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      Martin C. Dreiwitz, Who Took Student Musicians on World Tours, Dies at 91

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      He combined his love for travel and music to turn the Long Island Youth Orchestra into a globe-trotting powerhouse.Martin C. Dreiwitz, who drew on his twin passions for travel and classical music to found the globe-trotting Long Island Youth Orchestra, conducting his student musicians before audiences as close as Great Neck and Brookville and as far away as Karachi and Kathmandu, died on June 20 at a hospital near his home in Oyster Bay, N.Y. He was 91.Steven Behr, the president of the orchestra’s board of directors, said the cause was a heart attack.The orchestra may have counted some 100 performers, but Mr. Dreiwitz (pronounced DRY-witz) was practically a one-man show: He raised the funds, he scouted for new members, he cajoled parents to bring snacks on rehearsal days, and he conducted every performance from its founding in 1962 to his retirement in 2012.He was also the orchestra’s travel agent. In addition to playing four concerts a year, mostly at a performance hall on the campus of Long Island University Post in Brookville, N.Y., the orchestra went on a summer tour, almost always abroad, with multiple stops and often on multiple continents. One trip, in 1977, took them to Greece, Kenya, the Seychelles, India, Sri Lanka and Israel, with every detail arranged by Mr. Dreiwitz.Though he trained as a classical clarinetist, Mr. Dreiwitz was, in fact, a travel agent by trade, and he used his skills and connections to plot intricate journeys that even a professional orchestra might shrink from. He took pride in being among the first Western orchestras to play in places like Pakistan and Nepal, performing sold-out shows with students who often had never before left Long Island.He treated his musicians like adults, and saw his mission as one less about pedagogy than about preparation for a professional music career. He eschewed the typical youth orchestra fare — Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” — in favor of deep cuts from Mozart and Rossini and avant-garde composers like Virgil Thomson (a personal friend, who sometimes used the orchestra to test-run his latest work).He also tended to steer clear of Broadway scores, though he did have a soft spot for the music of George Gershwin, especially “Porgy and Bess,” and often included selections from that opera on the orchestra’s summer tour.Mr. Dreiwitz saw travel as another form of preparation. It was, he insisted, important for budding violists and clarinetists to learn how to perform at their best in strange new venues, in strange new cities, in front of strange new audiences.But he also simply loved the challenge of planning, say, a five-week trip for 85 students across five countries in East Asia. In between raising money and running rehearsals, during the school year he would dash off on reconnaissance trips, scouting each site for an upcoming tour — arranging hotels (or just as often private homes), checking out venues, even taste-testing restaurants. When the students arrived, months later, everything would be perfect.The orchestra ran on a shoestring budget, especially early on, when Mr. Dreiwitz refused to charge tuition. Instead, funds came from family donations, annual candy sales and, quite often, his own pocket. Every spring he offered a $2,500 scholarship to be split among the three best high school seniors, as judged by an outside panel.The Long Island Youth Orchestra in 1974. Alumni have gone on to play in most of the country’s major symphonies, and they populate countless chamber groups and academic music departments.Lester Paverman for The New York TimesMr. Dreiwitz’s hard work paid off. The orchestra’s 4,000 (and counting) alumni have gone on to play in many of the country’s major companies, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and they populate countless chamber groups and academic music departments.Mr. Dreiwitz could be stern and exacting on the podium, but, many of his former musicians said, he ran the orchestra like a family, fostering a vibe of collegiality instead of competitiveness.“I don’t twist anyone’s arm to join,” he told The New York Times in 1964. “They’re giving up their own time because they love music and want an opportunity to play. I don’t think you can find a more enthusiastic group of musicians any place.”Martin Charles Dreiwitz was born in Weehawken, N.J, on June 15, 1931, and raised in Brooklyn. His father, Samuel Dreiwitz, worked in the fur industry, and his mother, Charlotte (Silver) Dreiwitz, was a homemaker.He is survived by his two sons, Tuan Dinh and Dung Dinh.A gifted musician even as a child, he played clarinet and graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & the Arts), and he majored in music at the University of Chicago. Along the way he studied under woodwind luminaries like Simeon Bellison, the principal clarinetist for New York Philharmonic, and Anthony Gugliotti, who held the same post with the Philadelphia Orchestra.After graduating from college in 1953, he moved to Europe, where he traveled and studied to be a conductor, including a stint with Wilhelm Furtwängler in Vienna.He returned to the United States in the early 1960s and settled in suburban Long Island, hoping to find a job conducting. To make ends meet, he took a job as a travel agent and offered private clarinet lessons on the side.One day in 1962, one of his particularly talented students put down his instrument and frowned.“I’ve gotten this far,” Mr. Dreiwitz recalled the student saying, “and now I must wait years, until I get into a major orchestra, before I get some really good experience. Where do I go from here?”The seed was planted, and took root: Mr. Dreiwitz held auditions for what he initially called the North Shore Symphony Orchestra in September 1962. He started with just 52 musicians, and they held a concert the next spring. A few years later, he took them on their first trip, to Chicopee, Mass.It was stop and go in the early years, with Mr. Dreiwitz hitting up Nassau County music teachers to find promising players. But by the end of the 1960s, he no longer needed to. Eager students lined up outside his travel agency to audition, and every year he had a wait list. The orchestra went on its first overseas trip, to Europe, in 1971.He took emeritus status in 2012, handing the baton to Scott Dunn, a former student. He continued to come in to rehearsals at L.I.U. Post, though less and less often, and then not at all.But Mr. Dreiwitzhad one more hurrah. In 2018, hundreds of alumni returned for a concert in his honor, and he even mounted the podium, to conduct a selection from his beloved “Porgy and Bess.” More

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      Overlooked No More: Klaus Nomi, Singer With an Otherworldly Persona

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      His sound and look influenced everyone from Anohni to Lady Gaga. He also sang backup vocals for David Bowie.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.A wide range of musical genres fueled New York’s nightclubs in the late 1970s and early ’80s, including new wave, no wave, punk and post punk. Klaus Nomi, who performed during that era, defied being categorized under any of them.“I wouldn’t give it a label,” Nomi said of his sound in a Belgian television interview. “Maybe the only label is my own label: It’s Nomi style.”His music combined opera, infectious melodies, disco beats, German-accented countertenor vocals and undeniable grandeur. He influenced everyone from the singer-songwriter Anohni to Lady Gaga; in 2009, when Morrissey was asked to select eight essential records for the BBC radio program “Desert Island Discs,” Nomi’s version of Schumann’s “Der Nussbaum” made the list.Nomi’s stage look was equally eclectic, and inseparable from his sound. The gender-fluid mix included dark, dramatically-applied lipstick as well as nail polish, the occasional women’s garment and often a giant structured tuxedo top that suggested Dada as much as sci-fi. His style influenced the fashion world as well, in collections by designers like Jean Paul Gaultier and Riccardo Tisci.Nomi’s look was indisputably nonbinary, and a bit otherworldly. “He still comes across as an outrageously expressive and strange figure,” Tim Lawrence, author of the 2016 book “Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983,” said in a phone interview.“There was something about his entire being, which seemed to be queer, around makeup and voice and music and dress,” Lawrence said.Nomi — or Klaus Sperber, the name he was born with — moved to New York City from his native Germany in the early 1970s. He fell in with a group of creative friends and in late 1978 joined many of them to perform at New Wave Vaudeville, a series of quirky variety shows. The bill included a stripper, a singing dog and a performance artist dressed as a sadistic nun.Nomi, in the background at center, at the Mudd Club in Manhattan in 1979, the year he met David Bowie there.Alan KleinbergAs the closing act, Nomi sang an aria from Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila” while wearing a transparent raincoat over a shiny, fitted top and pants along with dramatic eye makeup and lipstick.“He really blew people’s minds,” Ann Magnuson, who directed the shows, said in an interview. “He had all these snarky punk rockers out there who were speechless.”With the performances came a new name, inspired by the name of a magazine focused on outer space, Omni.“Klaus said, ‘I can’t go out as Klaus Sperber,’” his friend Joey Arias, the singer and performance artist, recalled by phone. “‘That’s not a star’s name.’”Soon he was performing as Klaus Nomi at tastemaker Manhattan clubs like Max’s Kansas City and Hurrah, with a set list created with the help of Kristian Hoffman, a musician who served for a time as his musical director. The material included edgy originals and unconventional takes on well-known hits. Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” became an enraged dirge, for example; the chorus of “Lightnin’ Strikes” morphed into an aria. The thought was that pop songs would “catch the ear of an audience who isn’t ready for opera,” Hoffman said in an interview.As The New York Times put it in a review of one of his performances, Nomi’s music was “positively catchy, in a strange sort of way.”One night in late 1979, Nomi and Arias were at the Mudd Club, in TriBeCa, when they met David Bowie there. Nomi called him later — Bowie had asked him to, scribbling his phone number with a friend’s eyeliner — and Nomi and Arias were recruited to be Bowie’s backup singers for an appearance that December as the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live.”For the show’s three songs, they wore clinging women’s Thierry Mugler dresses, purchased at Henri Bendel. The look was extremely provocative at the time, especially on national television. Throughout, the TV cameras’ focus seemed to be as much on them as on Bowie.“It legitimized everything, because it had been sort of a private scene, and all of a sudden there it is, right in front of you on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” said Katy Kattelman, a designer who is known professionally as Katy K and who was a friend of Nomi’s.Soon after, Nomi signed a record deal with RCA France. His debut album, titled simply “Klaus Nomi,” was released in Europe in 1981; a second album, “A Simple Man,” came out the next year. The records sold well — “Klaus Nomi” earned gold-record status in France — and he performed abroad to packed venues.Nomi returned to New York toward the end of 1982, excited by the prospect of possible American tours and releases. But he arrived gaunt and exhausted — he had contracted AIDS. He died of complications of the illness on Aug. 6, 1983. He was 39.A scene from the 2004 documentary “The Nomi Song” showing Nomi getting ready for a performance.Palm PicturesNomi at Hurrah, one of many nightclubs he performed at in New York City.Harvey WangKlaus Sperber was born on Jan. 24, 1944, in Immenstadt, a town in what was then West Germany. He was raised by his mother, Bettina, who worked odd jobs. A fling with a soldier, whom Klaus never met, resulted in his birth. When he was a child, he and his mother moved to the city of Essen, about 400 miles away. Opera music was often playing in their house, and it set Klaus on his path.“The first time I heard an opera singer on the radio I said, ‘My God, I want to sing just like that,’” he said in interview footage that is included in the 2004 documentary “The Nomi Song.” As a teenager, he became equally fond of Elvis Presley.He moved to West Berlin and worked as an usher at Deutsche Oper, where he sometimes sang for colleagues after the audience had left. But he aspired to sing professionally, and, Arias said, “he felt like he was at a dead end.”“He wanted to come to New York because he felt like it would change his life,” Arias added.Nomi settled in Manhattan’s East Village. He worked for a while in the kitchen of the Upper East Side cafe and celebrity hangout Serendipity 3 and started a baking business with Kattelman called Tarts, Inc., supplying restaurants with desserts made in Nomi’s St. Marks Place apartment.Nomi was known to frequent after-hours clubs, like the Anvil and Mineshaft, where casual sex was commonplace. There were sexual encounters at home as well — Arias said he once arrived at Nomi’s apartment to find a naked Jean-Michel Basquiat toweling off.To get a green card, he married a woman, Melissa Moon, a U.S. citizen, in 1980.“I don’t think he was in any way being anything that wasn’t himself, which was pretty gay as far as I knew,” said the artist Kenny Scharf. “When you’re creating your persona, the sexuality part is obviously part of the persona. It was all part of his sense of style and him being an artist in every way.” More

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      Mary Mara, Actress on ‘ER,’ ‘Dexter’ and ‘Nash Bridges,’ Dies at 61

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      She appeared in dozens of movies and television shows in a career of more than 30 years. The police said they believed she died in a drowning accident.Mary Mara, a character actress who appeared on television shows including “Nash Bridges,” “Dexter” and “ER” in a career that spanned more than 30 years, has died in upstate New York. She was 61.The death was announced by the New York State Police, who said that Ms. Mara’s body was found on Sunday morning in the St. Lawrence River near Cape Vincent, N.Y., near the Canadian border, and that a preliminary investigation suggested that she had drowned while swimming.She lived in Cape Vincent.Ms. Mara was born on Sept. 21, 1960, in Syracuse, N.Y., to Roger Mara, the former director of special events for the New York State Fair, and Lucille Mara, an accountant. Her brother, Roger, who was a puppeteer, told The San Francisco Examiner in 1996 that he and Mary were encouraged by their mother’s flair for the dramatic.After graduating from Corcoran High School in Syracuse, Ms. Mara studied at San Francisco State University and later earned a master’s degree in fine arts from the Yale School of Drama. Throughout her career she dabbled in theater, most notably in 1989 in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of “Twelfth Night,” alongside Michelle Pfeiffer, Jeff Goldblum and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.That same year, she had her first onscreen credit, in the television movie “The Preppie Murder,” based on the true story of a young woman’s murder in New York. In 1992 she appeared in “Love Potion No. 9” and “Mr. Saturday Night,” in which Billy Crystal starred as a veteran stand-up comedian. Ms. Mara played his estranged daughter.Her other films included the 2008 horror movie “Prom Night.”She was perhaps best known for her recurring roles on “ER,” in which she played a patient, Loretta Sweet, from 1995-96, and on “Nash Bridges,” in which she played Inspector Bryn Carson from 1996-97.She once said she thought her character had been overshadowed by the male detectives played by Don Johnson and Cheech Marin on the latter show.“It is a male-dominated show with Don and Cheech the principals,” she told The Post-Standard of Syracuse in 1999. Although the show’s writers “started to write for me really well about halfway through the season,” she added, the producers “were afraid I would stand out too much.”Ms. Mara later appeared on “Dexter,” “Ray Donovan,” “Bones,” “Star Trek: Enterprise” and other shows. Her last credit was in the 2020 movie “Break Even.”In a statement, Ms. Mara’s manager, Craig Dorfman, described her as “electric, funny and a true individual.”Her survivors include a stepdaughter, Katie Mersola, and two sisters, Martha Mara and Susan Dailey, according to Variety.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

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      Patrick Adams, Master of New York’s Underground Disco Scene, Dies at 72

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      He produced, arranged or engineered many of the era’s biggest nightclub hits, even if his records rarely got much play on the radio.Patrick Adams, a producer, arranger and engineer who brought experimentation, sophistication and infectious grooves to countless soul and disco singles — his fellow producer Nile Rodgers called him “a master at keeping butts on the dance floor” — died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 72.His daughter, Joi Sanchez, said the cause was cancer.If you’ve boogied the night away at a disco or circled a roller rink in the last 50 years, chances are you’ve done it to music that Mr. Adams helped shepherd into existence, even if his name doesn’t ring a bell. Despite his low profile, he left his fingerprints everywhere, often as an engineer or arranger, sitting behind the mixing board for acts like Gladys Knight, Rick James and Salt-N-Pepa.His greatest legacy, though, was the scores of tracks he produced in the 1970s for New York’s underground disco scene, the energetic, transgressive and insanely creative corner of a genre often written off as cheesy and uncreative. If radio stations in Cleveland and Topeka weren’t playing music he had produced, you could be sure that New York clubs like Gallery and Paradise Garage were.“He was very underground,” Vince Aletti, who covered disco for Record World magazine, said in a phone interview. “He was really popular on a club level. He rarely broke through above that, but that kind of made him even more like he was ours.”Mr. Adams’s style varied from album to album, but each release was expertly crafted and irresistibly catchy, at once lofty and raunchy — like Musique’s “In the Bush,” a summer-defining club hit of 1978 that one critic said was among “the horniest records ever made.”As with many of Mr. Adams’s studio acts, Musique was in a way just a front for his own musical prowess. After a record executive hired him to create a disco hit, he wrote the music and lyrics, arranged the instruments (many of which he played himself) and hired the singers.He did much the same with acts like Inner Life, Phreek, Cloud One, Bumblebee Unlimited and the Universal Robot Band — a stable of groups, often drawing from the same pool of personnel, that allowed him to spread his creative wings in different directions.Some singles, like Inner Life’s “I’m Caught Up (In a One Night Love Affair),” are classic strings-and-beat disco, while others, like Cloud One’s “Atmospheric Strut,” are trippy blends of sci-fi funk and proto-house.But if Mr. Adams was in control, he was never dictatorial; his studio was always a collaborative space.“He gave you room to develop, as long as he thought it was creative,” Christine Wiltshire, who sang lead vocals for Musique, said in a phone interview. “He was never ‘This is the way it’s supposed to go.’”Unlike many disco producers then and many dance producers since, Mr. Adams had little regard for beats and loops. Those came later. He emphasized the melody, the lyrics and above all the story his songs were trying to tell.“If you start with a great song that has an attractive melody, a lyric that tells a story people can relate to, you’re way ahead of the game,” he told The New York Observer in 2017. “If you start with a beat, which in reality is not much different than anything anybody else could contrive with Fruity Loops or other computer software, you’re just one of a million people making noise.”Mr. Adams was best known for his disco work, but he got his start with soul bands in the early 1970s, and in the ’80s, after disco faded, he was an engineer for some of the leading acts in New York’s emerging hip-hop scene, like Salt-N-Pepa and Erik B. & Rakim.“I always look at music as music, not necessarily having a genre,” he told The Guardian in 2017. “I was not trying to make a disco record. I was trying to make just a great record.”Mr. Adams was born on March 17, 1950, in Harlem, where he grew up four blocks from the Apollo Theater. His father, Fince, was a merchant seaman, and his mother, Rose, was a homemaker.Patrick was musically inclined at an early age: His father bought him a trumpet when he was 10 and gave him an acoustic guitar when he was 12. He sang in choir and played guitar in a band, the Sparks, when he was 16.But his real interest was production. He experimented with his father’s reel-to-reel tape deck to master skills like overdubbing. He hung out at studios, learning about mixing boards. He would dissect songs he heard on the radio, trying to understand their arrangements and structure.“I always shopped for records by producer, arranger and songwriter,” he was quoted as saying in a profile by the journalist Jason King for the Red Bull Music Academy website. “The way D.J.s shop for records now is how I used to shop for records when I was a kid.”Later he would hang around the back door of the Apollo, so often that Reuben L. Phillips, who conducted the in-house orchestra, let him distribute sheet music.In the late 1960s he began working for Perception Records as an entry-level jingle writer; by 1970, he was executive vice president. A year later he discovered his first big act, the group Black Ivory, which sang slow-soul hits like “Don’t Turn Around” and “Time Is Love.”Mr. Adams became known around New York for his lush, energetic string arrangements, and in 1974 he left Perception to start his own arranging and engineering company. A year later he and the music promoter Peter Brown founded a label, P&P Records, to release his underground music.Mr. Adams never married, but he was in a longtime relationship with Ms. Wiltshire, the mother of Ms. Sanchez. They later separated, but the two remained close. Along with his daughter, he is survived by a brother, Gus; another daughter, Tira Adams; a son, Malcolm Holmes; and six grandchildren. His brother Terry died in 2020.Mr. Adams in performance at the Alhambra Ballroom in Harlem in 2017. Krisanne Johnson / Red Bull Content Pool While Mr. Adams never won the sort of public acclaim given to fellow producers like Mr. Rodgers or Quincy Jones, he did enjoy a renaissance in the 1990s among D.J.s who fell in love with his innovative productions. He found a similar following among hip-hop artists like Mac Miller, Raekwon and Kanye West, all of whom sampled his music.Still, he seemed at ease with his relative anonymity.“You can tell a Nile Rodgers record a million miles away because it has an imprint that emanates from his guitar,” Mr. Adams said in a 2017 interview for the Red Bull Music Academy. “In my case I tried to avoid that. I didn’t want my records to sound the same.“Whether that was a positive thing or a negative thing, I don’t know. But at the same time there is a signature in my music — sometimes it’s harmonic, and sometimes it’s just in the quirkiness of things. And sometimes you just don’t hear it until somebody points it out to you and asks, ‘Oh, he did that record too?’” More

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      Ken Knowlton, a Father of Computer Art and Animation, Dies at 91

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      His work at Bell Labs in the 1960s laid the groundwork for today’s computer-generated imagery in film and on TV.Ken Knowlton, an engineer, computer scientist and artist who helped pioneer the science and art of computer graphics and made many of the first computer-generated pictures, portraits and movies, died on June 16 in Sarasota, Florida. He was 91.His son, Rick Knowlton, said the cause of death, at a hospice facility, was unclear.In 1962, after finishing a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, Dr. Knowlton joined Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., a future-focused division of the Bell telephone conglomerate that was among the world’s leading research labs. After learning that the lab had installed a new machine that could print images onto film, he resolved to make movies using computer-generated graphics.“You could make pictures with letters on the screen or spots on the screen or lines on the screen,” he said in a 2016 interview, recalling his arrival at Bell Labs. “How about a movie?”Over the next several months, he developed what he believed to be the first computer programming language for computer animation, called BEFLIX (short for “Bell Labs Flicks”). The following year, he used this language to make an animated movie. Called “A Computer Technique for the Production of Animated Movies,” this 10-minute film described the technology used to make it.Though Dr. Knowlton was the only person to ever use the BEFLIX language —he and his colleagues quickly replaced it with other tools and techniques — the ideas behind this technology would eventually overhaul the movie business.By the mid-1980s, computer graphics were an integral part of feature films like “Tron” and “The Last Starfighter.” In 1995, a studio in Northern California, Pixar, released “Toy Story,” a feature film whose images were generated entirely by computer. Today, computer-generated imagery, or CGI, plays a role in practically every movie and television show.“He was the first man to fill a movie screen with pixels,” said Ted Nelson, a computer science pioneer and philosopher who wrote about Dr. Knowlton’s early work. “Now, every movie you see was created on a digital machine.”Kenneth Charles Knowlton was born on June 6, 1931, in Springville, N.Y. His parents, Frank and Eva (Reith) Knowlton, owned a farm in that small community, about 30 miles south of Buffalo, where they grew corn and raised chickens.After graduating a year early from high school as class valedictorian, Dr. Knowlton enrolled in a five-year engineering and physics program at Cornell University, where his parents had first met while studying agriculture before deciding to buy a farm. He stayed at Cornell for a master’s degree, which involved building an X-ray camera using parts from an electron microscope.At Cornell, he met his future wife, Roberta Behrens, and together they joined the Quakers. After he finished his master’s degree, they traveled to Quaker work camps that helped build housing infrastructure for the poor in El Salvador and Mexico, where he contracted polio. He walked with a leg brace or a cane for the rest of his life.It was at Cornell in the mid-1950s that Dr. Knowlton developed his interest in computers — room-size machines operated via punched cards and magnetic tape reels that were just beginning to arrive in government labs, academia and industry. After reading about a group at the Massachusetts Institute Technology that aimed to build computer technology that could translate between languages, like English and French, he joined the project as a Ph.D. student. His thesis advisers included the linguist Noam Chomsky and Marvin Minsky, a founding father of artificial intelligence.At Bell Labs, Dr. Knowlton realized that he could create detailed images by stringing together dots, letters, numbers and other symbols generated by a computer. Each symbol was chosen solely for its brightness — how bright or how dark it appeared at a distance. His computer programs, by carefully changing brightness as they placed each symbol, could then build familiar images, like flowers or faces.Dr. Knowlton and Dr. Harmon’s 12-foot-long computer-generated mosaic of a nude woman was hung on the wall of their boss’s office as a joke. This remastered version was recreated under Dr. Knowlton’s supervision in 2016. Jim Boulton, Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton; remastered from Jim Boulton’s backward-analyzed digital files of Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton’s “Studies in Perception I, 1966.”After experimenting with movies, he applied similar techniques to portraits and other still images. In the mid-1960s, he and a collaborator named Leon Harmon created a 12-foot-long computer-generated mosaic of a nude woman and, as a joke, hung it on the wall of their boss’s office.Their boss, Edward E. David, Jr., the Bell Labs executive director of communications research, who would later serve as science adviser to President Richard M. Nixon, was not amused. But the portrait later caught the attention of the pop artist Robert Rauschenberg, who put it on display in his New York City loft when he launched a project called Experiments in Art and Technology, or E.A.T., in the fall of 1967, aiming to develop new collaborations between artists and engineers.The New York Times published an article about the event the next day, including a picture of Dr. Knowlton’s image of the nude woman, titled “Computer Nude (Studies in Perception I).” It was believed to be the first full-frontal nude printed in the pages of The New York Times. A year later, the picture was part of a landmark exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art called “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age.”Dr. Knowlton remained at Bell Labs until 1982, experimenting with everything from computer-generated music to technologies that allowed deaf people to read sign language over the telephone. He later joined Wang Laboratories, where, in the late-1980s, he helped develop a personal computer that let users annotate documents with synchronized voice messages and digital pen strokes.In 2008, after retiring from tech research, he joined a magician and inventor named Mark Setteducati in creating a jigsaw puzzle called Ji Ga Zo, which could be arranged to resemble anyone’s face. “He had a mathematical mind combined with a great sense of aesthetics,” Mr. Setteducati said in a phone interview.In addition to his son Rick, Dr. Knowlton is survived by two other sons, Kenneth and David, all from his first marriage, which ended in divorce; a brother, Fredrick Knowlton; and a sister, Marie Knowlton. Two daughters, Melinda and Suzanne Knowlton, also from his first marriage, and his second wife, Barbara Bean-Knowlton, have died.While at Bell Labs, Mr. Knowlton collaborated with several well-known artists, including the experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek, the computer artist Lillian Schwartz and the electronic-music composer Laurie Spiegel. He saw himself as an engineer who helped others create art, as prescribed by Mr. Rauschenberg’s E.A.T. project.But later in life he began creating, showing and selling art of his own, building traditional analog images with dominoes, dice, seashells and other materials. He belatedly realized that when engineers collaborate with artists, they become more than engineers.“In the best cases, they become more complete humans, in part from understanding that all behavior comes not from logic but, at the bottommost level, from intrinsically indefensible emotions, values and drives,” he wrote in 2001. “Some ultimately become artists.” More

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      Meghan Stabile, Who Linked Jazz and Hip-Hop, Dies at 39

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      Shows that she produced on a shoestring sought to energize the jazz scene by connecting with younger audiences accustomed to D.J.s and turntables.Meghan Stabile, who saw jazz and hip-hop as genres that could cross-pollinate and who, hoping to bring jazz to younger audiences, started a shoestring business producing concerts that explored the intersection of the two, died on June 12 in Valrico, Fla. She was 39.Maureen Freeman, her grandmother, said the cause was suicide. She said that Ms. Stabile had recently relocated to Valrico hoping that might help in her struggles with depression.Ms. Stabile began producing shows while still a student at Berklee College of Music in Boston. She took to calling them Revive Da Live, a name that, at a time when turntablists were dominant, captured her interest in backing hip-hop artists with jazz musicians performing live.“It’s an organic hybrid,” she told The Boston Globe in 2012. “Jazz is in hip-hop’s DNA.”Once she relocated to New York in 2006, she continued to organize Revive Da Live events and formed the Revive Music Group, which produced shows, created an online forum called the Revivalist and released several albums in partnership with Blue Note Records, the noted jazz label.Ms. Stabile generally worked outside the jazz mainstream, booking shows in small clubs, but she gradually became something of a force in New York.“In the last year and a half,” The New York Times wrote in 2013, “she has emerged as a presence around the city — booking, promoting, cajoling, advising and herding young musicians, many of whom are still finding their way.”Don Was, now the president of Blue Note Records, told The Times then that he had first encountered Ms. Stabile two years earlier, when he joined the label as chief creative officer and went looking for the hot new things in jazz.“I started going online, four or five hours a night,” he said.“And invariably,” he continued, “every thread I was following led back to Meghan’s site. So night after night, she appeared to be at the center of the energy.”She was also producing shows in Boston and elsewhere. The goal, as she explained to The Globe, was to energize the jazz scene and connect it to audiences schooled on hip-hop. A Revive Music show at Berklee in 2012, for instance, was called “Hip Hop 1942” and featured ensembles playing jazz tunes, then showing how they had been sampled by hip-hop artists.“It’s important to honor the tradition of the music, and we still have shows that do that,” she told The Globe. “But we also have to honor the music of today and make it more relevant.”Blue Note posted a tribute to her on Twitter.“Beloved by the musicians she worked so hard for,” the post said, “she was a passionate advocate for jazz who built a vibrant scene around the music & gave a platform to so many deserving artists.”Ms. Stabile at the Village Underground in Greenwich Village in 2013. “It’s important to honor the tradition of the music,” she said. “But we also have to honor the music of today and make it more relevant.”Piotr Redlinski for The New York TimesMeghan Erin Stabile was born on July 26, 1982, in Grand Prairie, Texas, to Gina Marie Skidds. Her father was not part of her upbringing, and she was raised largely by Ms. Freeman and an aunt in Dover, N.H. Her relationship with her mother, who died last year, was difficult, she told The Times in 2013, and that gave her a certain irascible quality.“I got kicked out of four schools — three high schools and a middle school,” she said. “For fighting. I went through a lot, and I made it through. It didn’t break me. So always having that strength has been able to pull me through any type of situation.”She entered Berklee as a singer and guitarist, but, Ms. Freeman said in a phone interview, she could not overcome stage fright and soon focused on the business of music. She also got a bartending job at Wally’s Cafe, a jazz club in Boston, and began absorbing the jazz scene.She started producing, her grandmother said, “with nothing except her brain and pencil,” adding that she especially liked to help up-and-coming musicians, even though she never had much money.“She did everything she did,” Ms. Freeman said, “but it was always a scramble.”As Ms. Stabile’s reputation grew, some of her shows were in good-sized venues. In 2013, for instance, she booked the 19-piece Revive Big Band into the Highland Ballroom in Manhattan and lined up the dancer Savion Glover to appear with it. But an event like that belied her staff-of-one operation.“The outside illusion is great,” she told The Times. “Everyone thinks we’re this huge business. But look — it’s me sitting right here.”In 2013 Ms. Stabile struck a deal to produce and curate records for Blue Note, resulting in “Revive Music Presents: Supreme Sonacy Vol. 1,” released in 2015.“The idea of a strain of modern jazz that’s conversant with hip-hop — as a matter of course, rather than calculation — holds sway over much of this music,” Nate Chinen wrote in reviewing that record in The Times.Ms. Stabile had reduced her producing activities in recent years, focusing on her own health. But in a 2017 interview with the website CQP, she said that she thought her work over the years had helped connect two disparate worlds.“When I first started promoting shows, I had to learn how to promote specifically to the jazz heads and specifically to the hip-hop heads,” she said. “I had to find ways to lure them in. If I called it a jazz show, then the hip-hop heads wouldn’t buy tickets. If I called it a hip-hop show, jazz heads wouldn’t buy tickets.“So I had to create a new narrative early on. Once we got them in the room, once they heard the music, there was just no denying how fresh it was.”In addition to her grandmother, Ms. Stabile is survived by a brother, Michael Skidds, and a sister, Caitlyn Chaloux.Ms. Freeman said that though Ms. Stabile had reduced her producing activities, she had a long-term goal inspired by her own difficulties.“She wanted to promote a wellness center for jazz musicians,” she said, “so when they didn’t have a gig and they were struggling, they could go to her center.” More

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      James Rado, Co-Creator of the Musical ‘Hair,’ Is Dead at 90

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      Working with his fellow writer and actor Gerome Ragni and the composer Galt MacDermot, he jolted Broadway into the Age of Aquarius.James Rado, who jolted Broadway into the Age of Aquarius as a co-creator of “Hair,” the show, billed as an “American tribal love-rock musical,” that transfigured musical theater tradition with radical ’60s iconoclasm and rock ’n’ roll, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 90.The publicist Merle Frimark, a longtime friend, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was cardio-respiratory arrest.So much of the power of “Hair” resided in its seeming raw spontaneity, yet Mr. Rado (pronounced RAY-doe) labored over it for years with his collaborator Gerome Ragni to perfect that affect. Contrary to theatrical lore, he and Mr. Ragni were not out-of-work actors who wrote “Hair” to generate roles they could themselves play, but rather New York stage regulars with growing résumés.They met as cast members in an Off Broadway revue called “Hang Down Your Head and Die,” a London transfer that closed after one performance in October 1964. Mr. Rado bonded with Mr. Ragni and was soon talking to him about collaborating on a musical that would capture the exuberant, increasingly anti-establishment youth culture rising all around them in the streets of Lower Manhattan — a musical about hippies before hippies had a name.A musician before he’d become an actor, Mr. Rado began writing songs with Mr. Ragni, which they sometimes sang in what were then beatnik coffee houses in Greenwich Village.Moving to an apartment in Hoboken, N.J., where rents were even cheaper than in downtown Manhattan, they borrowed a typewriter from their landlord and went to work writing their musical in earnest, transcribing into song the sexual liberation, racial integration, pharmacological experimentation and opposition to the escalating Vietnam War that was galvanizing their young street archetypes. In solidarity, Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni let their short hair grow long.A museum stroll in mid-1965 brought them face to face with a painting of a tuft of hair by the Pop artist Jim Dine. Its title was “Hair.”“I called it to Jerry’s attention, and we were both knocked out,” Mr. Rado later recalled. Their nascent musical now had a name.A moment from the original production of “Hair,” at the Public Theater in Manhattan in 1967.DagmarWhat happened next would become the stuff of Broadway legend, albeit in fits and starts. In October 1966, on a train platform in New Haven, Conn., Mr. Ragni recognized Joseph Papp, impresario of the then-itinerant New York Shakespeare Festival, and handed him a bound script of “Hair.” Mr. Papp took it, read it and resolved to consider making “Hair” the opening production at his Public Theater, just nearing completion in what had been the old Astor Library on Lafayette Street in the East Village.Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni, meanwhile, had decided that their lyrics needed better melodies than the ones they had written, and embarked on a search for a legitimate composer to improve the songs. The search yielded the Canadian-born Galt MacDermot, a most unlikely choice: He was slightly older than his colleagues and a straight arrow with an eclectic musical background but scant Broadway experience. Mr. MacDermot wrote the melody for versions of “Aquarius” and several other songs, on spec, in less than 36 hours. It instantly became clear that he was the ideal choice for setting Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni’s lyric ruminations to rocking show music.A demonstration soon ensued in Mr. Papp’s office, with Mr. MacDermot singing and playing the trio’s new songs. Impressed, Mr. Papp announced that he would open the Public with “Hair.”Yet, second-guessing himself, he soon rescinded his offer, only to reconsider after a return office audition, this time with Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni doing the singing. “Hair” did, in fact, open the Public Theater on Oct. 17, 1967, with the 32-year-old Mr. Ragni leading the cast as George Berger — a hippie tribe’s nominal leader — but without the 35-year-old Mr. Rado, who was deemed too old by the show’s director, Gerald Freedman, to play the doomed protagonist, Claude Hooper Bukowski, even though the character was based almost entirely on Mr. Rado himself.“Hair” — an impressionistic near-fairy tale of a flock of flower children on the streets of New York taking LSD, burning draft cards, shocking tourists and making love before losing their conflicted comrade, Claude, to the Vietnam War — ran for eight weeks at the Public’s brand-new Anspacher Theater, generating ecstatic word of mouth and reviews that ranged from perplexed to appreciative.A wealthy young Midwesterner with political ambitions and strong antiwar politics named Michael Butler stepped in to move the show, first to Cheetah, a nightclub on West 53rd Street, and then — much rewritten by Mr. Rado and his collaborators, and with a visionary new director, Tom O’Horgan, now in charge — on to Broadway, where Mr. Rado was restored to the cast as Claude.Mr. Rado, second from left, with, from left, the actor Paul Nicholas, Mr. Ragni, the actor Oliver Tobias and the director Tom O’Horgan in London shortly after “Hair” opened there in 1968.Getty“Hair” was a Broadway sensation, hailed for its irresistible rock- and soul-driven score, its young cast of utter unknowns, its often-searing topicality and its must-see 20-second nude scene. It ran for 1,750 performances after opening at the Biltmore Theatre, on West 47th Street, on April 29, 1968. (It is now the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.)“Hair” quickly conquered the culture at large — though there were naysayers, who found its nudity, flagrant four-letter words and flouting of the American flag objectionable. It played all across America and ultimately the world, engendering a 1979 film adaptation directed by Milos Forman — which was disavowed by Mr. Rado — and a Tony Award-winning Broadway revival in 2009 that Mr. Rado helped guide. The original cast album won a Grammy Award and was the No. 1 album in the country for 13 straight weeks in 1969. (It was inducted into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2019.)The score generated ubiquitous cover versions. In 1969 alone, the Fifth Dimension’s medley of “Aquarius” and “Let the Sunshine In” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (it went on to win the Grammy Award for record of the year), while the Cowsills’ version of the title song reached No. 2, Oliver’s “Good Morning Starshine” hit No. 3 and Three Dog Night’s “Easy to Be Hard” got as high as No. 4. Among the many others who recorded songs from the “Hair” score was Nina Simone.“From the start, I envisioned that the score of ‘Hair’ would be something new for Broadway,” Mr. Rado later reflected, “a kind of pop-rock/show tune hybrid.”“We did have the desire to make something wonderful and spectacular for the moment,” he added. “We thought we’d stumbled on a great idea, and something that potentially could be a hit on Broadway, never thinking of the distant future.”James Alexander Radomski was born on Jan. 23, 1932, in Los Angeles to Alexander and Blanche (Bukowski) Radomski. His father was a sociologist who taught at the University of Rochester in upstate New York. Mr. Rado grew up in a Rochester suburb, Irondequoit, and then in Washington. He graduated from the University of Maryland, where he majored in speech and drama. A lover of Broadway musicals since childhood, he began writing songs in college and co-wrote two musicals that were produced on campus, “Interlude” and “Interlude II.”After serving two years in the Navy, he returned to pursue graduate theater studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, writing both music and lyrics for a revue there called “Cross Your Fingers.” After moving to New York, he wrote pop songs; recorded with his band, James Alexander and the Argyles; performed in summer stock; and did office work while studying method acting with Lee Strasberg.He landed his first Broadway job in 1963 in the ensemble of “Marathon ’33,” written by the actress June Havoc and produced by the Actors Studio. Following their initial encounter in 1964, he and Mr. Ragni were cast by Mike Nichols in his 1965 Chicago production of Ann Jellicoe’s comedy “The Knack.”In 1966, Mr. Rado appeared on Broadway in James Goldman’s “The Lion in Winter,” originating the role of Richard Lionheart, the oldest son of Henry II of England. His mainstream theatrical focus, however, was being redirected to the downtown avant-garde by Mr. Ragni, who, through his involvement with the Open Theater and Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa E.T.C., introduced Mr. Rado to the experimental aesthetic that became central to the experience of “Hair” onstage.“The truth is, we unlocked each other,” Mr. Rado wrote in a foreword to the book “Hair: The Story of the Show That Defined a Generation” (2010), by Eric Grode. “He was my creative catalyst, I probably his. We were great friends. It was a passionate kind of relationship that we directed into creativity, into writing, into creating this piece. We put the drama between us onstage.”Mr. Rado in 2017 at a Jazz at Lincoln Center celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Off Broadway opening of “Hair.”Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesIn the immediate aftermath of “Hair,” Mr. Rado’s fellowship with Mr. Ragni fractured. “We couldn’t be in a room together, we would burst into an argument,” he recalled. Mr. Rado wrote the music, lyrics and book (with his brother, Ted) for a “Hair” sequel he called “The Rainbow Rainbeam Radio Roadshow,” which ran Off Broadway in 1972, just as Mr. Ragni and Mr. MacDermot were suffering an ignominious Broadway flop with their post-“Hair” musical, “Dude.” Mr. Rado then reunited with Mr. Ragni to write “Sun (Audio Movie),” an environmental musical, with the composer Steve Margoshes, and “Jack Sound and His Dog Star Blowing His Final Trumpet on the Day of Doom,” also with Mr. Margoshes.Mr. Ragni died in 1991. Mr. MacDermot died in 2018.In 2008, Mr. Rado confirmed in an interview with The Advocate what had long been an open secret among his “Hair” castmates and collaborators: that he and Mr. Ragni had been lovers.“It was a deep, lifelong friendship and a love of my life,” Mr. Rado stated simply. “Looking back,” he later elaborated about “Hair,” “what was really underlying the whole thing was the new way men were relating to each other. They were very openly embracing each other as brothers. It wasn’t gay; it wasn’t repressed… We suddenly realized this was a musical about love in the larger sense.”Mr. Rado, whose brother is his only immediate survivor, never married and did not identify as gay, but rather as “omnisexual.” Asked before the 2009 “Hair” revival opened if the show was based on his relationship with Mr. Ragni, Mr. Rado answered yes.“We were in a love mode,” he said, “and this whole love movement started happening around us, so the show got it. ‘Hair’ was our baby in a way, which is pretty cool.”Maia Coleman contributed reporting. More

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      in Television

      Mark Shields, TV Pundit Known for His Sharp Wit, Dies at 85

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      A former campaign strategist, he became a fixture in American political journalism and punditry and was seen on “PBS NewsHour” for 33 years.Mark Shields, a piercing analyst of America’s political virtues and failings, first as a Democratic campaign strategist and then as a television commentator who both delighted and rankled audiences for four decades with his bluntly liberal views and sharply honed wit, died on Saturday at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. He was 85. His daughter, Amy Shields Doyle, said the cause was complications of kidney failure.Politics loomed large for Mr. Shields even when he was a boy. In 1948, when he was 11, his parents roused him at 5 a.m. so he could glimpse President Harry S. Truman as he was passing through Weymouth, the Massachusetts town south of Boston where they lived. He recalled that “the first time I ever saw my mother cry was the night that Adlai Stevenson lost in 1952.”A life immersed in politics began in earnest for him in the 1960s, not long after he had finished two years in the Marines. He started as a legislative assistant to Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin.He then struck out on his own as a political consultant to Democratic candidates; his first campaign at the national level was Robert F. Kennedy’s ill-fated presidential race in 1968. Mr. Shields was in San Francisco when Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. “I’ll go to my grave believing Robert Kennedy would have been the best president of my lifetime,” he told The New York Times in 1993.He had successes, like helping John J. Gilligan become governor of Ohio in 1970 and Kevin H. White win re-election as mayor of Boston in 1975. But he was certainly no stranger to defeat; he worked for men who vainly pursued national office in the 1970s, among them Edmund S. Muskie, R. Sargent Shriver and Morris K. Udall.“At one point,” Mr. Shields said, “I held the N.C.A.A. indoor record for concession speeches written and delivered.”As the 1970s ended, he decided on a different path. Thus began a long career that made him a fixture in American political journalism and punditry.He started out as a Washington Post editorial writer, but the inherent anonymity of the job discomfited him. He asked for, and got, a weekly column.Before long, he set out on his own. While he continued writing a column, which came to be distributed each week by Creators Syndicate, it was on television that he left his firmest imprint.From 1988 until it was canceled in 2005, he was a moderator and panelist on “Capital Gang,” a weekly CNN talk show that matched liberals like Mr. Shields with their conservative counterparts. He was also a panelist on another weekly public affairs program, “Inside Washington,” seen on PBS and ABC until it ended in 2013.In 1985, he wrote “On the Campaign Trail,” a somewhat irreverent look at the 1984 presidential race. Over the years he also taught courses on politics and the press at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.Mr. Shields during a taping of “Meet the Press” at the NBC studios in Washington in 2008.Alex Wong/Getty Images for Meet the PressHis longest stretch was as a commentator on “PBS NewsHour” from 1987 through 2020, when he decided at age 83 to end his regular gig. A self-described New Deal liberal, Mr. Shields was the counterpoint to a succession of conservative thinkers, including William Safire, Paul Gigot, David Gergen and, for the last 19 years, David Brooks.In a panegyric to his colleague, Mr. Brooks wrote in his New York Times column in December 2020 that “to this day Mark argues that politics is about looking for converts, not punishing heretics.”Mr. Shields’s manner was rumpled, his visage increasingly jowly, his accent unmistakably New England. He came across, The Times observed in 1993, as “just a guy who likes to argue about current events at the barbershop — the pundit next door.”His calling card was a no-nonsense political sensibility, infused with audience-pleasing humor that punctured the dominant character trait of many an office holder: pomposity. Not surprisingly, his targets, archconservatives conspicuous among them, did not take kindly to his arrows. And he did not always adhere to modern standards of correctness.Of President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Shields said dismissively that “the toughest thing he’s ever done was to ask Republicans to vote for a tax cut.” The House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy was “an invertebrate”; Senator Lindsey Graham made Tonto, the Lone Ranger’s loyal sidekick, “look like an independent spirit.” In both major parties, he said, too many are afflicted with “the Rolex gene” — making them money-hungry caterers to the wealthy.Asked in a 2013 C-SPAN interview which presidents he admired, he cited Gerald R. Ford, a Republican who took office in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Ford, he said, was “the most emotionally healthy.”“Not that the others were basket cases,” he said, but “they get that bug, and as the late and very great Mo Udall, who sought that office, once put it, the only known cure for the presidential virus is embalming fluid.”Politics, he maintained, was “a contact sport, a question of accepting an elbow or two,” and losing was “the original American sin.”“People come up with very creative excuses why they can’t be with you when you’re losing,” he said. “Like ‘my nephew is graduating from driving school,’ and ‘I’d love to be with you but we had a family appointment at the taxidermist.’”Still, for all their foibles, he had an abiding admiration for politicians, be they Democrats or Republicans, simply for entering the arena.“When you dare to run for public office, everyone you ever sat next to in high school homeroom or double-dated with or car-pooled with knows whether you won or, more likely, lost,” he said. “The political candidate dares to risk the public rejection that most of us will go to any length to avoid.”Mark Stephen Shields was born in Weymouth on May 25, 1937, one of four children of William Shields, a paper salesman involved in local politics, and Mary (Fallon) Shields, who taught school until she married.“In my Irish American Massachusetts family, you were born a Democrat and baptized a Catholic,” Mr. Shields wrote in 2009. “If your luck held out, you were also brought up to be a Boston Red Sox fan.”Mr. Shields, right, talking with Sandy Levin, Democrat of Michigan, before a meeting of the House Democratic caucus at the Capitol in Washington in 2011.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesHe attended schools in Weymouth and then the University of Notre Dame, where he majored in philosophy and graduated in 1959. With military conscription looming, he chose in 1960 to enlist in the Marines, emerging in 1962 as a lance corporal. He learned a lot in those two years, he said, including concepts of leadership encapsulated in a Marine tradition of officers not being fed until their subordinates were.“Would not our country be a more just and human place,” he wrote in 2010, “if the brass of Wall Street and Washington and executive suites believed that ‘officers eat last’?”As he set out on his career in politics, he met Anne Hudson, a lawyer and federal agency administrator. They were married in 1966. In addition to his daughter, a television producer, he is survived by his wife and two grandchildren. There were bumps along the road, including a period of excessive drinking. “If I wasn’t an alcoholic, I was probably a pretty good imitation of one,” he told C-SPAN, adding: “I have not had a drink since May 15, 1974. It took me that long to find out that God made whiskey so the Irish and the Indians wouldn’t run the world.”Some of his happiest moments, he said, were when he worked on political campaigns: “You think you are going to make a difference that’s going to be better for the country, and especially for widows and orphans and people who don’t even know your name and never will know your name. Boy, that’s probably as good as it gets.” More