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      R. Murray Schafer, Composer Who Heard Nature’s Music, Dies at 88

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      He delved into the relationship between sound and the environment. Many of his compositions incorporated the music of the natural world.R. Murray Schafer, a Canadian composer and writer who brought the concept of the “soundscape” to widespread recognition and pioneered the field of acoustic ecology — the relationship between sound, people and the environment — died on Aug. 14 at his home near Peterborough, Ontario. He was 88. The cause was dementia, his wife and collaborator, the mezzo-soprano Eleanor James, said.Mr. Schafer was already an inventive avant-garde composer when he began researching the relationship between sound and the environment in the late 1960s. He had joined a noise abatement society but disagreed with its treatment of noise as a negative phenomenon.“The sounds of the environment were changing rapidly, and it seemed that no one was documenting the changes,” he recalled in his 2012 memoir, “My Life on Earth and Elsewhere.” “Where were the museums for disappearing sounds? What was the effect of new sounds on human behavior and health?”With funding from UNESCO and the Donner Canadian Foundation, Mr. Schafer formed the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. His team of researchers compiled information about noise bylaws, conducted interviews about sounds of the past and tallied car horns honking at street intersections around the world.“It’s quite the task for people to understand that listening can be a very active and inspiring activity,” the composer Hildegard Westerkamp, who was a researcher for the project, said in an interview. “A socially conscious ear, and a culturally conscious ear, and a politically conscious ear — that’s all the legacy that he has given to us.”In 1977, Mr. Schafer published “The Tuning of the World,” a treatise on acoustic ecology, which has influenced generations of scholars and musicians. Drawing on poetry, biology and myth, the book provides a history of the world through its soundscapes while offering instructions in “ear cleaning” and sound walks to reconnect readers with their sonic environments.His immersion in environmental listening changed his compositional interests. In 1979, he composed “Music for Wilderness Lake,” in which 12 trombonists played around the shore of a small lake at dusk and dawn; floating on a raft, Mr. Schafer conducted them with colored flags.Such experiments formed the basis for “Patria,” a cycle of 12 theatrical works composed over 40 years that mingles world mythologies. In one installment, audience “initiates” chant in ancient Egyptian as part of an overnight performance; another of the works unfolds as a carnival.For the cycle’s epilogue, a “co-opera,” several dozen participants have for more than 30 years made a weeklong pilgrimage each August to Ontario’s Haliburton Forest and divided into clans to create collaborative theatrical rituals.Mr. Schafer at the Haliburton Wilderness Reserve in Canada, the site of a performance in 2005. “The world is a huge musical composition that’s going on all the time,” he said, “without a beginning and presumably without an ending.” Steve Payne for The New York TimesRaymond Murray Schafer was born July 18, 1933, in the Lake Huron city of Sarnia, Ontario, to Harold Schafer, an accountant for an oil company, and Belle Anderson Rose. He was born blind in one eye and, following a pair of operations at age 8, was given a glass eye, for which he was bullied in school in Toronto. He took piano lessons starting at 6 but was intent on being a painter.Discouraged by others from pursuing a career in art because of his eye condition and failing out of high school, Mr. Schafer ended up at the University of Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music, where he studied with the composer John Weinzweig and attended classes taught by the media theorist Marshall McLuhan.Already a keen intellectual, he preferred reading Rousseau to practicing piano; he angered one choir director by perusing art books during rehearsal. After several such incidents, he was thrown out of the school (though it later awarded him an honorary doctorate).Intent on studying composition in Vienna, Mr. Schafer worked as a deckhand on an oil tanker to raise travel funds. He roamed Europe — interviewing British composers for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, learning medieval German, attending a folk music conference in Romania — without a clear plan for his musical future.In Italy, Mr. Schafer convinced Ezra Pound to allow him to revive the poet’s little-known opera, “Le Testament de Villon,” which became a major BBC broadcast in 1962. (Pound gave him an envelope containing his final series of “Cantos” and asked him to deliver it to T.S. Eliot in London.)On his return to Toronto, Mr. Schafer in 1962 co-founded the innovative concert series Ten Centuries, which presented new and rarely heard music.As his career picked up, he answered requests for new works with irreverence, composing “Son of Heldenleben,” a parodic riff on the tone poem by Richard Strauss, and “No Longer Than Ten (10) Minutes,” in which an orchestra tunes up, a conductor walks on and offstage, and the players crescendo each time the audience tries to applaud. His 1966 “Requiems for the Party-Girl,” written for the mezzo-soprano Phyllis Mailing, is a darkly virtuosic monodrama in which a woman sings of her impending suicide.Mr. Schafer married Ms. Mailing in 1960, and they divorced in 1971. His second marriage, to Jean Reed, from 1975 to about 1999, also ended in divorce. He married Ms. James in 2011 after a long partnership. Along with her, he is survived by his brother, Paul.Mr. Schafer began his research on soundscapes after joining the faculty at Simon Fraser University in 1965. He also invented a radical approach to teaching, calling it “creative music education.” In a series of influential booklets, he provided exercises to encourage children’s creativity, asking them to “bring an interesting sound to school” or hum along with a tune that they had heard on a street corner.Alongside the mythic theater of “Patria,” Mr. Schafer composed more conventional scores, among them 13 string quartets and “Letters from Mignon,” a neo-Romantic song setting of love letters written to him by Ms. James. His genre-spanning oratorio “Apocalypsis” was first performed with a cast of more than 500 in 1980; it received a triumphant, career-capping revival at the Luminato Festival in Toronto in 2015.In a 2009 short film directed by David New, Mr. Schafer offers philosophical musings on listening amid the snowy soundscape outside his home, a remote farmhouse in the Indian River area in southern Ontario.“The world is a huge musical composition that’s going on all the time, without a beginning and presumably without an ending,” he said.“We are the composers of this huge, miraculous composition that’s going on around us. We can improve it, or we can destroy it. We can add more noises, or we can add more beautiful sounds. It’s all up to us.” More

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      Don Everly, Older Brother in Groundbreaking Rock Duo, Dies at 84

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      The Everly Brothers, Don and Phil, were the most successful rock act to emerge from Nashville in the 1950s, rivaling Elvis Presley for radio airplay. NASHVILLE — Don Everly, the elder of the two Everly Brothers, the groundbreaking duo whose fusion of Appalachian harmonies and a tighter, cleaner version of big-beat rock ’n’ roll made them harbingers of both folk-rock and country-rock, died on Saturday at his home here. He was 84. His death was confirmed by his family, which did not provide the cause. The most successful rock ’n’ roll act to emerge from Nashville in the 1950s, Mr. Everly and his brother, Phil, who died in 2014, once rivaled Elvis Presley and Pat Boone for airplay, placing an average of one single in the pop Top 10 every four months from 1957 to 1961.On the strength of ardent two-minute teenage dramas like “Wake Up Little Susie” and “Cathy’s Clown,” the duo all but single-handedly redefined what, stylistically and thematically, qualified as commercially viable music for the Nashville of their day. In the process they influenced generations of hitmakers, from British Invasion bands like the Beatles and the Hollies to the folk-rock duo Simon and Garfunkel and the Southern California country-rock band the Eagles.In 1975 Linda Ronstadt had a Top 10 pop single with a declamatory version of the Everlys’ 1960 hit “When Will I Be Loved.” Alternative-country forebears like Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris were likewise among the scores of popular musicians inspired by the duo’s enthralling mix of country and rhythm and blues.Paul Simon, in an email interview with The Times the morning after Phil Everly’s death, wrote: “Phil and Don were the most beautiful sounding duo I ever heard. Both voices pristine and soulful. The Everlys were there at the crossroads of country and R&B. They witnessed and were part of the birth of rock ‘n’ roll.”“Bye Bye Love,” with its tight harmonies, bluesy overtones and twanging rockabilly guitar, epitomized the brothers’ crossover approach, spending four weeks at No. 2 on the Billboard pop chart in 1957. It also reached the top spot on the country chart and the fifth spot on the R&B chart.Art Garfunkel and Don Everly performed in Hyde Park, London, in 2004. Mr. Everly recorded several solo albums.Jo Hale/Getty ImagesAs with many of their early recordings, including the No. 1 pop hits “Bird Dog” and “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” “Bye Bye Love” was written by the husband-and-wife team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant and featured backing from Nashville’s finest session musicians.Both brothers played acoustic guitar, with Don being regarded as a rhythmic innovator, but it was their intimate vocal blend that gave their records a distinctive and enduring quality. Don, who had the lower of the two voices, typically sang lead, with Phil singing a slightly higher but uncommonly close harmony part.“It’s almost like we could read each other’s minds when we sang,” Mr. Everly told The Los Angeles Times shortly after his brother’s death.The warmth of their vocals notwithstanding, the brothers’ relationship grew increasingly fraught as their career progressed. Their radio hits became scarcer as the ’60s wore on, and both men struggled with addiction. Don was hospitalized after taking an overdose of sleeping pills while the pair were on tour in Europe in 1962.A decade later, after nearly 20 years on the road together, their longstanding tensions came to a head. Phil smashed his guitar and stormed offstage during a performance at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, Calif., in 1973, leaving Don to finish the set and announce the duo’s breakup.“The Everly Brothers died 10 years ago,” he told the audience, marking the end of an era.Isaac Donald Everly was born on Feb. 1, 1937, in Brownie, Ky., not quite two years before his brother. Their mother, Margaret, and their father, Ike, a former coal miner, performed country music throughout the South and the Midwest before moving the family to Shenandoah, Iowa, in 1944. Shortly after their arrival there, “Little Donnie” and “Baby Boy Phil,” then ages 8 and 6, made their professional debut on a local radio station, KMA.The family went on to perform on radio in Indiana and Tennessee before settling in Nashville in 1955, when the Everly brothers, now in their teens, were hired as songwriters by the publishing company Acuff-Rose. Two years later Wesley Rose of Acuff-Rose would help them secure a recording contract with Cadence Records, an independent label in New York, with which they had their initial success as artists.Phil and Don Everly at the 10th annual Everly Brothers Homecoming concert in Central City, Ky., in 1997. The brothers had a fraught relationship and the act broke up in 1973, but they later reunited.Suzanne Feliciano/Messenger-Inquirer, via Associated PressDon’s first break as a writer came with “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” a Top 20 country hit for Kitty Wells in 1954, as well as with songs recorded by Anita Carter and Justin Tubb. He also wrote, among other Everly Brothers hits, “(’Til) I Kissed You,” which reached the pop Top 10 in 1959, and “So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad),” which did the same the next year. “Cathy’s Clown,” which he wrote with Phil, spent five weeks at the top of the pop chart in 1960.That record was the pair’s first hit for Warner Bros., which signed them after they left Cadence over a dispute about royalty payments in 1960. They moved from Nashville to Southern California the next year.Their subsequent lack of success in the United States — they continued to do well in England — could be attributed to any of a number of factors: the brothers’ simultaneous enlistment in the Marine Corps Reserve in 1961; their lack of access to material from the Bryants after their split with Cadence and Acuff-Rose; the meteoric rise of the Beatles, even though their harmonies on breakthrough hits like “Please Please Me” were modeled directly on those of the Everlys.They nevertheless continued to tour and record, releasing a series of influential albums for Warner Bros., notably “Roots,” a concept album that reckoned with the duo’s legacy and caught them up with the country-rock movement to which they gave shape.Don also released a self-titled album on the Ode label in 1970 and made two more solo albums, “Sunset Towers” on Ode and “Brother Juke Box” on Hickory, after the Everlys split up.In 1983 he and his brother reunited for a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London, a show that was filmed for a documentary. The next year they recorded “EB84,” a studio album produced by the Welsh singer-guitarist Dave Edmunds. That project included the minor hit “On the Wings of a Nightingale,” written for the Everlys by Paul McCartney.The duo released two more studio albums before the end of the decade. They were inducted as members of the inaugural class of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.They also received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 1997 and were enshrined in the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001.In 2003 they toured with Simon and Garfunkel, and in 2010 they appeared on an album by Don’s son, Edan Everly.In addition to his son, survivors include his wife, Adela Garza; three daughters, Venetia, Stacy and Erin; his mother, Margaret Everly, and six grandchildren.In an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2014, Mr. Everly acknowledged his decades of conflict with his brother but recalled their intimate musical communion with pride.“When Phil and I hit that one spot where I call it ‘The Everly Brothers,’” he said, “I don’t know where it is, ’cause it’s not me and it’s not him; it’s the two of us together.” More

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      Tom T. Hall, Country Music’s ‘Storyteller,’ Is Dead at 85

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      Mr. Hall, who wrote hits like “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” helped to imbue country lyrics with newfound depth and insight in the 1960s and ’70s.Tom T. Hall, a country singer and songwriter known for wry, socially conscious hit songs like “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” died on Friday at his home in Franklin, Tenn. He was 85.His death was confirmed by a director at the Williamson Memorial Funeral Home in Franklin.Known to his fans and fellow musicians as “the Storyteller,” Mr. Hall was among a small circle of Nashville songwriters, including Kris Kristofferson, Roger Miller and others, who imbued country lyrics with newfound depth and insight in the 1960s and ’70s. As his nickname suggests, he was a skilled narrator, although he told his stories less through the unfurling of linear plots than through the presentation of one-sided conversations or interior monologues that invited listeners into the lives of his often conflicted protagonists.“Homecoming,” his 1969 Top 10 country hit, portrays a singer who has been away from home so long — and is so wrapped up in his own celebrity — that he hardly knows his own people anymore.“I’m sorry that I couldn’t be there with you all when Mama passed away/I was on the road and when they came and told me it was just too late,” Mr. Hall sings in an unadorned baritone, assuming the role of the young entertainer during an overdue visit to his widowed father. Permitting his listeners to hear only the son’s portion of the dialogue, Mr. Hall refrains from passing judgment on the man, only to have him betray his self-absorption with one halfhearted apology after another.“I didn’t make judgments,” Mr. Hall once said in an interview. “I let the listener make judgments. When I got to the end of the story, if it had a moral, I let the listener find it.”Mr. Hall and his band arriving from Nashville for a sold-out tour of Australia in 1971.Antonin Cermak/Fairfax Media via Getty Images“Harper Valley P.T.A.,” which reached No. 1 in 1968 on both the country and the pop singles charts for the singer Jeannie C. Riley, was part allegory and part small-town morality play. Written amid mounting tensions over civil rights, women’s liberation and the war in Vietnam, the song pits an indomitable young widow against the two-faced authorities at her daughter’s school, unmasking petty hypocrisy and prejudice while at the same time giving voice to the nation’s larger social unrest. (The song gained sufficient traction within the pop mainstream to inspire a movie and a TV series of the same name.)Several of Mr. Hall’s other compositions also became major hits for his fellow artists, including “(Margie’s at) The Lincoln Park Inn,” a Top 10 country single for Bobby Bare in 1969, and “Hello Vietnam,” a No. 1 country hit for Johnnie Wright in 1965. “Hello Vietnam,” which featured backing vocals from Mr. Wright’s wife, Kitty Wells, was later used as the opening theme for the movie “Full Metal Jacket.”Mk/Associated PressAs a performer, Mr. Hall placed 21 singles in the country Top 10, most of them on Mercury Records. The most successful were “I Love,” “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died” and “A Week in a Country Jail.” Each spent two weeks at No. 1 on the country chart; the sentimental “I Love,” Mr. Hall’s only crossover hit as a recording artist, also reached the pop Top 20 in 1973.Backed by lean, uncluttered arrangements typically played by first-call Nashville session musicians, Mr. Hall’s songs were both straightforward and closely observed, forcing listeners to look at the world, and their preconceived notions about it, in a new light. Concerned with everyday lives and struggles, Mr. Hall’s concise, understated tales had the impact of well-wrought short stories. (He also wrote two volumes of short fiction and two novels.)Thomas Hall — he added the middle initial T to his name when he embarked on his career as a performer — was born on May 25, 1936, near Olive Hill, Ky. His father, Virgil, worked in a brick manufacturing plant and was also a preacher. His mother, Della, died when he was an adolescent. When he was 15, Mr. Hall dropped out of school to work in a garment factory to help support the family after his father was injured in a hunting accident.One of eight children, he began playing guitar and writing songs and poetry as a young boy. Floyd Carter, a local musician and raconteur, was an early influence, as well as the man Mr. Hall later memorialized in song as the colorful Clayton Delaney.Mr. Hall, center, performing with Ralph Stanley, left and Don Rigsby in Ashland, Ky., in 2003. Mr. Hall and his wife and songwriting partner, Iris Lawrence Hall, were given a Distinguished Achievement Award by the International Bluegrass Music Association the next year.John Flavell/The Independent, via Associated PressMr. Hall formed the Kentucky Travelers, a bluegrass band that played at local gatherings and on the radio, while doing factory work as a teenager. He joined the Army in 1957; while stationed in Germany, he performed humorous material on the Armed Forces Radio Network, before returning to the United States three years later and enrolling in Roanoke College in Virginia to study literature on the G.I. Bill.He moved to Nashville in 1964 and signed a recording contract with Mercury shortly after the Cajun singer Jimmy C. Newman had a Top 10 country hit with his song “D.J. for a Day.”In Mr. Hall’s career as a recording artist, which spanned more than two decades, he placed a total of 54 singles on the country charts. He also released more than three dozen albums, including two bluegrass projects: “The Magnificent Music Machine,” a 1976 collaboration with Bill Monroe, and “The Storyteller and the Banjoman” (1982), with Earl Scruggs.Mr. Hall joined the cast of the Grand Ole Opry in 1971 and won a Grammy Award for best album notes for the 1972 compilation “Tom T. Hall’s Greatest Hits.” He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1978 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2008. In the early 1980s, he hosted the syndicated television series “Pop! Goes the Country.”His songs continued to be recorded by mainstream country artists well into the 1990s, most notably “Little Bitty,” which reached the top of the country chart for Alan Jackson in 1996.Mr. Hall is survived by his son, Dean; a sister, Betty Kiser; and a brother, Larry. His wife of 46 years, Iris Lawrence Hall, known to most as Miss Dixie, died in 2015.The Halls did not have children of their own (Mr. Hall’s son is from a previous marriage), but Fox Hollow, their 67-acre farm and recording studio south of Nashville, was a haven for aspiring young singers and songwriters.Bluegrass was the couple’s passion during their final years together; for their many contributions to the idiom, including the numerous songs they wrote in that style, they were honored with a Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Bluegrass Music Association in 2004.“He didn’t like taking 35 dogs to a show, and he wouldn’t play golf with me because I was good,” Ms. Hall, a dog lover and animal rights activist, told The New York Times in 2008, explaining why the couple spent much of their retirement writing songs. “But songwriting was something we could do together.” More

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      in Television

      Tony Mendez, David Letterman’s Oddball ‘Cue Card Boy,’ Dies at 76

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      For more than 20 years, he wrote and flipped cards for Mr. Letterman’s “Late Show.” He was also a member of the show’s troupe of quirky onscreen characters.Tony Mendez, who was in charge of cue cards for “Late Show With David Letterman,” as well as one of the show’s breakout oddball characters, until an altercation (over cue cards) with one of the writers got him fired in 2014, died on July 29 at his home in Miami Beach. He was 76.Andrew Corbin, his former companion, confirmed the death but said he did not know the cause.Mr. Mendez’s on-camera exchanges with Mr. Letterman made him a key member of the show’s troupe of non-stars, among them the comedian’s mother, Dorothy Mengering; the stage manager Biff Henderson; and Mujibur and Sirajul, salesmen at a souvenir shop near the Ed Sullivan Theater, where the show was taped.Mr. Mendez started to print (in big black letters) and flip cue cards for Mr. Letterman periodically on his NBC show “Late Night With David Letterman” in 1990. He took over full time when Mr. Letterman moved to CBS in 1993. Nicknamed “Cue Card Boy” by Mr. Letterman, Mr. Mendez went on to turn the oversized cards for the comedian’s monologue and other scripted bits for another 21 years.“The flipping of the cards is very important,” Mr. Mendez told The New Yorker in 2001. “If you flip too fast, they can’t see the last line. If you’re too slow, you slow them down.”Mr. Mendez was also was the star of a series of bizarre online videos, “The Tony Mendez Show,” posted on the show’s website for several years. In 2007, a billboard promoting the Mendez show was unveiled near the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway, where Mr. Letterman taped his program. But Mr. Mendez’s time at “Late Show” ended in October 2014, when he assaulted one of the writers, Bill Scheft. The backstage incident made the front page of The New York Post with the headline “HATE SHOW: Backstage Battle Erupts at Letterman.”The two men had argued before the taping of the Oct. 8 show over changes to the cue cards. “He tells me what to do and I have to say, ‘I know what I’m doing,’” Mr. Mendez told The Post.The next day, The Post reported, Mr. Mendez was still angry. He grabbed Mr. Scheft’s shirt and shook him, leading to his firing (six months after Mr. Letterman announced that he would be retiring from the show in 2015).“It was an unfortunate way to end his time at the show, and a sad way to end a 22-year friendship,” Mr. Scheft said in an email.Antonio Emilio Mendez Jr. was born in Havana on March 27, 1945, and left Cuba by airplane in 1961 with his father, who worked in the law department of the University of Havana, and his mother, Josefina..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1gp0zvr{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;margin-bottom:25px;}No immediate family members survive.In Los Angeles, where Mr. Mendez lived with his family, his mother, who taught Spanish at U.C.L.A., met someone who knew Barney McNulty, who is credited with being the first person in television to use cue cards. Mr. McNulty hired Mr. Mendez to turn cards for soap operas, sitcoms like “The Lucy Show” and the variety show “The Hollywood Palace.”In his early 20s, he detoured into dancing. His sister, Josefina, was a prima ballerina with the Cuban National Ballet, and he grew up appreciating her art. He studied with the Houston Ballet, was an apprentice with the Harkness Ballet and received a scholarship from American Ballet Theater.“And in those days, if you could point your toes, they would give you a scholarship,” he said in an interview with Time Out New York magazine in 2008.He danced on Broadway in the 1970s and ’80s, in “Pippin,” “Irene,” “Dancin’” and “King of Hearts.” He also danced in tours of “Applause” and “Evita.”In 1984, nearing 40, he returned to flipping cards, this time for “Saturday Night Live,” where he stayed for nine years.“It was the most stressful job I ever had,” he told The New Yorker. “The hosts were totally freaked out. They would all try to memorize, and I would tell them that the script was going to be changing until the last minute, so they had to follow me.” Then, in 1993, Mr. Mendez succeeded his companion, Marty Zone, who had been diagnosed with H.I.V. five years earlier, as Mr. Letterman’s cue card man.Mr. Mendez’s relationship with Mr. Letterman was, he once recalled, unusually strong — until he was fired.“Nobody talks to him the way I do and he welcomes it because everybody is so afraid of him,” Mr. Mendez told Time Out. “And he knows he’ll get the truth from me.” More

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      in Movies

      Joe Galloway, Decorated Vietnam War Correspondent, Dies at 79

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      He chronicled the first major battle of the war in “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young” and raised questions about the invasion of Iraq.Joe Galloway, a war correspondent whose wrenching account of the first major battle of the Vietnam War was the basis for the book “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young,” which became a best seller and the basis of a hit movie, died on Wednesday in Concord, N.C. He was 79.His wife, Dr. Grace Liem, said the cause was complications of a heart attack.Mr. Galloway started in journalism at 17 and worked for 22 years as a war correspondent and bureau chief for United Press International. He was the only civilian awarded a medal of valor by the Army for combat action in the Vietnam War.He later wrote for U.S. News & World Report and for the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain. He played a vital role in the skeptical reporting by the chain’s Washington bureau about the George W. Bush administration’s claims that Iraq had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction, claims the administration used to justify the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.“He hates war, and he loves soldiers,” Lewis Lord, a former colleague at U.S. News, told the Military Writers and Editors Association when it honored Mr. Galloway in 2006 on his return to his home in Texas from his reporting base in Washington.Mr. Galloway and Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore collaborated on a wrenching account of the first major battle in Vietnam, published in 1992.In the foreword to “We Are Soldiers Still,” a sequel to “We Were Soldiers,” General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who led allied forces during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, called Mr. Galloway “the finest combat correspondent of our generation — a soldier’s reporter and a soldier’s friend.”Mr. Galloway, who carried a weapon while covering the Vietnam War as a U.P.I. correspondent, was embedded with American troops during the four-day battle of Ia Drang, in the jungle of the Central Highlands, which began a day after his 24th birthday in 1965. He was awarded a Bronze Star Medal with the “V” device, denoting heroism, for rescuing wounded soldiers under fire during the engagement.Both sides claimed victory, with the United States convinced it could win a war of attrition and North Vietnam confident it could withstand whatever technological advantage the Americans wielded over Vietnamese guerrillas.The U.S. troops were commanded by Harold G. Moore, then a lieutenant colonel and later a lieutenant general, with whom Mr. Galloway would collaborate on “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young.” The book was published in 1992 and adapted 10 years later into the Randall Wallace film “We Were Soldiers,” starring Mel Gibson, in which Barry Pepper played Mr. Galloway.Nicholas Proffitt wrote in The New York Times Book Review that “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young” was “a car crash of a book; you are horrified by what you’re seeing, but you can’t take your eyes off it.”Mr. Galloway and Lieutenant General Moore published “We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam” in 2008.Articles by Mr. Galloway reconstructing the battle, which became the basis of the first book, won a National Magazine Award for U.S. News & World Report in 1991.As a result of Mr. Galloway’s critical coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld summoned him to a meeting with high-ranking officers and accused him of relying on sources who were retired and out of the loop. As John Walcott, a colleague of his at U.S. News, Knight Ridder and McClatchy (which bought Knight Ridder), recalled, Mr. Galloway startled the group by declaring that some of his sources “might even be in this room.”He later admitted that he only said that to rattle the assembled military brass, and that “it was fun watching ’em sweat.” Mr. Galloway was an author, along with other U.S. News staff members, of “Triumph Without Victory: The Unreported History of the Persian Gulf War” (1992). His coverage of the later Persian Gulf conflict was portrayed in Rob Reiner’s film “Shock and Awe” (2017), in which Tommy Lee Jones played Mr. Galloway.In the 2002 movie “We Were Soldiers Once,” based on their book, Barry Pepper, left, played Mr. Galloway and Mel Gibson played General Moore, who was a lieutenant colonel during the Vietnam War.Stephen Vaughan/Paramount PicturesJoseph Lee Galloway Jr. was born on Nov. 13, 1941, in Refugio, Texas, to Joseph Galloway Sr. and Marian (Dewvell) Galloway. His father worked for Humble Oil.Less than a month after he was born, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Four of his mother’s brothers went to war; so did his father and five of his brothers.“I did not meet my father until the end of 1945, when he came home from the service,” Mr. Galloway said in an interview seen on C-SPAN. “My earliest memories,” he added, “are of living in houses full of frightened women looking out the window for the telegraph boy.” He was so affected by the war, he said, that he decided to become a war correspondent.He was hired by The Advocate in Victoria, Texas, when he was 17, joined U.P.I. at 19 and was bureau chief or regional manger in Tokyo, Jakarta, New Delhi, Singapore, Moscow, Los Angeles and Vietnam, where he served four stints.In addition to Dr. Liem, whom he married in 2012, he is survived by two sons, Joshua and Lee, from his first marriage, to Theresa Magdalene Null, who died in 1996. (His second marriage, to Karen Metsker, ended in divorce.) He is also survived by a stepdaughter, Li Mei Gilfillan; three grandchildren; and two step-grandchildren. He lived in Concord.Mr. Galloway acknowledged that when he arrived in Vietnam, most of what he knew about war he had learned from John Wayne movies, but he understood the need for accuracy in a combat zone. “You really don’t want to screw up a story about men who are armed and dangerous and who you will likely see again,” he said in an interview with historynet.com.He was also torn about reporting his doubts about American prospects for an honorable exit strategy.“I thought, ‘This war we can’t win, but I’m not going to say that, because I don’t want to hurt my friends, the soldiers who are fighting this war.’” he recalled. “You know the one thing about soldiers is that if they are in combat and they are losing their friends and buddies, you can’t tell them that they died for nothing. You can’t say that; you wound them, you hurt them, you damage them. And that I could not do.”Still, he said, he wished he could have “written a story so powerful about that battle” that it would have driven President Lyndon B. Johnson to withdraw.Mr. Lord, his former colleague, described Mr. Galloway as “a most unlikely antiwar activist — a big, blunt Texan, proud to bear arms, as politically incorrect as he could be, full of unprintable epithets and anecdotes.” But, he added, Mr. Galloway “had a heart as big as his home state, a superb intellect that shone mischievously through smiling Irish eyes, and an openness that made it possible for him to conclude that it was an unpardonable sin to send young Americans to fight meaningless wars.”Mr. Galloway’s view of war came through when he responded to criticism from the Pentagon after he profiled a retired Marine general who had critiqued Mr. Rumsfeld’s conduct of the Iraq war.In an email exchange, Mr. Rumsfeld’s spokesman maintained, “We’re all hard at it, trying to do what’s best for the country.” So was he, Mr. Galloway replied, during four decades of covering America’s valiant warriors.“Someone once asked me if I had learned anything from going to war so many times,” Mr. Galloway told the Pentagon spokesman. “My reply, ‘Yes, I learned how to cry.’” More

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      Sonny Chiba, Japanese Star With a ‘Kill Bill’ Connection, Dies at 82

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      His martial arts movies appalled some with their extreme violence, but the director Quentin Tarantino was a fan and gave him a late-career boost.Sonny Chiba, a Japanese action star who was known for ultraviolent martial arts movies and then, in 2003, was elevated to a whole new level of cinematic trendiness when one of his superfans, the director Quentin Tarantino, gave him a role in “Kill Bill: Vol. 1,” died on Wednesday. He was 82.His manager and friend, Timothy Beal, said the cause was Covid-19. Oricon, the Japanese news service, said he died at a hospital in Kimitsu, Japan.Mr. Chiba, who was trained in karate and other martial arts, began turning up on Japanese television in his early 20s. He was soon making movies as well, amassing more than 50 TV and film credits in Japan before the end of the 1960s. In the ’70s, with martial arts movies enjoying broad popularity thanks to the American-born Chinese star Bruce Lee, Mr. Chiba became widely known in Japan and beyond, especially because of “The Street Fighter” (1974) and its sequels.“The Street Fighter,” in which his character battled gangsters, was so violent that when it was released in the United States it was said to have been the first movie given an X rating for violence alone.“If nothing else,” A.H. Weiler wrote in a brief review in The New York Times in 1975, when the movie played in New York, “this Japanese-made, English-dubbed import illustrates that its inane violence deserves the X rating with which it has been labeled.” In 1996, when a DVD of the film was released, The Los Angeles Times said it was being “presented complete and uncut in all its eye-gouging, testicle-ripping, skull-pounding glory.”“The Street Fighter” and other Chiba movies made an impression on Mr. Tarantino. In the homage-filled “Kill Bill, Vol. 1,” he cast Mr. Chiba as the sword maker Hattori Hanzo, who provides Uma Thurman’s vengeful character with her weapon. A.O. Scott, reviewing the movie in The New York Times, got the reference but wasn’t enamored of it.“Check it out, Mr. Tarantino seems to be saying, Sonny Chiba’s in my movie,” he wrote. “How cool is that? Way too cool? Not cool enough? As I said, it depends. The movie-geek in-jokes are sometimes amusing and sometimes annoying.”In any case, Mr. Tarantino brought Mr. Chiba back the next year for “Kill Bill: Vol. 2,” and he enjoyed a late-career resurgence.He was a Yakuza boss in “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift” in 2006 and a sushi chef in the noir thriller “Sushi Girl” in 2012, among other roles. Mr. Beal said that before the pandemic, Mr. Chiba had been lined up for a role in a zombie movie called “Outbreak Z.”Mr. Chiba, who also acted under the name Shinichi Chiba, was born Sadaho Maeda on Jan. 23, 1939, in Fukuoka, Japan. His acting career received a boost when he was signed by Japan’s Toei studio in the early 1960s.Mr. Chiba made numerous movies, mostly samurai dramas, with the Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku, who gave him some of his earliest roles. He came to distance himself from the violence-drenched “Street Fighter” films — “That sort of performance is not the performance I am particularly proud of as an actor,” he told The Times in 2003 — but he looked more kindly on his work with Mr. Fukasaku.“Mr. Fukasaku was very sensitive to violence,” Mr. Chiba said. “His constant question was, ‘What is violence? What is authority? What is power?’ Ultimately, he denied violence, and always sided with the weak.”Martial arts, Mr. Chiba said, was not that different from acting.“Martial arts is part of the drama — it’s performance,” he said, “It’s a way of expressing emotions.”Information on Mr. Chiba’s survivors was not immediately available. More

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      Peter Rehberg, a Force in Underground Music, Dies at 53

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      He released his own experiments with sound under the name Pita, and also ran the influential label Editions Mego.It was 1997, and Peter Rehberg and two collaborators had booked a tour of jazz and rock clubs, places that had probably seen their share of experimentation. The people who came to the shows, though, weren’t prepared for what the trio unveiled.“There were some very interesting, sort of disturbed looks on their faces, because we set up with just three laptops in a row and just jammed out,” Mr. Rehberg recalled on a 2019 episode of the podcast “Noisextra.” “And everyone is going: ‘You can’t do that. That’s not music.’ And we’re going: ‘Yeah, fair enough; that’s not music. Did we say it was music?’”Synthesizers and other bedrocks of electronic music had been around forever, but at the time not many people viewed the laptop as a performance instrument.“We never thought of it as being a radical statement,” Mr. Rehberg said. “It was just like, ‘Oh, yeah; let’s do it this way.’”That was just one moment in Mr. Rehberg’s decades-long exploration of sound, both as an artist who often recorded under the name Pita and as head of Editions Mego, a label he founded after being a central part of an earlier label, Mego. He was an important figure in the world of experimental music, though his work — some early recordings were made from sounds emitted by a refrigerator — often defied even that label.Mr. Rehberg died on July 22 in Berlin. He was 53.His former partner, Isabelle Piechaczyk, said the cause was a heart attack.In addition to his solo work, Mr. Rehberg collaborated constantly, both with other sound experimentalists and with choreographers and makers of theater. And his label provided a platform for a wide range of artists who in the digital age have been pushing sound composition in all sorts of directions.“I followed Pita’s work as a musician and label owner for more than three decades, and he always defied expectations,” Peter Margasak, a music journalist and programmer, said by email. “He was the first person who made the laptop seem like a genuine tool for musical improvisation for me, manipulating a computer in real time with precision and voluminous possibility. His stewardship of Editions Mego revealed his eternal curiosity and openness, evolving aesthetically and geographically without surrendering an identity rooted in experimentation and innovation.”Mr. Rehberg was born on June 29, 1968, in London to Alexander and Barbara (Allen) Rehberg. As a youth he accumulated a vast record collection and was interested in new sounds of all sorts. In a tribute on the music and cultural website The Quietus, John Eden, who was a year behind him at Verulam, a secondary school for boys, and became a friend, recalled a moment when they both worked at a Tesco grocery.He drew a scolding, Mr. Eden wrote, “when it emerged that he had spent about an hour dropping Marmite jars on the concrete floor of the storeroom.”“He liked how they sounded,” Mr. Eden explained.Mr. Rehberg performing as part of the duo KTL, with Stephen O’Malley, at the Knockdown Center in Queens in 2013.Brian Harkin for The New York TimesBy his early 20s he was living in Vienna, working as a D.J. and immersed in the experimental scene there. Ramon Bauer, Andreas Pieper and Peter Meininger had created the Mego label, and its first release, in 1995, was “Fridge Trax,” a Bauer/Pieper/Rehberg collaboration built on refrigerator noise. In 1996 Mego issued Pita’s first release, “Seven Tons for Free.”Mego’s founders made him part of the label’s management team at a vibrant time for the label, and for experimentalism.“Electronic music is being flocked to by young composers who are doing to it something like what punk bands did to rock ’n’ roll in the mid-70s,” Ben Ratliff wrote in The New York Times in 2000, when Mr. Rehberg performed at the Beer and Sausage Festival in Brooklyn, “and Mego is the equivalent of an aesthetic-structuring punk label like Stiff,” the label that released early recordings by Elvis Costello, Devo and others.Mr. Rehberg continued to make solo recordings as Pita, releasing three more albums in the late 1990s and early 2000s, “Get Out,” “Get Down” and “Get Off.” Writing in The Chicago Reader in 2003, Mr. Margasak, who now lives in Berlin, described “Get Down” this way:“Sound files collide, flow and overlap, as disfigured melodic shapes, tangled-up beats and penetrating tones explode in a furious barrage. The music is often amorphous, but both the changes the synthetic patterns undergo and the order in which the sounds follow one another create some carefully considered surprises.”Mego went out of business in 2005, but Mr. Rehberg revived it soon after as Editions Mego. He went on to release work by scores of artists, sometimes forming sublabels devoted to particular strains or interests.“A Mego record will necessarily be adventurous,” Ben Beaumont-Thomas wrote in The Guardian in 2015, “whether it’s showcasing the glitch aesthetic of Fennesz, droning noise from Stephen O’Malley and others, or outsider guitar work from Bill Orcutt or Jim O’Rourke.”Mr. Rehberg, who for the past year had lived in both Berlin and Vienna, is survived by his father; a brother, Michael; his partner, Laura Siegmund; and a daughter from his relationship with Ms. Piechaczyk, Natasha Rehberg. More

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      Chucky Thompson, Hitmaking Producer, Is Dead at 53

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      He brought a range of musical influences to bear on the tracks he helped create for Mary J. Blige, the Notorious B.I.G. and many others.“My mind is always on ‘Record,’” the producer Chucky Thompson once told an interviewer, explaining how he was able to bring such a wide range of musical influences to the hits he helped create for Mary J. Blige, the Notorious B.I.G., Nas and other stars.For any particular track, he might draw on the soul records his parents used to play, or his time as a conga player in Chuck Brown’s go-go band, or some other style in his mental archive, as he sought to realize the vision the performer was after, or perhaps take him or her in a whole different direction.Mr. Thompson helped forge the hip-hop and R&B sound of the 1990s while in his mid-20s. He showed his versatility with his work on Ms. Blige’s second album, “My Life,” and the Notorious B.I.G.’s debut, “Ready to Die,” both released in 1994. The next year he was a producer on almost all the tracks on Faith Evans’s debut, “Faith,” another hit.In this period he was working for Bad Boy Entertainment, the influential label Sean “Diddy” Combs founded in 1993, as part of the producing team known as the Hitmen. But he continued to produce for a range of artists after the Hitmen dissolved later in the 1990s. If he — unlike some other producers in those years — defied categorization, that was deliberate.“In my brain, as a producer, I never wanted a sound,” he said in a 2013 video interview with Rahaman Kilpatrick. “That’s why you hear me on so many different records.”Mr. Thompson died on Aug. 9 in a hospital in the Los Angeles area. He was 53.His publicist, Tamar Juda, said the cause was Covid-19.Mr. Thompson was different from many of his contemporaries in that he was a multi-instrumentalist, often contributing guitar, piano, trombone or other flourishes to the tracks he produced. To get a particular effect for the 2002 Nas track “One Mic,” he flipped a guitar over and banged on the back of it.“He’s a true musician and doesn’t like to program heavily — just like me,” Mr. Combs told Billboard in 1995, when that publication included Mr. Thompson in an article on “the next crop of hotshot producers.” “Chucky has so many melodies in his head and produces from the heart.”Carl Edward Thompson Jr. was born on July 12, 1968, in Washington to Carl and Charlotte Thompson. In the 2013 interview, he said that his mother recognized his innate musical ability early.“She used to sit me in the kitchen and — you know how kids would just be banging and making noise? I was actually on beat with it,” he said. “She knew from there that something was different.”At 16 he was touring with Mr. Brown and his band, the Soul Searchers, playing the funk variant known as go-go, which was popular in and around Washington. It was a time when traditional live performances by bands were losing ground to D.J.s, who could keep the music constant rather than breaking between songs and thus keep people on the dance floor. Mr. Brown had his young conga player try to compensate.“He decided, ‘I’ll put a percussion break in between songs,’” Mr. Thompson told Rolling Stone in June. “So we would finish a song, then I’d do a percussion break, and I’d do a call and response — ask the crowd, ‘Y’all tired yet?’”The year 1994 was a big one for Mr. Thompson. Among the albums he worked on that year was the Notorious B.I.G.’s debut, “Ready to Die.”Bad Boy AristaThat same year, he co-produced much of Mary J. Blige’s “My Life,” the Grammy-nominated follow-up to her successful debut, “What’s the 4-1-1?,” with Ms. Blige and Sean Combs.Uptown RecordsBy the early 1990s he was in New York trying to market himself as a producer, and Mr. Combs and Ms. Blige were looking for material for the follow-up to her successful first album, “What’s the 4-1-1?” (1992).“She picked my song out of a ton of tracks from new and previous producers,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview with the website StupidDope.com in June. “I was truly honored. That track was ‘Be With You,’ and at that time it was very different for her and her sound. I felt at that moment we were onto something that would be special.”He ended up co-producing much of the album with Ms. Blige and Mr. Combs. Ms. Blige had a tough hip-hop image that defied female-singer stereotypes, and some people didn’t care for it. Mr. Thompson took that reaction into account as he helped her create the songs for her second album.“I didn’t like people throwing stones at something they didn’t understand,” he told Rolling Stone. “So I was like, on this record, people are gonna know you’re a singer. You’re the real deal.”“My Life,” full of confessional songs exploring Ms. Blige’s personal struggles, received a Grammy nomination for best R&B album and helped establish her as a star. In June, Amazon Prime unveiled a documentary about her career and the record, “Mary J. Blige’s My Life.”Over the years Mr. Thompson also produced for Usher, Raheem DeVaughn, Total and many others. He produced some of the final tracks for his early mentor, Mr. Brown, who died in 2012 at 75.Mr. Thompson’s survivors include five children, Ashley, Emille, Myles, Quincey and Trey Thompson. More