Music

“Walk on, walk on/With hope in your heart/And you’ll never walk alone.”Many Americans know “You’ll Never Walk Alone” as the emotional peak of Act II in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Carousel.” But in the 75 years since the number was first heard on Broadway, it has blossomed into a global anthem that strikes a strong chord during tough times.In recent weeks, it has come to embody the resilience, solidarity and need for promise required in the battle against the coronavirus — and suddenly, it seems everywhere, including a brief moment at the top of the British singles chart. Here are a few steps in the song’s evolution.‘Carousel’[embedded content]This clip from the 1956 Hollywood adaptation helps set up the song in the musical’s story line: The violent Billy Bigelow (Gordon MacRae) has died and his wife, Julie (Shirley Jones), is consoled by her cousin Nettie Fowler (Claramae Turner), who sings of succor and hope. “Carousel” opened on Broadway on April 19, 1945, and Frank Sinatra recorded a string-heavy, fairly straightforward version shortly after. Covers have been pouring out since.Gerry and the PacemakersYou may have heard of this other Liverpool hit machine managed by Brian Epstein and produced by George Martin in the early 1960s — that’s not surprising, since Gerry and the Pacemakers’ first three singles all topped the British charts. Their third No. 1 was “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” performed in 1963 with a gentle pop lilt rather than the original’s operatic grandeur. In 1985, the frontman Gerry Marsden took the song to No. 1 again with the Crowd, a supergroup convened to raise funds in the aftermath of the Bradford City stadium fire, which killed 56 people at a soccer match.Liverpool Football Club“You’ll Never Walk Alone” is such a part of Liverpool F.C. that the title is on the soccer club’s coat of arms and engraved atop Anfield stadium’s Shankly Gates. Almost immediately after Gerry and the Pacemakers turned it into a hit, the team’s supporters embraced the song as their anthem. Britain has a long, proud tradition of full-throated fans enlivening matches with chants, but few have the goosebump-triggering power of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” rising out of a sea of red shirts. (The last minute of Pink Floyd’s mellow “Fearless,” off the band’s 1971 album “Meddle,” also integrates the sound of Liverpool fans singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”)Richard AnthonyIn 1964, the French singer Richard Anthony (real name: Ricardo Anthony Btesh) came out with a translation that took some liberties with the original, as most adaptations at the time were wont. Suddenly, “You’ll Never Walk Alone” was a forlorn breakup ballad: “Only you, always you, I love you” and so on. To cover more of the European market, Anthony also recorded versions in Italian and Spanish.The SonicsOn their second album, “Boom,” the garage-punk band the Sonics led their own “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” with a quote from the Rodgers and Hammerstein tune. While “You’ll Never Walk Alone” is meant to be reassuring, the singer Gerry Roslie quickly morphs into the slightly menacing character you’d expect fronting a band whose signature songs were “Psycho” and “Strychnine.”The Madison ScoutsDrum and bugle corps have always built their repertoire out of a mix of contemporary hits, show tunes and classical pieces, but few have been identified with a song for as long as the Madison Scouts: “You’ll Never Walk Alone” has been part of this Wisconsin ensemble’s repertoire since the mid-1950s. Never underestimate the power of a large horn line gradually amping up until it can blow the hat off your head.Jerry LewisFor decades, Jerry Lewis concluded his annual telethon to raise funds for the Muscular Dystrophy Association by singing you-know-what. But this did not lessen the emotional impact for him, as you can see from this 2010 video, in which he performed “You’ll Never Walk Alone” for what he said was the 59th — and, unbeknown to him, the last — time. (Since his first telethon was in 1966, this means his association with the song went back even earlier.)Aretha FranklinAretha Franklin brought out the song’s spirituality on her best-selling gospel album “Amazing Grace,” recorded live with James Cleveland and the Southern California Community Choir in 1972. (A documentary about its making was finally unveiled in late 2018.) The track starts simply enough, with just Franklin and a piano. The band and choir come in around the four-minute mark, yet they don’t unleash their full power, and the song keeps simmering. The controlled intensity is maybe even more effective than a raise-the-roof escalation.Patti LaBelleOf course, escalation is great, too. Patti LaBelle and the Blue Belles recorded “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in 1962, and a live video from the Apollo has a casual amble — though that seemingly tossed-off final note reminds everybody who’s boss — sustained by the era’s trademark punchy soul arrangements. But it’s another Apollo performance that brings the audience to its feet, or perhaps knees. Everything is turned to 11 in 1985: the towering crest, the amped-up gospel choir, the electric delivery, the fake ending two-thirds of the way through followed by LaBelle taking everybody back to church. Hit that replay button one more time.Michael Ball, Captain Tom Moore and the NHS Voices of Care ChoirIn April, “You’ll Never Walk Alone” topped the British singles chart again, helmed — we’ve come full circle — by a musical-theater performer. Exerting maximum pressure on the lacrimal glands, the track combines the voices of Michael Ball (“Les Misérables,” “Phantom of the Opera”); Thomas Moore, a.k.a. Captain Tom (a 100-year-old World War II veteran who raised millions of pounds for charity by walking around his garden); and the NHS Voices of Care Choir. This cover somewhat eclipsed concurrent ones by the Mumford & Sons frontman Marcus Mumford and by Josh Groban.Maasstad HospitalThere is a very good chance you will tear up at this viral video of a Dutch hospital’s paramedics, nurses and doctors singing to each other through a glass door.Slicker, and perhaps a little bit more self-serving is a video Barbra Streisand recently posted, which edits together pictures of essential workers and footage of her performing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in tribute to the Sept. 11 victims at the end of the 2001 Emmy Awards.More upbeat is the Brussels Jazz Orchestra’s gently swinging take, recorded “for the brave who care for the sick, for everyone who stays at home to save others. You’re not alone!” More

The last surviving member of that landmark album’s sextet, he was a master of understatement, propelling his bandmates with a quiet persistence. More

Before the coronavirus, investigating how humans perceive time was mostly the work of psychologists. Then the pandemic confined half the globe to their homes, upending routines and blurring the markers we’d relied on to keep track.Now, time is an obsession. Google has registered a surge of searches for the day of the week. Individual days creep along, yet April sped by and May evaporated in a flash. And nature moves ahead on schedule, indifferent to human confusion.Investigations into the perception of time have long been the work of composers, too. Pierre Boulez distinguished between the time we count and the time we inhabit. When I spoke to the percussionist Steven Schick, he brought up those two categories.“One of the difficulties right now is that we have an underdeveloped capacity to simply occupy time, and we rely on our multiple strategies to count it,” he said. “And when these have been robbed, we are unmoored from the matrix that makes us feel comfortable.”Since the end of the 19th century, perhaps bridling against the nascent industrial age, composers have played with different ways of creating music resistant to man-made mechanics of time keeping. In the United States, the apotheosis of that phenomenon was the music of Morton Feldman, which, as the critic Michael Andor Brodeur wrote recently in The Washington Post, observes exquisitely subtle changes over vast stretches.Here are seven pieces that speak to the Covid-19 time warp: a playlist of music for the unmoored.Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’“Here, time becomes space” is the key line of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” At the end of March, the Italian novelist Francesca Melandri published a letter in The Guardian predicting what Britons would go through in the weeks to come. Since Italy was ahead in the pandemic’s trajectory, she said that she was writing from the future. The idea of the future as a country made sense to me. Sequestered in a three-bedroom apartment with my husband and three school-age children, I had come up with a way to carve extra room: I could get up very early in the morning before anyone else. Time became space.Satie’s ‘Gnossiennes’For hundreds of years, Western composers have used bar lines to subdivide a piece of music. Visually, they help musicians find their bearings in what would otherwise be slippery stream of symbols. But they also help them shape meaning by pointing out where to place emphasis. Take them away and a score becomes like a novel by James Joyce, pages and pages of prose without punctuation.Beginning in the late 1880s, Erik Satie did away with bar lines in compositions like the hypnotic “Gnossiennes” for piano, which feature delicate modal melodies in the right hand that seem to bob on the rolling arpeggios played in the left.Messiaen’s ‘Abyss of the Birds’In the music of Messiaen, time becomes a theological preoccupation. He sought ways to escape the linearity of human time to convey the eternal. He was fond of rhythmic palindromes that subverted the traditional one-way flow of a phrase. Slow tempos and expansive silences work to dissolve the listener’s grip on a discernible pulse or pattern, and transcriptions of birdsong stand in for a music perfectly freed from consecutive time.“The Abyss of the Birds,” a movement for solo clarinet from his “Quartet for the End of Time,” emerges out of silence so stealthily that it appears to have no beginning. Quicksilver flashes of birdsong erupt within the motionless calm in a way that points to the unknowability of nature.Philip Glass’s ‘Einstein on the Beach’In his search for nonlinear expressions of musical time, Messiaen also drew on Indian traditions. So did Philip Glass. In his work, pulse returns to the forefront and the mechanics of time keeping remain in full view. But with the help of Indian techniques of building time — through the accretion of rhythmic cells, repeated with tiny omissions and additions — the resulting music no longer forms a narrative line. Instead, pieces like “Knee Play 1,” from the opera “Einstein on the Beach,” unfold like a mandala that transfixes the listener. The changes in design are not hidden at all: Here, the singers intone the numbers of the beats. And yet the music feels perfectly static.Meredith Monk’s ‘Falling’The voices and instruments all trace the same snaky line, lubricated with keening glissandos. But after a few unison iterations, the ensemble splinters, with individual voices trailing slightly behind, like in a glitchy video conference.Over time, the looping lines overlap like multiple ambulance sirens mixing in traffic-stilled streets. They evoke a single story reiterated over a multiplicity of perspectives. In “Falling,” individual voices eventually peter out, one by one, until a single voice traces one last iteration, subtly mutated in its rhythm. The final silence feels less like an end than the gestation of a whole new cycle.Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s ‘Existence’Drones are an extreme expression of music that refuses to be subdivided or measured. Some modern composers wrote evening-long drone epics consisting of nothing other than a sustained, all-enveloping chord. For the Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir, they become the geological foundation of ecologies of sound that carry powerful emotional charges, somewhere between terror and awe.Pieces like “Existence” may also contain layers of discernible temporality, but the underlying growl of low-voiced instruments — actually a complex ocean of sound rather than a static drone — seem to belie human efforts at imposing order. At times the surface activity is sufficiently beguiling to draw attention away from it, but the hum is there all the time, changing and churning with inhuman patience.Jacob Cooper’s ‘Stabat Mater Dolorosa’[embedded content]When Jacob Cooper wrote this slow-motion take on Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater,” he was inspired by studies suggesting that time seems to stretch in the final moments before death, like a freeze-frame fall into the abyss. But this exhaustingly poignant work now seems to capture the Covid-specific grief of the bereaved, bereft even of the rituals of mourning. In a 28-minute long dirge, Mr. Cooper takes the opening bars of a gorgeous 18th-century lamentation full of aching harmonic suspensions and renders it in extreme slow motion so that its pulse becomes undetectable.Suspensions were a favorite expressive device in the Baroque era, created when one of two voices moves a step, creating a temporary dissonance that is resolved when the other voice follows suit, restoring consonance. At normal speed, this creates throbs of delicious tension, more a tease than real discomfort. But at Mr. Cooper’s glacial pace, each dissonance is left hanging so long that it seems to suck the oxygen out of the air. Traditional harmonic motion relies on human memory, the knowledge of where the music started and wants to return. But stretched out like this, a listener loses track of origins, and with it any hope of resolution. More

The Warner Music Group, the home of stars like Ed Sheeran, Cardi B and Led Zeppelin, announced on Tuesday that it would proceed with an initial public offering that would value the company at up to $13.3 billion.The listing, planned for Nasdaq, would be the latest sign of the dramatic turnaround in the fortunes of the music business. Warner was bought for $3.3 billion in 2011 by Access Industries, the conglomerate controlled by the Russian-born billionaire Len Blavatnik, when the industry seemed to be on a terminal decline.Since then, the music business has been reinvigorated by streaming services, leading investors to cash in. Last year, the Chinese company Tencent Holdings bought 10 percent of the Universal Music Group at a price that valued Universal at more than $33 billion.The Warner I.P.O. would float 70 million shares, or 13.7 percent of its common stock, for between $23 and $26 a share — valuing the company’s equity from $11.7 billion to $13.3 billion.Warner had nearly $3 billion in debt and $484 million in cash at the end of March, which would put the company’s enterprise value at about $16 billion if shares sell at the high end of the announced range.According to the company’s prospectus, its underwriters — Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs — have the option to purchase an additional 10.5 million shares within 30 days.Warner’s shares are being sold by Access Industries, and that company — not Warner — will receive proceeds from their sale. Access will retain 99 percent of voting power through its ownership of a separate class of stock. More