and political activist.During this period Mr. Rzewski became involved in the Musicians Action Collective, a coalition that organized benefit concerts for United Farm Workers, a defense fund for Attica inmates and the Chilean solidarity movement. He was soon drawn to the song “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido,” which had become an anthem for the Chilean resistance through performances by the exiled group Inti-Illimani. Written by Sergio Ortega and Quilapayún, the song served as the basis for Mr. Rzewski’s set of variations, commissioned for the United States Bicentennial and first performed by Ms. Oppens at the Kennedy Center in Washington in 1976.“People always say, ‘Well, how can music be political if it has no text?’ Mr. Rzewski told an interviewer that year. “It doesn’t require a text. It does, however, require some kind of consciousness of the active relationship between music and the rest of the world.”Returning to Europe in the late 1970s, Mr. Rzewski split his time between Italy and Liège, where he was a professor at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique until his death, and he made regular visits to the United States to perform and teach.After “The People United,” Mr. Rzewski largely focused on solo piano music, like the “North American Ballads” (1979), which bring together Baroque counterpoint, minimalist improvisation and leftist folk song. Subsequent major solo works include the theatrical “De Profundis,” in which a pianist plays while reciting Oscar Wilde’s infamous prison manifesto; the polystylistic, 10-hour-plus cycle “The Road”; and a sprawling series of miniature “Nanosonatas.”“Opera houses don’t come asking me to write operas,” he told The New York Times in 2008. “Symphony orchestras don’t come asking for symphonies. But there’s this piano player I see every day who keeps asking me for music. So that’s what I do.”Much of the music encourages improvisation, and, in performances of canonic works like Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata, Mr. Rzewski would create his own elaborate cadenzas.He remained true to his iconoclastic roots. In 2001 he released his scores as free downloads on the internet, and many are now available on the online Petrucci Music Library.There was, though, a darker side to his ornery personality. Mr. Rzewski could be exceedingly harsh to students in educational settings. After his death was announced, several musicians noted on Twitter that he had a reputation for inappropriate flirtation and sexual innuendo toward younger women.Mr. Rzewski married Nicole Abbeloos in 1963, and they later separated. His partner for many years was Françoise Walot; they separated around 2008. Survivors include six children, Alexis, Daniel, Jan, Noemi, Esther and Noam, and five grandchildren.Wary of the present, Mr. Rzewski also refused to dwell in nostalgia. “Free improvisation was going to change the world,” he told The New York Times in 2016, referring to his early days with Musica Elettronica Viva. “It was going to create an entirely new language, so that people could come together from different parts of the planet and instantly communicate.”After taking a beat, he added, “Well, of course, we were wrong.” More

Blending modern technology with traditional instruments, Mr. Hassell created a genre he described as “coffee-colored classical music of the future.”Jon Hassell, a composer and trumpeter who blended modern technology with ancient instruments and traditions to create what he called Fourth World music, died on Saturday. He was 84.His death was announced in a statement from his family released by his record label, Ndeya. It did not specify where he died or the immediate cause.Mr. Hassell’s music floated outside the genre boundaries of classical music, electronica, ambient music or jazz. He described Fourth World as “a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques” and, elsewhere, as “coffee-colored classical music of the future.”His music could be contemplative and atmospheric, darkly suspenseful or abstractly funky. On the 20 albums Mr. Hassell made as a leader, his trumpet usually had an eerily disembodied sound, one that was processed through electronics and enfolded in shadowy reverberations, sometimes using harmonizers to multiply each note in parallel lines.He played vocalistic phrases that invoked the bluesy intimacy of Miles Davis along with the Indian classical music that Mr. Hassell studied with the raga singer Pandit Pran Nath. Around his trumpet, as foreground and background coalesced, there might be drone tones, global percussion, wind or string ensembles, washes of synthesizer, samples, distorted guitar, voices and more.He delved into calm and aggression, reflection and propulsion, serenity and suspense. His polymorphous, layered, ambiguous yet sensual music helped shape decades of electronic experimentation from acts like Oneohtrix Point Never, Arca and Matmos.In a tribute in The Guardian in 2007, the musician and producer Brian Eno wrote, “He looks at the world in all its momentary and evanescent moods with respect, and this shows in his music. He sees dignity and beauty in all forms of the dance of life.”Through the years, Mr. Hassell collaborated repeatedly with Mr. Eno and the American musician Ry Cooder. He also recorded with musicians from Africa, Brazil, India and Europe; composed a piece (“Pano da Costa”) for the Kronos Quartet; and played recording sessions with Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, k.d. lang, Baaba Maal, David Sylvian, Tears for Fears, Bono and others.In a 1997 interview with the online magazine Perfect Sound Forever, Mr. Hassell said he wanted to create “music for above and below the waist simultaneously.” He added that Fourth World music was “about heart and head as the same thing. It’s about being transported to some place which is made up of both real and virtual geography.”Mr. Hassell was born on March 22, 1937, in Memphis. He picked up the instrument his father had played in college, a cornet, and studied music and played in big bands as a teenager. He attended the Eastman School of Music, exploring modern classical composition and earning a master’s degree. To avoid being drafted, he joined the Army band in Washington, D.C.Fascinated by the emerging field of electronic music, he made tape collages and won a grant to study with the avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen for two years in Cologne, Germany. His classmates included musicians who would go on to start the German band Can; he took LSD with them.He received a fellowship at the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at SUNY Buffalo. There, he composed music on one of the early Moog synthesizers. He also met the composer Terry Riley, who first recorded his Minimalist landmark “In C” in 1968 with musicians at SUNY Buffalo, including Mr. Hassell.Mr. Hassell performed in concerts with Mr. Riley and in the drone group Theatre of Eternal Music, which was led by another pioneering Minimalist, La Monte Young. Like them, Mr. Hassell became a student of Mr. Nath, the Indian singer whose subtleties of pitch and inflection would profoundly influence Mr. Hassell’s music; he applied raga singing to his trumpet playing.“It’s about making a beautiful shape in air. I call it calligraphy in sound,” he said in a 2009 interview with All About Jazz.Mr. Hassell’s musical direction was already clear on his 1977 debut album, “Vernal Equinox.” His electronically altered trumpet is joined by African mbira (thumb piano), Indian tabla drums, maracas, tropical bird calls, electronic drones, ocean waves and crickets.“This record fascinated me,” Mr. Eno wrote in 2007. “It was a dreamy, strange, meditative music that was inflected by Indian, African and South American music, but also seemed located in the lineage of tonal Minimalism. It was a music I felt I’d been waiting for.”In New York City, where in the late 1970s art-rock, punk, pop and jazz shared a creative flux, Mr. Eno sought out Mr. Hassell, and they collaborated on “Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics” (1980). As the marketing category “world music” arose, its sounds and ideas strongly influenced musicians like Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel. Mr. Eno was also producing Talking Heads, and Mr. Hassell’s ghostly trumpet is prominent in “Houses in Motion” on Talking Heads’ 1980 album, “Remain in Light.”Mr. Hassell helped conceptualize the 1981 Byrne-Eno album “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” which merged found recordings with studio rhythm tracks and introduced a broad audience to ideas of sonic and cultural collage. But Mr. Hassell later said that he could not afford the airfare to join the recording sessions, and he told Billboard magazine that he considered the results “too poppy.”Writing in 1982 for the science-fiction magazine Heavy Metal, Mr. Hassell championed both preserving and extending local traditions, in order “to understand which music made sorrows bearable and expressed the mystery of creation before the entry date of the first transistor radio into the village.”Through the decades, Mr. Hassell continued to record, experiment and recombine far-flung musical elements.He collaborated with the African percussionists and singers of Farafina, from Burkina Faso, for “Flash of the Spirit” in 1988. He wrote theater music for “Sulla Strada,” an Italian stage adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” He recorded with Mr. Cooder and Indian musicians — Ronu Majumdar on bansuri, a wooden flute, and Abhijit Banerjee on tabla drums — on the 2000 album “Hollow Bamboo.” In 2005 he began touring internationally with a group called Maarifa Street, which he named after a street in Iran; “maarifa” means knowledge or wisdom.Mr. Hassell learned evolving technology and made it speak for him, incorporating samples and complex signal processing. He also held on to the physicality of breath and lips on the trumpet.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Hassell conceived his two final albums, “Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One)” (2018) and “Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two)” (2020), as “pentimento,” a visual-arts term for the reappearance of images an artist had painted over.He described his approach to the music as “seeing it in terms of a painting with layers and touch-ups and start-overs with new layers that get erased in places that let the underlying pattern come to the top and be seen (or heard).”He had also been working on a book titled “The North and South of You,” he said in a 2018 interview with Billboard.“It’s the analysis of our current situation in terms of our overemphasis on the north of us, the rational and technological, instead of the south of us,” he said. “North is logic, south is the samba — and how much more of each would you rather have when the time comes to depart the planet?” More

In the six years between the Australian band’s albums, its singer and guitarist, Naomi Saalfield, was treated for breast cancer, and recovered.The Australian band Hiatus Kaiyote emerged in 2013 with an amorphous sound that pulled in rock, funk and soul, and caught the ear of Questlove, Erykah Badu and Q-Tip. Drake was listening, too: In 2017, he sampled a song from the band’s second LP for his playlist “More Life.” The group’s singer and guitarist, Naomi Saalfield, known as Nai Palm, appeared on his follow-up album, “Scorpion.” A few months later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.“Ultimately, I became obsessed with the concept of impermanence,” Saalfield, 32, said on a video call, speaking from an almost pitch-black room in her home in Fitzroy, a suburb of Melbourne. “Time is an illusion that you have forever, but no one knows how much time they have. And when you have a massive life scare, it really puts that in perspective.”The band — which includes the bassist Paul Bender, the keyboardist Simon Mavin and the drummer Perrin Moss — incorporated that urgency into “Mood Valiant,” its first album in six years, which came out on Friday. Through bright textures and sunlit Brazilian rhythms, it scores a trek from darkness to light, providing the soundtrack of what turned into a very personal journey.The band’s bassist, Paul Bender.Rafael RochaAnd its keyboardist, Simon Mavin.Si Jay GouldBefore Hiatus Kaiyote earned praise from some of neo-soul and hip-hop’s big names, it was a local group in Melbourne developing its hybrid sound organically. The band formed more than a decade ago, after Bender saw Saalfield playing a pink guitar in a small club and handed her a business card. She never called him, but a year later, they bumped into each other and began working on new music together. Moss and Mavin soon joined them, and the quartet started playing esoteric music with odd time signatures and complex rhythmic structures.“There was no normality to the way we were approaching this music,” Mavin, 38, said. “And it kind of opened my eyes to a whole new creative channel.”Hiatus Kaiyote’s debut, “Tawk Tomahawk,” arrived in 2013, and its 2015 follow-up, “Choose Your Weapon,” with its barrage of psych-funk blowouts and moody space-outs, landed as part of the moment that brought D’Angelo’s “Black Messiah,” Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly” and Kamasi Washington’s “The Epic.”“It was such a multitude of things,” Bender said of the group’s second album, which is packed with directional shifts. “I think that’s why the title fit. It’s like, ‘What do you want to choose today? What kind of vibe are you in?’”The band had completed instrumentals for “Mood Valiant” when Saalfield learned she had breast cancer — the disease that killed her mother — and she returned to Australia for an emergency mastectomy. When she recovered and returned to the studio, she came back with a renewed perspective on her personal and professional lives.“Ultimately, when I got sick, I was like, ‘What do you want from life? Who are you and what do you want to leave behind?’” Saalfield said. “It was actually a really powerful place to record from. I know what it is I am meant to do with my life and I’m going to do it as long as I’m here. And it kind of lit a fire under my butt.”“There’s always a spiritual element to our music,” said the band’s drummer, Perrin Moss.Si Jay GouldIt also inspired her to embrace the spiritual, already a part of the band’s alchemy. On a trip to Rio de Janeiro to record with the noted Brazilian composer Arthur Verocai, who contributed string and horn arrangements for the tropicalia-infused “Get Sun,” Saalfield stayed in the Amazon rainforest for 10 days, and took part in the kambo ritual of wiping frog poison onto her skin to remove the toxins in her body. She also recorded voice memos and used the clips for interludes on the album. The opening cut, “Flight of the Tiger Lily,” features two elders from the Varinawa people teaching her how to say the names of birds; “Hush Rattle” samples local women singing in their native language.“There’s always a spiritual element to our music,” Moss, 35, said. “In Hiatus, the more we’re in touch with our spiritual side, and more of a conduit for ideas, the better.”With its warped strings, dusty drums and introspective lyrics that embrace life, “Mood Valiant” has the feel of a ’70s Brazilian psych album. It’s being released by Brainfeeder, a label started in 2008 by the experimental producer Flying Lotus as a home for alternative soul, hip-hop and electronica.Saalfield said she hopes the LP will touch people when they need it most. “Everybody experiences suffering,” she said. “Everybody experiences joy, no matter how privileged you are or if you have nothing. The beautiful thing is that music is universal. If you can reach people in their darkest hour and comfort them, that’s what it’s for. And that’s what music does for me. It saved me in my darkest hour.” More