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      Nicki Minaj Reunites With Lil Wayne and Drake, and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Olivia Rodrigo, Tony Allen, L’Rain 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.Nicki Minaj with Drake and Lil Wayne, ‘Seeing Green’In honor of Nicki Minaj’s still-incendiary 2009 debut mixtape “Beam Me Up Scotty” finally arriving on streaming services, she’s organized a little YMCMB family reunion. “Seeing Green” is more of a status update than a club banger à la the trio’s classic “Truffle Butter,” but everyone is still in fine form. Wayne, as usual, plays the gonzo court jester, and he seizes the opportunity to unload all of those pandemic-related rhymes he’s been holding onto for the last year (“I put you six feet deep, I’m being socially distant”). Nicki locks back into her standard eviscerate-the-haters flow, and Drake continues to rap with a precision and bite that suggests, as did the recent “Scary Hours 2,” that whenever his promised “Certified Lover Boy” arrives, it might actually be worth the wait. “I played 48 minutes on a torn meniscus,” he boasts, “who’s subbing?” (But maybe see a doctor about that, Drake — it’s serious!) LINDSAY ZOLADZOlivia Rodrigo, ‘Good 4 U’The third single from Olivia Rodrigo’s forthcoming debut album, “Sour,” tells a story that will be familiar to anyone who’s heard her first single, “Driver’s License”: A former flame moves on too quickly after a breakup, leaving Rodrigo alone with all her feelings. But this time the 18-year-old Disney actress refracts it through a different lens and a whole new sonic palette. Though it starts off quiet, by the chorus “Good 4 U” explodes into a kind of “You Oughta Know” for the TikTok era, all righteous anger and pop-punky, primal-scream rage: “Good for you, you’re doing great out there without me — like a damn sociopath!” ZOLADZTorres, ‘Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in My Head’The new song from Mackenzie Scott — who makes brooding, searching indie-rock under the name Torres — might be the most accessible thing she’s ever released. And she knows it: She’s wryly described “Don’t Go Putting Wishes in My Head,” the first single from her forthcoming album “Thirstier,” as “my relentless arena country star moment.” More than anything, though, with its buzzing synths and soaring chorus, “Wishes” recalls the Killers at their most fist-clenchingly anthemic. “Just when I thought that it was over, it was only just beginning,” Scott sings, her voice trembling with intensity. She seems to understand that accepting joy can sometimes be an even more vulnerable act than confessing pain, but by the end of the song she sounds fearless, and ready to move toward the light. ZOLADZTony Allen, ‘Mau Mau’The drummer Tony Allen supplied the rhythmic foundation for Fela Kuti’s Nigerian Afrobeat in the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on West African traditions, jazz and funk, he built an architecture of unpredictable offbeats, unhurried but kinetic. Before his death in 2020, he had started a hip-hop project, creating beats and synthesizer bass lines and lining up vocalists. Allen’s new album, “There Is No End,” was completed posthumously by the producers Vincent Taeger and Vincent Taurelle. “Mau Mau” features Nah Eeto, a rapper from Kenya, with multitracked vocals that calmly bounce around the syllables of her lyrics — some in English, some not — to highlight all the ways Allen could dodge the downbeat while constantly flicking the music onward. JON PARELESMaría Grand, ‘Now, Take, Your, Day’The rising tenor saxophonist María Grand wrote the tunes that appear on “Reciprocity,” her new LP, in the middle of a pregnancy, while reading spiritual texts and paying close attention to the bond she was building with her not-yet-born child. (The album’s liner notes include her written reflections on becoming a mother, and how this found its way into the music.) The album, featuring Kanoa Mendenhall on bass and Savannah Harris on drums, is also a testament to the constant regeneration that becomes possible within a close musical partnership; on track after track, Grand dances nimbly over Harris’s subtly shifting patterns, and Mendenhall stubbornly insists on never repeating herself. “Now, Take, Your, Day” begins with all three members singing the song’s title in harmony, before the rhythm section lays down a loosely funky beat and Grand introduces the song’s downward-slanting melody on saxophone. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOBella Poarch, ‘Build a Bitch’Like many TikTok stars, Bella Poarch is making a move into her own music. “Build a Bitch” comes across cute and furious. Tinkly toy-piano sounds and perky la-las accompany her as she points out that women aren’t consumer products. “You don’t get to pick and choose/Different ass and bigger boobs,” she coos. “If you need perfect, I’m not built for you.” A post-“Westworld” video set in an android factory ends, inevitably, in mayhem. PARELESSleater-Kinney, ‘Worry With You’The forthcoming, self-produced Sleater-Kinney album “Path of Wellness” will be the first the Portland band releases as a duo, since its longtime power-drummer Janet Weiss departed in 2019, and her absence certainly makes the song feel a bit muted and minor. But there’s still a familiar pleasure in hearing Carrie Brownstein’s snaking guitar riffs and staccato vocals intertwine with Corin Tucker’s, as they sing of a long-term togetherness that’s provided comfort in good times and bad: “If I’m gonna mess up,” they avow, “I’m gonna mess up with you.” ZOLADZMartin Garrix featuring Bono & The Edge, ‘We Are the People’The official 2020 UEFA European Football Championship song is exactly what you’d expect from a soccer anthem by a big-room EDM D.J. collaborating with half of U2: a grand, thumping march with pinging guitars, vast synthesizer swells and determinedly inspirational lyrics. “You’ve faith and no fear for the fight,” Bono sings, “You pull hope from defeat in the night.” The song uses familiar tools for stadium-scale uplift, but they can still work. PARELESHolly Macve, ‘You Can Do Better’Regrets and reverb both loom large on Holly Macve’s second album, “Not the Girl,” a set of country-rooted ballads that place her reedy voice — determinedly sustained through countless breaks and quavers — in wide-screen, retro arrangements. “You Can Do Better” is a stately, swaying waltz, a breakup-and-makeup scenario that builds up to dramatic questions, swirling across voices and strings: “Is it so wrong to love you?/Is it so wrong to care?” PARELESL’Rain, ‘Blame Me’L’Rain — the songwriter, musician and producer Taja Cheek — opens an ever-widening, ever more disorienting sonic vortex in “Blame Me,” from her second album, “Fatigue,” due June 25. Sparse guitars pick fragments of chords that fall, then rise, as L’Rain muses cryptically on mortality and remorse. Soon, they’re enveloped by a ghostly orchestra and distant voices intoning, “Waste away now, make my way down”; as the track ends, she’s still in a lush harmonic and emotional limbo. PARELESElaine, ‘Right Now’Elaine is from South Africa, where she already has a large audience. But her sound bespeaks international R&B ambitions, with programmed trap drum sounds and an American accent. In “Right Now,” she tries to juggle a damaged relationship against a burgeoning career. “I cannot continue carrying all your insecurities/I got more priorities,” she sings, quietly but adamantly. Her alto is low, intimate and flexible; with her priorities, she’s not about to indulge a cheating ex, even if she’s tempted. PARELESAlan Jackson, ‘Where Have You Gone’“Where Have You Gone,” the title song of Alan Jackson’s new, 21-song album, starts off like a lonely lament for someone who’s left him: “It’s been way too long since you slipped away.” But it turns out he’s lamenting the way “sweet country music” used to sound: steel guitar, fiddle, “words from the heart.” It’s the style Jackson has upheld through his career, looking back to Merle Haggard and George Jones, only to see it supplanted lately by arena-country and infiltrations of hip-hop. “The airwaves are waiting,” he insists; current country radio says otherwise. PARELESSons of Kemet featuring Moor Mother and Angel Bat Dawid, ‘Pick Up Your Burning Cross’Over the rough rhythmic onrush of this United Kingdom-based quartet — featuring Theon Cross’s pulsing tuba, Shabaka Hutchings’s roof-raising saxophone and the interlocked drumming of Edward Wakili-Hick and Tom Skinner — a voice hovers, singing and speaking and laughing. It belongs to Angel Bat Dawid, and it’s soon joined by that of Moor Mother, another revolutionary poet and musician from this side of the Atlantic. “I don’t think you remember me/I was in last place,” Moor Mother begins, serving notice as the band presses ahead. The piece is on “Black to the Future,” Sons of Kemet’s fourth album. RUSSONELLOErika Dohi, ‘Particle Of …’Erika Dohi, a Japanese keyboardist and composer now based in New York City, is one of the musicians affiliated with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver’s label 37d03d (“people” upside-down). “Particle Of …” comes from her new album “I, Castorpollux,” and while it was composed by Andy Akiho (who also directed her music video), it fits the album’s aesthetic of Minimalistic repetitions and startling fractures. It uses percussive, single-note patterns on piano and prepared piano, played live and then computer manipulated, equally virtuosic and digitally skewed. Chords arrive at the end, like a surprise visit from 20th-century modernism. PARELES More

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      The Conductor Who Whipped American Orchestras Into Shape

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      Toting a loaded gun on the podium, Artur Rodzinski turned ensembles into technical marvels in the 1930s and ’40s.“For those who grew to musical maturity with the concert life of the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, his name may still have an aura,” Halina Rodzinski wrote in her memoirs, almost two decades after the death of her spouse, the Polish conductor Artur Rodzinski.“For those who are younger,” she went on to lament, “my husband is a dry reference in a musical encyclopedia or a name on a record cover in the cut-rate rack of a discount store.”That was in 1976. And the decades since have not been kind to Rodzinski, leaving him remembered, if at all, for embodying “all that a real maestro was supposed to be,” a critic once wrote: “preening, arbitrary, dictatorial, unpredictable, driven by ambition.”Possessing an “enormous vocabulary of Polish profanity” that he unloaded on musicians, as Time magazine reported, Rodzinski was also rumored to conduct with a revolver in his pocket. True, Halina confirmed in her book — and it was loaded.Rodzinski conducting at Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic’s home during his tenure in the 1940s.Bettmann/CorbisBut there was a time when Rodzinski was among the most lauded conductors in the land. He may have been “no poet of the baton,” as the critic Virgil Thomson put it in October 1943, when Rodzinski became music director of the New York Philharmonic. But he was “a first-class orchestral craftsman” and a “master trainer,” Thomson wrote later that season.Arguably no man had more of a hand in turning American orchestras into the technical marvels they became in the mid-20th century — whether through those he led himself, or through the example he set. He jolted up the standards of some of the great ensembles of the radio age: the Philadelphia Orchestra (as an assistant from 1925 to ’29), the Los Angeles Philharmonic (as music director from 1929 to ’33), the Cleveland Orchestra (1933 to ’43), the NBC Symphony (which he created in 1937), the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, as it was then known (1943 to ’47) and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for a single, tempestuous season after that.Flashier conductors would take those bands further: Leopold Stokowski, Rodzinski’s boss and booster, in Philadelphia; Otto Klemperer in Los Angeles; Arturo Toscanini, Rodzinski’s mentor, with the NBC; George Szell in Cleveland; Rafael Kubelik in Chicago. Their achievements were built on Rodzinski’s foundation, but their fame and commercial success far eclipsed his.Perhaps Rodzinski’s recordings might change our sense of him. With a rush of recent archival finds, for the first time since the LP era there is plenty to go on. Pristine Classical released a series of superb remasterings of Rodzinski’s studio work with the NBC, Cleveland and Chicago orchestras, as well as a few broadcast tapings from his New York period.Weightier still is a 16-disc box from Sony, which for the most part recovers 78s made with the New York Philharmonic from 1944 to ’46, filling a hole in the orchestra’s discography and offering a companion to Sony’s box, issued two years ago, of the Philharmonic recordings of John Barbirolli, Rodzinski’s widely derided predecessor.Wagner’s “Die Walküre” (New York Philharmonic, 1945)Sony ClassicalCompendiums such as these can bolster reputations, as long-silent work reaches fresh ears, or confirm legends born long ago. Sometimes, though, these box sets simply confirm the verdicts of history. And that, alas, is the case with Rodzinski.Here was a conductor capable of extraordinary feats of clarity and balancing, able to bring the lushest Romanticism to heel, whether in a sparkling Rachmaninoff Second Symphony, or in brisk, enthralling scenes from Wagner’s operas, including parts of “Die Walküre” with the soprano Helen Traubel.Perhaps surprisingly for such a turbulent character, objectivity was Rodzinski’s interpretive aim. He told Time for a cover story, just before his firing from the New York Philharmonic, that he hoped that “the music goes from the orchestra to the audience without going through myself.” (The very different Stokowski, he said with contempt, “plays music sexually.”)But if that literalism helped Rodzinski to train his orchestras in pinpoint precision, and brought out the best in intractable works like Sibelius’s Fourth, it could also bore — lacking the tension and vehemence of his idol and model, Toscanini.The New York Times critic Olin Downes admired Rodzinski’s technique, but he wrote in 1943 that he feared “a reticence approaching overrefinement.” Even Thomson — whose acclaim for Rodzinski surely had nothing to do with the conductor inviting Thomson, who was also a composer, to lead the Philharmonic in his “Symphony on a Hymn Tune” in 1945 — had to admit that guest conductors like Charles Munch made more of the orchestra Rodzinski had built.Perhaps surprisingly for such a turbulent character, objectivity was Rodzinski’s interpretive aim.Genevieve Naylor/Corbis, via Getty ImagesRodzinski was born on New Year’s Day 1892, in Split, and grew up in present-day Lviv, a city long fought over that was part of the Hapsburg monarchy and, later, Poland. While studying law in Vienna, he trained at the Academy of Music and, after suffering shrapnel wounds on the Eastern front in World War I, found a job as a cabaret pianist back in Lviv — relief from days spent inspecting meat shops. He made his debut leading Verdi’s “Ernani,” then moved to Warsaw. Stokowski heard him conduct Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” there, and offered to take him to Philadelphia.Filling in for Stokowski at Carnegie Hall in 1926, Rodzinski was already able to hold an orchestra “firmly in his grip,” Downes noted. Los Angeles and Cleveland followed — the latter a place where Rodzinski could add operas to the symphonic repertoire, not least the American premiere of Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” in 1935, a coup he scored against Stokowski’s Philadelphia.Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” (Cleveland Orchestra, 1940)Pristine ClassicalWhen Toscanini resigned from the New York Philharmonic in 1936, Rodzinski was asked to conduct eight weeks of the following season, and was widely seen as a plausible heir to the maestro’s throne. He became Toscanini’s favored candidate after the Italian conductor heard him at the Salzburg Festival.But the Philharmonic took a gamble on the less experienced Barbirolli that December, before Rodzinski had a chance to prove himself, which he did with an “Elektra” of “historic intensity,” Downes wrote, the following March. Furious, Toscanini instructed NBC to have Rodzinski drill the orchestra it was hiring for the Italian’s sensational return to New York.After the Philharmonic corrected its error (at least as Rodzinski saw it) at the end of 1942, Rodzinski had the unanimous support of the critics; their venom was infinite for Barbirolli, whose highly subjective aesthetic appalled writers who had been entranced by Toscanini’s lean, driven style.“The orchestra needs overhauling in every way,” Downes insisted. Time reported that guest conductors referred to its “undisciplined and arrogant members as ‘the Dead End Kids.’” When Rodzinski had 14 musicians fired months before his arrival, including the concertmaster, it was taken as evidence of a seriousness that Barbirolli was perceived to have lacked.After Rodzinski’s first concert in October 1943, performing Barbirolli’s beloved Elgar in a conscious attempt to demonstrate how it ought to go, Thomson wrote, brutally, that it was “pleasant” to hear the Philharmonic play “all together.” By April, he was drolly reporting that the strings “now play in tune.”Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony (New York Philharmonic, 1945)Sony ClassicalGranted this kind of shade, Rodzinski could do little but shine. He focused on music of the previous hundred years and rarely went back beyond Schumann and Berlioz to Beethoven, Mozart or Haydn. In the Sony box, his Brahms symphonies push on without quite becoming overwhelming; his Tchaikovsky Sixth is rather cool — “too conventional, too objective and too civilized,” as Downes put it in a review of its corresponding concert.Contemporary music did play a significant role in the Rodzinski era, taking a spot on most of his programs. Trying to duke it out with Serge Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony Orchestra, Rodzinski competed to premiere the works of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, whose Fifth Symphony he was the first to release on record. Hiring Leonard Bernstein as his assistant conductor in New York, Rodzinski also supported American composers like William Schuman and William Grant Still. Morton Gould’s “Spirituals,” Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait” and Darius Milhaud’s “Suite Française,” all composed during World War II, receive convincing recordings in the Sony box.Morton Gould’s “Jubilee,” from “Spirituals” (New York Philharmonic, 1946)Sony ClassicalStill, for Rodzinski the Philharmonic ultimately became the conductors’ graveyard it had long been reputed to be — far more so than for Barbirolli, who went on to greater things with the Hallé in Britain. Despite uniform praise for the excellence Rodzinski enforced, his position was never secure.Contract negotiations with the Philharmonic’s manager, the powerful agent Arthur Judson, dragged on so interminably that Rodzinski’s lawyer, the future C.I.A. director Allen Dulles, gave up. The conductor was left to discuss terms on his own, as he grew more anxious about his lack of control over guest conductors — his rival Stokowski among them — and what they performed.The Chicago Symphony, rebuilding after Désiré Defauw’s brief postlude to the 37-year tenure of Frederick Stock, sniffed an opportunity, and offered a post around Christmas 1946. With that offer in hand, Rodzinski dressed the Philharmonic’s board down with an hourlong speech about his problems with Judson on Feb. 3, before leaking his resignation to the press that night. The board fired him the next afternoon, amid mutual recriminations.“New York,” Rodzinski vowed to a reporter, “will go down.”Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” (Chicago Symphony, 1947)Pristine ClassicalHe lasted just months back in the Midwest. Critics there gave by-now-familiar praise to the rise in the quality of playing, and there were operatic successes, but Rodzinski again came up against entrenched interests, racking up deficits and finding far less willingness to make changes of personnel. Chicago’s board fired him in January 1948.There would be no more prominent posts for Rodzinski, the perfectionist who set the standards for the post-World War II era. He would make more recordings in the 1950s, mostly with the Royal Philharmonic on the Westminster label, but his health declined, and he would never again appear with the New York Philharmonic. He died in 1958. More

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      The Beatific Re-emergence of Beverly Glenn-Copeland

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      For decades, Beverly Glenn-Copeland made music heard by a precious few. In the early 1970s, he trained in classical music performance, and then released a couple of folk albums. In the 1980s, he made new age keyboard music. For the most part, he worked in children’s television.That music has been rediscovered now. Glenn-Copeland began performing for enthusiastic audiences a few years ago, and his music is largely back in print. For Glenn-Copeland, who is transgender, this acclaim has arrived in an era that is far more welcoming than the one in which he was raised.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Glenn-Copeland’s music; his winding path to a receptive, ready audience; and how the right music can be a bulwark against cynicism and trauma.Guests:Taja Cheek, an associate curator at MoMA PS1 and a musician who performs as L’RainMina Tavakoli, who writes about music for Pitchfork and The Washington Post More

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      Bach Invented. Now a Pianist Is Trying to Match Him.

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      With “Inventions/Reinventions,” Dan Tepfer fills out Bach’s missing two-part inventions with daring free improvisations.“Of course Bach is a million times greater than me,” the pianist Dan Tepfer said recently. “I can still have a conversation with him.”That conversation is ongoing. While Tepfer, 39, is best known as a jazz artist, who has worked with giants like the saxophonist Lee Konitz, he has also delved into Bach — with twists.In “Goldberg Variations/Variations,” Tepfer performed that monumental keyboard work, but instead of repeating each variation, as Bach’s score indicates, he improvised his own responses. Last year, homebound and intrigued by the idea that Bach’s contrapuntal lines would work just as well inverted, he recorded himself playing the “Goldbergs” on a Yamaha Disklavier, a grand piano with a high-tech player-piano function. A computer program he devised — Tepfer also has an undergraduate degree in astrophysics — then played back each variation, but flipped.Last Friday at Bargemusic, the recently reopened performance space docked near the Brooklyn Bridge in Dumbo, Tepfer offered his latest Bach project: “Inventions/Reinventions.” Bach wrote 15 two-part inventions as teaching pieces for young students, originally compiling them for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann. The pieces, written in just two voices, one per hand, are not technically difficult. But within their limits Bach introduces beginning players to some sophisticated elements of music, including daring harmonic modulations.The pianist and composer Dan Tepfer is best known as a jazz artist, but he has entered into daring conversations with canonical Bach works.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesOne aspect of these works has long raised a simple question. Since in his “Well-Tempered Clavier,” Bach wrote paired preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys, why did he not explore all those keys in the two-part inventions? Tepfer ascribes to the explanation that Bach wanted to focus beginners on only the “easiest keys” — that is, the ones with the fewest sharps or flats.So in “Inventions/Reinventions,” Tepfer boldly — even audaciously — supplies those “missing” nine inventions in the form of his own free improvisations.“Improvisation is what is dearest to my heart,” he said in an interview, “and has always felt so natural.”When he was a student, Tepfer said, he “spent vastly more time just improvising stuff at home,” even when teachers told him not to. He added that the way he thinks about jazz may well have been the way Bach would have thought about improvising.“And we know from the historical record that improvisation was essential to Bach,” Tepfer said. “He clearly excelled at it to a unique degree.”Of course, for Tepfer to supply his own improvised versions of the missing Bach inventions takes some bravado. “That tension is at the heart of any of these projects that I’ve done where I’ve kind of interacted with Bach and these totemic pieces,” he said. “But the only way these projects can come alive is if is feels like a true conversation, and in any good conversation people speak in their own voice.”That his improvisations are indeed free — created with “no preconceptions going in,” as he put it — came through in the performance at Bargemusic, in part because his “reinventions” sounded nothing like those captured on a video that was made the second time he tried the program out — in 2019 in Paris, where he was born to American parents and studied at a division of the Paris Conservatory.Following the sequence of pieces in Bach’s score, Tepfer begins with Invention No. 1 in C, a piece every elementary piano student learns, and goes right into the Invention No. 2 in C minor — probably the most musically complex of the 15, unfolding as an intricate canon and moving through distant realms of harmony. At Bargemusic, as in Paris, Tepfer played with transparent, articulate touch; a jazz musician’s feel for lithe, bouncy rhythms; and tastefully expressive lyrical freedom.Tepfer plays Bach:Bach didn’t write inventions in C-sharp major or minor, so Telfer supplied them. In Paris, his free improvisation in C-sharp major opened with a quizzical motif — a quick note that leapt to a repeated tone and hesitated, until that motif was echoed up and down the keyboard, becoming a hook for expanded passages of intersecting voices, wistful melodic stretches and some poignant episodes of dark, chromatic chords.Tepfer improvises:The equivalent improvisation at Bargemusic was more insistently rhythmic and spiky, driven by an invention-like motif that popped up everywhere and led to beautiful flights of harmony and some restless, agitated episodes.In Brooklyn, his improvisation in C-sharp minor was gently jazzy, with passages of jumpy riffs alternating with delicate filigree. In Paris, it was jazzy in a more assertive, punchy way, with a clipped three-note riff that shot downward one moment, then segued into fleeting passages that wanted to turn pensive but never gave in.And improvises again:Some of the improvisations in Brooklyn had a searching, mellow quality, as if Bill Evans were meeting Debussy. Perhaps the occasion, a return to live music in an intimate setting with just 25 people in attendance, brought out Tepfer’s ruminative side, as the performance continued and the improvisations turned impetuous, reflective, almost Romantic.“With the inventions, I’m not taking any material from Bach,” he said; instead, he tries to respond to the “concept” of the piece.“I try to come up with a musical idea,” he said, “and it’s not something preplanned.”That idea could be a short motif, like an intervallic figure. Then Tepfer wants to take this idea on a harmonic, fraught dramatic adventure, before finally getting the idea — the hero — safely home; he connects the inventions to ancient Greek rhetoric and drama. “That’s the DNA of Bach’s inventions,” he said. The quality of a dramatic scenario came through in all of Tepfer’s improvisations.In one sense, this conversation with Bach was a little unbalanced: Bach’s inventions mostly last a minute or two, while Tepfer’s improvisations tend to be five minutes or longer. Both in Paris and Brooklyn, the whole program lasted about 75 minutes. I could imagine another approach in which he tried, as a discipline, to constrict himself more to Bach’s time frame.Yet it was hard not to be swept away by Tepfer’s vision and compelling realizations. With disarming seriousness and extraordinary musicianship, he is honoring Bach by going all out in creating a conversation with him that is true to both artists.“We know from the historical record that Bach was very kind and respectful to his students,” Tepfer said. “So it’s perfectly OK to be fully yourself.” More

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      How a Times Team Captured the Sound of a Harlem Gospel Choir

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      What does a socially distant gospel choir sound like? Here’s how Times journalists and technologists put users inside the sanctuary of a church in Harlem.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.In March 2020, one of the earliest coronavirus superspreader events in the United States occurred when a church choir in Washington State met for a rehearsal. Of the 61 singers who attended, 53 developed symptoms of Covid-19. Soon after, congregations around the country held what would be their last in-house services of the year.Tariro Mzezewa, a New York Times reporter, talked to churches recently to learn how they had adapted. “My favorite part of going to church as a kid was the music and the sense of community,” she said. “I wanted to know how the pandemic changed that.”Some churches had a soloist sing from home during live-streamed services. Others created small pods of a few singers that performed from an empty sanctuary. Some had choir members spread out in the pews or the balcony.Churches are built for their acoustics, so when Tariro told our Narrative Projects team about these socially distant choirs, we wondered: What does that sound like? Three months later, we’ve created a special feature to give you a feel for that sensory experience.As a visual editor at the Times, I work on innovative journalism, joining with colleagues to leverage new technologies like augmented reality, photogrammetry, 3-D modelingand visualization and volumetric video (moving 3-D images of real people, like a hologram). One of the best parts of my job is the thrill I get from trying new things.For the past year, we have been experimenting with a technology called environmental photogrammetry, with which we can build photorealistic 3-D models of a room or a neighborhood.We wanted to transport our readers into a church to hear the new sound of these choirs. With the help of Bethel Gospel Assembly in Harlem, we built a 3-D model of its sanctuary and embedded 3-D audio in it, something we’ve never done before for the Times website.Times journalists and technologists spent two days at the church in April. They used lasers and sensors to measure the size of the room and the distance between all the objects in it. They also took more than 7,000 photographs, many of them using a drone inside the sanctuary (with the church’s blessing) to capture images of the upper reaches of the balcony and ceiling. That data was combined using photogrammetry software to produce the 3-D model in this interactive article.With 31 microphones, two mixing boards and a sea of cables, our team recorded a live rehearsal with a small group of singers, a band and Bethel’s leader, Bishop Carlton T. Brown. Using binaural audio, which replicates the acoustics of the human ear, we created a 3-D audio experience meant to mimic what it sounds like in that room.“You really get a sense of the energy and how important the live part of making music is,” said Jon Cohrs, a technical producer on The Times’s research and development team and an audio engineer. In the two days he spent at Bethel, Jon witnessed the camaraderie and connection among choir members. “It’s really special, and you can see how impactful it is for everybody involved.”The music you hear in the opening of the interactive feature is captured from two microphones in the back of the church, as if you were sitting in the pews hearing the voices reverberate through the cavernous space. You can move through the space in the 3-D experience, and the sound changes as you get closer to the stage and fly over the instruments.Working on this project over the past few months, I’ve spent many minutes a day listening to the ethereal music we recorded, often with my eyes closed, my mind floating somewhere between my home office in Brooklyn and that sanctuary in Harlem.Our reporting affirmed why so many churches went to great lengths to bring music to their communities during times of hardship. Again and again, pastors, congregants and choir members told us that church without music was never an option. Music is healing, they said, and it brings people together in a shared spiritual and cultural experience, even when we have to be physically apart.As part of her research, Tariro attended an Easter Sunday service at Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem, which is now allowing a small number of parishioners to attend in person. “There was a real sense of people sighing in relief, like, ‘We made it,’” she said. “A year ago they didn’t know if they’d make it.” More

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      St. Vincent Flirts With Autobiography and the Sounds of the ’70s

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      On her sixth solo album, “Daddy’s Home,” the singer and songwriter Annie Clark turns her world-building and role-playing briefly inward.In the middle of St. Vincent’s last album, the sleek and slinky “Masseduction” from 2017, there is an uncharacteristically sparse piano ballad called “Happy Birthday, Johnny.” Unlike a lot of St. Vincent songs, this one is almost provocatively simple: just a lovely melody that Annie Clark’s voice imbues with warm, weary pathos.It tells the apparently autobiographical story of two New York bohemians who’d once been inseparable, before the narrator got famous and her hard-living pal Johnny ended up on the street. In the last verse, he returns to hit her up for money. She hesitates, and he accuses her of “acting like all royalty” and severing their bond for good: “What happened to blood, our family/Annie, how could you do this to me?”That last line hits like an electric shock. Clark has always maintained a performance artist’s calculated caginess regarding how much of her private self she is willing to offer up in her music, and St. Vincent songs have never exactly presented themselves as first-person confessionals. Instead, Clark delights in world-building and role-playing, assigning each album its own highly stylized attitude, hairdo and mood board of references.Ever an interrogator of gender norms, Clark has used this technique to push back against the limiting assumption that female artists must always make “personal” music. And yet, with its first-name-basis and no-frills arrangement, something about “Happy Birthday, Johnny” feels especially raw. The New Yorker writer Nick Paumgarten asked Clark who Johnny is — a fair question, it seemed, about a song that telegraphed such candor. But Clark demurred. “Johnny’s just Johnny,” she answered. “Doesn’t everybody know a Johnny?”When Clark announced the title of her sixth solo album, “Daddy’s Home,” it appeared at first like it might be another “Happy Birthday, Johnny” moment — a sudden, uncharacteristic pivot to straightforward autobiography. Cheeky as it is, the phrase does point quite directly to an event in Clark’s personal life: Her father, who in 2010 was imprisoned for his role in a stock-manipulation scheme, recently got out of prison. Clark has studiously avoided addressing the matter until now, though in interviews promoting “Daddy’s Home,” she has suggested for the first time that her emotional response to her father’s incarceration informed, however obliquely, her unsettling 2011 masterpiece “Strange Mercy.”That record was deliciously creepy and anxiety-ridden, but a decade later, on “Daddy’s Home,” Clark is more inclined to address her father’s experience with a canted humor and swaggering bravado. “I signed autographs in the visitation room,” she sings on the vampy title track, “waiting for you the last time, inmate 502.” The song struts woozily, and between the lines, it wonders: Has the daughter inherited more of the father’s vices than she wants to admit? And if so, who’s her daddy now?The cover of “Daddy’s Home.”As ever, the album exists within a fully realized visual aesthetic, all seedy 1970s simulacra: grainy photographs, louche leisure suits, Gena Rowlands wig. The sonic influences are similarly period-specific; sitar and Mellotron abound. Looser and more fluid than the blurty riffs and prickly-pear tempos that have characterized other St. Vincent albums, “Daddy’s Home” channels Pink Floyd’s hi-fi panoramas, the ecstatic chord changes of “Innervisions”-era Stevie Wonder and the self-described “plastic soul” of David Bowie’s “Young Americans.”Clark and her co-producer, Jack Antonoff, have clearly had fun with the creation of this finely tuned alternate universe, but at a point, its many detailed references start to feel like clutter, preventing the songs from moving too freely in their own ways.The yawning single “The Melting of the Sun” is weighed down by constant, wink-wink verbal and sonic quotations of ’70s rock; “Hello from the dark side of the moon,” Clark sings, as her guitar wolf-whistles like Steve Miller’s in “The Joker.” “Like the heroines of Cassavetes, I’m under the influence daily,” she sings, a little too on the nose, on the drifting “The Laughing Man.” One indelible highlight is the gorgeously immersive psychedelia of “Live in the Dream,” but it is also a Pink Floyd-indebted slow-burner that begins with an echoing, “Hello …” Get it? Too often, these references feel as though they’re there just for the sake of cleverness. As a result, more frequently than it invents or reveals, “Daddy’s Home” gestures.Eventually, though, across its six-and-a-half minutes, “Live in the Dream” manages to drill down a little deeper. “Welcome, child, you’re free from the cage,” Clark sings in a gentle, hazy voice, as though she’s greeting someone waking up from a long coma. In these moments, “Daddy’s Home” nods to the psychotherapeutic concept known as “reparenting” — a process of realizing the needs that were not met in one’s own childhood and then becoming, in a sense, one’s own daddy. It’s rich territory to mine.Later in the record, on the searching but still humorous “My Baby Wants a Baby,” Clark revisits this idea and wonders whether or not she wants to enter that endless cycle of familial trauma. “What in the world would my baby say, I got your eyes and your mistakes?” she sings. “Then I couldn’t stay in bed all day/I couldn’t leave like my daddy.”With its warm Wurlitzer and Greek-chorus backing vocals from Lynne Fiddmont and Kenya Hathaway, “My Baby Wants a Baby” is also framed in ’70s rock styles. But unlike some of the album’s flatter material, this song doesn’t feel impeded by its instrumentation and conceptual ideas. Instead, it seems to be discovering and revealing as it goes along.It’s a relatively rare moment, though. As a whole, “Daddy’s Home” ends up feeling like a record that wants it both ways: It flirts with and even valorizes autobiographical disclosure only to retreat from it and back into a place of light pastiche when things risk becoming a little too messy.One of the most surprising moments comes during “The Melting of the Sun,” when Clark shouts out three of her musical heroes: Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell and Tori Amos. Like Clark, all three are known for virtuosity. But unlike Clark, they’re also known for the intense, fearless emotionality of their music and the way it can smudge the line between private emotion and public performance.If these are her lodestars, perhaps they can provide a pathway toward a genuinely revelatory new direction. Artifice can of course project larger truths, but it can just as easily become a trusty hiding place. On “Daddy’s Home,” Clark sometimes creeps up to her edge, only to return to that playfully distorted hall of mirrors that has become her comfort zone.St. Vincent“Daddy’s Home”(Loma Vista Recordings) More

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      A Soaring Arts Scene in Los Angeles Confronts a Changing Landscape

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      Its cultural institutions, buffeted by the pandemic, will have to recover without the help of Eli Broad, the transformational benefactor who died last month.LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is an open construction pit these days, surrounded by 12-foot-high wooden fences, with cranes rising across now open skies. Most of its midcentury modernist complex on Wilshire Boulevard was quietly demolished during the Covid shutdown to make way for a wavy $650 million light-filled building spanning the boulevard and designed by the architect Peter Zumthor.LACMA, as it is known, has long been a cultural anchor for Southern California, extraordinarily popular and as responsible as any institution for helping define the region’s cultural identity. “New Galleries. More Art. Opening 2024,” promises a sign in the courtyard. But the success of its next incarnation is hardly assured as the museum seeks to redefine its mission in a smaller building whose design, if adventurous, is not universally acclaimed.It is not only LACMA that finds itself in a moment of transition. Before the pandemic froze California in a wave of shutdowns and disease, Los Angeles had established itself as a cultural capital with its galaxy of museums, galleries and performing arts institutions, defying dated stereotypes of a superficial Hollywood with little interest in art. It now confronts uncertainty across its cultural landscape.Los Angeles institutions share many of the same challenges that their peers around the world face in trying to recover from the pandemic: bringing back wary audiences, confronting the expense and technical challenges of making their spaces safe, and raising money from philanthropists and government in the face of competing demands in a time of economic struggle. They are in precarious financial condition after a calamitous loss of revenue forced many to lay off staff members and abandon leases on theaters and galleries.But they face the added complications of recovering without the help of many of the old guard philanthropists who helped establish the civic and cultural scene here. That was underlined by the death last month of Eli Broad, 87, a billionaire philanthropist who played an outsized role in creating many of the region’s marquee cultural institutions, among them Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Broad, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and one of the buildings left standing at the LACMA complex.The next chapter for Los Angeles’s arts institutions will unfold without Eli Broad, a philanthropist who transformed the city’s cultural landscape who died last month. He is shown here in 2015 outside the Broad, a museum he financed himself to display his art collection. Kendrick Brinson for The New York TimesThere is cautious optimism that the region will return to its upward trajectory as the virus recedes.“Los Angeles, like New York, is a resilient city full of entrepreneurial creative people who will get back up on the horse,” said Ann Philbin, the director of the Hammer Museum, which was also in the midst of an expansion project in Westwood when the pandemic hit.But in many ways the challenges here are more intense and complex, in no small part because the virus hit at a time when so many things were in flux. The next steps — by cultural institutions, wealthy philanthropists, government and audiences — could well determine whether Covid will have derailed, or merely delayed, the city’s ascendance as a cultural destination.For all its wealth, Los Angeles has always been a challenging fund-raising environment. Michael Govan, the director of LACMA, struggled to raise money to build the Zumthor building. The project turned the corner after David Geffen, 78, an entertainment magnate who has become a major arts benefactor, agreed to donate $150 million.A rendering of the new David Geffen Galleries at Lacma, a wavy, light-filled building being designed by Peter Zumthor.Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner/The BoundaryThe death of Mr. Broad has rattled a Southern California arts world already worried about whether donors will come forward to help at a difficult time. Although he stepped down from public life in 2017, leaving the field to a new generation of benefactors, Mr. Broad had a history of being there at moments of need — getting the Walt Disney Concert Hall project back on track after it stalled in the 1990s, and offering a $30 million bailout for the Museum of Contemporary Art when it was on the verge of collapse in 2008.Mr. Broad was a singular figure in many ways — part billionaire philanthropist, part civic bulldozer — and it’s hardly clear who can (or even should) step in to fill in the gap he left. “It’s a little scary to imagine Los Angeles without Eli Broad,” said Donna Bojarsky, the founder of Future of Cities: Los Angeles, a nonprofit civic group.The pandemic was economically ruinous for many cultural organizations. The Los Angeles Philharmonic slashed its annual budget from $152 million to $77 million. Museums lost millions in revenues. The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills had to lay off 30 people.“It will probably take us 12 months to three years to get back to the same level of operation,” said Rachel Fine, the executive director of the Wallis.In addition to the challenge of philanthropy, the sheer difficulty of getting around this city — one sure sign that the recovery is at hand is that traffic has returned to roads and freeways — has long made it harder for theaters, music halls and galleries looking to draw crowds. The transit system is in the midst of a dramatic expansion, funded by a $120 billion mass transit plan. But it will be many years before it is completed.“It’s a wonderful place to live and it’s a wonderful place to work,” said Deborah Borda, who was the president of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for 17 years before becoming president of the New York Philharmonic. “And it’s truly a receptive place for the arts. But if you want be there for a 7:30 concert, you really have to leave at 6. I knew people who used to come but stopped: That would be a reason that they would give.”Los Angeles has long been a cultural magnet, and not just for the creative classes who flocked to Hollywood. It has drawn composers like Stravinsky and Schoenberg, writers like Thomas Mann and Joan Didion, architects like Frank Gehry and artists like David Hockney. It took longer for the city to establish institutions: Mr. Broad, who played a key role in establishing the Museum of Contemporary Art, recalled in a 2019 essay that while Los Angeles had long been home to brilliant artists, great art schools and leading galleries, it had lacked a modern or contemporary art museum when he got there.The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, a $482 million complex designed by Renzo Piano, is scheduled to open this year.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesAnd pandemic or not, the next three years promise to be transformative, with a series of openings of major projects that Los Angeles officials believe will dramatically expand the cultural offerings here.The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, a $482 million complex designed by Renzo Piano next door to LACMA, is scheduled to open by the end of the year. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a sprawling futuristic $1 billion building being financed by George Lucas, is scheduled to open in Exposition Park in 2023.“We are slowly climbing back,” Mr. Govan said. “I think the big institutions will survive. It’s been hard. But I can’t be anything other than optimistic.”Chad Smith, the chief executive officer of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, said that as recently as three weeks ago he was resigned to staging a handful of concerts this season at the Hollywood Bowl, expecting to be able to seat only 4,000 people in the 18,000-seat amphitheater. Now, the Bowl is planning 50 events and is hoping to fill 65 percent of capacity, reflecting the dramatic decline of the virus and the lifting of regulations.This is critical because the Bowl, with its diverse mixture of outdoor programming — from Beethoven to Car Seat Headrest — is a major source of revenue for the Philharmonic.“At this point, we see ourselves coming out of this, with these 40 or 50 concerts at the Bowl,” Mr. Smith said. “Our financial situation will improve. It has to improve. We have been relying entirely on contributions.”The arts scene is animated here not only by big institutions but by an estimated 500 small nonprofit arts organizations. Many were forced to abandon leases on performance or exhibition spaces over the past 14 months, and some are now in danger of fading away.The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a futuristic $1 billion building being financed by George Lucas, is under construction in Exposition Park.Alex Welsh for The New York Times“We see a lot of the arts, especially the performing arts, as being the last to recover,” said Kristin Sakoda, the director of the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture. “We know there is a long road to recovery.”In response, a group of philanthropists has created the L.A. Arts Recovery Fund to help theaters, music halls, museums and galleries survive the transition. “For Los Angeles to regain its prowess as a leader in the arts we need to come together,” William Ahmanson, the president of the Ahmanson Foundation, said in a letter seeking contributions.The Recovery Fund set a goal of $50 million, and has already raised $38.7 million. But even before Covid hit, cultural institutions were struggling to compete for philanthropic dollars, and there is concern that this trend will only continue.“The demand for social services and social justice funding is just ramped up so significantly, somewhat at the expense of performing arts,” said David Bohnett, a philanthropist and member of the board of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “That was already happening. But we are coming out of this learning the value of the performing arts to social service and social justice initiatives.”Still, arts executives are hopeful that a soaring stock market has created a new class of donors. “There is enough to support both social services and the cultural sector, and we just need more people to step forward in civic-mindedness,” Ms. Philbin said.Mr. Geffen, an art collector, said he was hopeful younger people who were getting wealthy and buying art would eventually become donors, though arts professionals said that transition has been slow to happen in Los Angeles. “I would think that young people who are making incredible amounts of money in tech,” he said, “will be generous in the future.”Still, he acknowledged the difficulties LACMA had faced before he wrote his $150 million check. “L.A. deserves a world class museum,” he said. “And it didn’t seem like anyone else was stepping up to the plate.” More

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      Bob Dylan Center, Featuring Archival Materials, to Open in 2022

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      Following the acquisition of the singer-songwriter’s once-secret archives in 2016, a Tulsa-based foundation will put lyrics, photos and films on display in Oklahoma.Dylanologists, rejoice — the archives are going on display.Starting May 10, 2022 — six years after the secret Bob Dylan Archives were revealed and acquired by the foundation of an Oklahoman billionaire — some 100,000 pieces of ephemera will be available to visit in Tulsa.The opening of the Bob Dylan Center, announced on Wednesday, will include rare and never-before-seen lyric manuscripts, photographs, songs and footage, alongside a new “immersive film experience” and a “recreation of an authentic studio environment,” organizers said. Public admission information will be released later in the year, while a founding membership (limited to 250 people) is available now for $7,500.The three-story center in the Tulsa arts district — designed by the architecture firm Olson Kundig — was founded by the American Song Archives and its backer, the George Kaiser Family Foundation, which along with the University of Tulsa acquired Dylan’s archives for between $15 million and $20 million in 2016. (Originally appraised at more than $60 million, the bulk of the materials were donated.)In announcing the acquisition, The New York Times called the troves “deeper and more vast than even most Dylan experts could imagine, promising untold insight into the songwriter’s work.” (And yet, of course: “Amid these mountains of paper, Mr. Dylan, the man, remains an enigma.”)The George Kaiser Family Foundation, named for the oil and banking magnate and Democratic donor, also operates the Woody Guthrie Center down the street. An early hero of Dylan’s, Guthrie was born in Oklahoma, and Dylan, now 79, noted at the time that “it makes a lot of sense, and it’s a great honor” for their archives to be held together, alongside the foundation’s cache of Native American art.George Kaiser said that he obtained the singers’ archives to facilitate both scholarly study and tourism, with hopes of revitalizing Tulsa. (The Guthrie and Dylan centers sit near the city’s Greenwood district, once known as Black Wall Street and the site of the Tulsa Race Massacre, the 1921 atrocity that has recently been revisited by journalists, historians and popular culture.)As a tease along with its announcement, the Dylan Center also publicized the existence of what it called a “heretofore-unknown recording” of Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” captured at an East 3rd Street apartment in 1962. The song, with updated lyrics, was eventually released the following year on “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.”Separately, the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum in Miami said this week that it would host an exhibition titled “Retrospectrum,” featuring some 120 drawings, paintings and sculptures by Dylan, building on a collection that originally debuted in Shanghai. The show runs from Nov. 30 through April 17, 2022. More