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      in Movies

      ‘The Five Demands’ Review: Occupying a College for Racial Justice

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      In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, a documentary recalls the occupation of City College 50 years ago.Among the wave of student protests that occurred across American university campuses in the late 1960s, the student occupation of The City College of New York in April 1969 was a highly local yet pivotal act of civil disobedience. The more than 200 Black and Puerto Rican students who occupied the buildings on South Campus for two weeks did so in protest of the school’s admissions policy and the lack of diversity in its student body. At a time when 40 percent of New York City’s high school graduates were Black or Latino, the film reports, only 9 percent of City College attendees were part of those communities. “The Five Demands,” a new documentary from Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss, returns to the campus 50 years later alongside former students, now in their late 60s and 70s, who participated in the protests.In interviews, City College alumni who were recruited through the college’s SEEK program (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) recall being underprepared in their education and made to feel like tokens who didn’t belong there by their white peers. And indeed, the “five demands” central to the occupation largely revolved not only around making efforts to admit more students of color, but also to provide them with adequate support once they were enrolled — a commitment that many elite colleges and universities still struggle with to this day.In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision that rejected affirmative action, the film feels eerily timely. Schiller and Weiss’s direction is utilitarian, cutting together talking-head interviews with montages of the occupation set to era-appropriate protest songs. But to its credit, the lack of flashiness puts the students’ struggles for racial justice front and center, and ultimately serves to highlight a less-remembered aspect of the countercultural student movement.The Five DemandsNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Music

      Juilliard Fires Professor After Sexual Misconduct Inquiry

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      An investigation found “credible evidence” that Robert Beaser, a composition professor, had engaged in “conduct which interfered with individuals’ academic work,” the school said.The Juilliard School has fired a professor who had been accused of sexually harassing students after an independent investigation found “credible evidence” that he had “engaged in conduct which interfered with individuals’ academic work,” the school said in a letter to students, staff, faculty and alumni on Thursday.Juilliard said the professor, Robert Beaser, 69, who served as chair of the composition department from 1994 to 2018, had behaved in a manner that was “inconsistent with Juilliard’s commitment to provide a safe and supportive learning environment for its students.” The school did not elaborate, saying only that the investigation had found evidence of a past “unreported relationship” and that Beaser had “repeatedly misrepresented facts about his actions.”Richard C. Schoenstein​, a lawyer for Beaser, denied that his client had misled his employer. He said the relationship in question took place three decades ago, had been known to Juilliard since then and had been the subject of previous inquiries. He called the school’s findings “unspecific and unattributed” and said that Beaser would “pursue his legal rights in full.”“Dr. Beaser is shocked and dismayed by Juilliard’s conclusions and actions,” Schoenstein said.The inquiry was ordered after an investigation in December 2022 by VAN, a classical music magazine, that detailed accusations against Beaser and other Juilliard composition teachers. VAN, citing interviews with unnamed former students, said that Beaser had made unwanted advances toward students and engaged in sexual relationships with them.The accusations prompted an outcry among students, faculty and alumni, as well as prominent composers and musicians. Juilliard placed Beaser on paid leave during the inquiry.Juilliard said that it had also looked into complaints against Christopher Rouse, another professor named in the VAN investigation. While the school determined that these allegations were also credible, it said that the complaints could not be fully investigated because Rouse had died in 2019.In the letter on Thursday, Juilliard said administrators had previously investigated some of these accusations of sexual misconduct in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and again in the 2017-18 academic year. These investigations “were handled based on their understanding of the information provided at that time,” according to the school.Juilliard said it had ordered the latest inquiry because of new information in news reports, and that the investigation had determined that “some students, especially women, experienced an environment in the department that did not live up to the school’s values and expectations.”Juilliard’s leaders said they were “dismayed by the negative impact” the events had on students at the time. They vowed to strengthen oversight, with measures including banning all sexual relationships between students and professors, beginning this fall. While professors have long been barred from having romantic relationships with undergraduates, the school has sometimes made exceptions for relationships between faculty members and graduate students.Juilliard said it would also seek to clarify channels for reporting harassment and bias.“Juilliard is committed to providing a safe, supportive and welcoming environment for all members of our school community, and to addressing concerns past and present,” the letter said. “No form of discrimination or harassment is tolerated, and we take all allegations reported to us seriously.” More

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      in Television

      A History Professor Takes On Hollywood

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      The life of a scholar used to be simpler, with success or failure whittled down to an easy dictum: “Publish or perish.”Today it’s more like publish and podcast or perish.“The definition of ‘public intellectual’ has really changed, and I’m proud to be a part of that,” Natalia Mehlman Petrzela said, moments after delivering a lecture to a class of undergraduates.Dr. Petrzela, an associate professor of history at the New School in New York, belongs to a group of scholars who are fluent in pop culture. In addition to publishing her work in peer-reviewed publications, she often presents her research through podcasts and other media outlets. And in a nod to her embrace of the new media economy, she has a side hustle: fitness instructor.But her decision to mix it up beyond the halls of academe has also landed her in the middle of a nasty social media drama and a Hollywood dispute. “This is the price of participation in a public sphere that is enormously different than academia,” she said.Estelle Freedman, a history professor at Stanford University who advised Dr. Petrzela on her Ph.D. thesis, described her as “a very serious scholar and a public intellectual who is quite unique in imagining, ‘How do we get scholarship out into the world and affect social change?’”Dr. Petrzela said she aims to be a “history communicator,” someone who’s able to reach large numbers of people with deeply researched works on the subjects that interest her. “I’ve got to meet the established standards of publishing in journals and being peer-reviewed,” she said, “but I’m also doing this other stuff and fighting for the legitimacy of topics that venture outside of politics and policy.”In her book “Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession,” Dr. Petrzela describes the cultural significance of fitness celebrities including Jack LaLanne and Richard Simmons and traces the rise of jogging, Jazzercise, yoga and Peloton. The book was published last month by the University of Chicago Press.Fitness is a topic that can easily be denigrated as an expression of trendy vanity, Dr. Petrzela said. “For that reason, I thought it was important that it was peer-reviewed and released by an esteemed press,” she said. “I don’t want to give fodder to skeptics who would say, ‘This is not serious.’”Cultural history is not a new discipline, but the academics who have ventured into that territory have tended to focus on eminent men, according to Nicole Hemmer, an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University.“Historians have studied popular culture throughout the 20th century and beyond, but the topics that have been taken seriously are those like Bob Dylan, his songs and political change,” Dr. Hemmer said. “Taking a serious look at the socioeconomic genesis and impact of Orangetheory and Peloton is pretty novel, and Natalia has put herself on the cutting edge of a realm of scholarship.”Dr. Petrzela’s wanderings from traditional paths of academia have also led her to podcasting. Along with Dr. Hemmer and another historian, Neil J. Young, she is the host of “Past Present,” a weekly show that analyzes cultural trends. In recent episodes, the three have taken a historical lens to “nepo-babies” — that is, the role of family relationships in Hollywood — and Ozempic, a diabetes medication that has gained popularity as a weight-loss drug.She has also found herself in the middle of the furious debates that are a daily part of social media.Late last year, Time magazine published an interview with Dr. Petrzela that included a mention of her research indicating that, in the early 1900s, amid an influx of immigrants into the United States, some exercise proponents encouraged white women to work out so that they could be strong enough to populate the country with white babies. Time’s headline seized on that point: “The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness.”In a post on Instagram, Donald J. Trump Jr. reacted to the article, saying, “Remember folks if it’s not climate change it’s white supremacy.” Amid the criticism that followed, Dr. Petrzela said she received death threats. “It escalated into a Twitter storm about ‘the woke professor’ who says exercise is racist, which was not the way I dreamed of introducing my book to the public,” she said.Dr. Petrzela was raised in Newton, Mass., the child of two professors of comparative literature at Boston University. Growing up, she hated sports and earned P.E. credits by taking a step-aerobics class at a Jewish Community Center. It was love at first v-step. “I couldn’t believe how much joy I felt doing something I previously thought I hated,” she said.After graduating from Columbia University, she completed stints as an analyst at an investment bank and a public-school teacher before earning a Ph.D. in history at Stanford University. Around the time she was defending her doctoral thesis, she became a Lululemon ambassador. The thesis became the basis of her first book, “Classroom Wars: Language, Sex and the Making of Modern Political Culture,” published by Oxford University Press in 2015.While working on “Classroom Wars,” she moved back to New York, where her boyfriend (now husband) lived. They joined an Equinox gym, where she encountered Patricia Moreno, a well known instructor in the New York fitness world who had created a program called intenSati, which blends roundhouse kicks and grapevines with shouted affirmations — think Jane Fonda at a self-help tent-revival.After studying under Ms. Moreno, Dr. Petrzela became a certified intenSati instructor. “She is the only fitness instructor of mine that I can securely say has a Ph.D. from Stanford,” said Tara Abrahams, an executive at The Meteor, a feminist media company, who has been attending Dr. Petrzela’s classes for about 10 years.As she built her career at the New School, publishing papers and essays in academic journals (History of Education Quarterly, The Peabody Journal of Education, Pacific Historical Review) and mainstream publications (The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate), she continued teaching intenSati. She also began to consider the role of physical fitness in American history and cultural life.And she dug deeper into podcasting. Along with Dr. Hemmer and Dr. Young, she created a limited podcast series, “Welcome to Your Fantasy,” that told the story of Steve Banerjee, the impresario behind the male dance club Chippendales, and the murder-for-hire charge that preceded his 1994 suicide. Dr. Petrzela was the host.Billed as a Spotify Original, and co-produced by Gimlet Media and Pineapple Street Studios, “Welcome to Your Fantasy” was a seamy, steamy true-crime drama that took place against a backdrop of the sexual, feminist and fitness revolutions of the 1970s and 1980s. Upon its release in 2021, it was a hit with listeners and earned glowing reviews from The Times, The New Yorker and The Financial Times.But Dr. Petrzela was not prepared for the sharp-elbowed culture of show business.Nearly a year before the “Welcome to Your Fantasy” podcast dropped on Spotify, a producer working with Pineapple Street Studios shared early episodes with Hollywood writers and producers to gauge their interest in a screen adaptation. As part of this effort, a producer sent episodes to the actor, screenwriter and stand-up comic Kumail Nanjiani and his wife and frequent writing partner, Emily V. Gordon. Ms. Gordon wrote in an email that she and her husband were not interested in optioning “Welcome to Your Fantasy.”“Kumail and I listened to the podcast and it’s such a fun story, but unfortunately I don’t think it’s the right project for us to write,” Ms. Gordon wrote in an email that Dr. Petrzela shared with The Times. “As much as we love watching crime stories, I don’t know if that’s a strength that we have as a writing duo. It didn’t spark an immediate take in our brains.”Pineapple Street Studios, Dr. Petrzela and the other producers involved with the podcast ended up signing a production deal with Netflix.A few months after the podcast became available, there was a plot twist: Hulu announced that Mr. Nanjiani would play the lead in a dramatic series based on the story of Mr. Banerjee, the Chippendales founder.He would also serve as an executive producer, as would Ms. Gordon. According to the show’s closing credits, it was “inspired by” “Deadly Dance: The Chippendales Murders,” a 2014 book written by K. Scot Macdonald and Patrick MontesDeOca and published by Kerrera House Press, a small independent publisher in Los Angeles.Netflix canceled its plans for a series based on “Welcome to Your Fantasy.” Hulu began streaming its series, called “Welcome to Chippendales,” in November 2022. The show was created by Robert Siegel, a writer and director who headed another Hulu series, “Pam & Tommy.”Dr. Petrzela, Dr. Hemmer and Dr. Young said they were struck by the similarities between the Hulu show and their podcast. They also said that the series included details that did not become public knowledge until listeners had heard “Welcome to Your Fantasy,” which included interviews with key players in the saga.“You don’t own history, and the lines of intellectual property can be really blurry,” Dr. Hemmer said. “But it raised big questions about what we do as scholars and what happens when that work becomes part of the entertainment field.”A spokesman for Hulu declined to comment. Mr. Siegel, the show’s creator, also declined to comment. Representatives for Mr. Nanjiani and Ms. Gordon said in a statement that, though the two were executive producers for the series, they were not creatively involved in the production. They added that their involvement “was limited to casting consultation, communication with the studio/network, marketing and editing.”Eleanor Kagan, the senior producer of “Welcome to Your Fantasy,” created a spreadsheet that laid out more than a dozen similarities between the podcast and the Hulu show. She and her fellow producers said they suspected that the Hulu series made use of their original reporting and narrative focus. In addition, they said, at least two key characters in the Hulu show were based on people who were interviewed extensively for “Welcome to Your Fantasy” and not mentioned in “Deadly Dance.”One of those people was Candace Mayeron, who once worked as a producer for Chippendales. She appears to provide the basis for “Denise” in the Hulu series, a character played by Juliette Lewis. Ms. Mayeron said that she tried to contact the writers and producers of “Welcome to Chippendales” (as well as representatives of Ms. Lewis) by email and phone to offer her consulting services free of charge, but no one replied to her.“There is no doubt that they relied on the podcast,” Ms. Mayeron said of the Hulu production.Dr. Petrzela’s latest book examines the history of fitness movements in the United States.Desmond Picotte for The New York TimesHodari Sababu, the first Black Chippendales dancer, seems to be the basis of the character named Otis in the Hulu show, portrayed by Quentin Phair. Over the years Mr. Sababu has given interviews about his Chippendales experience, but said he never went in-depth, as he did when he spoke with Dr. Petrzela for “Welcome to Your Fantasy.” Mr. Sababu also does not appear by name in “Deadly Dance.”Among the stories that he shared in the podcast was one in which Mr. Banerjee called a church to warn of the godlessness of Chippendales, resulting in a protest of the club that drew media attention. That incident is portrayed in “Welcome to Chippendales” as well. “I only watched part of the TV show,” Mr. Sababu told The Times, “but I thought, ‘How do they know that?’ The only way that they could know that is if they heard that podcast interview I did.”Dr. Petrzela is now focused on the classroom. This semester, she is teaching a class based on the research that went into her book on fitness, as well as a course called historical sources and methods. But she won’t forget her scrape with Hollywood.“I found myself really flabbergasted by this whole situation,” she said. “But then again, I come from a world of footnotes and source citations.” More

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      Pensacola Christian College Cancels Concert Over Gay Singer, Drawing Backlash

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      Pensacola Christian College called off an appearance by the King’s Singers, citing the “lifestyle” of a member.The King’s Singers, a renowned British a cappella ensemble, looked forward to its appearance last week at Pensacola Christian College in Florida, the final stop on the group’s four-city tour of the United States.Instead, the college informed the ensemble two hours before the concert was to begin on Saturday that it was being canceled because of concerns about what it called the lifestyle of a singer, who is gay. Students, parents and staff members had complained to the administration, saying that hosting the group would run counter to the college’s Baptist values.The school’s decision has drawn backlash, with artists, gay rights activists and the ensemble’s fans denouncing the college for homophobia and discrimination. The King’s Singers issued a statement on Monday expressing hope that “any conversations that follow might encourage a greater sense of love, acceptance and inclusion.”In an interview on Tuesday, Jonathan Howard, a member of the six-person group, called the cancellation “really shocking” and “hurtful.” The singers led a workshop for Pensacola students on Saturday and had started rehearsing for the concert — a crowd of more than 5,000 was expected — when they were pulled aside by college officials and informed of the cancellation, he said.Howard said it was the first time in the group’s 55-year history that an engagement had been canceled for reasons other than bad weather, war or the coronavirus pandemic. He also said the group had performed at Pensacola before.“Our mission is always the same: Can we bring people together, connect them and heal them through music?” he said. “Usually that’s received with open arms, even if our politics and personal beliefs are different.”Two members of the ensemble are gay, Howard said, though a statement by Pensacola Christian College made reference to only one. The statement provided by the school said it had canceled the concert after learning that one of the singers “openly maintained a lifestyle that contradicts Scripture.” It said it had treated the artists with “dignity and respect,” and that they were paid for the performance.A section in the school’s articles of faith that refers to several verses in the New Testament says the community believes that “Scripture forbids any form of sexual immorality including adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bestiality, incest, and use of pornography.”The cancellation comes amid growing concern about discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. people in parts of the United States, including Florida, where the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed legislation last year prohibiting classroom instruction and discussion about sexual orientation and gender identity in some elementary school grades, a law that opponents have called “Don’t Say Gay.”After news of the cancellation spread on social media, several performing artists posted messages in support of the King’s Singers.“Such a misguided, closed, short-sighted decision, which you met with dignity, love, comprehension, grace, and class,” the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato wrote on Twitter. “Let the music PLAY. Love is love, and true compassion is what endures. Thank you for showing the way!”The King’s Singers will continue their tour in Canada this week, appearing in Montreal; Toronto; Ottawa; and London, Ontario. More

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      At Rennie Harris’s Hip-Hop University, Teaching the Teachers

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      On a Friday morning in December the hip-hop choreographer Rennie Harris was in Boulder, Colo., teaching a master class. Rather than taking a post at the front of the studio and staying there, Harris moved among the students, weaving his way through the room and dancing along with them. He offered a few critiques, but more often he paused to share stories and historical tidbits, illuminating the lineage and theory behind the movements he was teaching.But this was more than just a master class. It was one of the final sessions in a yearlong program to train and certify hip-hop and street dance teachers. A few days later, most of these students became members of the first graduating class at the newly minted Rennie Harris University.Over the course of his decades-long career, Harris, who turns 59 this week, has been a guiding force, ushering hip-hop and street dance into new spaces and championing their history and legacy. He is perhaps most widely known for bringing these styles to the concert stage with his Philadelphia-based company Rennie Harris Puremovement. (The company will present its signature work, “Rome & Jewels,” a retelling of “Romeo and Juliet,” at the Joyce Theater in New York in February.) Rennie Harris University builds on the principles that have shaped its founder’s career, bringing them into the classroom.“No one’s teaching how to teach hip-hop, everyone’s just teaching people how to do it,” said Harris, here in Boulder for his program’s winter cypher session.Stephen Speranza“What’s special, I think, about the curriculum is the pedagogy piece,” Harris said in an interview. “Because no one’s teaching how to teach hip-hop, everyone’s just teaching people how to do it. It’s the assumption that because you can do it, then you can teach it, but everybody doesn’t know how to teach it.”Hip-hop teaching, he said, often focuses largely on learning choreography. Rennie Harris University aims to broaden the scope by giving educators a working knowledge not only of hip-hop technique, but also of its origins and culture. And because hip-hop and other street styles have historically been overlooked in academic settings that teach dance, a program like this one could help place qualified instructors in institutions where these styles have not been offered or prioritized.Farrah McAdam, a member of the first graduating class, said there were additional benefits: “I think this program helps quote, legitimize hip-hop, even though it’s legit as is, right? But we know in education or academic spaces, ballet and modern are seen as a higher priority or a higher foundation of dance than hip-hop or other cultural forms.”In dance programs across the United States, classical ballet and modern are typically part of the core curriculum, while genres like tap, hip-hop and other street styles are often offered as electives — if at all. And while faculty members, dancers and choreographers have grown more vocal about the need for change — especially after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, which brought renewed attention to racial bias in the arts — it has been slow in coming.Farrah McAdam and Tyreis Hunte in B-boy KO’s Popping Combo class in Boulder.Stephen SperanzaFor D. Sabela Grimes, a multidisciplinary artist and associate professor of practice at the Glorya Kaufman School of Dance at the University of Southern California, this phenomenon is part of what he calls the “ballet industrial complex.” Ballet, “at least in the American context, has created pathways for people to have careers as performers,” he said, “and then go into higher education.” But, he added, that has not been the case for hip-hop and street dance teachers.Grimes, an original “Rome & Jewels” cast member, said he was hopeful about the change he is seeing on an institutional level — and that programs like Harris’s would help with the momentum.“I think the program will be a resource,” he said, but “what I have learned working in higher education is that we’re going to need more. Times are changing, which is beautiful, but these institutions don’t move at the same pace that hip-hop culture in a really general sense moves and popular culture also moves.”Harris’s program may be the first of its kind at this level, but similar ones are in the works. Last fall, the British dance company ZooNation rolled out a slate of courses to train hip-hop teachers. And Moncell Durden, a dance scholar, hip-hop figure and a former member of Rennie Harris Puremovement, is developing a teacher certification program in Black American dance as part of his organization, Intangible Roots. It’s slated to begin in the fall, online and with in-person sessions in Los Angeles.The seeds for Rennie Harris University were planted more than 20 years ago, when Harris started Illadelph Legends, a dance festival that gathered hip-hop and street dance pioneers to teach classes and discuss the culture and the history of the forms. Harris said that Durden, who was also involved with the festival, had proposed a partnership with Unesco to create a certification program that would explore hip-hop as a form of traditional folklore. The idea didn’t come to fruition, Harris said, but he couldn’t get it out of his head.Harris presiding at the dance battle at the cypher session in Boulder.Stephen SperanzaHe got to work mining his connections across the dance world, he said, and “called some in favors.” Rennie Harris University welcomed its first pool of applicants in early 2021.The program is structured to allow students to take technique classes locally, with a list of qualified instructors near their homes provided by the school; students also meet virtually to take a rotating slate of courses online. Sessions cover hip-hop and street dance-specific injury prevention, pedagogy, theory and history; Harris’s contribution, a series called The Day Before Hip-Hop, traces the roots of the form back to the period of American slavery. The courses are taught by renowned dance scholars including Ayo Walker, Thomas DeFrantz, Charmaine Warren and Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, and hip-hop and street dance practitioners like Buddha Stretch, Pop Master Fabel and B-boy YNOT.“Most people think that dance is just dance,” said Stephanie Sanchez, a graduate of Rennie Harris University. “And it’s not, it’s so much more than that — it’s research, development, where this move comes from. And that’s exactly what Rennie is doing with this program.”On top of their course load, students attend multiday intensives called cypher sessions, with in-person dance classes and lectures. On the roster for the winter session, held in Boulder in December, were classes like Wake & Break, Tops & Rocks, Popping Combo and Can U Freestyle. (The spring session is in Miami; tuition covers the classes but students pay separate fees for travel, room and board.) The cypher sessions, named for an important hip-hop practice in which dancers (or rappers) gather to perform and cheer one another on — usually in a circle, taking turns in the center — bring students together in a community, a vital part of the Rennie Harris University experience and of hip-hop culture more broadly.To earn their certificates, students are required to pass an extensive slate of assessments. These include teaching a mock class, taking a written test and participating in the cypher-end dance battle, which welcomes dancers from the area and offers a $3,000 grand prize.Warming up before the dance battle.Stephen SperanzaPreparing to pull out their most impressive stunts, the students at the cypher session in December may have been feeling the pressure on the evening of the battle. But a strong sense of unity was the prevailing note. As the judges paused the competition to deliberate after the first round, the competitors fell into a cypher, dancing for — and with — one another as if they’d been dancing together for years.Many Rennie Harris University graduates have taken on Harris’s sense of mission. Tyreis Hunte, a senior at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., said they hoped to bring hip-hop and street dance into the academy in a deeper way, “to educate communities about the history and the integrity of street dance and street culture.”Some are already teaching dance, like McAdam, who works at Sonoma State University in California. She said her experience at Rennie Harris University had deepened her relationship to hip-hop. That it is not only about her teaching, she said, “but also just showing up to jams and battles and spaces, or opening doors for other people to come into the teaching space that might not usually have the access.”For Harris, too, the program is about opening doors. It’s an opportunity to share his knowledge, and also to widen hip-hop and street dance’s circle of influence and help reshape priorities.At Rennie Harris University, where the second cohort has already started classes, “we’re flipping the script,” he said. “Hip-hop dance is first. House dance is first. Street dance is first — that’s the focus, right? Anything else is secondary.” More

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      National Endowment for the Humanities Announces $31.5 Million in Grants

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      The third round of funding for the year will support 226 projects across the country.A PBS documentary on the 400-year history of Shakespeare’s plays, a New York Public Library summer program for educators on efforts to secure equitable access to education in Harlem in the 20th century, and research for a book on the history of red hair are among 226 beneficiaries of new grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities announced on Tuesday.The grants, which total $31.5 million and are the third round awarded this year, will support projects at museums, libraries, universities and historic sites in 45 states and Washington, D.C., as well as in Canada, England and the Netherlands.Such projects include a documentary, to be co-produced by Louisiana Public Broadcasting, about the Colfax Massacre — named after the town and parish where dozens of former slaves were killed during Reconstruction. Another, at Penn State, uses computational methods to analyze the clouds in landscapes by John Constable and to trace the adoption of his Realist techniques by other 19th-century European artists. Funding will also go toward research for a book examining how different cultures have envisioned Jesus, both in his own time and throughout history, by Elaine Pagels, a historian of religion at Princeton University.Shelly C. Lowe, the endowment’s chairwoman, said in a statement that the projects, which include educational programming for high school and college students, “will foster the exchange of ideas and increase access to humanities knowledge, resources and experiences.”In New York, 31 projects at the state’s cultural organizations will receive $4.6 million in grants. Funding will support the creation of a new permanent exhibition exploring 400 years of Brooklyn history at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, as well as books about St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York during the height of the AIDS crisis and the Hospital of the Innocents, a 600-year-old children’s care institution in Florence, Italy.Funding will also go toward the development of a podcast about the Federal Writers’ Project, a U.S. government initiative that provided jobs for out-of-work writers during the Great Depression, by the Washington-based Stone Soup Productions. Another grant will benefit a history of the Cherokee Nation being co-authored by Julie Reed, a historian at Penn State, and Rose Stremlau, a historian at Davidson College in North Carolina.The grants will also benefit the Peabody Collections, one of the oldest African American library collections in the country, at Hampton University, and a book by John Lisle on a 1980s lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency over its Cold War-era MK-Ultra program, which involved experiments in mind control. More

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      in Music

      Richard Taruskin, Vigorously Polemical Musicologist, Dies at 77

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      Author, critic, teacher and public intellectual, he was an unabashed flamethrower who challenged conventional thinking about classical music.Richard Taruskin, a commanding musicologist and public intellectual whose polemical scholarship and criticism upended conventional classical music history, died early Friday in Oakland, Calif. He was 77.His death, at a hospital, was caused by esophageal cancer, his wife, Cathy Roebuck Taruskin, said.An emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a specialist in Russian music, Mr. Taruskin was the author of a number of groundbreaking musicological studies, including the sweeping six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. He was also a contributor to The New York Times, where his trenchant, witty, and erudite writings represented a bygone era in which clashes over the meaning of classical music held mainstream import.“He was the most important living writer on classical music, either in academia or in journalism,” said Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, in a recent interview. “He knew everything, his ideas were potent, and he wrote with dashing style.”At a time when the classical canon was considered sacrosanct, Mr. Taruskin advanced the philosophy that it was a product of political forces. His bête noire was the widespread notion that Beethoven symphonies and Bach cantatas could be divorced from their historical contexts. He savagely critiqued this idea of “music itself,” which, he wrote, represented “a decontaminated space within which music can be composed, performed and listened to in a cultural and historical vacuum, that is, in perfect sterility.”Mr. Taruskin was the author of groundbreaking musicological studies, including the sweeping six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University PressHis words were anything but sterile: Mr. Taruskin courted controversy in nearly everything he wrote. In the late 1980s, he helped ignite the so-called “Shostakovich Wars” by critiquing the veracity of “Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov” (1979), which portrayed the composer as a secret dissident. (Mr. Volkov is a journalist, historian and musicologist.) Drawing on a careful debunking by the scholar Laurel Fay, Mr. Taruskin called the book’s positive reception “the greatest critical scandal I have ever witnessed.”In a contentious 2001 Times essay, Mr. Taruskin defended the Boston Symphony’s cancellation of a performance of excerpts from John Adams’s “The Death of Klinghoffer” after Sept. 11 that year, arguing that the opera romanticized terrorism and included antisemitic caricatures. Even in advocating for what some criticized as censorship, he underscored a central component of his worldview: that music was not neutral, and that the concert hall could not be separated from society.“Art is not blameless,” he wrote. “Art can inflict harm.” (His writings, too, could inflict harm; Adams retorted that the column was “an ugly personal attack, and an appeal to the worst kind of neoconservatism.”)Mr. Taruskin’s most consequential flamethrowing was his campaign against the movement for “historically authentic” performances of early music. In a series of essays anthologized in his 1995 book “Text and Act,” he argued that the use of period instruments and techniques was an outgrowth of contemporary tastes. He didn’t want conductors like Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Roger Norrington to stop performing; he just wanted them to drop the pretense of “authenticity.” And many did.“Being the true voice of one’s time is (as Shaw might have said) roughly 40,000 times as vital and important as being the assumed voice of history,” he wrote in The Times in 1990. “To be the expressive medium of one’s own age is — obviously, no? — a far worthier aim than historical verisimilitude. What is verisimilitude, after all, but correctness? And correctness is the paltriest of virtues. It is something to demand of students, not artists.”Mr. Taruskin had a no-holds-barred approach to intellectual combat, once comparing a fellow scholar’s advocacy for a Renaissance philosopher to Henry Kissinger’s defense of repression at Tiananmen Square. He faced accusations of constructing simplistic straw men, and lacking empathy for his historical subjects. Following a 1991 broadside by Mr. Taruskin contending that Sergei Prokofiev had composed Stalinist propaganda, one biographer complained of his “sneering antipathy.” Mr. Taruskin’s response? “I am sorry I did not flatter Prokofiev enough to please his admirers on his birthday, but he is dead. My concern is with the living.”But his feuds were often productive: They changed the conversation in the academy and the concert hall alike. Such hefty arguments, Mr. Taruskin believed, might help rescue classical music from its increasingly marginal status in American society.“I have always considered it important for musicologists to put their expertise at the service of ‘average consumers’ and alert them to the possibility that they are being hoodwinked, not only by commercial interests but by complaisant academics, biased critics, and pretentious performers,” he wrote in 1994.Mr. Ross said: “Whether you judged him right or wrong, he made you feel that the art form truly mattered on the wider cultural stage.” Mr. Taruskin’s polemics, he added, “ultimately served a constructive goal of taking classical music out of fantasyland and into the real world.”Richard Filler Taruskin was born on April 2, 1945, in New York City, in Queens, to Benjamin and Beatrice (Filler) Taruskin. The household of his youth was liberal, Jewish, feistily intellectual and musical: His father was a lawyer and amateur violinist, and his mother was a former piano teacher. He took up the cello at age 11 and, while attending the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & the Arts), voraciously consumed books on music history at the New York Public Library.At Columbia University, Mr. Taruskin studied music along with Russian, partly to reconnect with a branch of relatives in Moscow. He stayed for his Ph.D., with the music historian Paul Henry Lang as his mentor, as he researched early music and 19th-century Russian opera. He also began playing the viola da gamba in the New York freelance scene and, while subsequently teaching at Columbia, led the choral group Cappella Nova, which gave acclaimed performances of Renaissance repertoire. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1986.Mr. Taruskin conducting the choral group Cappella Nova in 1983. The group, which he led, was acclaimed for its performances of Renaissance repertoire.Keith Meyers/The New York TimesIn the 1970s, musicology was still largely focused on reviving obscure motets and analyzing Central European masterworks. Mr. Taruskin participated in the “New Musicology” movement, a generation of scholars that shook up the discipline by drawing on postmodern approaches, feminist and queer theory, and cultural studies.“Richard had a very keen sense of the political stakes of music history,” said the scholar Susan McClary, a pioneer of New Musicology, in an interview. “He also was an extraordinary musician. And so he was not going to sacrifice the music itself for context; these always went together for him.”While researching Russian composers for his doctorate — at a time when scholars largely dismissed them as peripheral figures — Mr. Taruskin realized how 19th-century politics had insidiously shaped the classical canon. It was no coincidence, he forcefully argued, that Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven were so well-regarded: Their popularity and acclaim represented the aftereffects of a long-unacknowledged, and deeply rooted, German nationalist ideology. His monographs on Russian opera and Musorgsky redefined the study of music in Eastern Europe, chipping away at longstanding myths.In 1984, Mr. Taruskin began writing for the short-lived Opus Magazine at the invitation of its editor, James R. Oestreich. After Mr. Oestreich moved to The New York Times, Mr. Taruskin contributed long-form essays to the paper’s Arts & Leisure section that poked at composers who were often treated as demigods; the section’s mailbag soon filled with irate readers. (He had no qualms about sending letters of his own, mailing curt postcards to prominent music critics to lambast their errors or logical fallacies.) His writings for The Times and The New Republic were later collected in the books “On Russian Music” and “The Danger of Music.”Mr. Taruskin attending an international conference in his honor at Princeton University in 2012. He was a larger-than-life figure at conferences of the American Musicological Society, and his presentations were blockbuster events. Jessica Kourkounis for The New York TimesTeaching a Stravinsky seminar at Columbia inspired the two-volume “Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions,” a seminal 1996 study that upended the cosmopolitan image that the composer and his acolytes had long cultivated. Mr. Taruskin drew attention to traditional Slavic melodies that Stravinsky had embedded within “The Rite of Spring,” and how the composer himself had deliberately obscured the folk roots of his revolutionary ballet.The Oxford History of Western Music, published in 2005, grew out of Mr. Taruskin’s undergraduate lectures at Berkeley and his dissatisfaction with textbooks that presented a parade of unassailable masterpieces. In more than 4,000 pages, he wove intricate analyses alongside rich contextualization, revealing musical history as a fraught terrain of argumentation, politics, and power.Critiques of the “Ox” abounded — that it betrayed its author’s personal grudges, that it unfairly treated modernists like Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez. But it remains a central, seemingly unsurpassable text. “This is the last time anyone’s going to tell this story,” Dr. McClary said. “And it was told in a way that was just as good as it ever possibly could have been.” (Her own criticism of the Ox is perhaps the most enduring: Mr. Taruskin’s survey almost entirely ignores Black musical traditions.)Garbed in a purple blazer, Mr. Taruskin was a larger-than-life figure at conferences of the American Musicological Society, where his presentations were blockbuster events. In recent years he refrained from giving papers in favor of attending talks by his many former pupils.He married Cathy Roebuck, a computer programmer at Berkeley, in 1984 and lived in El Cerrito, Calif. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his son, Paul Roebuck Taruskin; his daughter, Tessa Roebuck Taruskin; his sister, Miriam Lawrence; his brother, Raymond; and two grandchildren. Among Mr. Taruskin’s numerous awards was Japan’s prestigious Kyoto Prize, which he received in 2017. His most recent book was the 2020 compilation “Cursed Questions: On Music and Its Social Practices.” When he died, he was working to complete a book of essays that would serve as an intellectual biography.Despite his highhanded persona, Mr. Taruskin had a soft side known to colleagues and students. For years he sparred with the music theorist Pieter van den Toorn over the meaning of Stravinsky’s music — Mr. Taruskin arguing that it could not be separated from the politics of the 20th century, Mr. van den Toorn seeing such concerns as extrinsic to the scores.Nevertheless, Mr. Taruskin dedicated one of his books to Mr. van den Toorn. The inscription: “Public adversary, private pal.” More

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      ‘Accepted’ Review: Reaching for the Stars, Seeing Them Dissolve

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      After a scandal unravels at their private school in western Louisiana, four seniors pick up the pieces.In “Accepted” the director Dan Chen takes us inside the world of T.M. Landry, a Louisiana private school whose videos of African American students collecting Ivy League college acceptances once went viral. But nine months after the filmmakers’ first visit to the school, The New York Times published reports of physical abuse, falsified transcripts and “cultish” behavior on the part of its founders, Mike and Tracey Landry. Viewers of “Accepted” get a front-row seat to the life-altering impact of the school’s unraveling through the stories of four promising high school seniors: Adia, Alicia, Cathy and Issac.As we witness both the documentary’s subjects — and its director — navigate a shocking development in real time, a quietly probing film emerges that pierces the myth of American meritocracy.Chen makes the choice to plod along at the same measured pace throughout — even after the T.M Landry scandal comes to light — and forgo the cryptic scoring we’re used to hearing when the jig is up. Similarly, the cinematography by Chen and Daphne Qin Wu moves seamlessly between intimate hand-held shots and aerial views of western Louisiana landscapes that reflect the eventual loss of access to the Landrys and the school.In the end, it is the resilience of the film’s teenage subjects that lifts “Accepted” to new heights. As they sit for close-ups in front of a swirly blue backdrop, gone are the Georgetown and Stanford sweatshirts, and the hopes they once represented. But in their place sits a clear understanding of the misguided pressures placed upon individual minority students to succeed in a society that systemically disadvantages them and a surprisingly powerful tale about making peace with imperfection.AcceptedNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More