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      Grammy Officials Oppose an Open Hearing on Reasons for Ousting C.E.O.

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      The lawyer for the former chief executive, Deborah Dugan, said the Recording Academy, which runs the Grammy Awards, had already agreed to an open session to discuss her grievances.As the organization behind the Grammy Awards prepares for an arbitration hearing next month with Deborah Dugan, its ousted chief executive, lawyers for Ms. Dugan have accused the Grammys of reneging on a promise to have the proceedings be open to the public.The arbitration, over Ms. Dugan’s dismissal early last year after just five months on the job, could be a rare window into the opaque politics of the Recording Academy, after years of complaints from artists and others in the music industry that the group fails to adequately recognize women and minorities and is rife with conflicts of interest.Those criticisms boiled over when Ms. Dugan was placed on administrative leave by the academy just 10 days before the 62nd annual Grammys ceremony, in January 2020, and later fired. As the dispute played out between Ms. Dugan and the academy, Harvey Mason Jr., who was then the chairman and interim chief, declared the academy’s dedication to transparency.In a letter on Feb. 4, 2020, Mr. Mason, who has since taken over as chief executive, told Ms. Dugan that the academy had agreed to waive the confidentiality provision of the arbitration clause in Ms. Dugan’s employment contract.“The Recording Academy has absolutely nothing to hide,” Mr. Mason wrote, “and, in fact, welcomes the opportunity to tell its story so that the entire music community and the world can hear the truth — and nothing but the truth — about what you did to this proud institution during your brief tenure as president/C.E.O.“In short,” Mr. Mason continued, “we welcome a full public airing of your allegations against the Academy as well as the Academy’s many claims and defenses against you.”Harvey Mason Jr. wrote that “The Recording Academy has absolutely nothing to hide,” in a letter dated Feb. 4, 2020.Jordan Strauss/Invision, via Associated PressBut as the hearing, now set for July 12 in Los Angeles, approaches, the academy has requested the proceedings remain closed. In correspondence with the arbitrator, Sara Adler, and lawyers for both sides, the academy’s lawyers said that the organization “was and is willing to make public the results of this arbitration, and the reasoning for those results, and nothing more,” according to Anthony J. Oncidi of Proskauer Rose, a law firm that has long represented the academy.According to Mr. Oncidi, the confidentiality provision cited in Mr. Mason’s letter last year covered only the disclosure of “the existence, content or result of any arbitration,” and that a full public hearing would expose other confidential information and cause “further emotional distress” to witnesses.In an email to Ms. Adler last week, Michael J. Willemin, a lawyer for Ms. Dugan at the firm Wigdor LLP, said that the academy was changing its position and should be required to keep the hearing open.“The simple, undeniable fact,” Mr. Willemin wrote, “is that the parties agreed to open this proceeding to the public, and, therefore, it must be open to the public unless Ms. Dugan agrees otherwise.”According to the academy, Ms. Dugan was dismissed because she alienated the staff and exhibited bullying behavior toward an executive assistant assigned to her.Ms. Dugan cast the decision to dismiss her differently in a discrimination complaint lodged with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Ms. Dugan — who had led Red, the nonprofit co-founded by Bono of U2, and was brought into the Grammys as a change agent — said her dismissal was an act of retaliation after she challenged the “boys’ club” that she said dominated the academy.Dugan’s ouster also came three weeks after she wrote a detailed letter to the academy’s human resources department alleging voting irregularities, financial mismanagement and conflicts of interest involving members of the academy’s board and its executive committee. She also accused a prominent outside lawyer for the academy of making unwanted sexual advances toward her. (That lawyer, Joel Katz, disputed Ms. Dugan’s account.)The Recording Academy has for years faced complaints about its voting process and its poor record of recognizing women and people of color in many of the top awards. In 2018, Neil Portnow, Ms. Dugan’s predecessor, was criticized for suggesting that women should “step up” to be recognized at the Grammys.This year, the academy voted to eliminate most of its anonymous nomination review committees, in which experts selected by academy executives made the final decision on who made the final ballot in 61 of the Grammys’ 84 categories.Those committees were criticized by Ms. Dugan and came under fire from top musicians like the Weeknd. The next Grammy ceremony, set for Jan. 31, 2022, will be the first in years in which the committees will play no part in making up the ballots of most awards, although they will still be used for 11 categories like production and packaging. More

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      Amythyst Kiah Found Her Powerful Voice. Now She Has a Sound to Match It.

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      The 34-year-old singer and songwriter fuses folk, blues, rock and once-hidden emotion on her new album, “Wary + Strange.”NASHVILLE — Before Amythyst Kiah made her new album, “Wary + Strange,” she veered between two distinct aesthetics. Her 2013 debut, “Dig,” was filled with spare acoustic renditions of old-time material. Then came a more robust set of indie rock.“I do not understand what the hell my brain was doing separating the two,” she said recently, resting her elbows on a park picnic table. “I can do whatever the hell I want with the songs.”When Kiah and the producer Tony Berg recorded “Fancy Drones (Fracture Me),” a song about her excruciating awareness of being cut off from her emotions, in early 2020, the goal was to join the two halves of her artistic identity at last. The result: Kiah’s country-blues phrasing bent around a lurching groove, with the guttural buzz of Berg’s bass harmonica substituting for bass guitar.“When we were done with it, we looked at each other as if to say, ‘What the hell was this?’” Berg, who has worked with the indie-rock singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers and the band Phantom Planet, recalled in a phone interview.To Kiah, this was the sound of self-actualization: “It was one of the best days of my life,” she said.It wasn’t like she’d invented arbitrary reasons to corral her music into categories; developing her taste as an introspective Black listener and musician, she’d noticed that some genres are marked, and marketed, as white domains. There was, she recalled, “no talk about how Black people have consistently and always played integral roles in shaping industry and shaping culture and shaping music.”Kiah resides in East Tennessee, where she’s spent the entirety of her 34 years next to the Appalachian Mountains in one modest-size municipality or another, but she’d driven 300 miles west to Nashville to appear in a documentary about Black voices in country and roots music alongside Allison Russell, one of her bandmates in Our Native Daughters.That string band, convened in early 2018 by Rhiannon Giddens, is a group of banjo-playing Black women with significant overlapping experiences, but distinct sounds and sensibilities. Kiah’s contributions include one of her first pointedly topical compositions, “Black Myself,” a down-home, defiant testimony to Black pride that earned a Grammy nomination for best American roots song.On Friday, “Wary + Strange,” Kiah’s first nationally distributed solo release will arrive. It’s the work of an artist weary of correcting perceptions, book ended by the resolved refrain “Soapbox,” a slight song with a serious purpose: to reject the rejection she’s felt (“You can keep your sophistry”).Kiah took up the task of defining who she is when she grew aware that others were doing it for her. She was the only child of a manufacturing plant supervisor and a drugstore manager, one of the few families of color — or households that didn’t attend church — in their Chattanooga suburb. “We were all in the same socioeconomic bracket,” she said, “but at the end of the day, I was still Black, and there came a point where people that I used to hang out with just started ignoring me.”It was a revelation when she made an artistically inclined friend who had access to an older sibling’s Nine Inch Nails and Tori Amos CDs: “I was just like, ‘Oh, there’s other ways of being.’”“For the first time, I didn’t feel like I had to close off a part of myself,” Kiah said of making “Wary + Strange.”Liam Woods for The New York TimesKiah got into alternative metal bands, hearing echoes of her own unexpressed anger, but it was in the mystical, expansive angst of Amos’s piano epics that she found an approach to own. Instead of a piano, she requested an acoustic guitar. Her father, Carl Phillips, who’d played Southern rock, country, soul and pop in otherwise white gigging bands, and listened to plenty else besides, understood.“I don’t remember ever telling her that a particular category of music was bad, because I had a little bit of everything,” he said in an interview.Kiah dealt with intense social anxiety, so she was content to be a bedroom shredder. Learning classical fingerstyle guitar, with its blending of rhythm and lead, made her feel self-sufficient, like she had “this tiny orchestra beneath me.”A switch to an arts high school brought some respite. “I met the first Black nerds that I ever met in my life,” she said. “On top of that, I was able to be openly gay and literally no one cared.”That didn’t mean she was eager to play in front of others. Her third public performance was at her mother’s funeral, where she sang a momentous original. “She committed suicide,” Kiah said, “so my whole thing was, ‘Why did you leave me?’” She re-examines that loss, and how she dealt with it, in her new song “Wild Turkey.” “When I was 17, I pretended not to care, stayed numb for years to escape despair,” she sings, acknowledging her stoic self-protection.A decade, and much therapy, passed between those two compositions. “I just completely stopped writing down my feelings about anything,” Kiah explained. “I just wanted to be like a robot.”After her mother’s death, Kiah and her father went to live with her paternal grandmother in the considerably smaller Johnson City, Tenn., and she enrolled in a bluegrass guitar class at East Tennessee State University. A new fascination with flatpicking technique developed into a study of old-time music when she learned about the Black string band tradition concealed beneath the whitewashed narrative of what was once sold as hillbilly music.“To see that history unveiled before me, I was like, ‘Oh, so I do have a place in this country,” she said. “I am an American. I am Appalachian. This music is part of my heritage, and it influenced everything else that I listen to. Why wouldn’t I want to play it?’”Her father learned alongside her, borrowing textbooks and never missing a performance when she joined the school’s marquee old-time band. “Most of the places that they went to, it was majority culture and her,” he said, referring to white crowds. “I couldn’t imagine her being there by herself.”Receiving encouraging feedback about her singing convinced Kiah to focus on her voice, too. She worked up modern interpretations of mountain standards like “Darlin’ Corey,” dropping the key to suit the stern resonance of her low range. And she played on the regional circuit, with her father serving as informal tour manager. A band she called Her Chest of Glass was her first venture into full-band rock arrangements.No lineup has mattered more to Kiah’s career or consciousness than Our Native Daughters. She sensed the significance of their mission — recovering the musical agency of enslaved people and their descendants — but figured the album they released through Smithsonian Folkways would mostly have an “archival, academic” impact. To her surprise, its heartfelt historicity has registered with less scholarly audiences. “I didn’t think enough people were really prepared to accept these stories,” Kiah said.The potency of those vignettes emboldened her to take a personalized approach to folk and country-blues, and to record both stripped-down and muscled-up versions of her growing pile of material. At the Grammys, she met an A&R executive from Concord Music, who paired her with Berg. They agreed to scrap her existing recordings and start over. On “Wary + Strange,” she depicts a nightmarish netherworld of abandonment by spectral women — her mother; a lover — and a self-aware descent into melancholy, boozy depths. “There’s this feeling of being haunted and feeling slightly uncomfortable at all times,” Kiah said.Kiah reached for literary terms, “Southern Gothic” and “magical realism,” to describe her ideal sound to Berg: “This idea that you have a setting that is very familiar, very real, but then there’s these weird, otherworldly bits and pieces within it,” she explained.Berg foregrounded Kiah’s voice and guitar, and called in impressionistic instrumentalists like Blake Mills and Ethan Grushka. “What I wanted them to bring,” Berg said, “was something other than what you might expect. Sometimes it’s unrecognizable noise in the background, and that noise can represent the static that impedes the expression of ideas.”It’s had the opposite effect for Kiah. “For the first time” creating a record, she said, “I didn’t feel like I had to close off a part of myself.” More

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      Lil Baby and Lil Durk Share No. 1 With ‘The Voice of the Heroes’

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      The collaborative album by the two Atlanta-based rappers relied on streaming to top the Billboard chart.Last week’s top album may have hit No. 1 thanks to vinyl, but this week it’s back to the future: clicks.“The Voice of the Heroes,” an album pairing the Atlanta rapper Lil Baby with the like-minded Chicago rapper Lil Durk (now Atlanta-based, as well), was streamed 198 million times in its first week out — enough to open atop the Billboard 200 album chart.Digital plays of the duo’s 18 collaborative tracks made up the great majority of consumption for the release, which sold about 4,000 copies as a complete package and another 1,000 song downloads. All told including streams, “The Voice of the Heroes” earned 150,000 equivalent album units, according to the formulas of MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm.That path to the top of the chart represents the inverse of the one used last week by Taylor Swift, whose “Evermore” returned to No. 1 from No. 74 thanks to the sale of 102,000 vinyl LPs, 69,000 CDs and just 12 million streams. (About six months of pre-orders for the vinyl were counted in full once the LP shipped to customers.) This week, “Evermore” falls to No. 8, down 85 percent in equivalent sales.“The Voice of the Heroes” marks Lil Durk’s first No. 1 album, with his last two releases, “Just Cause Y’all Waited 2” and “The Voice,” having topped out at No. 2. According to Billboard, he is the sixth act to reach No. 1 for the first time this year, after Olivia Rodrigo, Moneybagg Yo, Rod Wave, Morgan Wallen and Playboi Carti. Lil Baby earned his first chart-topper last year with “My Turn,” which was No. 1 for five weeks.“Sour” by Rodrigo, which debuted at No. 1 last month, holds steady at No. 2 in its third week out, earning another 143,000 units sold. Two other former No. 1’s follow: Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 3 with 50,000 units, while J. Cole’s “The Off-Season” falls one spot this week to No. 4. “The Chaos Chapter: Freeze,” by the K-pop group Tomorrow x Together, debuts at No. 5 with 43,000 units. More

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      Overlooked No More: Jobriath, Openly Gay Glam Rocker in the ’70s

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      His space alien persona and theatrical rock music drew comparisons to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust character. But American audiences seemed unwilling to accept his sexuality.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.On March 8, 1974, American TV viewers got their first glimpse of the American glam rocker Jobriath on the popular NBC music program “The Midnight Special.” Jobriath, who was introduced by the singer Gladys Knight as “the act of tomorrow,” made a striking debut, wearing a futuristic silver-gray, hoop-shaped costume and singing a baroque-sounding number titled “I’maman.”For his second song, the electrifying “Rock of Ages,” he wore a tightfitting, one-piece purplish suit and a large, bubble helmet that, with the touch of his fingers, broke apart into petals that surrounded his head. His space alien persona and theatrical rock music drew comparisons to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust character, and his swaggering sound was likened to that of Mick Jagger. Onstage he moved like a ballet dancer.“We were so excited,” the actress Ann Magnuson, then a teenager, said in a phone interview. “‘Oh, did you see that helmet?’ You would talk about that in school the next day.”But Billy Cross, who played the guitar alongside Jobriath, remembered the performance, and the audience, differently. “It was horrible,” he said in a phone interview. “They hated us, and that wasn’t fun.”Such was the complicated existence of Jobriath, who is generally regarded as the first openly gay rock star. His image came with risks: He released just two albums, and both were poorly received by an audience that was largely unwilling to accept his effeminate persona. His short-lived career became a footnote to rock ’n’ roll history, and he ultimately died alone, his body discovered by the police some time later.Jobriath performing on NBC’s “The Midnight Special” in 1974. He emerged onstage in a futuristic silver-gray, hoop-shaped costume.Gary Null/NBC, via Getty ImagesFor his second number on “The Midnight Special,” Jobriath wore a tight-fitting one-piece purplish suit.Gary Null/NBC, via Getty ImagesHe was born Bruce Wayne Campbell on Dec. 14, 1946, in Pennsylvania (accounts differ on precisely where), the second of three children of James and Marion (Salisbury) Campbell. His father came from a military background, and his mother was a homemaker who later worked as an insurance secretary. (The full name he used, Jobriath Salisbury, was “an amalgam of his teenage obsession with religion and his mother’s maiden name,” Robert Cochrane wrote in the liner notes of a 2004 Jobriath compilation.)Bruce Campbell was a musical prodigy who could sight-read any composition at the piano, said Peter Batchelder, who met him in 1964 when they were music students at Temple University.“He could play pretty much the whole first movement of the Prokofiev second piano concerto,” he said by phone. “He could handle musical data like nobody I ever met before or since.”Finding Temple’s music courses elementary, Bruce dropped out after one semester and joined the military. “He wanted to impress his father,” said his half brother, Willie Fogle. “Of course he hated it, so he ran away.”Relocating to California under the name of Jobriath Salisbury, he agreed to play the piano accompaniment for a friend who was auditioning for the 1968 Los Angeles production of “Hair.” The musical’s director, seeing Jobriath as a good fit for a production celebrating the counterculture, gave him a role. “We were all dumbfounded,” said Oatis Stephens, a friend who also acted in “Hair.” “It was like, ‘Why aren’t you playing concerts with the Philharmonic?’”Jobriath later joined the New York City company of “Hair” but was fired, by his account, for upstaging the other actors. He then found himself lost and binging on alcohol. “I was floating down in the gutter,” he told Interview magazine in 1973.He was rescued, however, by the music entrepreneur and club owner Jerry Brandt, who heard a demo tape that Jobriath had sent to CBS Records. Brandt asked to become his manager.“He could write, he could sing, he could dance,” Brandt said in the 2012 documentary “Jobriath A.D.” “I bought it. I mean, he seduced me, period.” (Brandt died in January.)At Brandt’s direction, Jobriath transformed himself from a 1960s hippie to a glittering rock star, and in interviews he took aim at musicians like Bowie and Marc Bolan, the frontman for the band T. Rex, whose personas only hinted at sexual ambiguity.“I’m a true fairy,” he would say. He told NBC Los Angeles: “There’s a lot of people running around, putting makeup on and stuff, just because it’s chic. I just want to say that I’m no pretender.”Brandt brought Jobriath to the attention of Elektra Records, which signed him for a reported $500,000, a huge sum at the time for an unknown musician, equal to almost $3 million today. (In Mick Houghton’s 2010 book “Becoming Elektra,” Jac Holzman, the label’s founder, said that the actual figure was closer to $50,000.)Jobriath in May 1983 when he performed as a cabaret musician. He was found dead that summer, from AIDS, in his room at the Chelsea Hotel.Hopkins, NYC, via the Bruce Campbell estateJobriath’s debut album, titled simply “Jobriath” and released in October 1973, was a mix of glam rock, cabaret and funk, all given sophisticated arrangements at the Electric Lady recording studios in Manhattan. His lyrics could be risqué (“I’d do anything for you or to you,” he sang in “Take Me I’m Yours”), tender (“I know the child that I am has hurt you/And I was a woman when I made you cry,” in “Be Still”) or witty (“With you on my arm Betty Grable lost her charm,” in “Movie Queen”).“The material just impressed me by its complexity, sensitivity, breadth and quirkiness,” Eddie Kramer, who co-produced the record with Jobriath, said in a phone interview. “He was a genius.”Before the album was released, Brandt mounted a heavy promotional campaign, including full-page advertisements in Rolling Stone and Vogue, posters on the sides of buses and a gigantic billboard in Times Square depicting Jobriath as a nude statue. Coinciding with the album’s release, Jobriath had planned to make his live performance debut with three shows at the Paris Opera House, where he would emerge in a King Kong costume climbing a mini replica of the Empire State Building. The production cost was estimated at an exorbitant $200,000.The ad campaign is one reason Jobriath is considered to this day to have been among the music industry’s most overhyped acts.With the gay liberation movement growing in the early 1970s, Brandt assumed that Jobriath would be readily embraced. “The kids will emulate Jobriath,” he told Rolling Stone in 1973, “because he cares about his body, his mind, his responsibility to the public as a leader, as a force, as a manipulator of beauty and art.”The album earned some positive reviews, including one from Rolling Stone, which said it “exhibits honest, personal magnetism and talent to burn.” Other publications were more mixed. In his review for The New York Times, Henry Edwards made the inevitable comparison to Bowie. “Jobriath, too, writes about ‘space clowns,’ ‘earthlings’ and ‘morning starships,’” he wrote. “The results can only be described as dismal.”Sales of the album were poor, and the Paris Opera House shows were scrapped.“When it started out,” said Cross, Jobriath’s guitarist, “it was all about the music. After Jerry Brandt got involved, it was all about the career. Then after that started to take hold, it was all about Jobriath’s sexuality. America was not ready for that.”Jobriath put out a second album, “Creatures of the Street,” in 1974 and embarked on a national tour, only to encounter homophobic slurs during a performance at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. By the next year, even after his appearance on “The Midnight Special,” Elektra had dropped Jobriath from its roster, and he and Brandt had parted ways.“He didn’t sell any records,” Brandt said in “Jobriath A.D.,” the documentary film. “What gets a record company going is the smell of money. And there was no money. He didn’t generate 50 cents.”From the late 1970s onward, Jobriath performed pop standards as a cabaret musician, calling himself Cole Berlin, and lived at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. In a 1979 interview, he spoke of his former alter ego in the past tense: “Jobriath committed suicide in a drug, alcohol and publicity overdose.” He was found dead at the Chelsea Hotel in the summer of 1983. He was 36. AIDS, which had reached epidemic dimensions by then, was given as the cause.In the decades since his death, Jobriath’s music has been reissued, and a number of musicians have expressed admiration for him, including Morrissey, Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters and Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott.Jobriath’s impact on L.G.B.T.Q. music history also went through a reappraisal. “He was a sexual hero,” the British singer Marc Almond wrote in The Guardian in 2012. “For all the derision and marginalization he faced, Jobriath did touch lives.”Today, those who knew Jobriath in his various guises — classical music wunderkind, glam rocker, interpreter of the Great American Songbook — remember his talent. “Whether he was composing epic symphonic music of searing intensity (and orchestrating it at 16) or brazenly appropriating the Rolling Stones’s idiom,” Batchelder, his former classmate, said in an email, “there was always beauty in his work.” More

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      Juilliard Students Protest Tuition Increase With Marches and Music

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      After occupying parts of the school, some students were barred from entering the building. So they took the demonstration outside.The Juilliard School, one of the world’s leading performing arts conservatories, is better known for recitals than picket lines. But students protesting a planned tuition increase occupied parts of its Lincoln Center campus this week and, when they were later barred from entering a school building, led music- and dance-filled protests on West 65th Street.The protests began Monday when a group of students, objecting to plans to raise tuition to $51,230 a year from $49,260, occupied parts of the school’s Irene Diamond building and posted photos on social media of dozens of sheets of multicolored paper arranged to form the words “TUITION FREEZE.”On Wednesday, students said, they received an email from the administration saying that “school space” could not be used for nonschool events without permission. “Posting signage, posters or fliers, tabling in the lobby, solicitation or distributing print materials also requires advance authorization,” the message added.Students returned to the Diamond building that day, marching through the halls and stopping outside the door of the school’s president, Damian Woetzel. At one point, some said, they knocked on his door, chanting: “We know you’re in there. Will you meet students’ needs and freeze tuition?”Later, protesters said, they were barred from the Diamond building, and the school told them that it was investigating an incident that included reported violations “pertaining to community safety.” On Thursday, about 20 students continued their tuition protest on the sidewalk outside, waving placards and accusing the school of using heavy-handed tactics to quell dissent.“They have made it quite apparent they will not listen to us,” said Carl Hallberg, an 18-year-old drama student.Rosalie Contreras, a spokeswoman for Juilliard, wrote in an email that the school was increasing financial aid and raising the minimum wage for work-study jobs on campus to $15 an hour, and that it had special funding available for students experiencing financial hardship.“Juilliard respects the right of all community members including students to freely express opinions with demonstrations that are conducted in a reasonable time, place and manner,” Ms. Contreras added. “Regrettably the demonstration on Wednesday escalated to the point where public safety was called by an employee.”When some protestors were barred from a school building, pending an investigation, they continued their demonstrations outside.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBoth Mr. Hallberg and another student, Gabe Canepa, said they were part of a campus group called the Socialist Penguins, which had called for the protests. They said that they had not jeopardized anyone’s safety.Mr. Canepa, a 19-year-old dance student, added that students took the tuition increase seriously because it meant they would have less to spend on “rent, groceries, subway fares, supplies we need for school.”An online petition by the group said that “raising the already astronomically high cost of tuition” hurts working class students. It added: “We demand that Juilliard cancel their planned tuition raise.”Students taking part in the protests said that roughly 300 current students, or about 30 percent to a third of those currently enrolled, had signed the petition.The events at Juilliard this week appear to have been less contentious than school occupations that have taken place elsewhere in Manhattan over the years, including at New York University, Cooper Union and the New School, where police officers wearing helmets and carrying plastic shields arrested people who took over part of the school’s Fifth Avenue building in 2009. But the conflict struck a discordant note.Juilliard is also facing pressure on diversity issues. In May, CBS News quoted a Black student there saying she had been disturbed by an acting workshop in which the class members were asked to pretend they were slaves, as audio of whips, rain and racial slurs was played. Juilliard told CBS that the workshop was a “mistake” and that it regretted “that the workshop caused pain for students.”After Wednesday’s protests, several students said that they had received emails from Sabrina Tanbara, the assistant dean of student affairs, letting them know that their access to the Diamond building had been suspended pending an investigation.The next day, Juilliard’s dean of student development sent an email message to all students that provided some details of what the school was looking into. Referring to the protest on Wednesday afternoon outside the president’s office, Barrett Hipes, the dean, wrote: “Yesterday Public Safety received a report regarding confrontational and intimidating student conduct that caused an administrative assistant who was working alone in an office to become concerned for their own safety.”Unable to enter the Diamond building on Thursday, the students held a protest outside and encouraged passing motorists to honk their horns in support.One young man vogued on West 65th Street. Mr. Hallberg strummed a guitar, and another student plucked a standup bass, leading a singalong of the labor standard “Which Side Are You On?”Some students said they felt they had been punished without due process.Sarah Williams, a 19-year-old oboe student, said that she had written to Ms. Tanbara asking what, specifically, she was believed to have done that would justify barring her from the Diamond building. She said she had yet to receive a response.“My resources have been eliminated without any explanation,” she said.Raphael Zimmerman, a 20-year-old clarinet student, said he had received an email from Ms. Tanbara notifying him that he would be contacted to schedule an “investigatory meeting” to obtain his account of activity outside the president’s office late on Wednesday afternoon.“I think saying the several minutes we spent knocking on that door and singing was harassment,” he said, “is essentially rejecting our right to assemble and demonstrate.” More

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      Tania León Wins Music Pulitzer for ‘Stride’

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      The New York Philharmonic premiered the work, both solemn and celebratory, in February 2020.In the 1990s, the composer Tania León was named a new-music adviser to the New York Philharmonic. But the orchestra did not play any of her work back then.It made up for lost time in February 2020, when the Philharmonic premiered Ms. León’s “Stride,” a work both solemn and celebratory, as part of its Project 19 initiative, for which it commissioned 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which barred the states from denying women the right to vote.On Friday “Stride” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music. It is a culminating honor in the career of a composer, now 78, who grew up in Cuba; found a footing writing percussive dance works in New York; created a series of memorable orchestral pieces shot through with intricate Latin rhythmic grooves; and became an outspoken advocate for cultural diversity in music. She has also been a pathbreaking conductor, and currently directs the wide-ranging festival Composers Now.Ms. León, who found out about the prize as she left her dentist’s office on Friday, said she started crying at the news. “My mother and my grandmother were maids when they were 8-year-olds,” she said in a phone interview. “My family had so much hope for me and the new generation, to give us an education, and when something major has happened in my life, that’s the first thing that comes to mind.”Inspired by the courage of the women in her family, and by the suffragist Susan B. Anthony, the 15-minute “Stride” isn’t purely optimistic. Forthright brass fanfares recur throughout the piece, a kind of periodic annunciation, and jazzy wind solos squiggle out of the orchestral textures, but a dark, unsettled energy always lurks.The composer Ellen Reid, who won the Pulitzer in 2019 and was part of the committee that awarded this year’s prize, said she had heard the Philharmonic perform “Stride” at Lincoln Center last year.“It was one of the last performances before the pandemic,” she said by phone. “Tania has a way of weaving together so many musical traditions with such joy. She’s just such a wonderful ambassador for music, and her love is infectious.”Explosive bells sound at the end of the piece: “Every time I think about it,” Ms. León said, “I want to hear even more — all the bells in the nation.” But a West African beat shuffles underneath — a reminder that Black women were initially excluded from the right that was granted by the 19th Amendment.“Under all these bells of celebration,” Ms. León said, “there is still a kind of struggle.”Struggle, and movement.“It’s very nice to be recognized,” she added. “But the biggest prize of my life is that I’ve been able to manifest a dream that started in a very small place, far from here, with people who are not here any more. That, for me, is what ‘Stride’ is about: moving forward.”Joshua Barone contributed reporting. More

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      Lorde’s Sunburst, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Ava Max, Clairo, PmBata and others.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 theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Lorde, ‘Solar Power’About the last thing to be expected from a songwriter as moody and intense as Lorde was a carefree ditty about fun in the summer sun. “Solar Power,” the title song from an impending album, is just that, riding three chords and brisk acoustic rhythm guitar (and glancing back at George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90”) to celebrate hitting the beach, getting sun-tanned cheeks and tossing away her “cellular device”: “Can you reach me? No! You can’t,” she sings, and giggles. She has an offhand but attention-getting boast — “I’m kind of like a prettier Jesus” — and an invitation completely free of ambivalence: “Come on and let the bliss begin.” JON PARELESAva Max, ‘EveryTime I Cry’Just to be certain, I have Googled and confirmed that no one has yet referred to Ava Max as Una Lipa. There’s still time. (This is a compliment.) JON CARAMANICASaint Jhn and SZA, ‘Just for Me’A beat ticks along behind slow-pulsing synthesizer chords as Saint Jhn appears, claiming lovelorn angst but safely distancing it with Auto-Tune. But when SZA arrives, a minute and a half in, her voice leaps out. Like him, she proclaims a desperate, dangerous infatuation. Unlike him, she sounds like she means it. PARELESPmBata, ‘Favorite Song’Endlessly cheerful lite-pop-soul, “Favorite Song” is a bopping strut from PmBata, toggling between singing and rapping, though less hip-hop-influenced than his earlier singles like “Down for Real.” The come-ons are a little frisky, but the attitude is never less than sweet. CARAMANICAJomoro featuring Sharon Van Etten, ‘Nest’Jomoro is the alliance of two percussionists turned songwriters: Joey Waronker, Beck’s longtime drummer, and Mauro Refosco, a David Byrne mainstay. Of course they need singers, and they have assorted guests on Jomoro’s album, “Blue Marble Sky.” Sharon Van Etten provides sustain and suspense on “Nest,” singing about “the darkest corner, the back of the mind” over a steadfast march of synthesizer tones textured with bells, shakers and hand drums: physical percussion to orchestrate a mental journey inward. PARELESClairo, ‘Blouse’It was inevitable that current bedroom-pop songwriters would discover the hushed intricacies of predecessors like Elliott Smith and Nick Drake. Clairo embraces both, recalling Smith’s whispery vocal harmonies immediately and Drake’s elegant string arrangements soon afterward. She’s singing about a kitchen-table lovers’ quarrel and a situation neither man would think to portray: “Why do I tell you how I feel/When you’re just looking down my blouse?” PARELESEsperanza Spalding featuring Corey King, ‘Formwela 4’Over an eddying sequence of arpeggios plucked by Corey King on acoustic guitar, surrounded by the sounds of springtime, Esperanza Spalding sings in patient and gentle tones about long-term trauma, and about reaching out for support. “Wanna be grown and let it go/really didn’t let it go though,” she begins. When Spalding gets to the chorus, it mostly consists of one repeated line: “Dare to say it.” This track, released Friday, comes as part of Spalding’s Songwrights Apothecary Lab, an evolving project that imagines musical collaboration as a pathway toward healing. (It already yielded a suite of three powerful tracks, created with other prominent musicians and released earlier this year.) She and King wrote “Formwela 4” in response to a simple challenge: “Say what is most difficult to say between loved ones.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOHypnotic Brass Ensemble featuring Perfume Genius: ‘A Fullness of Light in Your Soul’The Minimalism-loving Hypnotic Brass Ensemble has rediscovered “Sapphie,” an EP that was released in 1998 by the prolific English musician Richard Youngs and rereleased in 2006 by the Jagjaguwar label, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary with left-field, interdisciplinary collaborations. Youngs’s original version was a stark acoustic meditation, just quiet fingerpicking behind Youngs’s high, breaking voice, with musings like “Sometimes it’s better never than late/and there’s a spareness of days” and “Happiness leaves everything as it is/and the future isn’t anything.” Hypnotic Brass Ensemble adds inner harmonies and orchestrates them with Philip Glass-like motifs for brass and woodwinds and surreal reverberations as Perfume Genius sings in a rapt falsetto, trading Youngs’s solitude for immersive depths. The video — perhaps taking a hint from the song’s first line, “working around museums,” shows the visual artist Lonnie Holley creating images with spray paint, twigs and wire. PARELESJulian Lage, ‘Squint’The gangly, big-boned drum style on this track might be recognizable — particularly to fans of the Bad Plus — as the sound of Dave King when he’s having fun. The drummer is heard here in a newish trio, led by the virtuoso guitarist Julian Lage, and featuring Jorge Roeder on bass. “Squint,” the title track from Lage’s Blue Note debut, begins with the guitarist alone, causally demonstrating why he’s one of the most dazzling improvisers around; then King comes in and things cohere into that lumbering swing feel, held together by Roeder’s steady gait on the bass. RUSSONELLOPoo Bear, ‘The Day You Left’Poo Bear (Jason Boyd), a songwriter and producer with Justin Bieber, Usher, Jill Scott and many others, shows his own achingly mournful voice in “The Day You Left.” He’s a desperately long-suffering lover who knows he’s been betrayed for years, but still wants his partner back. The production, by a team that includes Skrillex, keeps opening new electronic spaces around him, with celestial keyboards in some, shadowy whispers in others. PARELESNoCap, ‘Time Speed’More glorious yelps from the Alabama sing-rapper NoCap, who, over light blues-country guitar, is enduring some push and pull with a partner. “I might be gone for a while, just write,” he urges, but confesses he’s not in the driver’s seat. If she feels compelled to stray, he says, “just don’t hold him tight.” CARAMANICA More

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      How a Family Transformed the Look of European Theater

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      The Bibienas, the focus of an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, dominated Baroque theatrical design.Many of us have not seen the inside of a theater in well over a year. But as performance spaces around the country are on the verge of reopening, the Morgan Library & Museum is offering a quietly astonishing reminder of what we’ve been missing.Open through Sept. 12 at the Morgan, “Architecture, Theater and Fantasy” is a small but exquisite show of drawings by the Bibiena family, which transformed theatrical design in the 17th and 18th centuries. Organized around a promised gift to the museum of 25 Bibiena works by Jules Fisher, the Tony Award-winning Broadway lighting designer, the exhibit is the first in the United States of the family’s drawings in over 30 years.The small but exquisite exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum is the first of the Bibienas’ drawings in the United States in over 30 years.Janny ChiuFrom Lisbon to St. Petersburg, Russia, the Bibienas dominated every major court theater in Baroque Europe. Their innovations in perspective opened new dramatic possibilities, and their lavish projects cost vast sums, with single spectacles running budgets of up to $10 million in today’s dollars. Writing to Alexander Pope of an opera performed outdoors in Vienna to consecrate the Austrian crown prince’s birth in 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu described a massive stage constructed over a canal. Gilded flotillas sailed beneath it — a spectacle, she wrote, “so large that it is hard to carry the eye to the end of it.”That production’s designer, Ferdinando Galli Bibiena (1657-1743), had arrived in Vienna in 1711 as the official scenographer for the Hapsburg court of Charles VII. His father, the Tuscan painter Giovanni Maria Galli (1618-65), came from a village in Arezzo called Bibbiena, and adapted its name as his own. Young Ferdinando started out in Bologna as a master of quadratura, or illusionistic ceiling painting. But his theatrical talents took his career in other directions in the 1680s.Until that time, European scenery primarily utilized single-point perspective. This optical technique, perfected in 15th-century Italian visual art, arranged scenic images around a central vanishing point, creating the semblance of an infinitely receding space. (A Bibiena drawing already in the Morgan’s collection makes the regress dizzyingly, almost terrifyingly, steep.)Single-point perspective, which gained popularity in the 16th and 17th centuries, produced images of endless depth, like a single central street running away from the viewer. Morgan Library & MuseumThe technique gained popularity over the 16th and 17th centuries, gradually taking over Europe’s indoor theaters during the Age of Reason. It gave designers a way to make a shallow stage space appear substantially larger, using only painted flats set in grooves that ran parallel to the proscenium.The one-point “perspectiva artificialis” produced images of endless depth, like a single central street running away from the viewer. But in practice, the illusion only worked for one privileged spectator — typically an emperor or prince seated centrally in the auditorium. Everyone else’s view was distorted. What’s more, sustaining the trick kept actors largely downstage; if they moved toward the back of the stage, they seemed to become giants.Sometime around 1687, Ferdinando began modernizing this convention. For a royal entertainment staged that April in honor of the Duke of Piacenza’s birthday, he rotated the vanishing point away from center stage, and added a second one on the other side of the playing space. Suddenly two vistas opened up.Ferdinando’s two-point perspective allowed onstage scenery to be viewed as if at an angle, so the device came to be known as “scene vedute per angolo,” or simply “scena per angolo.” It opened the stage to a wider array of perspectives, and eventually became ubiquitous.The Bibienas’ innovation (as in this design from the early 18th century) was to add a second vanishing point, making the scene appear to be angled.Morgan Library & MuseumThe oblique view worked better than one-point at depicting massive, magnificent interiors that tantalizingly suggested spaces beyond what was visible onstage. Ferdinando’s skill in quadratura helped him convincingly mimic the underside of ceilings. Suddenly, flat panels conveyed the startlingly powerful and monumental illusion of three-dimensional, vaulted chambers.These images seem to draw their spectators into the picture plane by an almost gravitational force, pulling them across the proscenium threshold. They triumph in the virtual reality of theater. Actors could now more plausibly move around, and a wider range of viewers in the auditorium could get the scenic illusion without the risk of unintended anamorphosis, or visual warping.The designs tantalizingly suggested spaces beyond what was visible onstage.Morgan Library & MuseumOne can only imagine how the sets looked in performance. Although the Bibienas commanded European stages for a century, their work survives today almost entirely in the form of sketches and renderings. Most of the more than a dozen theater buildings they designed eventually burned; the most notable exception is the sumptuous, recently renovated Margravial Opera House in Bayreuth, Germany, built in the 1740s by Giuseppe Galli Bibiena (1695-1757) and his son Carlo (1721-87). (Richard Wagner briefly considered it as the venue for his epic “Ring” cycle.)Still, the drawings exude an irresistible sensuousness. Primarily in black and brown ink, busy hand markings trace rough motifs and ornaments everywhere, touching nearly every surface. Using wash or watercolor to create painterly effects, the drawings emphasize the allure of dreamy distances. (Or forbidding ones: One scenic sketch in the Morgan exhibit, a prison interior by Antonio Galli Bibiena, one of Ferdinando’s sons, seems to anticipate the labyrinthine “imaginary prisons” of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who knew the Bibiena style well and may have even studied with the family.)“A Colonnaded Stage,” from the mid-1700s, includes some severed feet from a statue once collaged into the image, then removed partially — evoking, perhaps, experimentation with which set pieces to use. Morgan Library & MuseumIn several drawings, you get hints of the design process. “A Colonnaded Stage,” inked mostly in black, sports garlands that were drawn, later on, in brown. Some severed feet remain from a statue once collaged into the image, then removed partially — evoking, perhaps, experimentation with which set pieces to use. In “Left Portion of a Palatial Hall,” the viewer sees how three flat panels, labeled F, G and H, converge into depicting a three-dimensional portal.While other architects and designers, like Andrea Pozzo and Filippo Juvarra, had been dabbling in multipoint perspective when Ferdinando made his innovations, the technique quickly became his brand, and international demand for his new style soon arose. Together with his brother Francesco (1659-1739) and his son Giuseppe, Ferdinando founded a sprawling family business, comprising a handful of major talents and a bunch of lesser-known ones.In “Left Portion of a Palatial Hall,” the viewer sees how three of the flat panels used for scenery in this era, labeled F, G and H, converge into depicting a three-dimensional portal.Morgan Library & MuseumThe Bibienas enjoyed fame for a hundred years. Their heyday ended when tastes changed in favor of humbler settings in the middle of the 18th century. The designs linger like lovingly preserved ruins, fragments of a lost world. As the art historian A.H. Mayor once wrote, the family was “heir to all the Baroque, all that Bernini and Borromini had dreamed but had had to leave undone.” Those earlier artists had practically invented Baroque theatricality in their sculptural and architectural works, but the Bibienas translated it into stage décor. What’s more, they made it go viral.“At their drawing boards,” Mayor wrote, “unhampered by the need for permanence, the cost of marble, the delays of masons, the whims or death of patrons, the Bibienas, in designs as arbitrary as the mandates of the autocrats they served, summed up the great emotional architecture of the Baroque.”Joseph Cermatori, an assistant professor of English at Skidmore College, is the author of “Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetics of Theater,” which will be published in November by Johns Hopkins University Press. More