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      Joel Chadabe, Explorer of Electronic Music’s Frontier, Dies at 82

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      As both a composer and an advocate, Mr. Chadabe devoted himself to what one music critic called the “marriage between humans and their computers.”Joel Chadabe, a composer who helped pioneer electronic music in the 1960s, later developing compositional software programs and founding the Electronic Music Foundation, an advocacy organization for electronic music, died on May 2 at his home in Albany, N.Y. He was 82.His wife, Françoise Chadabe, said the cause was ampullary cancer, a rare form similar to pancreatic cancer.In 1965, when Mr. Chadabe was 27 and computer music was in its nascence, he was asked by the State University of New York at Albany to run its electronic music studio. He had recently graduated from Yale’s music school, and his sensibilities lay with jazz and opera, but he needed a job, so he accepted. From his perch at the university, Mr. Chadabe began to explore the wonders of making music with machines.“I took to it, I think, because for me it was the frontier,” he said in a 2013 interview with the University of Minnesota. “It was the new frontier of music, and I saw unlimited possibilities.”Early on, Mr. Chadabe (pronounced CHA-da-bee) commissioned Bob Moog, who had just started developing a commercial synthesizer, to build one for the studio. He could initially afford only part of the synthesizer (which he powered with a car battery), but after securing enough funding he asked Mr. Moog to create what he called a “super synthesizer.” The result, known as CEMS (Coordinated Electronic Music Studio), was a system that filled an entire room at the university and offered a vast range of sonic capabilities. Students were soon lining up to experiment with it.Before long, Mr. Chadabe found himself mesmerized by the machine as well. At night, he would wait for the campus to clear out so that he could sequester himself with the synthesizer, twisting its knobs to generate soundscapes. He went on to compose electronic music prolifically and to release several experimental albums, including “After Some Songs” (1995), which featured his abstractions of jazz standards, and “Many Times …” (2004).Mr. Chadabe hosted concerts at the university, to which he invited avant-garde composers like Alvin Lucier and Julius Eastman to perform works. In 1972, John Cage visited the studio to tape “Bird Cage,” a sound collage that featured shrill chirps that he had recorded in aviaries. Mr. Chadabe also acquired an early Synclavier for the school, a digital synthesizer that was later used by artists like Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode and Genesis.Reviewing a 1983 concert performance in The New York Times, Bernard Holland wrote, “Mr. Chadabe seemed everywhere to be asking gentle, unassertive questions about who will lead and who will follow in this new marriage between humans and their computers, about how fully and how well people will cope with the potential riches and intimidating complexities of this newest addition to our family of musical instruments.”In the 1980s, Mr. Chadabe began developing compositional software programs that musicians could use to make electronic music at home. He founded a company called Intelligent Music, which released programs like M, Jam Factory and UpBeat, which the band New Order used in recording its 1989 album, “Technique.”In 1994, he formed the Electronic Music Foundation, a nonprofit organization that sought to increase public awareness of electronic music. The group presented concerts and festivals; had a record label that released work by composers including Cage, Laurie Spiegel and Iannis Xenakis; and maintained an online CD store.“A lot of important people in the electronic scene weren’t exactly high profile in terms of the public, but Joel was incredibly interconnected with the community, and he reached a lot of people with the Electronic Music Foundation,” said Kyle Gann, who was the longtime new-music critic for The Village Voice. “He had a tremendous underground influence.”Mr. Chadabe in 1993, a year before he formed the Electronic Music Foundation, a nonprofit organization that sought to increase public awareness of computerized music.Seth McBrideAs artists like Daft Punk and the Chemical Brothers enjoyed mainstream success in the 1990s, Mr. Chadabe felt it was vital to document electronic music’s history while its pioneers were still alive. He published the book “Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music,” which featured more than 150 interviews with figures like Mr. Moog, the composers Milton Babbitt, Pierre Henry and Éliane Radigue, and Ikutaro Kakehashi, the founder of the Roland Corporation and an architect of MIDI. (Inevitably, Mr. Chadabe’s own contributions were also included.)While he interviewed his subjects, Mr. Chadabe tried to divine what precisely it was that had compelled them all to make music with machines.“In writing the book I asked people, ‘Why do you use electronics?’” he recalled in his University of Minnesota interview. “One of the answers that I received mostly was. ‘To make any sound.’”Joel Avon Chadabe was born on Dec. 12, 1938, in the Bronx and grew up in the Throgs Neck neighborhood. His father, Solon, was a lawyer. His mother, Sylvia (Cohen) Chadabe, was a homemaker.Joel attended the private Bentley School in Manhattan and studied classical piano. His parents hoped that he would become a lawyer, but instead he studied music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, graduating in 1959. At Yale, he studied with the composer Elliott Carter, and after he acquired a master’s in 1962, he continued his studies with Mr. Carter in Italy. He was in Rome when he heard about an unusual job opening at SUNY Albany.In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, Benjamin, and a sister, Susan Strzemien.As he grew older, Mr. Chadabe became a passionate environmentalist, and in 2006 he started the Ear to the Earth music festival, which featured performances of electronic music themed around nature. At the festival in New York that year, one composition included the rustling of pine beetles, and another utilized a soundscape of the city’s pigeons.Mr. Chadabe retired from SUNY Albany in the late 1990s but continued to teach electronic music courses at the Manhattan School of Music, New York University and Bennington College, where he had been teaching as an adjunct since the 1970s.Well into his 70s, Mr. Chadabe remained tantalized by the possibilities of electronic music, whose potential he felt was only just being understood.“Electronics has opened up an amazing world of sound, and more than just an amazing world of sound, an amazing way to understand sound,” he said in 2013. “We are really just beginning to get a good handle on how sound works and how we can transform it.” More

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      Mark York, Actor on ‘The Office,’ Dies at 55

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      The Ohio native, who advocated greater visibility onscreen for people with disabilities, appeared in early seasons of the NBC sitcom as Billy Merchant.Mark York, the actor best known for playing Billy Merchant on the NBC sitcom “The Office,” died last week in Dayton, Ohio. He was 55.His death was confirmed by the Montgomery County coroner’s office, which said on Tuesday that he had died in a hospital of natural causes. Mr. York’s family said in an obituary that he had died after “a brief and unexpected illness.”Mr. York appeared in four episodes of “The Office” from 2006 to 2009 as the property manager of the office park where Dunder Mifflin, the fictional paper company at the center of the series, made its home. His character, Billy Merchant, who like Mr. York was a paraplegic, was introduced in the second season when Michael Scott, the bumbling branch manager played by Steve Carell, brought him to the office for a cringe-inducing meeting on disability awareness.In the scene, Mr. York’s character gamely answers Michael’s clueless questions about his wheelchair use. But when Michael tries to equate it with burning his foot on a George Foreman grill, Billy interrupts: “You know what, Michael? Let me stop you right there … and leave.”“The letters I get about the character are great,” Mr. York told People magazine in 2010, saying one fan had written that he “shed light on how crazy office politics can be” for workers with disabilities who are just trying to do their jobs.Making wheelchair users more visible onscreen was only one of Mr. York’s goals. He also supported efforts to find a cure for spinal cord injuries, serving as the Southern California representative for SCI Research Advancement, a nonprofit foundation that works to expedite research.“He would constantly come up with ideas for us, and ultimately he came up with an idea to contact the White House,” Will Ambler, the founder of the group, said in an interview.In January 2010, Mr. York, Mr. Ambler and one of the foundation’s board members met in Washington with Kareem Dale, President Barack Obama’s special assistant for disability policy, and other government officials. Mr. York, an avid traveler, drove there from Ohio in his car, a red Dodge Magnum with hand controls that he called Roxanne and had more than 300,000 miles on it.For wheelchair users, driving is a way of regaining freedom, and Mr. York “just took it to the highest level he could,” Mr. Ambler said, adding, “He was liberated, he was free and he could go anywhere he wanted.”Although they didn’t get the changes that they proposed, the group has pressed on and Mr. York had recently suggested approaching the White House again.“He was working on it until the very end,” Mr. Ambler said.Cast members from “The Office” shared their condolences on Twitter.“He was a terrific human, a positive force and a dynamic actor,” said Rainn Wilson, who played Dwight Schrute.Marcus A. York was born on Nov. 27, 1965, in Arcanum, Ohio, and graduated from Arcanum High School. In 1988, a car accident left him disabled. The accident gave him “a new lease on life,” according to a biography on his website, and he graduated from Anderson University in Indiana with majors in psychology, sociology and social work. While he was in college, friends encouraged Mr. York to pursue modeling and acting, and he later moved to California.In addition to television commercials, Mr. York appeared in the shows “8 Simple Rules” and “CSI: NY.” He also had an uncredited role in the 2001 film “A.I. Artificial Intelligence.”According to his obituary, he had been working in recent years as an inventor and had obtained two patents.Mr. York is survived by his parents, Glenn and Becky York, and three brothers, Brian, Jeff and David. More

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      Roger Hawkins, Drummer Heard on Numerous Hits, Is Dead at 75

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      An innately soulful musician, he recorded with Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and many others and was an architect of what became known as the Muscle Shoals sound.Roger Hawkins in performance in 1973. He was member of the band Traffic at the time, but he was best known as a studio musician.Brian Cooke/RedfernsRoger Hawkins, who played drums on numerous pop and soul hits of the 1960s and ’70s and was among the architects of the funky sound that became identified with Muscle Shoals, Ala., died on Thursday at his home in Sheffield, Ala. He was 75.His death was confirmed by his friend and frequent musical collaborator David Hood, who said Mr. Hawkins had been suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other conditions.An innately soulful musician, Mr. Hawkins initially distinguished himself in the mid-’60s as a member of the house band at the producer Rick Hall’s FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala. (The initials stand for Florence Alabama Music Enterprises.) His colleagues were the keyboardist Barry Beckett, the guitarist Jimmy Johnson and Mr. Hood, who played bass. Mr. Hood is the last surviving member of that rhythm section.Mr. Hawkins’s less-is-more approach to drumming at FAME — often little more than a cymbal and a snare — can be heard on Percy Sledge’s gospel-steeped “When a Man Loves a Woman,” a No. 1 pop single in 1966. He was also a driving force behind Aretha Franklin’s imperious “Respect,” a No. 1 pop hit the next year, as well as her Top 10 singles “Chain of Fools” (1967) and “Think” (1968).Mr. Hawkins was a driving force behind some of Aretha Franklin’s biggest hits. Seen here with Ms. Franklin in a New York studio in 1968 are, from left, the producer Arif Mardin, the guitarist Tommy Cogbill, Mr. Hawkins, the bassist Jerry Jemmott, the keyboardist Spooner Oldham, the guitarist Jimmy Johnson and the producer and arranger Tom Dowd.The Estate of David Gahr/Getty ImagesRemarkably, none of the four members of the FAME rhythm section could read music. They extemporized their parts in response to what was happening in the studio.“Nobody really suggested anything to play; we would interpret it,” Mr. Hawkins said in a 2017 interview with Modern Drummer magazine. “Now that I look back at what we did, in addition to being musicians, we were really arrangers as well. It was up to us to come up with the part.”In his 2015 memoir, “The Man From Muscle Shoals: My Journey From Shame to FAME,” Mr. Hall attributed the transformation of the middle section of Wilson Pickett’s “Land of 1000 Dances,” a Top 10 hit recorded at FAME in 1966, to the genius of Mr. Hawkins.“All the musicians stopped playing except Roger Hawkins, who continued to play with every ounce of strength he had in his body,” Mr. Hall recalled. “I poured the echo into the drums and Pickett started screaming, ‘Nah, nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah, nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah.’”From left, Mr. Johnson, Wilson Pickett, Mr. Oldham, Mr. Hawkins and Junior Lowe at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala., in 1966.FAME StudiosMr. Hawkins said that a principal influence on his playing was Al Jackson Jr., the drummer with Booker T. & the MGs, the rhythm section at Stax Records. “Through listening to Al Jackson is how I learned to build a drum part in a soul ballad,” he said in a 2019 interview with Alabama magazine.In 1969 Mr. Hawkins and the other members of the FAME rhythm section parted ways with Mr. Hall over a financial dispute. They soon opened their own studio, Muscle Shoals Sound, in a former coffin warehouse in nearby Sheffield.Renaming themselves the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, the four men appeared on many other hits over the next decade, including the Staple Singers’ chart-topping pop-gospel single “I’ll Take You There,” a 1972 recording galvanized by Mr. Hawkins’s skittering Caribbean-style drum figure. They also appeared, along with the gospel quartet the Dixie Hummingbirds, on Paul Simon’s “Loves Me Like a Rock,” a Top 10 single in 1973.Mr. Hawkins and Mr. Hood worked briefly with the British rock band Traffic as well; they are on the band’s 1973 album, “Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory.”Mr. Hawkins and his colleagues became known as the Swampers after the producer Denny Cordell heard the pianist Leon Russell commend them for their “funky, soulful Southern swamp sound.” The Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd mentioned them, by that name, in their 1974 pop hit “Sweet Home Alabama.”Mr. Hawkins also worked as a producer, often in tandem with Mr. Beckett, on records like “Starting All Over Again,” a Top 20 pop hit for the R&B duo Mel and Tim in 1972. The entire rhythm section produced (with Mr. Seger) and played on Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band’s “Old Time Rock & Roll,” a Top 40 hit perennially cited as among the most played jukebox records of all time.Roger Gail Hawkins was born on Oct. 16, 1945, in Mishawaka, Ind., but was raised in Greenhill, Ala. He was the only child of John Hawkins, who managed a shoe store there, and Merta Rose Haddock Hawkins, who worked in a nearby knitting mill.Roger became enamored of rhythm while attending services at a local Pentecostal church as a youth. His father bought him his first drum kit when he was 13.As an adolescent, he began spending time at FAME, then located above a drugstore in Muscle Shoals, before he joined the Del Rays, a local band, led by Mr. Johnson, that played fraternity parties and other dances. By 1966 he was doing session work at FAME.Early in his career Mr. Hawkins (top right with Mr. Oldham) played in the band Dan Penn and the Pallbearers, along with, from left, Mr. Lowe, Mr. Penn and Donnie Fritts.FAME StudiosHe and the other owners of Muscle Shoals Sound sold the studio in the 1990s. Mr. Hawkins stayed on as the studio’s manager under its new owners.Mr. Hawkins was inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in 1995, along with the other members of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. Thirteen years later they were enshrined in the Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville.He is survived by his wife of 19 years, Brenda Gay Hawkins; a son, Dale; and two grandchildren.Mr. Hawkins’s approach to session work often focused on those moments in a recording when he remained silent, waiting for just the right time and place to strike the next note.“Every musician strives to be the best they can,” he told Modern Drummer. “Not every musician gets the chances I had. Some new studio players have an attitude of ‘Man, I’ve got to play something great here — got to play the fast stuff to be hired again.’“That’s not the way to go,” he continued. “I’ve always said this: I was always a better listener than I was a drummer. I would advise any drummer to become a listener.” More

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      Arthur Pomposello, Impresario for a Cabaret Swan Song, Dies at 85

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      He was the host at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel during an improbable resurgence of cabaret from the 1980s to the early 2000s. He died of complications of Covid-19.This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Arthur Pomposello, the host of the Oak Room, the cabaret supper club in the Algonquin Hotel, practiced the arts of theatricality and discretion.A dark-haired former model in a tuxedo, he parted a red curtain to allow guests inside. He glided onstage and introduced Andrea Marcovicci, for decades the Oak Room’s main attraction, as “our songbird.” He gossiped with journalists about what he called “my cabaret,” and in return the papers gave him labels like “a loquacious fixture.”But Mr. Pomposello could also work quietly. “This is cabaret,” he whispered to loud customers. “We don’t talk here.” He rearranged the tables, making light crowds appear livelier and making big crowds fit.Inspectors would check to see if the small-capacity room exceeded legal limits.“He would show them the kitchen or show them the upstairs — ‘Oh, come right this way,’” Ms. Marcovicci recalled. “They’d never see the room when it had 110 people in it. Never.”Mr. Pomposello died on May 6 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 85. The cause was complications of Covid-19, his son Sean said.When Mr. Pomposello started at the Algonquin as a bartender, in 1980, you could still feel transported to the hotel’s famed past as a daily gathering place for writers. He once entered the lobby and noticed Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut sharing a drink. The next instant, Eudora Welty walked in.Cabaret turned a profit for only a select few, but Mr. Pomposello kept his perch at the Oak Room under several different owners of the Algonquin.Jack Manning/The New York TimesIn the middle to late 1980s, as figures like Michael Feinstein and Harry Connick Jr. launched their careers from the Oak Room, Mr. Pomposello’s responsibilities grew. He booked talent and managed the finances, keeping his perch under several different owners of the Algonquin.“I’ve not lost a penny in nine years,” he told The New York Times in 1998.When he saw his son Sean, he raved about visits from faded stars whose glow had never dimmed for Mr. Pomposello. The Nicholas brothers, tap-dancers who rose to fame in the 1930s, turned heads the night they arrived, Mr. Pomposello said.Sean recently looked through his father’s address book to invite people to the wake. “I can’t find too many friends,” Sean said. “I find a lot of cabaret stars, some of whom are no longer alive.”Arthur Pomposello was born on Nov. 19, 1935, in Harlem and grew up in the Bronx. His father, Arthur, played jazz guitar under his nickname, Scotty Bond. His mother, Concetta (Bellafatto) Pomposello, was a homemaker who went to work at the pocketbook counter in Bloomingdale’s after she and Scotty divorced, when their son was a teenager.Arthur dreamed of becoming a movie star and spent summers in Los Angeles. When that didn’t work out, he went to Michigan State University. He graduated with a degree in hotel management.Back in New York, he worked at a succession of hotels, including Hampshire House, and restaurants, including Café des Artistes. He modeled and found modest acting work. He cooked up entrepreneurial schemes like “Pompie’s Pushers,” models selling authentic Italian food from handcarts. Nothing took — until the Oak Room. Mr. Pomposello stayed until a dispute with management in 2002.Mr. Pomposello married Eunice Mahoney, a telephone operator, in 1958. They divorced in 1979. That same year he married Alicia Cirino, a bunny at the New York Playboy Club. She died of heart failure in 2007.In addition to his son Sean, Mr. Pomposello is survived by two more children from his first marriage, Peri Kish-Pomposello and Chris Pomposello, and five grandchildren. A son from his second marriage, Adam, died in an accident in 2008.After he left the Oak Room, Mr. Pomposello worked as a night concierge at the Plaza Hotel until the pandemic last spring, when he was 84. Mr. Pomposello never stopped hoping to find a new venue of his own. In 2015 and 2016, he organized several performances at restaurants of an act he called “Pompie’s Place,” which featured jazz and blues singers and Mr. Pomposello himself as the impresario of an imaginary club.The discovery of a new restaurant or a theater with a large lobby set his gears turning, Sean Pomposello said: “He’d get this wistful look in his face, looking around the place, and thinking about how he’s going to book cabaret.” More

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      Rahul Vohra, Indian Actor and Video Blogger, Dies at 35

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      His YouTube posts dissected issues of Indian life, especially gender inequality. He died of complications of Covid-19 after lamenting his hospital treatment.Rahul Vohra began his acting career in the theater and later worked in low-budget films and television ads. But he was fascinated by the role technology played in shaping conversations about society, so he turned to video blogging.After he and Jyoti Tiwari married in December, she joined him in producing short, scripted videos in Hindi about issues like gender disparity, rising gas prices and the difficulties of working from home during the pandemic. Several have received more than 1 million views, and Mr. Vohra swiftly became one of India’s most popular YouTube stars.In one video, titled “Story of a Woman,” he asks for a cup of tea from his wife, who is played by an actress and is seen lost in thought after a long day of housework.“I am not a robot,” she says.“You only stay at home; what else do you do?” Mr. Vohra asks. She challenges him to do household chores for a day, telling him that then he would understand what she had meant. After accepting the challenge, he’s soon seen struggling and tiring within hours.“Even if I am sick, I had to do this work every day,” the wife says. “In reverse I ask for nothing, just a bit of respect and love.”Mr. Vohra died of complications of Covid-19 on May 9 at a hospital in New Delhi, Ms. Tiwari said. He was 35.He had fallen ill in New Delhi’s second wave of the pandemic, when much of the country’s health care system was overwhelmed. He found himself making desperate calls to his wife from his hospital bed, telling her that he feared he would die. She called the hospital for help but received little attention, she said. He was eventually moved to another hospital and died there.His videos struck a chord with young and middle-class Indians. “There was something about him which touched the lives of people,” a friend, Ankur Seth, said. “He spread positivity around even in dark times.”Rahul Vohra was born into a middle-class family in New Delhi on Jan. 27, 1986. His father, Suresh Vohra, works in a manufacturing firm, and his mother, Bimla Vohra, is a homemaker. Along with his wife and parents, he is survived by a sister, Neeru Vohra.Mr. Vohra received a degree in commerce from Delhi University. A talented performer from a young age, he was then offered a place at the prestigious Asmita Theater Group school in New Delhi.Two days after he died, Ms. Tiwari, 29, a writer for YouTube videos, found on her husband’s phone a video of him struggling to breathe and complaining about the poor quality of medical care at the hospital where he had initially been admitted. She posted it on Instagram with the hashtag #justiceforirahulvohra.“This is extremely valuable right now,” he said in the video, referring to his oxygen mask. “Without it patients get giddy and suffer.”In another post the day before he died, on his Facebook page, he wrote, “I would have lived had I received better treatment.” He tagged Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has been severely criticized for his handling of the pandemic.“My Rahul has left us, everyone knows that but, no one knows how he left us,” Ms. Tiwari wrote on Instagram. “I hope my husband will get justice.” More

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      Mary Ahern, Who Produced Early TV and Then Preserved It, Dies at 98

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      Ms. Ahern was a key behind-the-scenes figure in the landmark series “Omnibus” before becoming the Paley Center for Media’s first curator.Mary V. Ahern, who was an important behind-the-scenes figure on the cultural magazine show “Omnibus” and other early television programs, then helped preserve those and similar touchstones of television history as the Paley Center for Media’s first curator, died on May 1 at a care center in Peabody, Mass. She was 98.Her niece Joan Curry said the cause was cancer.Ms. Ahern spent much of her career working with Robert Saudek, an Emmy Award-winning producer whom The New York Times once described as “alchemist in chief of what is often recalled as the golden age of television.” Mr. Saudek, who died in 1997, created “Omnibus” in 1952, when television was new. Ms. Ahern was his valued right hand, as she had been earlier when he worked in radio.“Omnibus” was hosted by Alistair Cooke, who at the time was known primarily from radio, and it cast an incredibly wide net as it explored what could be done on the new medium and whether anyone would watch it.Orson Welles, Yul Brynner, Ethel Barrymore, James Dean and other famous or soon-to-be-famous actors appeared in staged dramas. William Inge and other playwrights unveiled new works. Gene Kelly tap-danced with the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. There was a segment that explained what an X-ray was. One particularly inspired episode put children’s toys to the adult test: Professional musicians jammed on kiddie instruments, and a professional chef tried to make a dinner for six using a tiny toy oven.At the time, television job titles and duties were less rigidly defined than they are now, but Ms. Ahern was essentially a producer on some episodes, a script writer on others, lead researcher or editor or supervisor on still others, and sometimes all those at once.She was pivotal in bringing Leonard Bernstein to the program, meeting over lunch with him and Paul Feigay, another “Omnibus” producer, who had worked with Mr. Bernstein on the 1944 musical “On the Town.” She and Mr. Feigay showed Mr. Bernstein some Beethoven sketchbooks that had come their way that were filled with the composer’s notes from his writing of the Fifth Symphony, including an assortment of rejected ideas.“Lenny had never seen these sketches at all,” Ms. Ahern said in an oral history recorded by Ron Simon in 2017 for the Television Academy Foundation. As they were leaving the lunch, she said, he was struck with an idea.“I remember coming out on Fifth Avenue with Lenny,” she recounted, “and he said, ‘You know what I could do?’ — because he knew the score, of course, backwards; he’d conducted the Beethoven Fifth many times. He said, ‘I could look at where he would have put those sketches and why he rejected them.’ And that was the first program we did on Bernstein.”That episode, broadcast in November 1954, is regarded as a classic early example of television that both entertains and enlightens. Mr. Bernstein, Howard Taubman wrote in The Times, “made vividly clear how Beethoven fought his way to the right phrase.”The episode’s success led to a series of appearances on the program by Mr. Bernstein, on subjects including opera, Bach and the art of conducting. A Bernstein episode on musical comedy in 1956 included among the cast an unknown singer named Carol Burnett, making one of her first television appearances.But Mr. Bernstein’s television talks weren’t improvised; one of Ms. Ahern’s tasks was working over his proposed scripts, which were full of musical terms of art, to make them more friendly to the general viewer.“He knew so much,” she said. “What he didn’t realize is — and I was the perfect foil for that — that people did not know what he knew.”Leonard Bernstein on the television program “Omnibus” in 1956. Ms. Ahern played a pivotal role in bringing Mr. Bernstein to the program.Yale Joel/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images“Omnibus,” which began on CBS, moved to ABC and then NBC before finishing its run in 1961 after more than 150 episodes, most of which — these being TV’s early days — were broadcast live. By then Mr. Saudek had formed his own production company and Ms. Ahern had joined him there, where she continued to be a key figure in numerous productions.In the mid-1970s William S. Paley, the chairman of CBS, decided to create the Museum of Broadcasting, dedicated to preserving TV and radio history, and brought in Mr. Saudek to be its first president. Ms. Ahern became curator of the new museum, which opened in 1976 and is now the Paley Center for Media.“That title makes me feel I should have jars with old bones,” she told The Times in 1977, but in fact it made her a foundational figure in documenting and preserving important programs, old TV commercials and assorted broadcasting oddities. Later, from 1986 to 1989, she did similar work as an acquisitions specialist at the Library of Congress.Mary Virginia Ahern was born on Oct. 15, 1922, in Cambridge, Mass. Her father, Thomas, was in real estate and insurance, and her mother, Nora, was a teacher.Ms. Ahern enrolled at Radcliffe College to study anthropology but switched to literature, graduating in 1942. Then, during World War II, she served for three years in the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service.“She supervised the inspection of gas masks and was assigned to the procurement of flame throwers and other deadly weapons,” The Times wrote in a 1959 article about her. “One of her associates has noted that this was an incongruous occupation for a gentle, retiring young woman who had majored in American literature at college. But, he added: ‘I’m sure she was good at it. She knows how to get to the essence of any problem.’”After the war, Ms. Ahern enrolled in a management training course at the Harvard Business School (which was not yet admitting women to its master’s program).“They had internships, which were novel in those days,” she said in the oral history, “and I had an internship to what was the brand-new American Broadcasting Company, in the public affairs department.”The head of that department was Mr. Saudek.Ms. Ahern being interviewed for the Television Academy Foundation in 2017.The Television Academy Foundation InterviewsThey worked together on radio documentaries, taking on weighty subjects like the Marshall Plan and urban slums. In the early 1950s, when the Ford Foundation set itself the task of developing TV programs that would inform and enlighten, it hired Mr. Saudek, by then an ABC vice president, as director of what it called the TV-Radio Workshop. He brought along Ms. Ahern, and she helped him start “Omnibus.” Few women were working as producers at the time.Programs Ms. Ahern worked on after “Omnibus” included the mid-1960s anthology documentary series “Profiles in Courage,” a Saudek production, for which she wrote and edited scripts. In the 1970s she worked with Mr. Bernstein again as one of the producers of his “Norton Lectures” series for PBS. In the 1980s, Ms. Ahern was credited with greatly expanding the Library of Congress’s radio and TV holdings, particularly by acquiring countless programs from the NBC archives.In addition to Ms. Curry, Ms. Ahern is survived by two other nieces, Mary H. Ahern and Sharon A. Ahern.Ms. Ahern’s long association with Mr. Bernstein included traveling to the Soviet Union in 1959 to oversee the filming of “Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in Moscow,” which Mr. Saudek’s company was making for CBS. The Times wrote about her behind-the-scenes role, not only for the Bernstein special, but also for many other programs, saying she “has investigated and become proficient in such diverse subjects as jet aircraft, burlesque and sea horses.”Among the problems she had to solve in Moscow, the article said, was how to translate the title of Aaron Copland’s “Billy the Kid,” which was on the program, into Russian. She consulted a teacher in Kiev.“The closest equivalent the adviser could offer,” the newspaper said, “was ‘Fellow Billy.’” More

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      Paul Mooney, Trailblazing Comedian, Dies at 79

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      A comic writer and performer, he was known for his boundary-pushing routines about racism and social justice and for his work with Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle.Paul Mooney, the boundary-pushing comedian and comedy writer who made his views on race, racism and social justice abundantly clear as Richard Pryor’s longtime behind-the-scenes partner, a contributor to “In Living Color” and a performer and writer on “Chappelle’s Show,” died on Wednesday at his home in Oakland, Calif. He was 79.The cause was a heart attack, said Cassandra Williams, his publicist. Mr. Mooney was found to have prostate cancer in 2014.If you knew Mr. Pryor’s work, you probably knew Mr. Mooney’s words. The two worked together on the short-lived 1977 variety series “The Richard Pryor Show”; “Pryor’s Place” (1984), Mr. Pryor’s unlikely attempt at a children’s show; television specials; the album and film “Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip” (1982); the autobiographical film “Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling” (1986), which Mr. Pryor starred in and directed; and Mr. Pryor’s 1975 appearance as host on “Saturday Night Live.” That episode included a now-famous escalating-racial-insults job-interview sketch with Chevy Chase, written by Mr. Mooney.In an interview with The New York Times after Mr. Pryor’s death in 2005 at 65, Mr. Mooney described himself as Mr. Pryor’s “Black writer.”As a writer on “In Living Color,” Keenen Ivory Wayans’s hit sketch comedy show that had its premiere on Fox in 1990 with a predominantly Black cast, Mr. Mooney was the inspiration for and co-creator of Homey D. Clown, a less than jovial circus-costumed character who was forced to interact with children (part of his parole agreement) and usually ended up frightening them.As a writer and performer on “Chappelle’s Show” in the early 2000s, Mr. Mooney played Negrodamus, a turbaned mystic who foretold the future (Hillary Rodham Clinton’s political prospects, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver’s marriage), appeared as the expert in “Ask a Black Dude” and reviewed movies alongside white female critics. Discussing “Gone With the Wind,” he revealed that Hattie McDaniel, who played the enslaved character known as Mammy, had been reincarnated as Oprah Winfrey — for the money.Mr. Mooney’s film roles included the singer Sam Cooke in “The Buddy Holly Story” (1978) and Junebug, an old-school stand-up comedian with equal amounts of dignity, integrity and genius, in “Bamboozled” (2000), Spike Lee’s dark farce about a television network bringing back the minstrel-show genre.On “Chappelle’s Show” in the early 2000s, Mr. Mooney played Negrodamus, a turbaned mystic who foretold the future.Comedy CentralPaul Mooney was born Paul Gladney on Aug. 4, 1941, in Shreveport, La., to George Gladney and LaVoya Ealy, who were both teenagers. When Paul was 7, he moved with his mother and her parents to Oakland, where he was largely raised by his grandmother, Aimay Ealy.Although some reports said he had taken his stage surname from the Hollywood actor Paul Muni, he corrected that in his 2007 memoir, “White Is the New Black.” His family loved nicknames, he wrote, and his grandmother just started calling him Mooney when he was a child.Paul was 14 when he and his mother moved to nearby Berkeley. There, at a local movie theater, he won his first “hambone” contest, performing an African-American stomping dance that involves slapping and patting the body like a drum. It was then that he realized that he loved applause — and prize money.He had his first taste of fame when he became a teenage regular on a local dance-party television show. After the Army (he was drafted and served in Germany), he came home to all kinds of sales jobs and, even more, to a future in entertainment. He did his first stand-up comedy (alongside friends who were folk singers), created a Black improvisational group called the Yankee Doodle Bedbugs, and joined the noted improv group the Second City. He also took a job for a while as ringmaster of the traveling Gatti-Charles Circus, which, he said, just called for looking good and telling jokes.Mr. Mooney and Richard Pryor (seated) attended the premiere of Spike Lee’s concert film “The Original Kings of Comedy” in Los Angeles in 2000. With them were, from left, Walter Latham, one of the film’s producers, along with Cedric the Entertainer, Steve Harvey, Mr. Lee and D.L. Hughley.Fred Prouser/ReutersHe met Mr. Pryor in the late 1960s at a party, and they soon discovered that their personal lives were antithetical. “Pryor was a self-loathing, drug-addicted genius, Mooney an industrious teetotaler, but they bonded over laughs and a distrust of the white Hollywood power structure,” The Los Angeles Times wrote in 2010.Mr. Mooney continued his comedy career after Mr. Pryor’s death, preserving his routines in documentaries and DVDs like “The Godfather of Comedy” (2012) and “Jesus Is Black — So Was Cleopatra — Know Your History” (2007).In “Jesus Is Black,” his three sons — Shane (whose mother was Yvonne Carothers, whom Mr. Pryor married in 1973) and Daryl and Dwayne (twin sons from an earlier relationship) — appeared as themselves. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Mooney had strong opinions, even about himself.“Whatever that thing is that white people like in Blacks, I don’t have it,” he wrote in his memoir. “Maybe it’s my arrogance or my self-assurance or the way I carry myself, but whatever it is, I don’t have it.”Marie Fazio contributed reporting. More

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      Dr. Aaron Stern, Who Enforced the Movie Ratings Code, Dies at 96

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      He was a New York psychiatrist who went to Hollywood to help lay down guidelines for sex and violence in films. Not everyone was pleased.Dr. Aaron Stern, a psychiatrist who as head of Hollywood’s movie rating board in the early 1970s established himself as filmgoers’ sentry against carnal imagery and violence, died on April 13 in Manhattan. He was 96.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his stepdaughter Jennifer Klein.An author, professor and management consultant who had always been intrigued by corporate ladder-climbing, he jousted with egocentric studio executives, producers, directors and actors — providing ample grist for his 1979 book, “Me: The Narcissistic American.”From 1971 to 1974, Dr. Stern was the director of the self-policing Classification and Rating Administration of the Motion Picture Association of America, which had been founded only a few years earlier. It replaced the rigidly moralistic Production Code imposed in the early 1930s and censoriously administered by Will H. Hays, a Presbyterian deacon and former national Republican Party chairman.The new ratings board, which was struggling to gain credibility when it began, graded films by letter to let moviegoers know in advance how much violence, sexuality and foul language to expect on the screen.The board’s decision that a film merited a rating of R, or restricted, might lure more adults, but would immediately eliminate the pool of unchaperoned moviegoers under 17; an X rating would bar anyone under 17 altogether.Dr. Stern recast the PG (parental guidance) category to include a warning that “some material might not be suitable for pre-teenagers.” He also tried, but failed, to abolish the X rating — on the grounds, he told The Los Angeles Times in 1972, that it wasn’t the job of the Motion Picture Association to keep people out of theaters. (The X rating was changed to NC-17 in 1990, but its meaning remained unchanged.)Not until last year, with the release of “Three Christs,” a movie about hospitalized patients who believed they were Jesus, did Dr. Stern receive a screen credit (he was one of the film’s 17 producers). But the lack of onscreen recognition belied the power he wielded as director of the board, which privately screened films and then voted on which letter rating to impose.Even some critics gave the new letter-coded classification the benefit of the doubt in the early 1970s, agreeing that its decisions, in contrast to those of the old Production Code, were becoming more grounded in sociology than theology. Still, two young members of the rating board, appointed under a one-year fellowship, wrote a scathing critique of its methodology that was published in The New York Times in 1972.They accused Dr. Stern of megalomaniacal meddling, editing scripts before filming and cropping scenes afterward, and of tolerating gratuitous violence but being puritanical about sex. They claimed, among other things, that he had warned Ernest Lehman, the director of “Portnoy’s Complaint” (1972), that focusing on masturbation in the film version of Philip Roth’s novel risked an X rating.“You can have a love scene, but as soon as you start to unbutton or unzip you must cut,” Dr. Stern was quoted as saying in The Hollywood Reporter about sex in movies.The Times article prompted letters praising Dr. Stern from several directors, including Mr. Lehman, who said that Dr. Stern’s advice had actually improved his final cut of “Portnoy’s Complaint.” To which The Times film critic Vincent Canby sniffed, “If Mr. Lehman was really influenced by Dr. Stern’s advice two years ago, then he should sue the doctor for malpractice.”Dr. Stern argued that the rating system, while imperfect, served several goals. Among other things, he said, it fended off even more restrictive definitions of obscenity by Congress, the courts and localities; and it warned people away from what they might find intrusive as mores evolved and society became more accepting.“Social growth should make the rating system more and more obsolete,” he told The Los Angeles Times.Members of the movie rating board privately screened films and then voted on which letter rating to impose. An R rating might lure more adults, but would immediately eliminate the pool of unchaperoned moviegoers under 17.Motion Picture Association of AmericaAaron Stern was born on March 26, 1925, in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father, Benjamin Israel Stern, was a carpenter, and his mother, Anna (Fishader) Stern, was a homemaker. Raised in Bensonhurst and Sheepshead Bay, he was the youngest of three children and the only one born in the United States.After graduating from Brooklyn College in 1947, he earned a master’s degree in psychological services and a doctorate in child development from Columbia University, and a medical degree from the State University of New York’s Downstate Health Sciences University.In addition to his stepdaughter Ms. Klein, he is survived by his wife, Betty Lee (Baum) Stern; two children, Debra Marrone and Scott Stern, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce; two other stepchildren, Lauren Rosenkranz and Jonathan Otto; and 13 grandchildren.Dr. Stern was introduced to Jack Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture Association, by a neighbor in Great Neck, N.Y., Robert Benjamin, an executive at United Artists. He initially began reviewing films for the association and was recruited by Mr. Valenti to run the ratings administration in mid-1971.He left there early in 1974 to join Columbia Pictures Industries and eventually returned from Los Angeles to New York, where he revived his private practice. He also taught at Yale, Columbia, New York University and the University of California, Los Angeles, and he served as chief operating officer of Tiger Management, a hedge fund, and a trustee of the Robertson Foundation.A veteran educator at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Dr. Stern, with his wife, donated $5 million in 2019 to endow a professorship and fellowship at Weill Cornell Medicine to treat patients with pathological personality disorders. The gift was in gratitude for the care he had received during a medical emergency.Dr. Stern had been interested in narcissism even before he went to Hollywood, but his experience there proved inspirational.In “Me: The Narcissistic American,” he wrote that babies are born narcissistic, unconcerned about whom they awaken in the middle of the night, and need to be disciplined as they mature to take others into account.“When narcissism is for survival, as with the infant and the founding of a country,” he wrote, “it is not as destructive as when one is established, successful and affluent.”In 1981, Mr. Valenti told The Times that he had “made a mistake of putting a psychiatrist in charge” of the ratings system. Dr. Stern replied, “I am at a loss to respond to that.”But he had acknowledged, when he still held the job, “There’s no way to sit in this chair and be loved.” He was constantly second-guessed.Why give “The Exorcist” (1973) an R rating? (“I think it’s a great film,” he told the director, William Friedkin. “I’m not going to ask you to cut a frame.”) Why originally give Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” (1971) an X for a ménage à trois filmed in high speed? (“If we did that, any hard-core pornographer could speed up his scenes and legitimately ask for an R on the same basis.”) Later, as a private $1,000-a-day consultant, he helped edit Mr. Friedkin’s “Cruising” (1980), about a serial killer of gay men, to gain an R instead of an X.“You can only rate the explicit elements on the screen — never the morality or the thought issues behind it,” Dr. Stern said in 1972. “That is the province of religion, leaders, critics and each individual.” More