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      What’s the Deal With the Dare?

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      In the stairwell of Electric Lady Studios a few weeks ago, Harrison Patrick Smith, 28, was handed a coat hanger carrying an unassuming pair of pants and a T-shirt. “Oh, my street clothes!” he said and laughed, subtly pumping a low fist by his side. “Yes!”Smith, who records dance rock he characterized as “electroclash revival” with a “supersized attitude” as the Dare, isn’t always in his signature crisp black suit, and doesn’t always prefer it. But you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise, as he’s been spotted in it a lot lately: performing live, attending fashion shows, filming music videos, at parties.“All of my musical heroes typically commit to the bit, and are larger than life, and the music is never secondary,” Smith explained earlier that day. “The bit” — in this case, the suit — “furthers the story of the music, or piques the interest or the imagination of the listener even more.”He referenced David Bowie’s Thin White Duke persona. “If he was just wearing a T-shirt and jeans, would he be David Bowie? And would you even like the music as much?” Smith continued. “If there wasn’t that lore around the music, would you even like any of it?” he asked, not without earnestness.Harrison Patrick Smith, who records as the Dare, makes music that provokes a strong response.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesNearing the release of his debut album, “What’s Wrong With New York?” (out Sept. 6), mentioning the Dare to anyone with an opinion about him is sure to provoke a strong one.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Laurie Anderson Conjured Amelia Earhart’s Final Flight

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      Imagine — or perhaps remember — a time when the world seemed much larger, when air travel was novel and dangerous, when wireless communication could never be taken for granted.That’s the era Laurie Anderson conjures on her new album, “Amelia,” out Friday. In a fast-moving 36 minutes and 22 tracks, “Amelia” traces the doomed final flight of Amelia Earhart, who set out “to become the first woman to circumnavigate the Earth,” as Anderson narrates. Earhart took off from Oakland on May 20, 1937, and flew across the Americas, Africa and Asia before her plane disappeared over the Pacific on July 2.“I really fell in love with Amelia,” Anderson said in a video interview from her New York City studio, where she was surrounded by keyboards and mixing equipment, preparing for a tech rehearsal. “Amelia really was this badass person.”Amelia Earhart “was the original blogger,” Laurie Anderson said, noting her journey was very documented.Like nearly the entire body of work that Anderson has created since the 1980s, “Amelia” is an uncontainable hybrid. It unfolds as something between a song cycle, an oratorio and a vintage radio drama. Anderson deploys a string orchestra, electronics and a jazz-tinged rhythm section along with her gallery of singing and speaking voices. Parts of “Amelia” are matter-of-fact and diaristic, noting dates and places. But there are also stretches of heaving orchestral counterpoint that grow enveloping, even dizzying, evoking the vastness, and danger, of sky and ocean.Anderson describes “Amelia” as “a distant cousin” of music she composed for a concert series in 2000 by the American Composers Orchestra for the turn of the millennium. The conductor Dennis Russell Davies had called on Anderson, Philip Glass, Samuel Barber and others to write music about flight.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Oasis Comeback: A Timeline of the Gallagher Brothers’ Feud

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      When Liam and Noel Gallagher get together, hide the tambourines.The Kinks, the Allman Brothers Band, the Jacksons: Every band of brothers occasionally bickered, even feuded.But no sibling rivalry reached the level of rancor found in Oasis, the Britpop band that improbably announced that it is reuniting after years of animosity, insults and at least one incident involving a cricket bat.Here’s a look at the roller coaster career of Liam and Noel Gallagher, two brothers who managed to produce the music of a generation while mostly despising each other.The sound of the ’90s had a taste of the ’60s.The members of Oasis in 1993, from left to right: Paul McGuigan, Noel Gallagher, Tony McCarroll, Paul Arthurs and Liam Gallagher. James Fry/Getty ImagesOasis was formed in 1991 in Manchester, England. There were various members, some of whom came and went. But the constants were the Gallagher brothers: Liam, the lead singer, and Noel, the lead guitarist and songwriter.They soon came to be the most prominent band in a ’90s movement called Britpop, joining groups like Blur and Pulp in producing catchy rock music with a ’60s influence.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Bargain at the Opera: Philadelphia Offers All Seats for as Low as $11

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      Seeking new audiences, Opera Philadelphia is putting in place a pay-what-you-can model, one of the first of its kind by a major opera company.In Philadelphia, a night at the opera may now be cheaper than going to the movies.Opera Philadelphia, a company with a reputation for innovation and ambition, announced on Tuesday that it was putting in place a pay-what-you-can model for the 2024-25 season, with all tickets for all performances starting at $11. The initiative, which the company calls Pick Your Price, is aimed at attracting new audiences.“People want to go to the opera, but it’s expensive,” said Anthony Roth Costanzo, the celebrated American countertenor who became the company’s general director and president in June. “Our goal is to bring opera to more people and bring more people to the opera.”It immediately proved popular. On Tuesday, the day the initiative was announced, Opera Philadelphia said it sold more than 2,200 tickets for the coming season, compared with about 20 the day before. The tickets were originally priced at $26 to $300.High ticket prices have long been a barrier to audiences, and especially to newcomers. In recent years a number of performing arts groups, including Lincoln Center, the Chicago Sinfonietta and Ars Nova, the Off Broadway incubator, have experimented with pay-what-you-can approaches. Other opera companies have experimented with discounts, including rush tickets and deals offered to young people. But Opera Philadelphia’s approach was one of the boldest yet.Its website explains that all tickets start at $11 but that people will be given the option of choosing to pay much more, including the standard price.Like many nonprofit performing arts organizations, Opera Philadelphia gets much more of its revenue from philanthropy than through ticket sales. Radically lowering the prices could encourage more donations, which will no longer risk being seen as subsidizing an expensive art form that is out of reach for many people. And Costanzo said that the new model would allow the company to concentrate more on staging interesting works, and less on worrying about ticket sales.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Man Charged With Tupac Shakur’s Murder Loses Bid for Release

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      A judge declined to release Duane Keith Davis, whose trial is scheduled for March, after a dispute over the source of the bail funds.A judge in Nevada declined on Tuesday to release a man who was charged with the murder of the rapper Tupac Shakur after expressing concern that the money provided to bail him out from jail could be connected to a possible deal to tell his story in a TV series.The man, Duane Keith Davis, known as Keffe D, has said for years that he was a critical player in the gang-orchestrated shooting of the rapper, drawing scrutiny from prosecutors nearly three decades after the killing. A grand jury indicted Mr. Davis on one count of murder with use of a deadly weapon last year.Mr. Davis has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer has said that those admissions of responsibility — which he made in a memoir and in videotaped interviews — were “for entertainment purposes” under the belief that he had been granted immunity from prosecution.Judge Carli Kierny of the Eighth Judicial District Court in Nevada declined to release Mr. Davis after a dispute over the source of the funds that would have been used for bail.Prosecutors had opposed his release, pointing to an interview on YouTube in which the man who posted the bail bond premium of about $112,000 said he would help out only if Mr. Davis agreed to do a TV series with him.“This is him getting paid from his retelling of his criminal past,” Binu Palal, one of the prosecutors overseeing the case, said at a court hearing in June.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How the Politics of the Gaza War Engulfed the Melbourne Symphony

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      The orchestra faced criticism for canceling a performance by a pianist who spoke about the war. Now a top leader has departed and the ensemble has opened an inquiry.The pianist Jayson Gillham was performing Beethoven’s “Waldstein” sonata and Ligeti’s études at a concert hall in Melbourne, Australia, earlier this month when the concert took an unexpected turn.When Gillham, 38, returned to the stage after intermission, he announced that he would depart from the printed program and play a world premiere: a piece called “Witness” by his friend, the composer Connor D’Netto, dedicated to journalists killed in Gaza.Speaking to the audience, Gillham blamed Israel for the deaths of more than 100 Palestinian journalists over the past 10 months, and said that “the killing of journalists is a war crime in international law, and it is done in an effort to prevent the documentation and broadcasting of war crimes to the world.”The next day, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, which had presented Gillham’s solo recital, informed him it was removing him from a planned concert with the orchestra a few days later, replacing his Mozart piano concerto with a Beethoven symphony. The ensemble said in a letter to audience members that Gillham had made “unauthorized statements” that represented an “intrusion of personal political views” on a piano recital.“I was really surprised,” Gillham said in an interview. “It felt like an overreaction.”A backlash followed: Artists, journalists and music fans in Australia denounced the Melbourne Symphony for canceling Gillham’s performance and defended his right to free speech. The orchestra backtracked, issuing a statement saying it had been wrong to cancel Gillham’s appearance and that it would work to reschedule it. It wound up canceling the Beethoven performance, citing “safety concerns.”But the fallout has continued.On Monday, the Melbourne Symphony announced that its managing director, Sophie Galaise, was departing. The ensemble said it was commissioning an outside investigation into the incident, to be led by Peter Garrett, the former lead singer of the Australian rock band Midnight Oil, who has also been a government minister.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      9 Surprising Songs Sampled in Classic Hip-Hop Tracks

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      Hear where moments of Kraftwerk, Enya, Herb Alpert and more ended up in producers’ deft hands.Kraftwerk.Cyril Zingaro/Keystone, via Associated PressDear listeners,Today’s playlist is a celebration of a tried-and-true method of discovering new-to-you music: identifying the samples in hip-hop songs.In his recently released book “Hip-Hop Is History,” Questlove recalls a story from his childhood that speaks to this experience. When he couldn’t fall asleep, he’d listen to the radio in the middle of the night, when D.J.s were free to play the most outré sounds. “During those years,” he writes, “I heard a song that was bizarre synth music, completely compelling, pure hypnosis on the airwaves.” He tried to tape it but could never correctly anticipate when it would come on. Several years passed and he still hadn’t figured out what that elusive song was, but then one day he heard it — or something like it — at a roller rink birthday party. When he asked about it, the D.J. was so taken with his curiosity, he gifted him the 12-inch single. “It was ‘Planet Rock,’” he writes, referencing the legendary track by Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force. “It sampled the Kraftwerk song I had heard, which I learned was called ‘Trans-Europe Express.’ That party and that 12-inch made my day, my year and part of my life.”These days it’s much easier to track down the source of a sample, thanks to Google searches, apps like Shazam and websites like the invaluable database WhoSampled.com. But samples are still powerful portals between genres, cultures and music’s past and present. Sampling is the reason Dr. Dre is one degree of separation from the Scottish composer David McCallum, and why we know that Enya is a fan of the Fugees — and vice versa.There are so many great and unexpected samples in classic hip-hop songs that today’s playlist should be considered only a brief introduction. (Perhaps a sequel will arrive in a future Amplifier, too.) If you’re a true hip-hop head, listen to the playlist before reading the descriptions below and see how many tracks you can name from hearing the source material of their samples. And if you’re more familiar with the originals than the songs that sampled them, make sure you also check out the hip-hop classics linked in the descriptions below.We so tight that you get our styles tangled,LindsayListen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Pianist Who’s Not Afraid to Improvise on Mozart

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      Robert Levin has long argued that Mozart would have made up new material while performing, and he follows the master in a series of dazzling recordings.Robert Levin playing an excerpt of Mozart, whose complete works for keyboard and orchestra he has recently finished releasing on disc.Cadenzas are a concerto soloist’s time to shine: the moments when the rest of the orchestra dramatically drops out and a single musician gets the chance to command the stage.For about half of Mozart’s piano concertos, cadenzas he wrote have been preserved, and those are what you usually hear in concerts and on recordings. Other composers later filled in the gaps with cadenzas that have also become traditional. Some performers write their own.But 250 years ago, when Mozart was a star pianist, he wouldn’t have performed prewritten cadenzas — even ones he had composed.“When Mozart wrote his concertos, they were a vehicle for his skills,” the pianist and scholar Robert Levin said by telephone from Salzburg, Austria — Mozart’s hometown — where he teaches at the Mozarteum University. “He was respected as a composer and lionized as a performer, but it was as an improviser that he was on top of the heap.”Levin, 76, has long argued that Mozart, as a player, made up new cadenzas and ornaments in the moment. And he has sought to revive that spirit of improvisation in a landmark cycle of the concertos on period instruments, a 13-album project begun more than 30 years ago with the Academy of Ancient Music, led by Christopher Hogwood.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More