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      Her Symphony Reclaims an Ancestral Story, and Classical Music

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      Tamar-kali, a former punk rocker, wove episodes of Gullah Geechee history into “Sea Island Symphony,” premiering at Lincoln Center in Manhattan.When the composer Tamar-kali goes fishing in the South Carolina low country, she thinks about her ancestors — the Gullah Geechee — singing spirituals like “Wade in the Water.” And she pictures Harriet Tubman arriving with Union gunboats in the summer of 1863 when those ancestors actually had to wade in the water to their freedom.The Gullah Geechee, who called Tubman Black Moses, helped create a rich book of spirituals that fused biblical imagery with their own plight. “You think about a people who have been engaging in this faith as a form of coping with their lot in life,” Tamar-kali said, “which is the absolute removal of their agency, their humanity, as chattel slaves.”Tamar-kali, who lives in Brooklyn, is always thinking about history, and it infuses her music. The largest expression yet is her “Sea Island Symphony: Red Rice, Cotton and Indigo,” a new work for orchestra and vocalists that is to have its world premiere on Wednesday in Manhattan as part of Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City.The programmatic symphony paints the Gullah Geechee story from the Civil War through the rise of Robert Smalls, a Carolina man who was born enslaved and became a United States congressman in 1875.“I’m a full-concept girl,” said Tamar-kali, who began working on the piece in 2019. “I started it and then I realized: Oh, this is not something small. Because it’s like I really go with the guidance from the muses.”The symphony’s world premiere, performed by American Composers Orchestra, is the culmination of a series she curated called “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle” that has included panel discussions about the complex and often neglected history of America’s Black composers and classical music. Tamar-kali said it was important to her that the piece be contextualized and that the series happen around Independence Day to emphasize that “the end of colonial British rule only symbolized independence for a very small population.”The four-movement “Sea Island Symphony” is the most ambitious addition yet to a composing and performing career that has included punk rock, film scores and opera. Tamar-kali’s eclectic output is the product of wildly varied input — her family’s juke joint in the Sea Islands, blues and jazz, and the Ashkenazi cantorial melodies and classical music she absorbed growing up in New York City.Tamar-kali, center, at Joe’s Pub in 2008.Scott Ellison SmithTamar-kali C. Brown — that’s her full name — describes herself as “a kid that classical music lost.” She received a formal music education at an all-girls Catholic school in Brooklyn in the 1980s, studying theory and singing in a classical choir. But her experience there — she called it “a post-colonial missionary mind-set institutional space” — gave her “no desire to continue that journey that basically felt, to me, like a war,” she said. “So I figured out early on that I would deal with music on my own terms.”She arrived on the New York musical scene screaming — shredding an electric guitar and belting out lyrics of resistance by way of punk rock, becoming a fixture at Joe’s Pub. Shanta Thake, the new chief artistic officer at Lincoln Center, was an early fan. “If you were just to describe her visually, walking around, she is so fierce,” Thake said. “There’s this warrior fierceness to who she is onstage, and just such a command of the audience, of the songs themselves.”Another fan from the Joe’s Pub days was the composer Daniel Bernard Roumain, now a professor at Arizona State University. Roumain was living in Harlem in the early 2000s, and he invited Tamar-kali to his apartment, where they recorded a raw electric version of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill.”“She was this seminal New York artist who was bold and brash, avant-garde,” Roumain said, “incredibly powerful and incredibly inventive. She was a destination, and her career was, even at that time, landmark.”Tamar-kali transcended punk to found the Psychochamber Ensemble, an all-female string and choral group that also covered Kate Bush. She was dipping back into classical music, and she realized, if only after the fact, that she was trying to recreate the fellowship she had experienced in school choir — but now in a safe space while maintaining her agency. “I didn’t even realize I was trying to heal myself,” she said.Before long, Tamar-kali’s string writing and story sense attracted film directors. She made her scoring debut with Dee Rees’s “Mudbound” in 2017. She recently scored a PBS documentary about the Gullah Geechee, “After Sherman,” and is working on John Ridley’s biopic of Shirley Chisholm starring Regina King.The film work is acoustic and often chamber sized, with a handmade quality, created in her studio in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn. She often incorporates her own singing voice. Her music is always, in a way, vocal, Roumain said: It “is always boundless, is always wanting to speak. In some ways, it can’t be contained.”Tamar-kali described herself as “a kid that classical music lost.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesShe composes most of her music with her voice, which she then translates into software and synth mock-ups before it’s interpreted by other musicians.It was Roumain who nominated Tamar-kali in 2019 for an Arizona State commission that became the seed for “Sea Island Symphony,” a work she describes, stylistically, as Americana, a synthesis of all of her influences. “It just … it sounds like me,” she said.The finished symphony opens with a movement depicting the Port Royal Experiment of 1861, in which the Gullah were left to manage themselves in the low country’s undesirable marshlands, with text sung by a tenor representing a newly freed person.The second movement travels forward to the Combahee River Raid of 1863, when Tubman led a Union military operation to rescue more than 700 enslaved people, and reclaims the true origins of the song “Kum ba yah.” “It’s not about making amends or being all happy and sweet,” Tamar-kali said. “It’s a cry for intercession by the higher power: ‘Come by here, my lord.’”The segment culminates in a ring shout, a call-and-response circle that enslaved Africans developed to preserve their heritage while strategically not offending their white captors. The singers will be accompanied by a “shout stick,” historically often a mop or broomstick, since drums were outlawed at the time.The third movement is a scenic piece inspired by General Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, an 1865 military order that granted the area’s newly freed people ownership of the Gullah Geechee corridor. The final movement traces the story of Robert Smalls, who used his navigational skills to sail to freedom; he joined the Union army and later become a congressman. Though Smalls’s name is all over his hometown, Beaufort, it’s another piece of history that Tamar-kali discovered only as an adult.Tamar-kali said she hoped eventually to take the symphony down to the low country and to Washington, D.C. She insisted on this premiere being part of free summer programming, which means it’s one night only, with a small budget and very limited rehearsal.Having grown up attending free concerts in Brooklyn and Central Park, she knows that “the most multicultural, multigenerational audiences, of the most diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, exist at free public programming,” she said, adding it was “the gateway to diversity in the halls. But it’s overlooked, and it’s underfunded.”Classical music lost her once. She wants it to find more people like her. More

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      Echoes of William Byrd in Caroline Shaw, Nico Muhly and Others

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      Four popular composers explain how this Englishman’s ideas ricochet through their own works today.The works of William Byrd hold significant historical interest, but they are also remarkably influential on music that is being written today.Here are edited excerpts from conversations with four composers who have written pieces directly inspired by Byrd, or who grew up singing in the choral tradition of which he is such an important part.The composer Roxanna Panufnik, who has written music that responds directly to Byrd’s.Benjamin Ealovega PhotographyRoxanna PanufnikPanufnik, whose body of choral music includes a “Coronation Sanctus,” written for the crowning of Charles III, composed a “Kyrie After Byrd” in 2014 and is working on another response.I’m really in awe of Byrd. First, how brave he was being a Catholic in such dangerous times, during the Tudors and Queen Elizabeth’s reign. That’s no joke, and thank God he was a musician, because I think that’s probably what saved him. But I love his harmony. Byrd, Tallis and Bach — I think their harmonic changes are more emotional, and sometimes more radical than a lot of 19th-century composers. He was really a man ahead of his time.Susie Digby formed this professional choir, ORA Singers, and she wanted to do a project where people took their inspiration from Byrd. She particularly wanted for me to do something from his five-part Mass. As soon as I heard the Kyrie, immediately — there’s a certain harmonic U-turn in the middle of the road, in the middle of the stave, and I just thought, “Oh, my goodness, that’s what I want to do.” So I started it like Byrd, but then took it a step even further, or two, or three.The composer James MacMillan, who began singing Byrd’s music as a student.Liam Henderson for The New York TimesJames MacMillanMacMillan — like Byrd, a committed Catholic — recently wrote “Ye Sacred Muses” for the King’s Singers and Fretwork, the viol consort. The piece employs a text that Byrd used to commemorate Thomas Tallis.I first got to know his music, and first sang his music, as a teenager at school in Scotland. Our high school choir was singing bits of his four-part Mass. As a fledgling composer, who was very interested in early counterpoint and getting to grips with how you should handle complexity, it was a wonderful lesson in how to make line against line work in a piece of music. His music is known among the singing community, the choral community, but maybe beyond that he’s not as well known as he should be. Classical music audiences tend to forget about the pre-Baroque, and it’s a pity because William Byrd is one of music history’s great figures.Another wonderful motet by Byrd is “Justorum animae,” which is basically a commemoration or a celebration of martyrs. It’s quite clear whom he means. He was seeing people being put to death because of their faith. I think Byrd and Tallis knew people who were arrested, and I think there were some composers for one reason or another during this time arrested. They must have thought that that could have been in the cards. The only comparable situation today is in dictatorships, behind what was the Iron Curtain — Shostakovich living with fear, with his bag packed, ready to go.Caroline Shaw’s “Partita for 8 Voices” carries traces of Byrd’s style.Bryan Thomas for The New York TimesCaroline ShawShaw, a singer, violinist and composer, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for “Partita for 8 Voices.”I grew up singing in an Episcopal church choir, and I don’t think we really sang much Byrd then. But when I was at Yale, I started singing at Christ Church New Haven, which is a High Anglican church. We would often do the Byrd for Four, Byrd for Five [two of the Masses] at the services in the morning, or the motets. The thing that really is the biggest influence on my writing, and approach to music, is the Compline service, which we would do on Sunday nights at 10 p.m. There are two particular ones that I remember: “Ne irascaris,” which is so beautiful, the one that starts with the men in the bottom and then the higher voices come in later; and “Justorum animae.”There’s a physical experience to singing Byrd or Tallis, or a lot of that era of music. It’s the feeling of early polyphony and homophony, where they’re just enjoying the sound of voices together, and the beginnings of harmonies moving, and getting to make sound in these beautiful spaces, where the resonance of certain chords is spiritual. The first part of “Partita” that I wrote, which was “Passacaglia” — I wanted to hear the sound of a bunch of voices just kind of chatting gutturally, going into vocal fry and then suddenly exploding into a chord that feels like that, feels like one of those Byrd or Tallis, perfectly voiced chords, just the resonance of it.Nico Muhly, who said, “There’s always a Byrd for something.”Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesNico MuhlyMuhly grew up singing in an Episcopal church, and continues to write works in the Anglican tradition. Several of his pieces reflect the importance of Byrd, most explicitly “Two Motets,” an orchestration of “Bow thine Ear” and “Miserere mei, Deus.”For me, the highest form of personal and artistic satisfaction is: Some random introit of mine is happening at Magdalen College, Oxford, and they’re also doing the Byrd “Sing Joyfully.” That, to me, is the pinnacle. You’re in this kind of linked-up way with music whose power comes in completely different ways than the Romantic tradition. Of course, with Byrd, most of it is designed for people to look upward and inward, because it’s sacred music. So for me the project is, how do you bring that into concert music, or how do you write music that is honest and engaged with that tradition, without a fuss?It’s part of my daily listening, it’s part of my year, in the context of going to church. There’s always a Byrd for something. I do simultaneously love thinking about his political positioning, and I love thinking about the relationship of Catholicism to what he’s doing. But I also feel like what he gets at is a more delicious form of engagement with the ear, which is to say: If you don’t know that — if you don’t know everything that was going on with his faith, and how that was practiced, and where that was practiced — the ear, I think, still can articulate that there’s a deeper well of meaning. 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      Robert Sherman, WQXR Host of Classical and Folk Music Shows, Dies at 90

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      For more than five decades, he brought together emerging classical and folk performers as well as established stars for interviews and live performances.Robert Sherman interviewing the flutist Marina Piccinini at the studios of WQXR-FM in 1991. He had been on the radio in New York since 1969.Steve J. ShermanRobert Sherman, a charming, easygoing radio personality who hosted three long-running shows over more than a half-century on the New York classical music station WQXR-FM, died on Tuesday at his home in Ossining, N.Y., in Westchester County. He was 90.His son Steve said the cause was a stroke, the fourth Mr. Sherman had had since 2021.Mr. Sherman had been working behind the scenes at WQXR for more than a decade before he began hosting “Woody’s Children,” a weekly folk music program, in 1969. A year later, he began “The Listening Room,” a daily program on which both established and emerging musicians were interviewed and played live music for 23 years. His guests included Jessye Norman, Itzhak Perlman, Robert Merrill and Leopold Stokowski.And in 1978, he started “Young Artists Showcase,” a weekly show that offered a prestigious platform for up-and-coming musicians to perform. That program is still on the air.“Bob, in many ways, embodied everything WQXR tried to be,” Ed Yim, the station’s chief content officer, said in a phone interview. “He was a guiding spirit. He supported young artists and approached classical music as being for everyone. He’s someone we all turned to when we wanted to know the history of something, or why we did things a certain way.”Mr. Sherman, whose mother was the concert pianist and teacher Nadia Reisenberg, wanted to conduct interviews that took flight as friendly conversations, rather than limiting his guests to answering prepared questions.In 1974, for example, he was speaking off the air to the contralto Marian Anderson during a news break on “The Listening Room” when, he later recalled, she said it had been many years since she heard one of the recordings he had just played. Back on the air, he asked her if she listened much to her own music.“When there’s listening time for our records, very often we make the choice to take the other things,” she said. But, she added after discussing some of her musical preferences, “music, in any case, gives one a great sense of quiet, and that is the kind I like rather than that which is discordant.”Mr. Sherman interviewing Leonard Bernstein in 1984. He wanted the interviews he conducted to take flight as friendly conversations.Steve J. ShermanThe pianist Emanuel Ax was on “The Listening Room” several times in his 20s, before he became famous. He recalled how welcoming Mr. Sherman had been.“For someone so young, it was a big deal,” he said by phone, adding that he took easily to being on the radio. “The thing he let me do, which I flipped for, is he used to let me read some of the ads on the show. Each time I’d come on, he let me say, ‘And now, Emanuel Ax is going to read the following ad.’”Mr. Ax was among the performers at a concert celebrating Mr. Sherman’s 90th birthday last year, which Mr. Sherman himself hosted, as were the violinists Chee-Yun Kim, Joshua Bell and Ani Kavafian and the Emerson String Quartet. Ms. Kim, who also spoke, discussed her first appearance on “Young Artists Showcase,” when she was a teenager.“I never spoke on a radio station ever, not even in Korea,” she said. “And I said to you, ‘I am so nervous, but it’s a live show — what if I make a mistake?’ And you told me, do you remember what you told me, you said: ‘Just talk to the microphone as you’re talking to me and people happen to listen in. That’s it. It’s just us two.’ And I was like, OK.”Robert Sherman was born on July 23, 1932, in Manhattan. His parents were immigrants: His father, Isaac, who ran an import-export business and other companies, was from Ukraine. His mother, Ms. Reisenberg, was Lithuanian.She taught Robert to play piano — with limited success.“I had a certain talent for it and lacked the discipline to do anything,” Mr. Sherman said in an interview in 2019 for the Avery Fisher Artist Program oral history project. “Mother always told me, ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t tell anybody you study with me, because you’re not typical of my class.’”He joked that he chose to attend the academically rigorous Stuyvesant High School, where he figured he would be the best pianist, rather than a performing arts school, where he assumed he would be the worst.After graduating from New York University with a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1952, he earned a master’s degree in music from Teachers College, Columbia University. He then entered the Army, where he played piano in a band that toured in U.S.O. shows.He joined WQXR — which until 2009 was owned by The New York Times — in the mid-1950s as a clerk and typist. He gradually moved up to director of recorded music and then music director; by 1969, he was program director. He also wrote scripts for a show called “Folk Music of the World,” but he wanted to create a different type of program that was more connected to the contemporary surge in folk music’s popularity.His proposal was approved, but the station interviewed other potential hosts, including Pete Seeger, before choosing Mr. Sherman. The show was called “Woody’s Children,” after a reference by Mr. Seeger, on the first episode, to the singer-songwriters who followed Woody Guthrie. WQXR canceled the program in 1999, saying it no longer fit the station’s format. But it was picked up by the Fordham University station WFUV, where it ran until earlier this year.Mr. Sherman’s guests on “Woody’s Children” over the years included Judy Collins, Odetta, Tom Paxton and Peter, Paul and Mary.“After nearly 55 years on the radio dial,” Rich McLaughlin, WFUV’s program director, said in a statement after Mr. Sherman’s death, “‘Woody’ is as much Sherman as he is Guthrie.”Mr. Sherman hosted the 1,800th installment of “Young Artists Showcase” in 2012.Steve J. ShermanMr. Sherman hosted “The Listening Room” until WQXR canceled it in 1993. “Young Artists Showcase,” which he hosted for 45 years, has continued with guest hosts.Mr. Sherman also wrote music criticism for The New York Times; hosted “Vibrations,” a short-lived music show on the New York public television station WNET, in 1972; and collaborated with Victor Borge, the comic piano virtuoso, on two books, “My Favorite Intermissions: Lives of the Musical Greats and Other Facts You Never Knew You Were Missing” (1971) and a sequel, “My Favorite Comedies in Music” (1980).With his brother, Alexander (who died in 2013), Mr. Sherman compiled a book about their mother, “Nadia Reisenberg: A Musician’s Scrapbook” (1986), which used interviews, letters, photographs and newspaper clippings to tell her story.“I really didn’t want to do the typical artist’s biography, which is that she played here, she played there, and everybody loved her,” Mr. Sherman told The Standard-Star of New Rochelle, N.Y. “I wanted to make it more personal and at the same time more documentary.”In addition to his son Steve, a performing arts photographer, Mr. Sherman is survived by his partner, Jill Bloom; another son, Peter; and four grandchildren. His marriage to Ruth Gershuni ended in divorce; his marriage to Veronica Bravo ended with her death in 2012.At Mr. Sherman’s 90th-birthday concert, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma remembered being invited to the WQXR studio at the Times building for an interview when he was 15. He was so anxious, he said, that he steeled himself by drinking several gin and tonics in a nearby bar. (He had an ID from the Juilliard School that said he was 23.)“I bumped into you the next day,” he recalled to Mr. Sherman, “and you said, ‘Yo-Yo, I just want you to know I spent all last night splicing’ — this was in the days of tape — ‘this interview from completely unintelligible sentences, and I turned it into something that made even a tiny bit of sense.’” More

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      Inside the Shed’s Sonic Sphere

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      A hanging concert hall at the Shed in Manhattan purports to offer something “experimental, experiential and communal.” Our critic climbs the stairs.“Whoa,” a man near me said as the curtains swept open.He, I and a couple of hundred other people had been waiting in a large room at the Shed, the arts center at Hudson Yards in Manhattan. Portentous, woozy background music was playing, as if an alien encounter was imminent.Then those curtains parted, and a much larger room was revealed: the Shed’s vast McCourt space, in which a sphere, 65 feet in diameter and pocked like Swiss cheese, had been suspended from the faraway ceiling and bathed in red light.This arresting — indeed, “whoa”-inducing — sight was the Sonic Sphere, a realization of a concert hall design by the brilliant, peerlessly loopy composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007), who inspired Germany to build the first one for the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka, Japan.Stockhausen, an impresario of electroacoustic experimentation and far-out notions like a string quartet playing inside a helicopter, imagined the audiences for his “Kugelauditorium” sitting on a sound-permeable level within the sphere, so that speakers could be placed under, as well as around and over, them.During the six months that the Osaka exposition was open, hundreds of thousands of people came and heard taped music adapted for the in-the-round playback possibilities, as well as live performances. Then, for the next half century, the idea lay dormant; Carnegie Hall and Vienna’s Musikverein remained intact, having not been replaced by giant spheres.Enter, a few years ago, a team led by Ed Cooke (whose biography calls him “a multidisciplinary explorer of consciousness”), the sound designer Merijn Royaards and Nicholas Christie, the project’s engineering director.They have built Sonic Spheres in France, Britain, Mexico and the United States. Each time, like the plant in “Little Shop of Horrors,” the contraption has grown. The Shed iteration, open through the end of July, is the first to hang in midair, at a cost of more than $2 million.As in Osaka, some of the presentations offer taped music; some, live. On Saturday, I climbed the many steps to the sphere’s entrance and reclined, like everyone else, in a comfortable hammock-like seat, listening to the seductively sullen 2009 debut album by the British band the xx. Forty-five minutes after that was over, the pianist Igor Levit appeared in person to perform, for a fresh audience, Morton Feldman’s “Palais de Mari,” from 1986.Colors and configurations of lights on the fabric skin of the Sphere tended to shift with the music’s beat as Levit performed.James Estrin/The New York TimesLights, in colors and configurations that tended to shift with the music’s beat, played on the fabric skin of this big Wiffle ball. But for an audience that could be seeing the high-definition stadium shows of Beyoncé or Taylor Swift this summer, the visuals were blurry, rudimentary stuff; this was the aspect of the presentation that felt most trapped in 1970.And the audio experience that emerged from the 124 speakers was unremarkable at best. The xx remix did nicely separate the bass, coming up palpably but not too heavily out of the bottom of the sphere, from the voices around and above. To no compelling end, though, and the album’s whispery intimacy was supersized into a much blander grandeur.The situation was more distressing for Levit. While the spare, spacious chords of “Palais de Mari” registered more or less cleanly, with only slight fuzz, the sound was muddy for the Bach chorale he played as a prelude; it was the perennial challenge of amplifying acoustic instruments, times 124. And the jittery lighting, a collaboration between Levit and the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, could hardly have been more uncomprehending of Feldman’s glacial austerity.For all the souped-up spiffiness of the Sonic Sphere, the programming on Saturday felt like a retread of artists who were more interesting when Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director, presented them during his stint at the Park Avenue Armory uptown.There, in 2014, the xx did a celebrated (live) residency in front of only a few dozen people per show. Levit, the following year, played Bach as part of an ornate concentration exercise orchestrated by Marina Abramovic. (Will he, now a fixture of New York’s more unconventional spaces, end up hanging upside-down at the piano once the Perelman Performing Arts Center opens this fall?)Those Armory shows were more memorable than either Shed set. Both of them on Saturday were under 40 minutes, but I found myself getting antsy well before time was up. Perhaps the audiences at Burning Man, the techno-hippie hedonist bonanza in the Nevada desert where a Sonic Sphere was built last year, were more engrossed, experiencing it on harder drugs than the Coke Zero I’d had with dinner.Sober, none of the music was more interesting, effective, illuminated or illuminating in this space than it would have been elsewhere. It was clear that the main point was that first reveal, as the curtains opened and everyone’s phones came out, ready to post images of something big and glamorous on social media.So, millions of dollars for Instagram bait — but fine, if its creators didn’t also hype it as “an unlimited instrument of empathy” that’s “experimental, experiential and communal.” I felt, in fact, more distant from my fellow audience members in the Sonic Sphere, even the ones reclining next to me, than I have at most any traditional concert hall.In this, the sphere is of a piece with the other current offering at the Shed: a weird virtual-reality simulacrum of a solo piano concert by the composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died in March.The Sonic Sphere was billed as “an unlimited instrument of empathy” that’s “experimental, experiential and communal.”James Estrin/The New York TimesEmpathy? Communal experience? No, the hologram-like specter of Sakamoto was more vivid and substantial than the other people watching with me, who, while I wore the VR glasses, faded into transparent ghostliness.The wall text in the holding room for the Sonic Sphere acknowledges that technology can isolate us from each other, but adds that mustn’t necessarily be the case: “We need it to delight and inspire us, not just passively, but in ways that provoke action.”But, as with so much ambitious, empty-headed, underwhelming, ultimately depressing tech, the action that’s provoked by this expensive spectacle is merely a passing moment of “whoa.” More

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      Jakub Hrusa, the Royal Opera’s Next Leader, Keeps Quality in Mind

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      “I don’t want to exclude anything,” says the Czech conductor Jakub Hrusa, who plans to present Czech music alongside mainstream repertoire in London.For the next music director of the Royal Opera House, Jakub Hrusa, one main thing defines the theater’s activities: “Quality.”“It’s the quality of human relationships and sensitivity to the genre so that it can be done really well,” he said. “There is an environment which is cultivating, not killing, creativity and the individual voice.”An authoritative, elegant but humble presence on the podium, Mr. Hrusa, a Czech native, has become one of today’s most sought conductors. At the end of the 2024-25 season, he will succeed Antonio Pappano, who became music director at the Royal Opera in 2002.Mr. Hrusa, 41, already resides with his family in London while serving as chief conductor of the Bamberg Symphony and principal guest conductor of both the Czech Philharmonic and the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. In November, he will make his U.S. operatic debut with a production of Janacek’s “Jenufa” at Lyric Opera of Chicago.A passionate advocate of his country’s composers, Mr. Hrusa has penned his own suite based on another Janacek opera, “The Cunning Little Vixen”; championed the symphonies of the little-performed Miloslav Kabelac; and written a book of essays about Bohuslav Martinu.But he of course embraces a range of mainstream repertoire. As a regular guest with the Glyndebourne Festival, Mr. Hrusa conducted works by Mozart, Puccini and many more. In 2018 at the Royal Opera, he led Bizet’s “Carmen” in a production by Barrie Kosky, a director he will rejoin for a cycle of Wagner’s “Ring” after his tenure begins in Covent Garden. (Mr. Pappano will kick off the project this September with “Das Rheingold.”)In a recent interview, Mr. Hrusa discussed his anticipation about becoming music director and some of his repertoire choices, including Czech music. The following conversation has been edited and condensed.You must be looking forward to making the Royal Opera your artistic home.Opera is kind of a pinnacle of what is possible to achieve in music. But it’s a genre which, in practice, demands an incredible amount of compromise. Covent Garden is a fantastic exception because it maintains basic principles for what opera needs to shine. So they care about the rehearsal process. The stage management is better quality than anywhere. The orchestra is motivated to play on the best possible level every night.Of course, opera is occasionally criticized for being elitist. But what I sense is that the house really matters to the local community. And yet the profile is very international, including with running streams worldwide.You’ll be working alongside Antonio Pappano for the next two seasons — how does the house bear his handwriting, and what can we expect you to bring to the table?I’m a huge believer in natural transitions rather than radical changes. The house is very harmonious. After those over 20 years of Tony Pappano’s tenure, it’s achieved an incredible amount.Covent Garden has the broadest possible ambition to embrace opera as a genre internationally, and rightly so. That said, Italian repertoire is and must remain an integral part of any house’s curriculum.It will only be a slight shift in focus. I will do Italian masters such as Puccini and Verdi. The house has appointed Speranza Scappucci as principal guest conductor, which I’m very happy about because she is an extremely inspiring artist, and her focus is much more like Tony’s.Jakub Hrusa leading the New York Philharmonic in 2019. In November, he will make his U.S. operatic debut with a production of Janacek’s “Jenufa” at Lyric Opera of Chicago.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesI would very naturally want to embrace a bit more Czech music, which I think everyone expects because there’s so much to offer there, and why not do it with the love and conviction of a Czech conductor? Janacek will be in a central point because he is arguably the best Czech composer of opera, and one of the best composers of opera of all time.But I don’t want to exclude anything. I will do German opera, Russian opera, French opera.Has Janacek succeeded at entering the operatic repertoire?I think he’s made it. Of course, Janacek will never be Giuseppe Verdi or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. His music is too specifically urgent and emotionally charged.He will always be a little bit more the performer’s hero than the general public’s hero. But I haven’t yet met anyone who would stay indifferent to Janacek’s music. You can’t. It’s too powerful.There is, of course, a wonderful tradition of presenting Czech music in London.It would be very difficult to find another country apart from Britain which has taken so much care about our traditions. Of course, Czech music is by far not the only segment they are passionate about. There is a huge sense of openness to other music cultures. And they’re always embraced with respect and curiosity and quality.Are there any contemporary composers whom you’d like to champion?I’m rather eclectic in that field. I would love that to be more of a team decision because it’s a huge enterprise to make a contemporary opera alive onstage. It’s a huge investment of creative power and finances. I’d like to have this be thoroughly discussed and know, institutionally, that we’re doing something which we all want. More

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      London Tours on Opera and Classical Music Offer Looks Behind the Curtain

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      Fans of music from centuries past will find a wide variety of experiences and collections. One even comes with a side of rock ’n’ roll.Have you ever wondered what happens behind the red velvet curtains at the Royal Opera House? Do you relish a bit of backstage gossip or enjoy looking at centuries-old instruments? London has a rich variety of tours and collections for opera and classical-music enthusiasts. Here’s a selection.Royal Opera HouseWho were some of the women who made history at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden? It’s a question that the opera house is answering in detail in a tour that runs through Aug. 12.Among the many stars the tour is spotlighting is a soprano who gave a whole new meaning to the word “diva”: Adelina Patti (1843-1919), an Italian who made her opera debut in New York at 16, then crossed the Atlantic for a 23-year Covent Garden career.She was admired for her coloratura singing and feared for her business chops. According to the tour organizers, she demanded to be paid in gold at least half an hour before each stage appearance and commanded $100,000 per show (in today’s money). And in a performance as Violetta in “La Traviata,” she wore a custom gown encrusted with 3,700 of her own diamonds.The singer comes up in another tour: an outdoor one organized jointly by the Royal Opera House and the Bow Street Police Museum that runs through Aug. 31. During Patti’s diamond-studded performance of “La Traviata” at the Theatre Royal (the precursor of the current opera house), security had to be reinforced in a big way because of the precious stones embedded in her gown. Covent Garden at the time teemed with pickpockets, robbers, criminals and even murderers. So police officers surreptitiously joined the chorus onstage — where they could get as close as possible to the soprano and go unnoticed.The Royal Albert Hall, named for Prince Albert and inaugurated in 1871, a decade after his death, has featured luminaries from Albert Einstein to Adele. Suzie Howell for The New York TimesRoyal Albert HallWith 5,272 seats, Royal Albert Hall is more comparable in size to an arena than to a classical-music concert hall; in fact, the Cirque du Soleil regularly performs there. It’s named after Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, and was inaugurated in 1871, a decade after his death. You can hear that royal back story and get the lowdown on the hall’s tricky acoustics in an hourlong tour. The tour also covers some of the luminaries who graced the main stage (such as Albert Einstein and Muhammad Ali) and some of the more outlandish events held in the hall, including a séance and an opera performance for which the auditorium was flooded with 56,000 liters (nearly 15,000 gallons) of water.Handel Hendrix HouseThe museum, in a Georgian townhouse at 25 Brook Street in Mayfair, has a rich history: George Frideric Handel lived there from 1723 until his death in 1759. (Jimi Hendrix rented an apartment on the top floor in the late 1960s, but that’s another story.) The house is now a museum where you can visit Handel’s bedroom, the dining room where he rehearsed and gave private recitals, and the basement kitchen. This is where Handel composed “Zadok the Priest,” the British coronation anthem, which was recently performed for King Charles III. Here, too, Handel wrote “Messiah,” which took him about three weeks to compose.Speaking of “Messiah,” if you would like to see the first published score of songs from the oratorio, head to the Foundling Museum, on the grounds of the Foundling Hospital, a children’s home in Bloomsbury. The score was donated by Handel, one of the hospital’s major benefactors, who gave benefit concerts there and even composed an anthem for his first one. Also on display: Handel’s will.A new exhibition at the Royal College of Music features hidden treasures such as this yuequin, a stringed instrument from China, which was brought to London in the early 19th century and acquired by King George IV.HM King Charles III; photo by Claire ChevalierRoyal College of MusicThe Royal College of Music has a collection of more than 14,000 objects covering five centuries of music making. That includes about 1,000 musical instruments, such as the world’s earliest-dated guitar.A new exhibition features hidden treasures from the collection, including a photograph of Mary Garden. She was a Scottish-born soprano who moved to the United States in the late 19th century, joined the Opéra Comique in Paris in 1900 and premiered the role of Mélisande in “Pelléas et Mélisande,” the only opera that Debussy ever completed.Also on display is a yuequin, a stringed instrument from the ancient city of Guangzhou in China, which was brought to London in the early 19th century and acquired by King George IV. More

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      What Opera Singers Gained, and Lost, Performing While Pregnant

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      “It’s adjustable, yes?” Standing in a dressing room in the opera house in Montpellier, France, in May, the soprano Maya Kherani tugged at the waistband of her tiered skirt. A draper kneeling behind her shook out the hem while the costume designer looked on with satisfaction.“We’re lucky,” she said, cupping her hands around the smooth orb of her belly. “It works for the character.”Kherani considered herself fortunate not because she had landed the role of Autonoe, a lead in “Orfeo,” by the Baroque composer Antonio Sartorio. Instead, Kherani, who gave birth on Sunday, was relieved to discover that her costumes in this modern-dress production came with elasticated waists and flat shoes that would make it bearable to sing and act while 32 weeks pregnant.Better yet: The stage director Benjamin Lazar decided to incorporate her pregnancy into the staging, making it the driving force behind her character’s quest to win back her errant lover.“It works dramaturgically really well for my character,” Kherani said in a FaceTime interview from Montpellier. “In my gestures and in the staging, I am referencing the pregnancy. Everyone’s really supportive, which is not always the case.”In most musical professions, pregnant women — not their employers — determine how long they continue to work. When opera singers want to perform pregnant, however, they rely on the good will and skill of a creative team: drapers who add strategic ruching to costumes; stage directors who might change a risky piece of stage business or adapt their concept to include the pregnancy.All too often, though, pregnant singers lose work. And yet opera is a rare business in which pregnancy and childbirth can directly and positively affect the core product — the voice. The science behind the phenomenon is still poorly understood, but it is such a noticeable and common occurrence that it has become something of a truism in opera: After childbirth, the voice seems enriched with warmth, creaminess and depth of color.Kherani found her voice improved after becoming pregnant. “You learn to use a wider base of breath support including the back muscles,” she said, “which I think every singer is trying to access, but I have been forced to.”Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesChanging bodies, of course, go along with the changing voices. A growing number of women in the industry are speaking out about what they feel are cancellations motivated by their appearance rather than sound. Officially, opera houses say they are concerned about safety. Francesca Zambello, the artistic director of Washington National Opera, said, “As a general rule we are interested in the safety and well-being of all artists working for us.” The Metropolitan Opera said in a statement that “if a pregnant singer wishes to perform, we make sure it is safe for them to do so.”But not all cancellations reflect the wishes of the pregnant singer. The mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke said in a video interview she was removed from a production weeks before opening when the company learned she was pregnant, and that she lost a role at another opera house after her management told the company she would be in her second trimester during the performances. A fellow singer later told her the production would have required Cooke to go down a slide, but Cooke said safety was not mentioned in the cancellation, nor was she consulted.“The industry still views you as their property,” Cooke said. “Your choices are their choices.”Like other singers who were eager to speak about pregnancy and motherhood in opera, Cooke asked me not to name the companies that canceled her contracts. In part, this was because of fear of retribution. But also, as the soprano Kathryn Lewek told me before her last performance in the Met’s recent run of Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” the goal was not to shame or remove certain administrators or directors. “We want to help bring about change,” she said.More than five years after the #MeToo movement sparked an overdue investigation of sexual harassment and misconduct in classical music, the field is buzzing with voices calling for more equity around pregnancy and parenthood. The soprano Julia Bullock, who gave birth to her first child last year, has taken to Instagram to post about performing as a lactating mother. The mezzo J’Nai Bridges publicly shared her decision to freeze her eggs at a time in her career when she is a sought-after Carmen — a notably physical role. Social media is especially vital for singers because so many are freelancers, lacking the organized lobbying power of unions and working much of the year on the road.After a singer gives birth, Kherani said, “All the support and alignment creates a stronger foundation for the breath, and that can result in a richer tone.”Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesOn Facebook, the Momology private discussion groups for mothers in the performing arts are bursting at the seams. The classically trained Broadway singer Andrea Jones-Sojola, who created the first group in 2010, caps membership at 500 for each group to create a cohesive support network. This year, she opened a fifth. Jones said pregnancy-related cancellations are an important thread. “A lot of women were afraid to make it known publicly,” she said. “They were afraid to fight for themselves.”Singers also turn to each other for advice on how to navigate technical challenges during pregnancy. Many report doing their best work in their second and sometimes third trimesters, after symptoms like nausea and fatigue have abated and other physiological changes enhance their vocal power. Much of that power comes from the muscles and tissue singers learn to activate for what is known as appoggio, the internal support they lean on to control the breath flow. For some women, the presence of the unborn baby is like a corset they can push against.Dr. Paul Kwak, an ENT specialist who works with opera singers, said voices are affected by the hypervascular state the body enters in pregnancy as it creates more blood vessels and increases blood flow through tissue. Because the tissue and muscle in the vocal folds can become engorged with that extra blood, he said, “it can change the ways the vocal folds themselves oscillate.” At the same time, changes to the abdominal cavity create pressure on the bottom of the diaphragm. “Some women like it,” Dr. Kwak said, “they feel they have a support there, a shelf to push against.”Lewek, who sang the role of Queen of the Night in “The Magic Flute” through two pregnancies, described the experience as one of adjusting “to the fact that a human is taking up square footage in this very delicate part of my anatomy where I work.” By the second trimester, she said she felt as if she were performing “on steroids.” “Everything was so easy,” she said, “high notes just came shooting out of me.”Many singers said the improvement of the voice after childbirth may be the result of integrating tools used during pregnancy into their vocal technique. “You learn to use a wider base of breath support including the back muscles,” Kherani said, “which I think every singer is trying to access, but I have been forced to.” The changes in her body’s center of gravity also made her hyperaware of her posture, another important factor in singing. After a singer gives birth, she said, “All the support and alignment creates a stronger foundation for the breath, and that can result in a richer tone.”Dr. Kwak said richness was a difficult factor to study scientifically. A singer’s vocal tone, or timbre, is shaped by the tissue in her mouth, tongue, pharynx and face, he said, adding that it was possible this tissue became more supple after pregnancy. But studying its changes during and after pregnancy isn’t easy. “That’s why it’s such a mystery,” he said.Many female singers report doing their best work in their second and sometimes third trimesters, after symptoms like nausea and fatigue have abated and other physiological changes enhance their vocal power.Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesRecovering from childbirth can be traumatic for many singers, who have to reacquaint themselves with a body that has changed most radically in the very area that is the powerhouse of their art. The soprano Erin Morley said she lost 30 pounds in the first week after each of her three deliveries. “I found it much easier to sing during my second and third trimesters than I did during the fourth trimester,” she said, echoing many mothers I asked about their recovery following childbirth.Six weeks after delivering her first child by cesarean, Lewek performed the Queen of the Night at the Met. (Morley sang the role of Pamina, the Queen’s daughter, having just given birth to her third, and the two singers spent their breaks breastfeeding in the same dressing room.) The week before rehearsals started, with her “entire support system slashed in half” by surgery, Lewek was still able to sing only up to a high G, a full octave below what Mozart’s music required.With the help of a physical therapist, she devised a workaround. “I found a diaphragmatic rather than muscular way of supporting staccati in Queen of the Night,” she said, “that, overall, I would never want to sustain my entire singing career. But it got me through that gig and it opened up a new set of skills.” Her tone, too, opened up, after the births of each of her children, when she said she noticed “a blossoming of the tone quality of my voice that now has lent itself to bigger repertoire.”She wondered: “Was it the pregnancies that really changed my voice, or was it the recovery?”Lewek said she was fortunate that she was able to perform her star role in the “Magic Flute” up until being eight and a half months pregnant with her first child. But during that same pregnancy, she was abruptly removed from a different role, shortly after she had shown up to rehearsals with a visible baby bump. Citing safety concerns involving the set, the company urged her to withdraw, she said, even though she felt comfortable with what the production required of her. When the company added financial incentives and promises of a future role, she relented.“It wasn’t my decision,” Lewek said, “but my agent said I should grab the offer and run.”Morley said she lost a major role because of concerns she wouldn’t fit through a trap door in the set. And during a later pregnancy she lost a role because it required singing an aria standing on a chair in what would have been her second trimester. “I was really considering making a statement,” she said, “but these were companies I wanted to work with again, and I was very worried that there would be repercussions.” Besides, her contract was paid, which she knew was not always the case in such situations. “It felt kind of like dirty money,” she said. “Like they were paying me so I would not talk.”One singer who went public was Julie Fuchs, after she was booted from a production of “The Magic Flute” two years ago at Hamburg State Opera, where she would have sung the role of Pamina four months into her first pregnancy. When Fuchs announced on social media that she was out of the production, her feed lit up with outrage. Many commentators suggested misogyny was to blame for the company’s decision, although the director, Jette Steckel, was a woman. After arbitration, Fuchs settled with the company under terms that do not allow her to speak about the case.The company said the production’s flight scenes made it unsafe for a pregnant Pamina. “The legal situation for the protection of the expectant mother is clear,” its director of artistic management, Tillmann Wiegand, said in a statement at the time, “and we will never take a health risk, even if only a risky scenic action could take place on the stage.”Kherani at home with her daughter Eila and husband Zaafir.Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesInnovations in set design and technology can make opera stages a risky work environment. Wagnerians are especially likely to find themselves airborne. Morley said she came to an agreement with the Met to bow out of a planned Ring Cycle during her first pregnancy because as one of the Rhinemaidens she would have had to fly in a harness. But when Zambello learned of the pregnancy of a Valkyrie in a Washington National Opera production, she adapted her concept. While the other Valkyries made their entrance by parachute, she had this singer run onstage trailing hers. “I said, ‘OK, you are the nonflying Valkyrie,’” Zambello said. “They were all wearing flight jumpsuits and I said, ‘we’ll just make yours baggier.’”The mezzo Isabel Leonard was in her first trimester when she sang Cherubino in “Marriage of Figaro” at the Met, a trouser role — a male character sung by a woman. A dancer from childhood, she said she wasn’t showing at the time and told no one.Leonard said reconciling the rights of pregnant singers and theatrical standards required a more honest and open conversation. “We are storytellers,” she said. “How far into realism are we going? There has to be a bigger discussion within companies, production by production.”Those channels of communication may open up as more singers enter the administrative suites of opera houses. Bullock, a founding member of American Modern Opera Company, said her organization was looking into formalizing financial support for artists who needed to travel with young children. For a recent tour in Europe, her contract included a per diem, accommodations and travel fare for her infant and designated caregivers.“I can’t really expect that from every arts institution where I work,” Bullock said. “But if you want my presence fully, so that I can really do the job that you’ve hired me to do, this is a part of it.”The soprano Christine Goerke joined Detroit Opera as associate artistic director in 2021. She credits motherhood with propelling her into the dramatic lead roles in Wagner and Strauss she is now known for. “It allowed me to reach into these bigger roles in a way that suddenly felt like that’s where I belonged,” she said of the changes to her voice postpartum.A vocal champion of parents’ rights in opera, she said she recognized the complexity of the situation. “Now that I am on both sides of the desk, I can see the different sides of this. It is difficult to have a pregnant Octavian,” she said, referring to a trouser role in Strauss’s “Rosenkavalier.” However, she continued, “before a snap decision is made, I would like to see conversations between the artist who is pregnant and the director and bring in other people. It may be that you can come up with a different solution.”Many singers said opera houses were beginning to be more attuned to the needs of singers who are traveling with children. They might provide information on local nanny services and playgrounds or retain the services of a pediatrician along with the ENT who is on call in every theater. Lewek said together with other mothers she was preparing a list of best practices to improve equity for pregnant artists and parents in opera houses. She would like to see unilateral cancellations become a thing of the past.“This is not Hollywood. There is another priority why we’re hired to do the job,” she said. “It’s the voice.” More

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      Robert Black, Bass Virtuoso of the Avant-Garde, Is Dead at 67

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      As part of the influential Bang on a Can All-Stars, he helped popularize experimental music through international tours and well-regarded albums.Robert Black, a virtuoso bassist who collaborated with prominent composers including Philip Glass and John Cage and was a founding member of the influential Bang on a Can All-Stars ensemble, died on Thursday at his home in Hartford, Conn. He was 67.His partner, Gary Knoble, said the cause was colon cancer.Mr. Black was already a prominent interpreter of modern music for bass when he was invited, in 1987, to perform at the first Bang on a Can festival, a freewheeling marathon of contemporary music in downtown Manhattan.“He had a beautiful sound,” the composer Michael Gordon, one of the founders of Bang on a Can, said in an interview. “He did everything with the bass: He danced with it, he drummed on it, he scraped it, he coached all kinds of amazing sounds out of it.”At that festival, Mr. Black performed Iannis Xenakis’s “Theraps” — an extraordinarily difficult piece that traverses five octaves through uncanny glissandos — and Tom Johnson’s “Failing,” which asks the performer to play increasingly complex passages on the bass while at the same time reading aloud a humorous text that self-consciously describes the possibility of failure.“When I fail to succeed, I will succeed in communicating the essence of the piece,” Mr. Black stated while playing a tricky line — as per the composer’s instructions — to laughter from the audience, captured in a definitive live recording.In 1992, Mr. Gordon and his fellow Bang on a Can directors David Lang and Julia Wolfe asked Mr. Black to join the newly formed All-Stars sextet, which brought further renown and attention to the festival’s visceral, rock-inflected music. His technique was central to the group’s sound: In Ms. Wolfe’s 1997 piece “Believing,” written for the All-Stars, he improvised frenzied passages that Ms. Wolfe once called “quintessential Robert Black-isms.”As a soloist and a chamber musician, Mr. Black championed contemporary music and commissioned work from dozens of composers. His reserved personality belied the cacophonous sounds he could summon with his instrument, a double bass nicknamed Simone that was made in Paris in 1900.Mr. Black’s theatrical approach to performance extended to dramatic speaking — he commissioned a large-scale work from Philip Glass that includes the recitation of poetry by Lou Reed and Patti Smith — and even dancing, as a member of Yoshiko Chuma’s School of Hard Knocks, an interdisciplinary troupe.Mr. Black in 2021. His reserved personality belied the cacophonous sounds he could summon with his instrument.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesRobert Alan Black was born in Denver on March 16, 1956, to Ned Black, an engineer, and Frances (Canzone) Black. Growing up in the suburbs of Denver, he began playing bass in middle school. He attended the University of North Texas before transferring to the Hartt School in Connecticut, where he studied with Gary Karr. While in college, he started performing music composed by his friends, and he freelanced in the New York area after graduating in 1979.“It felt like nobody really trusted me,” he recalled of this time in a 2015 interview. “I would go to the orchestra rehearsal, playing along, and my colleagues were going, ‘Yeah, but you also do that strange contemporary music, you play John Cage.’ And then I would go to a hard-core new music thing, and they’d go, ‘Yeah, you’re really not one of us because you also play in an orchestra.”But, inspired by his longtime partner, the composer James Sellars, as well as the pianist Yvar Mikhashoff, Mr. Black increasingly dedicated himself to contemporary composition, at a time when few classical virtuosos were committed to new works. An early showcase was Mr. Sellars’s “For Love of the Double Bass,” a piece for bass and piano that combines music and theater, in which Mr. Black seduced his instrument, buying it a dress, dancing with it and ultimately taking it to bed.As part of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Mr. Black helped popularize experimental music through international tours and well-regarded albums. He and the guitarist Mark Stewart, the only two original members to remain with the sextet, performed together for more than three decades.“He was deeply kind, often playful, gently yet fiercely devoted to the composer and his colleagues onstage,” Mr. Stewart wrote in an email. “His humility was real because his wisdom came from listening.”Mr. Black also pursued a solo career, building a sizable new repertoire for his instrument and recording the complete bass music of Giacinto Scelsi and Christian Wolff. A dedicated pedagogue, he taught at the Hartt School for 29 years. In 2017, he formed the Robert Black Foundation to support contemporary music. He frequently commissioned work from young and emerging composers, whose music he performed as part of a monthly Friday series during the pandemic, live-streamed from his home.At Mr. Black’s final concert, which was in April amid a grove of trees in Philadelphia, he took part in “Murmur in the Trees,” a piece for 24 basses composed by Eve Beglarian.In an unconventional arrangement, Mr. Black had been partners since 1974 with both Mr. Sellars, who died in 2017, and Mr. Knoble, and he had also been married to Elliott Fredouelle since 2016. (They all lived together.) He is also survived by a sister, Debbie Walker.In 2013 Mr. Black, a gifted improviser, trekked into the culverts of Moab, Utah, with his bass to make a new album — a duet with the desert. The recording captures not just the vast array of strange sounds he drew from Simone, but also the murmurs of birds and insects. It was, he explained, an attempt to “make the environment start to sing.”“I would just fool around on the instrument, getting used to the space and the sound,” he told Colorado Public Radio. “When it came time to record — this sounds like such a cliché, but it really is true — I would just try to empty my mind, start listening, and just let my hands move.” More