Music

In the summer of 1964, Motown was in a bind. Its biggest female star, Mary Wells, had just reached No. 1 with “My Guy,” and then quit the label — the first major defection from the young company, which had set itself up in Detroit as a flawless factory of black pop.So Berry Gordy Jr., Motown’s founder, and his team tried to craft a hit for a trio of young women from the label’s bench, the Supremes, who had struggled to crack the Top 40. Their chosen song, “Where Did Our Love Go,” was carefully arranged for hit potential — all that was left was to sell it to radio programmers.That job fell to Barney Ales, Mr. Gordy’s indefatigable lieutenant, who proclaimed in a company news release that “Where Did Our Love Go” would be Motown’s next No. 1. He was soon proved correct and the Supremes, led by Diana Ross, were anointed Motown’s newest superstars.Mr. Ales died on April 17 in Malibu, Calif., at age 85. The Universal Music Group, which owns the Motown label, announced the death but did not specify the cause.Mr. Ales was one of Mr. Gordy’s most indispensable executives throughout the 1960s, when Motown became a ubiquitous force in American pop culture and a prime symbol of black enterprise at the height of the civil rights movement.Officially, he was in charge of sales and promotion. But as a high-ranking white executive at a black-owned label, Mr. Ales was also instrumental in promoting Motown’s music to the white-dominated industry — most importantly the programmers who decided what songs were played on Top 40 radio stations.Crossing over to the pop mainstream was crucial to Mr. Gordy’s vision for Motown. The label’s sound was rooted in R&B, yet its artists were carefully styled to appeal to white audiences, down to the sequined gowns, etiquette lessons and Las Vegas nightclub engagements for acts like the Supremes.“There’s no question that Ales’s race gave him access to, and influence with, pop radio D.J.s and programmers,” Adam White, who collaborated with Mr. Ales on the 2016 book “Motown: The Sound of Young America,” said by email.“That was the reality of the times,” Mr. White added, “even as pop radio was recognizing that its audience was drawn to the kind of R&B-pop that Motown was perfecting.”Baldassare Ales was born in Detroit on May 13, 1934, to Silvestro Ales, a Sicilian-born barber, and Evelyn (Winfield) Ales, who grew up in Cheboygan, Mich. He attended Thomas M. Cooley High School in Detroit and as a young man worked on a Dodge assembly line.He began his education in the music industry at 21 in the stockroom of Capitol Records’ local office, rising to positions in sales and promotion. In 1959, he became the Detroit branch manager of Warner Bros. Records.Those jobs gave Mr. Ales entree to the record stores, distributors and programmers vital to making any song a hit. He met Mr. Gordy in 1960 and was soon hired as the national sales and promotion manager at Motown, which Mr. Gordy had founded in 1959 with an $800 loan from his family.Mr. Ales built the label’s sales and promotion team, which in the early days was predominantly white. Part of his job involved collecting money the label’s distributors owed — a hazard for most independent labels, which Mr. Ales dealt with by threatening to withhold Motown’s supply of hits from nonpaying accounts.“It didn’t just happen overnight. It was a well-thought-out philosophy that we had,” Mr. Ales said of the label’s business plan in a 2016 interview with The Detroit Free Press. “Motown was a music company. It wasn’t an R&B company. It wasn’t a soul company. It was the same as Capitol Records or CBS: a company devoted to making music.”Mr. Ales offered a glimpse of his method on a one-sided 45 r.p.m. record titled “An Important Message From Barney Ales (Play Immediately)” that was sent to distributors in 1970. Over three minutes, he implored them to help make a No. 1 hit out of Ms. Ross’s debut solo single, “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand).”“I’m concerned and I want action,” he told them. But the single stalled at No. 20.When Motown moved its headquarters to Los Angeles in 1972, Mr. Ales remained in Detroit. A few years later he started his own label, Prodigal, but in 1975 he rejoined Motown and sold Prodigal to it. In the late 1970s he served as Motown’s president.He left Motown again in 1979 and worked with various companies, including the jazz label Pablo and Elton John’s Rocket Record Company. In the 1990s he also worked with the AEM Record Group, which released music by the funk hero George Clinton — whom Mr. Ales had known since the 1960s, when Mr. Clinton was signed to Motown’s music publishing subsidiary, Jobete, as a songwriter.Mr. Ales is survived by his wife, Eileen; his sons, Steven, Barney and Brett; his daughters, Shelley DeRose and Cristina Ales-Neggazi; nine grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.In a statement, Mr. Gordy praised Mr. Ales’s ability to sell the label’s music to anyone who would buy it.“I just thought Barney was the greatest salesperson in the world, and he had like the United Nations in his sales department,” Mr. Gordy said. “I wanted to sell music to all people: whites, blacks, Jews, gentiles, the cops and the robbers.” More

Amorphous, open-ended, unstructured time, with undercurrents of foreboding, pockets of boredom and fleeting interludes of peace or reassessment. That’s what Covid-19 has brought to many people — and it’s a mental state that Brian Eno’s vast recorded catalog has been prepared for since he first popularized the term “ambient music” in the 1970s. The long days and featureless nights of self-quarantine offer an opportune moment to revisit — or get acquainted with — Eno’s time-warping music.He does have other skills. On four solo albums from the 1970s, after he left Roxy Music, Eno thoroughly mastered rock-song structure, with slyly cerebral lyrics and skewed instrumental sounds; all four albums are gems, particularly “Before and After Science” from 1977. He has intermittently made song albums in the decades since. And his 1981 collaboration with David Byrne on “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” — shaping found-sound sampled vocals from international sources into rhythm-driven, club-ready tracks — opened new doors in dance music.But for the most part, Eno has channeled his pop impulses into production and collaborations — with U2, David Bowie, Talking Heads, John Cale and lately Karl Hyde of Underworld. Yet the bulk of his own recordings, and all of those selected here, are instrumentals that, old or new, are particularly suited to orchestrate this uneasy historical moment.Eno was not the first to make music designed to maintain a subliminal, atmospheric presence while evading the foreground. By his account, medical circumstance led him to thinking about music as just one element in a larger environment. When he was immobilized after an automobile accident, a friend left music playing on a record player he couldn’t reach, at such low volume that it melded with all the other sounds in the room; Eno being Eno, he ended up listening with John Cage-like attentiveness. That gave him the idea for his quiet, ambient (although he hadn’t yet settled on the term) 1975 album, “Discreet Music.” Soon, Eno would stake out an ambient music genre that has since been populated by countless composers alongside him.Yet Eno himself has continued to rework what ambient music might mean with continual flexibility, shifting his approaches and adapting constantly to new technology and circumstances. He has released multiple albums per year throughout a four-decade solo career — including, this year, “Mixing Colours,” a collaboration with his brother Roger Eno. There are clearly sounds he is drawn to repeatedly: glimmering reverberant timbres, uncannily sustained chords and clusters, melodic phrases that shy away from turning into melodies. But his catalog holds ample exceptions to any generalization about his music.Eno has improvised in the studio, alone or with collaborators, using real time recordings or making surreal edits. He has composed extremely short ambient works — like the six-second Windows 95 start-up sound — and potentially endless ones. He has made music that seems cyclical and music that hints at narrative. For decades, he has created generative music: systems that are set in motion, like loops of irregular length or permutations of computer-generated tones, and chosen particular results like a favorite bolt of a textile. He edits, manipulates and recombines his recordings, or he allows his generative music to flow freely, as he has done with installations in galleries, museums, hospitals and public spaces. He has worked by concept, by instinct, by collaboration and by every conceivable combination of them all.Here are some of Eno’s best ambient works — long tracks, often, that might provide half-heard diversion through a sleepless night. (Listen to the full playlist on Spotify, too.)‘The Heavenly Music Corporation 1’ (Fripp & Eno, 1973)Eno and Robert Fripp (King Crimson’s guitarist) experimented in the early 1970s with looping — which, back in the analog era, involved routing a tape through two tape recorders, to layer the recording from the first one with the playback from the second. The loop sets up a pulsating drone in “The Heavenly Music Corporation 1,” topped by lead-guitar solos from Fripp that claw and flail, then braid themselves back into the drone: aggression patiently reframed. (Note: Although streaming services break the piece up into tracks, it’s worth hearing as an uninterrupted whole.)‘Discreet Music’ (1975)The title track of Eno’s first solo ambient breakthrough loops and undulates for just over half an hour, with endlessly recurring, somehow optimistic two-note and four-note motifs that float in an amniotic bath of consonances. The reedy electronic tones suggest woodwinds played by musicians who never have to pause for breath. More

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Arlene Saunders, a charismatic soprano who was a fixture of opera companies in New York and Hamburg, Germany, died on April 17 at the Hebrew Home at Riverdale in the Bronx. She was 89.Lisa A. Raskin, her stepdaughter, said the cause was complications of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.Ms. Saunders was never wanting for praise for her musicianship, but she rose to fame as an affecting performer with dramatic authority. As Eva in Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” at the Metropolitan Opera, she was described in The New York Times as “singing as easily as if she were conversing.” And The Times, writing about a stadium concert in 1963, said she had “something rare and exciting in a soprano: a genuine flare.”Arlene Pearl Soszynski was born on Oct. 5, 1930, in Cleveland to Walter and Julia Soszynski. She grew up there and went to college at Baldwin Wallace University in nearby Berea, Ohio.Her career was sparked by two debuts in 1961, both as Mimì in Puccini’s “La Bohème”: at the Teatro Nuovo in Milan, and with New York City Opera.The Times’s review of the City Opera production began, “Arlene Saunders is a soprano who can sing beautifully, act effectively and illuminate any operatic stage fortunate enough to be graced by her talents.” She would go on to star in more classics with the company, including Puccini’s “La Fanciulla del West,” Bizet’s “Carmen” and Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.”She continued to perform internationally in the 1960s, singing Pamina in “The Magic Flute” at the Glyndebourne Festival in Britain and becoming a regular at the Hamburg State Opera — where she performed in the premiere of Gian Carlo Menotti’s “Help, Help, the Globolinks!” in 1968 and was honored with the title Kammersängerin.When the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts opened in 1971, Ms. Saunders starred in its inaugural opera, Ginastera’s “Beatrix Cenci.” She also made a belated debut with the Met that decade in “Meistersinger.” Her farewell came in 1985, in “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires.In 1986, Ms. Saunders returned to New York and married Dr. Raymond A. Raskin, who died in 2017. She is survived by her stepchildren, Ms. Raskin and Dr. Jonathan M. Raskin, as well as two step-grandchildren.Away from the stage, she was never far from opera. She led programs, including one at New York University, and for most of the 1990s ran a nonprofit group called Opera Mobilé, which packed a production of “Pagliacci” in a truck to be staged in parks throughout New York City. More