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      James Caan, Actor Who Won Fame in ‘The Godfather,’ Dies at 82

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      A Bronx native, he starred in countless movies and TV shows, but was most closely identified with the volatile character Sonny Corleone.James Caan, who built a durable film career in varied roles across six decades but was forever identified most closely with one of his earliest characters, the quick-tempered, skirt-chasing Sonny Corleone in the original “Godfather” movie, died on Wednesday. He was 82. His death was announced by his family on Twitter and confirmed by his manager, Matt DelPiano. Both his family and his manager declined to say where he died or cite a cause.By the time “The Godfather” was released in 1972, Mr. Caan had established himself as a young actor worth keeping an eye on. He had a meaty role in “El Dorado,” a 1966 western that starred John Wayne and Robert Mitchum. (Wayne, Mr. Caan said, cheated at chess games during breaks in the filming.)In “The Rain People,” a 1969 movie that was his first collaboration with the director Francis Ford Coppola, he earned critical praise playing a simple-minded former football player.“Brian’s Song” (1971), an early made-for-television movie, brought him to the attention of a wider audience. Based on a true story, it focused on the friendship between a Black football star, Gale Sayers of the Chicago Bears (played by Billy Dee Williams), and a white teammate, Brian Piccolo. Piccolo died of cancer in 1970 at 26, and Mr. Caan played him with verve and humor in an unabashedly three-hanky film.Then came Mr. Coppola’s “Godfather.” Initially cast as the central figure, Michael Corleone — the role ultimately played by Al Pacino — Mr. Caan ended up playing Sonny, quick to anger and ultimately gunned down on a causeway. He threw himself into the role so fully that for years, he said, strangers would say things to him like “Hey, don’t go through that tollbooth again.”Some even mistook him for a real mobster. “I’ve been accused so many times,” he told Vanity Fair in 2004. “I won ‘Italian of the Year’ twice in New York, and I’m not Italian.”He was in fact Jewish, reared in Sunnyside, Queens, by German-born parents. “I was denied in a country club once,” he said. “Oh, yeah, the guy sat in front of the board and he says, ‘No, no, he’s a wiseguy, been downtown. He’s a made guy.’ I thought, ‘What, are you out of your mind?’ ”Mr. Caan received an Emmy nomination for best actor for “Brian’s Song” and an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor for “The Godfather.” His Oscar competition included Mr. Pacino and another “Godfather” actor, Robert Duvall. The three canceled one another out, and the award went to Joel Grey for “Cabaret.”Mr. Caan’s performance as the pro football player Brian Piccolo in the 1971 television movie “Brian’s Song” earned him an Emmy nomination.ABCBy then, Mr. Caan’s career had kicked into high gear. The decade that followed was especially fertile. Among his roles were a love-struck sailor in “Cinderella Liberty” (1973), a self-destructive professor in “The Gambler” (1974), an anti-authority athlete in “Rollerball” (1975), a fierce World War II sergeant in “A Bridge Too Far” (1977) and a not-too-bright ex-con in “Thief” (1981), a favorite movie of his.Not all his films received favorable notices, but with his rugged good looks and obvious smarts, his acting usually did. Reviewing “Cinderella Liberty” for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote: “Mr. Caan seems to be shaping up as the Paul Newman of the nineteen-seventies. An intelligent, versatile actor with a low-key but unmistakable public personality.”Like Paul Newman, Mr. Caan tried his hand at directing. But he did so only once, with “Hide in Plain Sight” (1980), in which he also acted, playing a man searching for his children after they and their mother are brought into the government’s witness-protection program. The film fared poorly at the box office and left him disenchanted.“Everybody wants to do ‘Rocky 9’ and ‘Airport 96’ and ‘Jaws 7,’ ” he said in 1981. “And you look and you listen, and what little idealism you have left slowly dwindles.”Mr. Caan with the actress Lilyan Chauvin, left, and his wife at the time, the actress Sheila Ryan, at a movie preview in 1975.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn his prime, Mr. Caan had a man’s-man reputation that he savored. In interviews, he strewed four-letter words like birdseed. He earned a sixth-degree black belt in karate. He roped steers on the rodeo circuit and managed a boxer — pursuits, especially rodeo, that left him with so many stitches and screws in his shoulders and arms that the sportswriter Jim Murray once said, “Jimmy Caan was not born, he was embroidered.”Mr. Caan also had a bad-boy reputation. He was married and divorced four times. He appeared as a character witness for an old friend from Queens who was on trial as a mobster because, he said, stand-up guys stay loyal to their pals. And he had his own brushes with the law.The police questioned him at length in 1993 after a man fell to his death from the fire escape of a Los Angeles apartment where Mr. Caan was staying. The authorities concluded that the death was accidental, and Mr. Caan said he was asleep when it occurred.The next year the North Hollywood police arrested him after he flashed a loaded pistol in public. He said he had done it only to break up a fight. The charges were dropped.Along the way, he checked into a rehab center for an addiction to cocaine that began after his sister, Barbara Licker, died of leukemia in 1981. The two of them had been close — she was president of a movie production company that included James and their brother, Ronald — and her death hit him hard.He barely worked for the next six years and wound up deep in debt. “I got into the whole lifestyle of girls and drugs and partying,” he told Entertainment Weekly, adding that “you really do get caught up in it, and it’s very destructive.”Mr. Caan in a scene from another of his best-known films, “Misery” (1990), in which he played a writer held captive by a crazed fan.Columbia Pictures/Getty ImagesBut he bounced back, starting in 1987 with the Vietnam War drama “Gardens of Stone,” another collaboration with Mr. Coppola, in which he played a tough sergeant. He then took on roles including a writer held captive by a crazed fan (played by Kathy Bates) in the box-office hit “Misery” (1990), directed by Rob Reiner and based on a novel by Stephen King; a tough but romantic mob guy in “Honeymoon in Vegas” (1992); yet another mobster in the comedy “Mickey Blue Eyes” (1999); and a cantankerous book editor in “Elf” (2003).He also turned to television, notably the series “Las Vegas,” on which he was seen from 2003 to 2007 as the president of operations and security chief for a casino. Still, though he worked steadily, his later career lacked the incandescence of his earlier years.Born on March 26, 1940, in the Bronx, James Edmund Caan grew up in Queens, the son of Arthur Caan, a wholesale dealer of kosher meat, and Sophie (Falkenstein) Caan, a homemaker.Street life held his interest more than classrooms did. He dropped out of several schools before settling down at Rhodes Preparatory School in Manhattan, where he graduated in 1956 at age 16.At Michigan State University, he hoped to make the football team but failed. He switched to Hofstra University on Long Island — Mr. Coppola was a classmate — but dropped out before long. Nonetheless, his interest in acting was kindled there. He went on to study for five years at the well-regarded Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater in Manhattan.Mr. Caan at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif., in 2010.Hugh Hamilton for The New York TimesAt around that time he met an actress named Dee Jay Mathis, who became the first of his four wives (the lengths of his marriages ranged from 12 years to barely a year). He is survived by his brother, Ronald; five children, the actor Scott Caan and Tara, Alexander, James and Jacob Caan; and four grandchildren. Mr. Caan’s early work included roles in 1960s television series like “Route 66,” “Dr. Kildare” and “Wagon Train.” Movies soon loomed, with “The Godfather” dominant.In that film, he said, he had improvised some of his lines and actions, including two words that he did not invent but that he ushered into the vernacular. Sonny tells Michael how hard it will be to kill the family’s enemies: “You gotta get up like this and — bada bing! — you blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit.”“Bada bing? Bada boom? I said that, didn’t I?” Mr. Caan said in an interview with Vanity Fair. “Or did I just say bada bing? It just came out of my mouth. I don’t know from where.” More

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      Ni Kuang, Novelist and Screenwriter for Martial Arts Films, Dies at 87

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      Best known for fantastical thrillers that doubled as political allegories, he also wrote hundreds of martial arts films for Bruce Lee and others.HONG KONG — Ni Kuang, a prolific author of fantasy novels imbued with criticism of the Chinese Communist Party and a screenwriter for more than 200 martial arts films, died here on Sunday. He was 87.His death was announced by his daughter-in-law, the actress Vivian Chow, on social media. She did not state the cause but said he died at a cancer rehabilitation center.Best known for his fantastical thrillers, Mr. Ni wrote the screenplays for many of the action movies produced by the Shaw Brothers, who dominated the Hong Kong market. He also created the story lines and central characters for Bruce Lee’s first two major films, “The Big Boss” (1971) and “Fist of Fury” (1972), although the screenwriting credit for both films went to the director, Lo Wei.In the Chinese-speaking world, Mr. Ni was perhaps best known for the “Wisely” series, a collection of about 150 adventure stories first published as newspaper serials. The stories told of the title character’s encounters with aliens and battles with intelligent monsters, but they sometimes also contained pointed political criticism.Born in 1935 to a working-class family in Shanghai, Mr. Ni was given two names at birth, as was the custom: Ni Yiming and Ni Cong. Information on his parents was not immediately available, but it is known that he had six siblings.He began working in his teens as a public security official during China’s land-reform movement, believing in the Communist Party’s promise of a more egalitarian future. But he quickly grew disillusioned after being given the task of writing daily execution notices about landowners, who were blamed for China’s rural poverty and persecuted as public enemies. When he questioned whether they had committed other crimes to warrant a death sentence, his superiors rebuked him.Bruce Lee in “Fist of Fury” (1972), for which Mr. Li created the story line and the central characters. He did not receive screenwriting credit, but he did for more than 200 other martial arts films.Golden Harvest Company“That was the beginning of my distaste for the party,” he said in a 2019 interview with Paul Shieh, a prominent lawyer and television host, for RTHK, the Hong Kong public broadcaster.His troubles did not end there. While stationed in Inner Mongolia, Mr. Ni mated a crippled wolf with two dogs, then raised a pack of their cubs in secret. When the cubs attacked a more senior official, he was punished and made to write long essays of contrition. In public sessions where so-called class enemies were denounced, he got in trouble for giggling. He was also branded as an anti-revolutionary after being caught dismantling wooden planks from a footbridge to burn as fuel during a cold spell.A friend had warned Mr. Ni that he could face heavy penalties for his transgressions and helped him steal a horse so he could escape, Mr. Ni said in the RTHK interview. He returned to Shanghai, where he paid smugglers to help him stow away on a boat to Hong Kong in 1957.At first, Mr. Ni made less than 50 cents a day doing factory work and odd jobs. In interviews, he described in great detail the first meal he had paid for with his earnings: a bowl of rice topped with glistening slabs of fatty barbecued pork.Mr. Ni soon found a vocation as a writer of serialized fiction when The Kung Sheung Daily News accepted a manuscript he wrote, “Buried Alive,” about land reform in mainland China. He threw himself into writing full time, saying in interviews that at the peak of his career he wrote as many as 20,000 words a day. He published the first installments of the “Wisely” saga in the newspaper Ming Pao in 1963.“Back then, I wrote novels as a living, to feed mouths and get through the day, so I had no way of writing exquisitely,” he said, adding that he had time for neither research nor revision while writing. “I could only rely on what was in my head.”Although he never returned to the mainland, his early life experiences there often figured into his writing, even as his fiction became more supernatural. “Old Cat,” a “Wisely” novel first published in 1971, was inspired by a gray-blue Persian cat that had kept Mr. Ni company when he was locked in a hut as punishment. He had spent hours untangling its knotted, matty hair, he said in an interview. The cat in the novel battled aliens.In a speech at the Hong Kong Book Fair in 2019 about his legacy as a science-fiction writer, Mr. Ni argued that his work did not really fit into that genre as it is traditionally defined. He had once avoided writing about aliens, he said, but found them to be convenient narrative devices when he was stuck on a plot.“My science fiction is completely different from Western science fiction or what most people would consider ‘hard’ science fiction,” he said.Having completed only junior high school, he added, he lacked a proper understanding of science. He drew more from ancient Chinese myths and legends.Mr. Ni also brought his imagination to the big screen, earning screenwriting credits for movies that included “One-Armed Swordsman,” which broke Hong Kong box-office records in 1967.Mr. Ni married Li Guozhen in 1959. She survives him. His survivors also include their daughter, Ni Sui, and their son, Joe Nieh. Over the years, Mr. Ni did not hold back in his critiques of the Chinese Communist Party, and he described Hong Kong as a refuge for free thinking. But he was pessimistic about the city’s future under Beijing’s tightening grip.His 1983 novel, “Chasing the Dragon,” was widely cited as a prescient description of the political backdrop that prompted pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019, followed by a sweeping crackdown.In the book, Mr. Ni writes about an unnamed metropolis that is reduced to a shell of itself:There’s no need to destroy the architecture of this big city, no need to kill any of its residents. Even the appearance of the big city could look exactly the same as before. But to destroy and kill this big city, one only needs to make its original merits disappear. And all that would take are stupid words and actions coming from just a few people.When asked by Mr. Shieh of RTHK what disappearing merits he meant, Mr. Ni said, “Freedom.”“Freedom of speech is the mother of all freedoms,” he continued. “Without freedom of speech, there is no other freedom at all.” More

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      Joe Turkel, the Spectral Bartender in ‘The Shining,’ Dies at 94

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      Also memorably seen in “Blade Runner,” he was a favorite among directors looking for someone who could bring zealous professionalism to even the smallest role.Joe Turkel, a gaunt-faced yeoman character actor who appeared in scores of movies but is best known for two of his final performances — as Lloyd the bartender in “The Shining” and Dr. Eldon Tyrell in “Blade Runner” — died on June 27 in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 94.His son Craig Turkel said the death, at a hospital, was caused by liver failure.Mr. Turkel (pronounced ter-KELL) was a favorite among directors looking for someone who could bring zealous professionalism to even the smallest role.In movies like “Hellcats of the Navy” (1957) and “The Sand Pebbles” (1966), he held his own alongside leading men like Ronald Reagan and Steve McQueen. It was often up to Mr. Turkel to provide a subtle but unmistakable plot pivot, using his steely onscreen demeanor and perfectly delivered lines to shift a film’s entire mood.Nowhere was that more true than in the three movies he made for Stanley Kubrick, with whom he formed something of a mutual admiration society. Both men, who were about the same age, had grown up as working-class secular Jews in New York. Both were huge baseball fanatics. And both were perfectionists about their work.Mr. Turkel had a small role in “The Killing,” Mr. Kubrick’s 1956 film about a racetrack robbery, and then returned a year later as a condemned soldier in “Paths of Glory.” In both films, he contrasted a stony stillness with sudden explosions of manic action to convey meaning far beyond his few brief lines.He went on to become a prolific television actor, with roles on popular shows like “Bonanza,” “Ironside” and “Fantasy Island.”He returned to Mr. Kubrick’s service in 1980 for “The Shining,” an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. The story revolves around an author, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), who is hired as the winter caretaker of the secluded, otherwise empty Overlook Hotel and moves there with his family.Under the influence of malevolent supernatural forces, Jack slowly goes crazy. At one point he enters the hotel’s bar, where he finds Lloyd, played by Mr. Turkel. Jack asks for a bourbon, and Lloyd pours him a shot of Jack Daniel’s.Mr. Nicholson dominates their conversation, but it is Mr. Turkel’s ominously stoic presence that shifts the film into a darker register.“In dress and demeanor, he’s the prototypical old-school hotel barman,” Mr. Turkel told The Toronto Star in 2014. “He obviously takes pride in his work and the corruption he enables; most bartenders are stylish and a little bit evil. Poor Lloyd doesn’t know the difference between bourbon and Tennessee whiskey, though.”Joseph Turkel was born on July 15, 1927, in Brooklyn. His father, Benjamin Turkel, was a tailor, and his mother, Gazella (Goldfisher) Turkel, was a homemaker and part-time opera singer.Along with his son Craig, Mr. Turkel is survived by another son, Robert; his brother, David; and two grandchildren. His wife, Anita (Cacciatore) Turkel, died before him.He joined the U.S. merchant marine in 1944 and the Army in 1946. After receiving an honorable discharge, he briefly returned to New York for acting classes before heading to Hollywood in 1947.His first credited role was in “City Across the River” (1949), a film about a program for juvenile delinquents that also featured a young Tony Curtis.His work on “The Shining” brought him to the attention of Ridley Scott, who was casting “Blade Runner,” his adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”He was cast as Dr. Tyrell, the brilliant but haughty founder of a company that produces robots so perfect that they blur the line between human and machine — an uncanniness that leads to Dr. Tyrell’s bloody demise at the hands of one of his creations.Although “Blade Runner” has become one of the most critically acclaimed science fiction films in history, it was originally a box-office dud. Mr. Turkel, having grown tired of grinding through auditions after decades in Hollywood, decided to retire; aside from a few more small TV and film roles, he never acted again.Instead he tried his hand at screenplays (although none of them were produced), became a regular on the fan-convention circuit and wrote a memoir, “The Miseries of Success,” which remains unpublished.“I’ve done some great films,” he told an interviewer for Blade Zone, a “Blade Runner” fan site, in 1999. “I know other actors that have done brilliant films. They still have to go out and audition and meet the producer, director, and please these people no matter what they’ve done. Of course the great big stars don’t do that. But there are great quality actors that do that and they find it demeaning.”Still, he added, “I’ve had a hell of a career.” More

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      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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      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