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      in Music

      Adam Abeshouse, Prolific Producer of Classical Music, Dies at 63

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      A trained violinist, he found his calling in the studio control room. He also started a foundation to help fund recordings that lack major-label support.Adam Abeshouse, a Grammy Award-winning producer of classical music for more than 30 years who also ran a foundation that helps fund the recording of works not supported by major labels, died on Oct. 10 at his home in South Salem, N.Y., in Westchester County. He was 63.His wife, Maria Abeshouse, said the cause was bile duct cancer.Mr. Abeshouse, who was also a concert violinist, was prolific: Starting in the early 1990s, he produced (and often engineered and edited) hundreds of albums. Among the musicians he worked with were the violinists Joshua Bell and Itzhak Perlman, the pianists Simone Dinnerstein, Garrick Ohlsson, Leon Fleisher and Lara Downes, and the Kronos Quartet. In 2000, he won the Grammy for classical music producer of the year.Musicians described Mr. Abeshouse as a technically brilliant and joyful producer.“He had so many different qualities necessary for recording, but you don’t expect them all to be contained in one person,” said Ms. Dinnerstein, who recorded 14 albums with Mr. Abeshouse, including her newest, “The Eye Is the First Circle,” which documents a 2021 performance of Charles Ives’s “Concord” Sonata.“He had a fantastic, acute ear,” she added. “He knew how to do a recording session; he knew when you needed a break or needed to move on or to be pushed. He was an amazing engineer; he knew all about sound, microphones, acoustics, and had a huge array of vintage microphones.“And he was astonishingly good at editing. From all the takes in a session, putting them together was almost like being a sculptor.”Mr. Bell said that Mr. Abeshouse’s background as a violinist helped their collaborations.“He was a wonderful violinist; he didn’t just hack away at it,” Mr. Bell recalled, adding that Mr. Abeshouse helped him get past his perfectionism in the studio.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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      in Music

      Marvin Schlachter, Record Executive Who Championed Disco, Dies at 90

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      In the 1960s, he helped get wide exposure for Black artists like Dionne Warwick. A decade later, he brought dance music from the clubs to radio success.Marvin Schlachter, a music executive who helped launch Dionne Warwick and the Shirelles in the 1960s and who a decade later created one of the world’s most influential disco labels, bringing acts like Musique and France Joli to the masses, died on Sept. 19 in Manhattan. He was 90.His son Brad said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was intestinal cancer.Beginning in the early 1960s, Mr. Schlachter played a crucial role in the emergence of Black musicians from genre-based appeal to become a force in the American music mainstream.Mr. Schlachter in 1962, a year after he became executive vice president of Scepter Records.Record World magazine, via Schlachter familyHe spent nine years as an executive with Scepter Records, a New York label comparable in some ways to Motown in Detroit (although much smaller). The label brought in Black songwriters, producers and musicians and promoted their albums among white audiences — still an unusual idea at the time.Among Scepter’s biggest successes was Ms. Warwick, whom the label paired with the songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David. The Bacharach-David team wrote many of Ms. Warwick’s early signature hits, including “Don’t Make Me Over,” “Walk On By” and “Alfie.”Dionne Warwick’s first album was released by Scepter Records in 1963, early in her long association with the songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David.Scepter RecordsWe 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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      in Music

      As Taylor Swift and Others Revive Cassettes, Fans Look for Tape Decks

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      Musicians and fans have developed a new taste for an old format, but manufacturers largely stopped making players. Listeners are finding creative (and vintage) solutions.When Taylor Swift released “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” in an array of physical formats last year, Cora Buel knew she had to get the cassette right away. Buel, a 48-year-old based in Daly City, Calif., is a fan of Swift’s music — an affinity she shares with her teenage daughter, who has since bought her mother more tapes as gifts. One main reason? Buel drives a 1998 BMW Z3, and has no other convenient options for on-the-road album playback.“Just get an old car that only plays cassettes,” Buel said, “and you’ll listen every day.”Although Buel might be an extreme proponent of retro design — she works as chief revenue officer at ThredUp, an online consignment store — the cassette’s return is by now almost as unmistakable as the format’s distinctive hiss and warble.Dominant in the United States from the early 1980s until it was overtaken commercially by the compact disc in the early 1990s, the cassette tape has survived as an underground phenomenon, a deliberately anachronistic medium of choice for artists on the noise, avant-garde and low-fi fringes. But tapes began turning up at the trend-chasing retailer Urban Outfitters as long ago as 2015, the same year that digital streaming first overtook download sales. Nearly a decade later, Swift’s latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” stands as the top-selling cassette of the year so far, with about 23,000 copies sold through June 30, according to the tracking service Luminate.Sure, cassette sales of Swift’s new album pale beside its performance in even other physical formats, where it boasts sales of 1.1 million copies on CD and another 988,000 on vinyl. But “Tortured Poets” alone is on pace to beat the total annual sales of all albums on cassette for as recently as 2009, when the Luminate precursor Nielsen SoundScan reported a mere 34,000 units shipped. If Spotify killed the iTunes star, and vinyl is increasingly a high-priced luxury item — never mind CDs for the moment — then cassettes could be the cockroaches that outlive them all.As labels look to capitalize on “superfans” who will buy multiple formats, artists releasing new music on cassette this year cross genres and generations. A sampling of musicians embracing the format includes: the pop polymath Charli XCX, the alternative-rock titan Kim Deal, the adventurous South Florida rapper Denzel Curry, the outré Thom Yorke band the Smile, the black-metal group Darkthrone, the pop-rock duo Twenty One Pilots, the meditative electronic producer Tycho, the masked country singer Orville Peck, the folk-pop troubadour Shawn Mendes, the reigning pop wunderkind Billie Eilish, the garage-rocker Ty Segall, the alt-pop eclecticist Remi Wolf and the sultry singer-songwriter Omar Apollo.Though the last new car to be factory-equipped with a cassette deck was reportedly a 2010 Lexus, more than a quarter of light-duty vehicles on the road are at least 15 years old, according to a recent analysis by S&P Global Mobility. Susanna Thomson of the Oakland, Calif., band Sour Widows still listens to cassettes in her 1998 Volvo wagon, which has a tape deck and a CD player. “I-90,” a song on the alternative-rock group’s bittersweet new album, “Revival of a Friend,” includes lyrics about driving down the interstate while singing along repeatedly to a beloved cassette; the tape in question was by the Southern California punk-rock outfit Joyce Manor.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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      in Music

      R. Peter Munves, Master Marketer of Classical Music, Dies at 97

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      As an executive at Columbia and RCA Records, he popularized the classics for mass audiences by applying the same techniques used to sell pop music.R. Peter Munves, a record company executive who revolutionized the marketing of classical music, died on Aug. 19 in Glen Cove, N.Y. He was 97.His death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by his son Ben.Mr. Munves carved out a moneymaking niche in what for much of its history has been a low-margin, struggling industry, selling classical music to mass audiences by applying the techniques of pop music marketing.In the 1960s, while at Columbia Records, he created a series called “Classical Greatest Hits” that packaged bits of Brahms, Mozart, Bach and other composers onto single LPs. In 1968 he signed the electronic musician Wendy Carlos to record “Switched-On Bach” — pieces by Bach on the Moog synthesizer.Both ideas were big hits, commercially if not with the critics. Time magazine reported in a 1971 profile of Mr. Munves that the “Greatest Hits” series “scored a solid bull’s-eye in the market and rang up $1,000,000” in revenues. The “Switched-On Bach” album, Time said, was Columbia’s “all-time best classical seller.”In 1968, Mr. Munves signed the electronic musician Wendy Carlos to record an album of Bach compositions on the Moog synthesizer. It was said to be Columbia’s best-selling classical album of all time.Columbia/CBSIn 1981 Mr. Munves produced an album that compiled 222 well-known themes from classical music. One critic called it a “marketing masterpiece.”Columbia/CBSMr. Munves went on to produce an album called “Themefinder” — a compilation of 222 well-known themes from classical music that the New York Times music critic Edward Rothstein called a “marketing masterpiece” upon its release in 1981, adding that Mr. Munves was “an inspired producer.”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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      in Music

      Herbie Flowers, ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ Bassist, Dies at 86

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      A celebrated session musician who appeared on a host of classic rock albums, he made his most lasting mark with his contribution to Lou Reed’s most famous song.Herbie Flowers, a prolific British session musician who rode a handful of notes to rock immortality with his indelible bass line on Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” — just one of the many landmark recordings on which he supported a constellation of rock stars — died on Sept. 5. He was 86.Family members announced his death on social media. The family did not say where he died or cite a cause.Mr. Flowers, a bassist who also occasionally played tuba, began his career as a session musician in the late 1960s. He carved out his sliver of rock glory by playing on more than 500 hit albums by the end of the 1970s, according to the BBC.The classic albums Mr. Flowers played on could have filled a dorm room shelf in the 1970s and ’80s. Among them were Elton John’s “Madman Across the Water” and Harry Nilsson’s “Nilsson Schmilsson,” both from 1971; Cat Stevens’s “Foreigner” (1973); and David Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs” (1974).He joined forces with three-quarters of rock’s equivalent of the royal family, recording with Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. He also recorded with Dusty Springfield, Serge Gainsbourg and David Essex, whom he joined on the sinewy 1973 hit “Rock On.”Despite his proximity to fame, Mr. Flowers described himself as little more than a hired hand.As a studio musician, he once told Bass Player magazine, “they play you the song or sling you a chord chart, and you come up with what you think are fancy bass lines.” You “get your job done as quickly as you can,” he added, “and as soon as they say ‘Thanks very much,’ get the hell out of there.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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      in Music

      Jerry Fuller, Writer of ‘Young Girl’ and Other Hit Songs, Dies at 85

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      He located a musical sweet spot between the romantic and the risqué for Ricky Nelson, Johnny Mathis and most famously Gary Puckett and the Union Gap.Jerry Fuller, a songwriter who helped give the sexual revolution a Top 40 soundtrack, died on July 18 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 85.The cause was complications of lung cancer, his wife, Annette Fuller, said.Mr. Fuller had a brief solo career as a crooner, starting in the late 1950s. Though he would become well known as a songwriter a decade later, his compositions retained some of the earnestness of this earlier period.Gary Puckett and the Union Gap had a hit with Mr. Fuller’s song “Young Girl” in 1968. In later decades the song would draw scorn for its upbeat treatment of an older man’s flirtation with an underage girl.Columbia RecordsHe specialized in love songs, and in songs about lustful desire that sounded like love songs. His first major hit was “Travelin’ Man,” about a globe-trotter who sings, “In every port I own the heart/Of at least one lovely girl.” Ricky Nelson took it to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1961.The song — which boasts of “a pretty señorita waiting for me down in old Mexico,” “my sweet fräulein down in Berlin town” and “my cute little eskimo” in Alaska — emphasizes the yearning behind each affair rather than conquest.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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      in Television

      How the Music Industry Learned to Love Piracy

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      A recent documentary has industry bigwigs telling a galling story about the file-sharing era: Everything worked out for the best.How do you disassemble a decades-long, multibillion-dollar industry in just a few short years? This was the question at the heart of this summer’s two-part Paramount+ documentary, “How Music Got Free,” which examines the greed and myopia of the music business in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when an assortment of otherwise feckless teenagers and tech enthusiasts finally figured out how to trade songs over the internet. Depending on your perspective, it is either a delightful yarn about the money-changers in the temple getting their due or a long, sad narrative about corporations and consumers banding together to deprive artists of a fair wage.Far from demonizing the innovators of online music piracy, “How Music Got Free” regards them as digital Robin Hood figures, visionaries whose passion for technology and music leveled the economic playing field. One montage contrasts the Croesus-like wealth of artists like Master P with the hardscrabble lives of residents of Shelby, N.C., as if seeking to justify piracy in one persuasive sweep of social-realist juxtaposition. Shelby is the home of Bennie Lydell Glover, a computer wizard and CD-manufacturing-plant employee who smuggled countless embargoed records onto the internet — a pipeline of prerelease material large enough to affect the sales of artists as big as Kanye West and 50 Cent. The documentary is also quick to point out the orgiastic profits reaped by record labels during the ’80s and ’90s, when CDs could be manufactured for around $2 and sold for $20, a practice that proved doubly lucrative as the new format induced consumers to buy their record collections all over again. The old expression goes: Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered. When the damage was done — from 2006 to 2016, CD sales dropped 84 percent — an entire generation had internalized the notion that they should never expect to pay anything for the music they cherished. The carnage could scarcely be calculated.“How Music Got Free” offers a sympathetic look back at the early days of this paradigm shift, but it’s worth remembering how music moguls and corporations actually responded to piracy at the time. Their reaction might best be described as a Keystone Kops-style combination of outrage, threats and litigation that mirrored the general stages of grief. Their indignant protests had a plaintive message: “You’re stealing from your favorite artists!” The unspoken second half of that was: “That’s our job!”This is worth remembering specifically because “How Music Got Free” was produced by Eminem, among others, and features a parade of industry bigwigs including Jimmy Iovine, 50 Cent, Timbaland and Marshall Mathers himself. Today the documentary treats the rise of online file-sharing services as first an astonishment, then a nuisance, then an existential threat and then, amazingly, a panacea. The original pirates are judged to be “pioneers” who lit the only clear path forward for the music industry. That path turns out to be streaming, a neat compromise between letting consumers listen to whatever they want online and collecting just enough money for it that big record labels are satisfied with their cut. A highly weird coda praises the contemporary streaming economy as a populist breakthrough, wherein, per the documentary’s narration, “we are one step closer to an artist being able to chart their own course.” Also: “Fans can experience music in their own ways.” Also, per one Panglossian talking head: “If you like music, you have more opportunities.” Also: “The artists themselves are just having more direct relationships with the consumers,” which — what does this even mean?History is written by the winners, and Eminem, Iovine and the rest of the plutocrats involved with “How Music Got Free” are clear victors in the aftermath of the piracy wars. What is left unmentioned, of course, is the surrounding blast crater, which has functionally erased a once-thriving ecosystem of middle-class musicians. Those artists survived on the old model of physical sales and mechanical royalties; now they have been almost completely excised from the profit pool of the streaming economy. Perhaps you have read the numbers and wrangled with their penurious abstractions. Per the Recording Industry Association of America, streaming currently accounts for 84 percent of revenue from recorded music. One estimate had streaming platforms paying an average of $0.00173 per stream; more recent numbers have it as $0.0046. Either way, a majority of that princely sum is typically captured by record labels, while the artist is left to make do with the remainder. I will save you the trouble of getting out your calculator. What this means is that it is essentially impossible for all but a glancingly small number of musicians to make meaningful income from their recordings.All turned out well, and music was solved forever.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