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      Franco Battiato, Pop Singer and Versatile Composer, Dies at 76

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      Though hugely popular as a singer-songwriter in Italy, he never stopped experimenting. He composed for movies, opera and ballet, directed films and painted.Franco Battiato, one of Italy’s most prominent singer-songwriters, who expressed esoteric ideas in catchy lyrics and, ever an eclectic artist, also composed operas and movie soundtracks, directed films and painted, died on Tuesday at his home in Milo, Sicily. He was 76.His manager, Francesco Cattini, confirmed the death. He did not give a cause but said Mr. Battiato had been ill for a long time.In a career of nearly 60 years, Mr. Battiato explored a variety of musical genres with an eye toward innovation. His works included experimental electronic music, symphonic compositions and ballets in addition to pop songs. Mystical and spiritual qualities permeated much of his work.President Sergio Mattarella, in a statement, called him “a cultured and refined artist who charmed a vast public, even beyond national borders, with his unmistakable musical style — a product of intense studying and feverish experimentation.”Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture, referred to one of Mr. Battiato’s lyrics on Twitter: “How hard it is to find the dawn within nightfall. (Franco Battiato, R.I.P.)”Mr. Battiato began his career performing in a cabaret in Milan. He reached a wider audience in the 1960s, when he appeared on a variety show on national television. His “La Voce del Padrone” (“The Master’s Voice”), released in 1981, is said to have been the first pop album by an Italian musician to sell one million copies.Despite his commercial success, Mr. Battiato continued experimenting. He composed music that mixed historical, social, ethnic and mystical themes; he wrote lyrics in Italian dialects and foreign languages.“He had a vast musical and literary culture that was mostly self-taught,” Mr. Cattini said. “He did not like repeating himself, and that made him unique.”His lyrics included references to “Euclidean Jesuits,” Ming dynasty emperors and the whirling dervishes of Sufism, a mystical form of Islam.“Speaking of the Sufis in Italy in the 1980s was like talking about aliens,” said Giuseppe Pollicelli, one of the directors of “Temporary Road,” a 2013 documentary about Mr. Battiato. “But people got it, and loved it.”He added, “He had a magic touch in channeling complex topics through songs that were easy to listen to, memorize and internalize, even if people could not always decrypt the meaning.”Mr. Battiato’s 1991 pop song “Povera Patria” (“Poor Homeland”), a lament about an Italy crushed by the abuse of power and governed by “perfect and useless buffoons,” became a hit, and some of its lyrics entered everyday language in Italy.The next year, after the Persian Gulf war, Mr. Battiato performed with the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra in Baghdad as a gesture of solidarity, sitting on the floor and singing in Arabic and Italian.“He wasn’t interested in politics, but in people,” Mr. Cattini said.He was also a painter. In a 2012 video interview, Mr. Battiato explained that he had always had a restless curiosity and, frustrated by his lack of drawing skills, had decided to learn how to paint. His artwork, initially signed with the pseudonym Süphan Barzani, was exhibited in galleries in Italy, Sweden and the United States. He drew the covers of two of his albums and of the libretto for his second opera, “Gilgamesh,” written in 1992. (His first was “Genesis,” in 1987.)His soundtracks for Italian movies include one for “A Violent Life” (1990), about the Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini; he also composed music for ballets staged at the Maggio Musicale theater in Florence. And as a filmmaker he was named “best new director” by the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists in 2004 for his “Lost Love,” about a boy’s journey from Sicily to Milan in the 1950s.Francesco Battiato was born on March 23, 1945, in Jonia, a coastal town in eastern Sicily. His father, Salvatore, was a wine merchant; his mother, Grazia (Patti) Battiato, was a homemaker. He attended high school in Acireale, Sicily, and moved to Milan when he was 19 to try to make a living in music.He is survived by his older brother, Michele.After living in Milan for years, Mr. Battiato moved in the late 1980s to a villa in Milo, north of the eastern coastal city of Catania, tucked between the volcano Etna and the Mediterranean. He had spent most of his time there since then. 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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      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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      ‘Los Hermanos/The Brothers’ Review: A Long-Deferred Duet

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      In this documentary, two musician siblings — one who lives in Cuba, the other in the United States — get a chance to tour together.A moving documentary with generous amounts of music, “Los Hermanos/The Brothers” follows two musician siblings from Havana whose personal closeness is at odds with the geopolitics that keep them apart. Ilmar Gavilán, a violinist, left at 14 to study in Moscow and later immigrated to the United States. Aldo López-Gavilán, his younger brother, a pianist and composer, mostly stayed in Cuba, apart from conservatory training in London. Until December 2014, when President Obama announced a restoration of American relations with Cuba, the brothers — the sons of professional musicians — had few opportunities to perform together, or even to see each other.Directed by Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider, the documentary follows the brothers separately and as a pair from 2016 to 2018, as they visit their respective homes and travel the United States on a musical tour. The film shows how their differing backgrounds have shaped their musical styles and their attitudes. Aldo talks about the lack of good pianos in Cuba. Ilmar explains how the embargo prevented Aldo from having their mother’s piano there repaired by Steinway in the United States. When Ilmar visits Cuba, Aldo praises the government stores while Ilmar teases him about how infrequently the rations allow him to obtain a chicken. In Detroit, Ilmar laments the visible inequality.The film might have done more to explain the logistics of the brothers’ border hassles, and there are a few occasions when the year of filming could be clarified. But the electrifying musical collaborations — in addition to the poignant sibling performances, Joshua Bell performs Aldo’s music with Aldo at Lincoln Center — more than make up for those quibbles.Los Hermanos/The BrothersNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      Metropolitan Opera Reaches Deal With Union Representing Chorus

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      Labor troubles have cast the company’s planned reopening in September in doubt; two other major unions have yet to reach deals.The Metropolitan Opera, whose efforts to cut the pay of its workers to help it survive the pandemic had left it locked in a bitter dispute with its unions, threatening to derail its planned September reopening, announced Tuesday that it had reached a deal with the union representing its chorus and other workers.The union, the American Guild of Musical Artists — which also represents soloists, dancers, actors and stage managers — is the first of the three largest Met unions to reach such a deal after months of sometimes-bitter division between labor and management over how deep and lasting the pandemic pay cuts should be. The Met had been seeking to cut the payroll costs for its highest-paid unions by 30 percent, which it said would cut the take-home pay of those workers by around 20 percent.The terms of the deal — the culmination of 14 weeks of negotiations — were not immediately disclosed; the company said they would remain confidential until the union held a vote to ratify the agreement on May 24.In recent weeks, New York officials have taken steps to loosen the restrictions around live performance, and in recent days several major Broadway shows have announced their intention to resume performances in September and October. But whether the Met can reopen in September, after the pandemic forced the opera house to remain closed for more than a year, depends on how quickly it can resolve its remaining labor problems.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in a statement that he was grateful to the guild for “recognizing the extraordinary economic challenges the Met faces in the coming seasons.”Leonard Egert, the executive director of the guild, said in a statement that the new contract would “ensure the Met becomes a more equitable and better workplace.”“We are pleased to arrive at a new deal during the most trying time in performing arts’ history,” he said.The Met’s deal with the guild is just one step toward reopening. The union that represents its stagehands, Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, has been locked out since December, after the two sides failed to reach an agreement on pay cuts. Without its union stagehands, starting performances will likely be impossible. And the union representing the Met’s orchestra is still negotiating its contract.The opera company, the largest performing arts organization in the nation, says that it has lost $150 million in earned revenues — including ticket sales to the opera house and to its cinema simulcasts, as well as its shop and dining revenues — since the coronavirus pandemic forced it to close its doors more than a year ago. If the Met reopens in September, it will have gone 18 months without live performances in its opera house.The Met’s management has argued that such a long period of closure — and the uncertainty over the return of its audiences in an era where it could take years for New York City tourism to rebound to prepandemic levels — requires it to seek financial sacrifices from its employees. It has said that half of its proposed pay cuts would be restored once ticket revenues and core donations returned to prepandemic levels. A number of major American orchestras and opera companies have already negotiated pay cuts with their workers to help them survive the pandemic.After the opera house was closed, the members of its orchestra and chorus went unpaid for nearly a year. Then the company brought them to the bargaining table with the offer of up to $1,543 a week, less than half of what they are typically paid.On Thursday, union members are planning to rally in front of Lincoln Center as a display of solidarity during tense negotiations with management. Union leaders have accused the Met’s management of using the pandemic as a reason to force concessions from labor.If approved, the agreement with the guild will take effect on Aug. 1; for now, unions members will continue to receive partial payments. More

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      Martin Bookspan, Cultured Voice of Lincoln Center Telecasts, Dies at 94

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      The longtime announcer for “Live From Lincoln Center,” he said he wanted his audience “to become involved, to love what they’re hearing.”Martin Bookspan, who parlayed a childhood grounding in classical music into a career as the announcer for the “Live From Lincoln Center” telecasts and the radio broadcasts of the Boston Symphony and the New York Philharmonic, died on April 29 at his home in Aventura, Fla. He was 94.The cause was congestive heart failure, his daughter Rachel Sobel said.Mr. Bookspan started violin lessons when he was 6, but he realized by the time he entered college that he would never be the next Fritz Kreisler or Jascha Heifetz. After an early career behind the scenes at radio stations in Boston and New York, he established himself as a stalwart of “Live From Lincoln Center,” the PBS program that became America’s premier source of classical music on broadcast television. He joined the program when it went on the air in 1976.“Live From Lincoln Center” was, for him, not that different from radio — he was heard but not seen. He would open the broadcast, then hand off to on-camera hosts like Beverly Sills, Dick Cavett or Hugh Downs.“The camera was never on Marty,” said John Goberman, the program’s longtime executive producer. But, he added, Mr. Bookspan “was more than just the announcer. The comfortable and familiar part of every broadcast was Marty Bookspan.”Mr. Bookspan’s voice “didn’t sound like a lion,” Mr. Goberman said. “He spoke in a very straightforward, friendly, conversational way.” The Palm Beach Post, describing Mr. Bookspan’s voice after an interview in 1994, said: “Even on the telephone, it’s a voice that resonates with the rarefied air of high culture, the sort of voice you might hear on a public-television pledge drive. But it’s not so stuffy that you couldn’t imagine it delivering the play-by-play of your favorite team.”Mr. Bookspan himself said, “If I have a technique, it’s the technique of the sportscaster.”“As sportscasters make the game come alive, I hope I have made concerts come alive,” he explained in 2006, as he prepared to leave “Live From Lincoln Center” after 30 years. “I want the audience to become involved, to love what they’re hearing.”By then, the “Live From Lincoln Center” audience was accustomed to hearing his preconcert warm-ups and his postconcert signoffs. With a well-dressed crowd in the audience and big-name performers on the stage, the proceedings had a touch of glamour, but not necessarily for Mr. Bookspan. He and his microphone were sometimes installed in dressing rooms, closets — even, at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, in what had been a women’s restroom. He was connected to the stage through his headphones and a video monitor.The soprano Renée Fleming and the conductor Louis Langrée on opening night of the Mostly Mozart Festival in 2005, which was broadcast on “Live From Lincoln Center.”Richard Termine for The New York TimesMartin Bookspan was born on July 30, 1926, in Boston. His father, Simon, was a dry goods salesman who later switched to selling insurance; his mother, Martha (Schwartz) Bookspan was a homemaker. Simon Bookspan was passionate about Jewish liturgical music and took his son to hear prominent cantors.At Harvard, Martin majored not in music but in German literature. He graduated cum laude in 1947.He was also heard on the campus radio station, where he conducted his first important interview in 1944. His guest was the composer Aaron Copland, who revealed that he was considering writing a piece for the choreographer Martha Graham. It turned out to be the ballet “Appalachian Spring.”In his future broadcast career, Mr. Bookspan would interview more than 1,000 performers and composers, from the conductor Maurice Abravanel to the composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.After working as the music director at WBMS, a classical-music station in Boston, he joined the staff of the Boston Symphony in 1954 as its radio, television and recordings coordinator. In 1956, he moved to New York to become the director of recorded music at WQXR, then owned by The New York Times.At WQXR, he hired John Corigliano, at the time a fledgling composer, as an assistant. He proved to be a concerned boss.Mr. Corigliano called in sick one summer morning. “I should’ve known better, because Marty was so considerate, he called later in the afternoon,” Mr. Corigliano, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2001, said in an interview. “I went off to the beach. Marty called, and my roommate answered the phone. Marty said, ‘How is John feeling?’ My roommate said, ‘Oh, he’s great. He’s at the beach.’“The next day I walked in. There’s Marty. I approached him slowly and said, ‘I’ll never do it again.’”Mr. Bookspan left WQXR in 1967 and joined the music licensing agency ASCAP as coordinator of symphonic and concert activities. He was later vice president and director of artists and repertoire for the Moss Music Group, an artists’ management agency. He was also an adjunct professor of music at New York University.In the 1960s and ’70s, he was an arts critic for several television stations, including WABC and WPIX in New York and WNAC (now WHDH) in Boston. He was a host of “The Eternal Light,” an NBC program produced with the Jewish Theological Seminary, and, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the announcer for the CBS soap opera “The Guiding Light.”He also wrote reviews of recordings for The New York Times (on open-reel tapes in the 1960s and compact discs in the 1990s). He wrote several books, including “101 Masterpieces of Music and Their Composers” (1968) and, with Ross Yockey, biographies of the conductors André Previn and Zubin Mehta. He handled radio broadcasts for the Boston Symphony and later for the New York Philharmonic.His wife, Janet Bookspan, died in 2008. Besides Ms. Sobel, he is survived by a son, David; another daughter, Deborah Margol; six grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.The tenor Jan Peerce called Mr. Bookspan’s knowledge of music “encyclopedic,” and it served him well when he had to ad-lib.One night in 1959, he was the announcer for a Boston Symphony broadcast that featured the pianist Rudolf Serkin playing Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Mr. Bookspan did his usual introduction before Serkin and the conductor Charles Munch made their way across the stage. Mr. Bookspan told The Berkshire Eagle in March that once they plunged in, “I did the one thing that I learned I should never do again: I left my broadcast booth.”With Serkin “flailing away with a vengeance, pounding the pedals for all they were worth, caught up in the work and oblivious to all else” — as Mr. Bookspan recalled in a different interview — he headed to the green room to chat with Aaron Copland, who was on hand for the concert.Suddenly, in the second movement of the Brahms, there was silence.“I ran across the backstage and up the stairs, and en route picked up the news that there was a problem with the piano,” he told The Eagle. “I got to the microphone and huffed and puffed my way through, reporting, ‘There was a problem with the piano’ and that ‘as soon as I catch my breath, I’ll tell you what’s going on.’”Mr. Bookspan talked nonstop for more than 15 minutes until the piano had been fixed and Serkin and the orchestra started playing again. More

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      The Composer at the Frontier of Movie Music

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      The first time I understood what it is that the composer Nicholas Britell does for a film — understood with my whole body — I was in his studio, listening to a mistake he had made and the way he had fixed it. Earlier, in a cafe off Lincoln Center, I had asked him about the process of making “Moonlight,” the Oscar-winning coming-of-age story he scored for Barry Jenkins. Britell told me about a scene, early in the film, in which the protagonist’s mentor teaches him to swim. “I was looking at the sequence like, ‘Oh, Juan and Little swim,’” Britell said. “It’s a beautiful moment. This will be something special he can carry with him.” So Britell wrote a sweet piece in F major, an orchestral swell with a clarinet singing a variation on Little’s theme on top. He played it for Jenkins. The response was a visceral “nope.”Jenkins urged him to think of the scene as a spiritual baptism. This wasn’t simple optimism or happiness. It was the first day of the rest of Little’s life. “And I still get moved even just thinking about it,” Britell said. “Because I immediately knew.” On the spot, he began improvising something darker, in D minor, with the virtuosic feeling of a cadenza. “I was playing it on my keyboard with a kind of fake violence,” he said. “Barry was directing me from the couch. And so right there, I just made it in front of him.”In his studio, Britell played me the scene. First he cued up his original attempt, over footage from an early cut. It was tender, unambiguous movie music that could have scored any rite of passage; I pictured a high school football team triumphing against all odds. Then he cued up “Middle of the World,” the music he made with Jenkins. The violin plays jolting waves of arpeggios, wild and exhilarating. Little vanishes into the ocean, Juan holding him but somehow not protecting him, only initiating him into a kind of violent abandon. You watch with your heart in your throat: It’s beautiful and also, somehow, terrifying.The studio I was listening in — seated in the same spot Jenkins occupied as the music was written — is the size a New York realtor would market as a child’s bedroom, in an apartment overlooking the Hudson. It’s dark, the walls covered with gray acoustic foam, and Britell often works with the lights off. He shares the apartment with his wife, the cellist Caitlin Sullivan, who “is constantly and correctly encouraging me to take walks.” She also worries that he drinks too much Perrier. There are bookshelves and vintage movie posters on the walls — “Chariots of Fire” greets you at the entrance — and a small sofa, the left side of which is Jenkins’s territory. A huge monitor is mounted over Britell’s keyboard, for projecting rough cuts. (With a movie-size screen, you make movie-size music, Britell has learned.) There’s also a subwoofer the size of a washing machine; Britell’s scores include tones so low that they feel less like something audible and more like approaching weather.Last year, in February, Britell invited me back to the studio to watch him and Jenkins at work. The two hadn’t previously allowed anyone to sit in on their sessions, days-long confabs that involve near-clinical infusions of Shake Shack. They were still early in their work on “The Underground Railroad” — a 10-part series, based on the novel by Colson Whitehead, that debuts on Amazon this month. It is Britell’s first television collaboration with Jenkins, and his compositions for it are less a single score than 10 intersecting, fully realized musical universes.The first piece he played me at the session was something the two men made hours before: a dark, inquisitive piano sequence only a few bars long, circling the drain of a few dissonant notes. “One of the things we keep discovering is, for some reason, pianos,” he said. “Really specific pianos, like slightly warped.” He played another sequence to demonstrate. “It’s felted” — the piano’s hammers are padded with extra cloth — “so it’s really muffled. But it’s always like, piano works.”Jenkins sauntered in after finishing his burger in the kitchen. All he had on hand were a few unedited shots, he explained, “but I like to have some kind of picture while we’re working. If it works with this picture, it feels like you can tell if it’s part of the world.” He had been shooting in Georgia since August and flew up to spend the weekend with Britell before heading back to the set. By this point, his voice sounded felted, too. “Ninety-two days, 24 to go,” he said, rubbing his face. “We don’t normally work like this until we’re done. But, yeah, no choice.” In hindsight, this wasn’t quite true; only weeks later, the pandemic would shutter production for months, leaving them to finish their work in a sun-drenched quarantine pod in Los Angeles. Still, by the end of the session, Jenkins had slid down until he was sitting on the floor, slumped against the couch with his hoodie tugged over his face. “You can’t make a meal of how tired I am when you write this,” he warned. ‘I’m a musical Neanderthal, really. Nick speaks Neander.’I was more struck by how comfortable the two men seemed together. Britell’s voice even sounded different when he was with Jenkins, half an octave down, words running together easily. “You have to understand,” Jenkins said, “when we did ‘Moonlight,’ I didn’t really know Nick at that point.” This is the origin of the Jenkins-Britell partnership, the filmmaking equivalent of buying a house unseen. The producer Jeremy Kleiner had arranged an afternoon coffee between the men, which turned into evening drinks, the two of them talking for hours, mostly not about music. “They just vibed the whole time,” Sullivan told me. “And Barry hired him. He hired him never having heard any samples of Nick’s music of any kind.”“We had one meeting,” Jenkins said. “We went off and shot the film, and then it was like, ‘Oh, just come to New York.’ And so I walk into this place,” he said, giving considerable side-eye to the premises. “ ‘We’re gonna work in your bedroom? How’s that gonna work?’ But he made all this wonderful music. So, yeah, now it’s like a little home away from home.”“It’s a little mystical,” Britell said, deflecting credit to the tiny studio. “I think a lot of it is just feeling like it’s a safe space where you can kind of zone off and go on these little journeys.” He sat back and smiled, happy to vanish into the acoustic foam.You have almost certainly heard Nicholas Britell’s music, even if you don’t know his name. He is one of the hardest-working film composers of the past decade, despite having spent its early years wrapping up a career at a hedge fund. More than any other contemporary composer, he appears to have the whole of music history at his command, shifting easily between vocabularies, often in the same film. You may have seen “The Big Short” (2015), the manic, Oscar-winning story of the 2008 financial crash, whose score tried to musically embody subprime mortgages. Or maybe “Moonlight” (2016), narrated by a violin-and-piano theme that matures with the protagonist, tugged lower and richer by techniques borrowed from Southern hip-hop. Maybe you remember Bobby Riggs’s sleazy upright piano competing with Billy Jean King’s majestic concert grand in “Battle of the Sexes” (2017), the vinyl-soft crackle of “If Beale Street Could Talk” (2018) or the alluringly deranged sweep of “Vice” (2018).Britell also scored HBO’s “Succession,” whose title sequence would become the most unexpected hit of 2019 that wasn’t “Old Town Road” — a piece initially indistinguishable from the period music for froufrou costume dramas, except that in the background, maids are carrying value packs of Bounty and wealthy sociopaths are making penis jokes. The theme is dementedly catchy, classical phrases capped with an industrial fizz that sounds like a can of La Croix popping open, or a cash register. “Why is the ‘Succession’ theme so meme-able?” the website Vulture asked, on the same day the rapper Pusha T put out a remix with Britell’s enthusiastic collaboration.“Nick Britell,” the film-music historian Jon Burlingame told me, “is a fascinating example of where film music has gone.” Consider what movies sounded like in their earliest years: the swashbucklers that Erich Korngold scored in the 1930s, or Max Steiner’s lush “Casablanca,” or the sweeping historical epics, like “Ben-Hur,” that Miklos Rozsa wrote for in the ’50s. These composers had been classically taught and turned out symphonic, romantic scores. By the ’60s, film composers like Henry Mancini and Quincy Jones were coming up through a different musical education, rooted in jazz and pop. The next few decades featured competing visions of what film music could do — Vangelis’s triumphal synths, but also John Williams, whose blockbuster orchestrations wouldn’t have been unfamiliar to Korngold. Hans Zimmer managed to do both, inflecting his classical scores with a menacing buzz. “And then,” Burlingame says, “you get to Nick Britell.” His classical training gives him “a fairly large toolbox from which to draw,” including the traditional orchestra, like the 90-piece ensemble in “Vice.” “But his age and experience have also informed him in terms of much more contemporary musical forms,” Burlingame points out. From hip-hop, especially, Britell learned how to make sounds speak by ripping them open, warping notes to convey an affecting emotional arc rarely heard in cinema.The composers and filmmakers I spoke to about Britell emphasized the poetic intelligence he brings to his work. But his emotional reach is equally important. Part of his job is helping directors and producers feel things they can’t explain but know they want to feel. As Jesse Armstrong, the showrunner for “Succession,” told me: “I’m a musical Neanderthal, really. Nick speaks Neander.” Dede Gardner, who produced “The Big Short” and “Beale Street” and is an executive producer for “The Underground Railroad,” told me that when you introduce Britell to someone, “it’s like the air starts to vibrate and hum.” He is, she says, “the perfect person. He’s so expansive.”The director Adam McKay, who worked closely with Britell on “The Big Short” and “Vice,” likes to joke that “you can’t talk about Britell in factual terms, because all you’ll do is gush about him.” Britell’s only flaw that he can think of, he says, is that the composer doesn’t have true perfect pitch — “he has relative perfect pitch.” McKay delights in reciting Britell’s C.V., which reads like a setup for one of his comedies: a Harvard-educated, world-class pianist who studied psychology and once played keys in a moderately successful hip-hop band. “And then he graduates, and you think, Oh, he’s going to go into music. No.” Instead, McKay says, Britell winds up managing portfolios at “one of the biggest currency-trading hedge funds on Wall Street. And then he goes and starts scoring movies. And within five years, he’s nominated for Academy Awards.” You could practically hear McKay shaking his head through the phone. “Brutal.”Britell, who is 40, grew up mostly in Manhattan, in a home with the kind of devout enthusiasm for the arts characteristic of many Upper West Side Jewish families. His father, a lawyer, had a layman’s love of music, and Britell remembers figuring out the distinction between Bach and Mozart as his dad toggled between classical stations on the car radio. His mother was a musical-comedy actress before becoming a teacher — in the 1940s, in West Palm Beach, Fla., she was a child star on a local television program called something like “Aunt Lollipop’s Story Hour” — and the apartment was filled with old books of Rodgers and Hart show tunes. Britell learned to play on a broken player piano that his grandmother picked up from a neighbor; he began tinkering with it when he was 5, driven by an overwhelming desire to figure out “Chariots of Fire.” Slowly he started writing his own boyish pieces — he and his younger brother each fondly remember a repetitive number called “The Train Symphony” — and then, as an adolescent, imaginary scores. “I would write fake TV themes for myself all the time,” he says. “This is a fall drama on ABC, or this is a family comedy, or this is a detective story.”He went to private school in New York City until he was 13, when the family moved to Westport, Conn. On weekends, he commuted into the city for the Juilliard precollege program, where he trained as a pianist. He commuted too between musical worlds. It was the early ’90s, and Britell was transfixed by the hip-hop swallowing the city: the lyrics, and the beats you could feel in your chest, and the mystery of early samples, recordings of recordings that gradually morphed, leaving a fossil record of every person who touched them. He thought of hip-hop as otherworldly in the same way that he found Bach otherworldly. He remembers being walloped by the opening of A Tribe Called Quest’s “Excursions”: the almost-muddy double-bass sample, the way Q-Tip drops in, the drum break adding some final alchemical element. It was like learning, as a teenager, that there were more letters to the alphabet than he’d been taught.He arrived for his freshman year at Harvard loving everything — math and history, Brahms and Gang Starr — and was abruptly confronted by the necessity of choice. Lost and unsure, he left. For a year he tried to see if he was meant to become a concert pianist, living with his parents and scraping up work around the tristate area: cocktail gigs, the Jewish organist at the Episcopal church. The loneliness was sharper than he had anticipated. After a year, he went back to Harvard with the same sense of indecision, only now with the understanding that he couldn’t work alone.At a party soon after he returned to campus, he approached two guys rapping along with a D.J. and drums and asked if they needed keys. The group they formed, the Witness Protection Program, consumed his next three years. At its height, the group toured the Northeastern college and club circuits and opened for acts like Blackalicious and Jurassic 5. At the same time, Britell became close with another classmate, Nick Louvel, who was working on a film and invited Britell to write the score. They spent hours together watching films John Williams worked on, pausing often to interrogate the music. Britell thinks about Louvel often; he died in 2015, in a car accident, just as Britell’s musical career was taking off. He was the first person to ask Britell to write a score, and the question proved transformative. “We were always working on this movie, and I was always with the band, and those experiences really defined my life,” Britell says.But the band broke up after college, and the film he’d done with Louvel wasn’t headed to theaters anytime soon. A classmate who worked at Bear Stearns suggested that Britell consider interviewing. He got an offer and took it. “I was thinking to myself, Oh, in six months, I’ll probably go,” Britell recalls. Louvel’s film would break out; people would snap up the beats he was sending around; someone would hire him to produce. Except none of that happened, for years.Caitlin Sullivan, Britell’s wife, has played on nearly all his scores, including a melody symbolizing love in “Beale Street.” She is also the reason Britell is not currently researching emerging-market currencies in a Midtown office. The two first met when they were 18, studying music at a summer program in Aspen, Colo. — this despite years attending the same Juilliard program. They reunited after college, when Sullivan was embarking on her career as a professional cellist. She took Britell out for a birthday dinner in 2005, and they have been together ever since. By that point, Britell had been in finance for about a year, traveling to interview central bankers and people in finance ministries in Europe and East Asia. He thought he was happy. If you’re a curious person, Sullivan observes, a hypercompetent person, “it’s sometimes hard to actually parse out your true feelings.” For years she watched him come home and play the piano, or improvise beats on his old keyboard. “He’d be up, in a suit, gone around 7:30 a.m. every day and home around dinnertime,” she says. “But he would need to touch the piano.” He scrounged time for projects with friends, including short films for a former classmate, Natalie Portman. (In one of her films, he made a cameo as a cocktail pianist, tucked discreetly behind Lauren Bacall.)In 2008, on a vacation, Sullivan watched the heavy way Britell would pull out his BlackBerry to check the markets. For months, he had been so depressed that it felt like vertigo, but until Sullivan told him he was unhappy, he hadn’t fully known it. The markets, meanwhile, had guttered, Bear Stearns had folded in front of his eyes and, terrifyingly, the smartest people he knew had no idea what was going on. “People were traumatized,” he says. “It was scary to see that end to what I knew about the way that the world’s economy worked.” The demolished instrumentals leading up to the market’s implosion in “The Big Short” are the closest Britell gets to a vocabulary for what it was like to watch the world crash down.In 2010, Britell proposed to Sullivan; a month later, he gave notice. By the time they married, he had started to make trips to Los Angeles, a two-year odyssey of “bouncing couches” and trying to arrange coffee dates with directors and producers. “I was down to do anything,” he says. “I wrote telephone hold music for free. For free.” One evening, Jeremy Kleiner, an executive at Plan B Entertainment, attended a party and noticed someone playing Gershwin in the corner of the room. “We had just gotten a green light for the script of ‘12 Years a Slave’ and hadn’t really gotten into the question of composers,” Kleiner says, “and here’s this guy playing on a grand piano at a cocktail party.” Kleiner introduced Britell to the film’s director, Steve McQueen. Then Plan B introduced him to McKay, and then to Jenkins, and within five years, Britell was being nominated for Oscars.If there’s a through line across Britell’s work, it may be his fascination with winding melodies that make harmonic missteps. The most ambitious example is “Vice,” a kind of antiheroic symphony with an evil heartbeat at its center. It’s a profound technical achievement — buzzing with double fugues and allusions to multiple styles and genres, gesturing toward big-band jazz before ducking away into solo piano or full orchestra. But it’s also a statement about how much Adam McKay trusts Britell. “I don’t even know how to describe our working relationship,” McKay told me. “He’s almost like a producer, because I’ll tell him the idea from the second I have the premise, and he and I will just start kicking it around.”When McKay was beginning to think about a Dick Cheney mocku-biopic, Britell sent him a note about Mahler’s Ninth. The symphony was the last Mahler completed — while working on it, he was slowly dying from a heart condition. Leonard Bernstein suggested that the symphony’s skewed percussive opening was a reflection of Mahler’s own uneven heartbeat. This seemed like an appropriate reference point for a movie about a man whose life has been framed by repeated heart attacks. McKay began listening to the Ninth constantly, writing the script to it, and when he finished, Britell wrote a twisted, magisterial, Ninth-like score. “Vice” sounds like “Peter and the Wolf,” if Peter were also the Wolf.Britell and Barry Jenkins working on the music for “The Underground Railroad” in Los Angeles in November.Emma McIntyre/Getty Images“Dick Cheney’s heart is central to understanding his story,” Britell told me in his studio. “What is a malignant rhythm? How, rhythmically, could you play with it? And then I started doing that harmonically as well.” He turned to his Triton keyboard, the same one he used in the Witness Protection Program, and played the theme slowly, landing hard on the dissonant chords and staring at me intently, as if he were channeling either Dick Cheney or the Phantom of the Opera. “It has the shape of something strong,” he said, and yet it has a deadly flaw. You’re reeled in, then repulsed.There are intriguing parallels between Britell and George Gershwin, another brilliant, energetic Jewish kid who infused the classical canon with the buoyant new genre he loved. Britell’s most arresting scores tend to fuse both ends of his musical education. “Succession” is 18th-century court music married to heart-pounding beats; “Moonlight” chops and screws a classical piano-and-violin duet as if it’s a Three 6 Mafia track. “What I’ve found in the past,” Jon Burlingame told me, “is that people have found it impossible to incorporate such modern musical forms as hip-hop into dramatic underscore for films. When Nick did it in ‘Moonlight,’ I was frankly stunned. I didn’t think it was possible.”Hip-hop was Britell’s initiation to the fragility of sound — how it could be sampled, stretched and broken and somehow, through the breaking, made more powerful. He loves hearing a story in the sounds around notes: the hiss of spun vinyl, or the musician’s breathing. Britell’s signature may be music that’s been through something: As Barry Jenkins puts it, a productive line of inquiry for the two of them has been: How can we break this?Take the scene in “Beale Street” when Daniel struggles to tell Fonny what happened to him in prison — a rape, unmistakable in James Baldwin’s novel, that the movie seems to allude to through Britell’s music and Brian Tyree Henry’s remarkable face. On the surface, Miles Davis plays coolly on a record player. But underneath, Britell has taken the cellos from “Eros,” which scored an early romantic scene, and bent them. “We talked about it almost like we were harming them,” he told me. “Hurting the sound, making it feel like the sound is damaged.” You find similar damage in Britell’s breakout score for “The Big Short.” As the movie opens, in the 1970s, funky horns are the sound of irrational exuberance; later, when Steve Carell’s character realizes the industry is built on 40 years of sand, they return as a faint whine, like a chastened mosquito. “That’s what’s happened to his understanding,” Britell said. “It’s been mangled and stretched out and transformed.”The question of what hip-hop means for Britell may come together most concretely on “Succession.” He had read the pilot script and visited the set with Adam McKay, who suggested him for the project. The show had to have gravitas, Jesse Armstrong told him, but it was also deeply absurd, and the music would have to say both these things at once. It wasn’t clear how Britell could make that happen. Then he started thinking about Kendall Roy, one of the heirs apparent who anchor the show.“The first thing you see,” Britell said, “is he’s in the back of this car rapping to the Beastie Boys.” It’s hard not to think about Kendall as a failed Britell, a parallel-universe version of what he might have been if he had stayed in finance: a Wall Street bro who hides inside his headphones and disconnects from the world he chose. The scene — a young man rapping earnestly inside a chauffeured car — offered a window into how the Roys’ self-conception might contrast sharply with their destructive incompetence. “What if the sound that they imagined for themselves was this dark, courtly, late-1700s harmonic sound?” Britell asked himself. “I played Jesse some of these chords,” he said, “and he was just sort of like, ‘Yes.’”“It was just a wonderful, hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck feeling that you don’t often have,” Armstrong told me. “To get that feeling, to feel like, Oh, my God, this is something which just feels like the show.” The waltz-like rhythm, reflecting the unsteady dance between the three central siblings, was “a smart insight” that continues to shape the way Armstrong writes the series.The show’s addictive title sequence was the last recording Britell made for Season 1. He had structured the season’s music like a symphony; the title theme, like an overture, introduces you to all the elements you’ll hear in the show, which Britell recited for me. The beguiling melody. The detuned pianos. “The cello melody, the idea of these huge beats, the weird sleigh bell — ” The sleigh bell? “That’s its own thing,” Britell admitted. “That actually doesn’t appear in other parts of the show.” The main theme is everything, but brighter. “You’re presented with these ideas so you will both recognize them but also notice how they change, and you’ll have this set of expectations. This is the world you’re about to enter.” When Britell sent the title theme to the production team, he reminded himself that the nature of his profession is adapting; he’s used to coming up with a hundred ideas, presenting a director a few dozen and possibly seeing them all rejected. But he also thought, I really don’t know what to do if they don’t like this.“I’ll never forget it,” Britell said. “Jesse sent an email back, and he was like, ‘I think the right words for this are [expletive] yeah.’”As Jenkins and I sat on the little studio couch, Britell played an early sketch for the opening of “The Underground Railroad.” A violin bent into a brass fanfare, and then a piano waltzed in, suggesting mystery — another winding melody that makes bewitching missteps. At this point, he and Jenkins had about three hours of music drafted, and at least as many still to go. He scrolled down a long list of file names. “Some of these things, we have a sort of very loose, amorphous idea,” he said, hitting play on another piece. “So this is an idea of descending downward — ”“I think this comes from the cicada,” Jenkins said. “Just that one melody.” He started singing softly. Do do do, do do do …Jenkins had been making recordings on set, collecting natural sounds that Britell would pitch down to make instruments. The piano track he’d played me earlier started out as a field recording: the whistle of cicadas and bird noise, an airy crackling that turned out to be cotton. “I just do Play-Doh with some of this audio,” Britell said, filtering out high frequencies and adding reverb until the cicadas sounded blurry and spectral. In one track, an insect caught in the Play-Doh turned into a bell, tolling the same three ghostly notes. “We don’t know what that is, by the way,” Jenkins said. “We just call him Fred now.”Britell started a new piano track.Jenkins: “And this piano was to match — ”Britell: “Trying to match Fred’s melody.”Jenkins: “So Fred the bug has to get a co-producer credit.”Jenkins had also been drawn to the noises of the human environment during the shoot. “We were shooting down in Savannah,” he said, “and there was a construction site next to our set, and I was like, ‘Oh, that drill has a really nice rhythm to it.’ And so I had the P.A.s go out and record it and sent it to Nick.” Britell started laughing. “I remember getting these texts from you in the middle of the day,” he said, “and it was just noise.”Britell and Jenkins.Emma McIntyre/Getty ImagesThere’s a slight Willy Wonka vibe to Britell in his studio, and as I processed Fred and the drill, he and Jenkins grinned like the inventors of the Everlasting Gobstopper. Over time, the two have grown more comfortable with thinking about a score in terms of manipulated recordings, not just a composition for instruments. “If everything’s in context,” Britell said, “the drill is music.” In “Moonlight,” they used ocean sounds; in “Beale Street,” subways. They were looking forward to getting new fire sounds. “We actually do have people on set burning things,” Jenkins said.Aria“The Underground Railroad”Britell cued up early footage from the show: images of an enslaved family in ragged clothing, faces stinging with confrontation; a white-haired Black man standing alone in a cotton field as cicada noises crackled, as if the field were catching fire; two young Black women seated at a dance, a man bowing and offering his hand — a fairy-tale sequence that feels more like a horror movie.“I didn’t mind the fire being out by that point,” Jenkins said. “Right as he reached for her hand.”I didn’t fully understand what they were up to until Britell played me a trailer they made for the Television Critics Association, a summary of the show’s music that starts with frantic arpeggios, almost unbearably high, then moves through the waltzing midrange of the Fred-​the-bug piano melody and settles gradually into a resonant bass. “It’s that descending idea,” he said. “Going underground, going downward.” The final bass notes were made from the sounds of the drill — you literally hit earth. They weren’t drawn to the drill just because they wanted to allude to the show’s title. It was an attraction Jenkins had to a sound that felt right, and then became right. “We start with an idea,” Britell said. “It’s a feeling. It could even be really subtle. That’s why I’m so sensitive to these early things. We need those early places. And the great part is when you start with these things, and you don’t know why, and then they actually — ”“Start to make sense,” Jenkins said.“And you’re just like, Oh, that’s why we’ve been following this.”Sitting in the dark with empty bottles of seltzer, none of us could have anticipated that the world was about to shut down. By the time the show neared completion a year later, Britell and Jenkins would be engaged in their most radical experiments to date. By that point, Britell’s language for parts of the project was bracingly tactile: He spoke of “stripping sounds down” to an “abrasive” raw surface, peeling them to their bones. When he bent notes enough, he says, “they revealed whole other characters.” “The Underground Railroad” emerged from last year broken and changed but still recognizable; you can feel that February session still underfoot. “It all winds up somewhere,” Britell had told me. “There’s no wrong turn.”As we wrapped up, Jenkins concluded, “The piano just works for the show.”“It does.”“Like, I can see the episodes when I hear this stuff.”“And what’s so interesting is at no point in any of the other projects did we feel that way,” Britell said.“The piano’s just the bedrock, man,” Jenkins said. “The piano and Fred.”Jamie Fisher is a writer whose work focuses on culture and literary criticism. She is working on a collection of short stories. This is her first feature for the magazine. More

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      When Bernstein Conducted Stravinsky, Modern Music Came Alive

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      A box set of recordings pairs Stravinsky, 50 years after his death, with the conductor who championed his works.On April 6, 1971, a balmy spring day in New Haven, Conn., I arrived at the main building of the Yale School of Music a little late for a piano lesson. But I stopped at the front door. Someone had tacked up a small white note card: “Igor Stravinsky died today.”Those four words staggered me. Stravinsky had been central to the entire span of 20th-century music thus far. His “Rite of Spring,” from 1913, had been part of the creation of modernism — what seemed like ancient history. Yet in an analysis class that very semester in 1971, we were studying the score of what was still quite a new piece — his extraordinary “Requiem Canticles,” from 1966 — trying to understand the ways he had adapted 12-tone technique to his own ends. He seemed almost to embody the entirety of modern music and its various styles. What would happen now that he was gone?I’d been a Stravinsky fan since my early teens, when I listened over and over to the recording he conducted of his “Firebird.” The closest I came to him in person was in the spring of 1966. I had just graduated from high school and was attending all the programs of a Stravinsky festival presented by the New York Philharmonic. The final concert ended with the composer leading a performance of his “Symphony of Psalms.” I can’t tell you how many musicians I’ve met since then who have envied me for being there that day.Stravinsky was in the audience for the first program, which was conducted by Leonard Bernstein and ended with “The Rite of Spring.” Even today, that piece still has the power to shock. Back then, when it was not as familiar, the music seemed truly mind-blowing, especially in Bernstein’s mysterious and volcanic, yet somehow cohesive and eerily beautiful performance.During the ovation, Stravinsky, who was seated at the front of the first tier, stood up, smiled and gestured his thanks to Bernstein and the orchestra musicians. During intermission he had remained in his seat, and ushers kept students like me away. But I got close enough to wave at him eagerly; I think he saw me.Stravinsky and Bernstein were linked in my mind: the world’s greatest living composer and his greatest (and certainly most famous) champion. That reputation has lingered: To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Stravinsky’s death, Sony has released a box set pairing these two artists.Yet Bernstein’s Stravinsky discography is actually frustratingly small; the Sony set contains only six discs. Even in the concert hall, Bernstein did not conduct the range of Stravinsky works he might have — unlike the comprehensive approach he took to, for example, the symphonies of Mahler.Bernstein recording Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex” with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Symphony Hall in 1972.Sony Music EntertainmentStravinsky was central to much of the span of the 20th century and its music.Sam Falk/The New York TimesBernstein was one of Stravinsky’s greatest (and certainly most famous) conductor champions.Sam Falk/The New York TimesStarting in the 1950s, when Stravinsky was still a challenging composer for most audiences, Bernstein led accounts of pieces that clearly compelled him, especially the “The Rite of Spring” and “The Firebird,” as well as seminal works from Stravinsky’s Neo-Classical period, like Symphony in Three Movements, the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, Symphony of Psalms and more.The “Rite,” Bernstein’s signature piece, kept turning up, even on one of his Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts, in 1958, which opened with Haydn’s Symphony No. 104, followed by the Stravinsky. Bernstein must have thought that you might as well start students early on the “Rite” and show them what “classical” music could really sound like. Can you imagine that being presented as an educational program today?A couple of the recordings in the Sony set are classics, including two accounts of the “Rite”: Bernstein’s original 1958 version with the Philharmonic, and his reconsidered, still molten, yet more weighty and heaving account from 1972 with the London Symphony Orchestra.The revelation, for me, is a disc that pairs two lesser-known recordings: “Symphony of Psalms,” from 1972, with the London Symphony Orchestra and the English Bach Festival Chorus, and the opera-oratorio “Oedipus Rex,” recorded later that year with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, some excellent singers (including the tenor René Kollo as Oedipus and the mezzo-soprano Tatiana Troyanos as Jocasta) and the Harvard Glee Club. That “Oedipus” was recorded at Symphony Hall in Boston, in conjunction with the Norton Lectures that Bernstein delivered at Harvard in 1973.In the sixth and final of those lectures, “The Poetry of Earth,” Bernstein discusses the intentional stylistic incongruities in Stravinsky’s Neo-Classical works, singling out “Symphony of Psalms,” scored unusually for four-part chorus and an orchestra with just lower strings (no violins or violas), woodwinds (except for clarinets), brass and percussion, including two pianos. The chorus sings Latin versions of three psalm texts; the music looks back to the heritage of sacred vocal works, yet through an austere contemporary prism. The first movement, a setting of verses from Psalm 38 (“Hear my prayer, O Lord”), is a “prayer with teeth in it, a prayer made of steel,” Bernstein said in his lecture. “It violates our expectations, shatters us with its irony.”Bernstein brings those qualities to life in his recording, right from what he called the “brusque, startling, pistol-shot of a chord” that opens the movement, immediately followed by “some kind of Bachian finger exercises.” The tempo is daringly reined in. The instrumental textures are dark and weighty, yet remain dry and lucid. The choristers sound solemn and stoic on the surface, but a pleading, almost desperate edge to their singing comes through.The whole performance evolves in this manner, with Bernstein focusing on Stravinsky’s tart, hard-edge harmonies, even in the gravely beautiful slow second movement. Stravinsky’s counterintuitive choral setting of the word “alleluia,” which opens the third movement with chords that sound yearning and almost hopeless, comes across with affecting poignancy. At first I thought Bernstein might have gone too far with his approach — that the performance overall comes close to plodding. Not so. It’s now my favorite version.Bernstein, recording “Oedipus Rex,” maintained a grave tone throughout the score.Sony Music EntertainmentBernstein made the “Oedipus Rex” recording essentially so that he could use it to demonstrate some points in that final Norton lecture about stylistic misalliances. He argued that in composing this take on ancient Greek tragedy — which uses a Latin translation of Jean Cocteau’s French version — Stravinsky somehow found resonances with Verdi, specifically “Aida.” That might seem incongruous, Bernstein said. But what matters, he went on to explain, was that somewhere deep in Stravinsky’s consciousness “the basic metaphor contained in ‘Aida’ registered, stuck, and connected with the corresponding deep metaphor in ‘Oedipus Rex.’”The “Oedipus” score begins with a four-note motif, thickly harmonized by chorus and orchestra, in which the people of Thebes implore Oedipus to save the city from a deadly plague. Bernstein, in his lecture, convincingly links that motif to a pleading phrase sung by Aida, beseeching the princess Amneris, her captor and rival in love, to have pity on her.Bernstein’s performance of this opening blast is emphatic and anguished, and significantly slower than in Stravinsky’s own recording. Bernstein maintains that grave tone throughout the score, making the most of the passages with winding Verdian lyricism; juicing every crunchy chord; and, when called for, letting the chorus and orchestra flail away with clipped rhythmic intensity.The Sony box also offers bracingly crisp performances of the chamber work “L’Histoire du Soldat” and the Octet for Wind Instruments, which Bernstein recorded with players from the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1947. I also love the accounts of the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, with Seymour Lipkin as the piano soloist, and “Petrushka” (the 1947 version) with the New York Philharmonic. (As a bonus, there is also a recording of Bernstein discussing Stravinsky and his “Petrushka” ballet.)As it turned out, my last direct encounter with Bernstein also involved the “Rite.” In the summer of 1987 at Tanglewood, three years before his death, he spent a week rehearsing a large orchestra of college-age players for a performance of the piece. Though the rehearsals were closed to the public, I was then a freelance critic at The Boston Globe and was permitted to watch. At times I even sat onstage, behind the players, so I could see Bernstein as he faced them.Bernstein in rehearsal at Tanglewood in the summer of 1987.Heinz H. Weissenstein/Whitestone Photo, via BSO ArchivesThese gifted young artists could barely believe that the most celebrated classical musician in the world was teaching them — and this, of all pieces. Though he was infamous for being overly emotional, a gusher of enthusiasm, Bernstein in rehearsal was precise, exacting and impressively specific with his descriptions of the music. In one restless passage for the bassoons, Bernstein found the playing too jittery and playful.“It’s not a fanfare,” he said. “Ever heard a Russian choir singing in elongated notes?”That was the deep, resonant sound and character that he wanted. And the players got it. During the “Spring Rounds” section, he said that the music had to be “an assortment of groans and wails and troll sounds.” His words elicited collective nods, and the orchestra’s playing came alive. It was ominous and wild, without a trace of caricature. More