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      in Theater

      Keith Johnstone, Champion of Improvisational Theater, Dies at 90

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      The theatrical games and performance techniques Mr. Johnstone developed became a familiar part of the acting arsenal.Early in what became a career in theater, Keith Johnstone was commissioned to write a play for a new company in England and studied up for the job by watching the troupe’s actors rehearse someone else’s play. What stood out to him was not the rehearsal techniques, but the fact that he found the sessions boring — “until the actors broke for coffee or stagehands began moving sets around the stage.”“It was only at these times that there seemed to be moments of truth on the stage,” he told The Calgary Herald many years later, in 1982. “When they resumed acting, the performers abandoned their kinetic dance and entered separate glass cages.”That realization helped fuel Mr. Johnstone’s determination that theater and the people who practiced it could benefit from more spontaneity and creativity, and from emphasizing the quest for truth over the mastery of actorly techniques.He spent the rest of his career preaching the gospel of improvisation, developing games, exercises and live shows that were the opposite of tightly scripted theater. His 1979 book, “Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre,” is among the most widely used texts in the world of improvisational theater, and the Loose Moose Theater Company, which he created in 1977 after relocating to Canada, became an institution in Calgary.Mr. Johnstone died on March 11 in Calgary. He was 90.Theresa Robbins Dudeck, his literary executor and the author of “Keith Johnstone: A Critical Biography” (2013), confirmed the death.Mr. Johnstone didn’t invent improv, and he wasn’t alone in promoting the technique; the actress and educator Viola Spolin published “Improvisation for the Theater” in 1963, and troupes like the Second City in Chicago, founded in 1959, were also working the territory. But his contributions were considerable. Among Mr. Johnstone’s liveliest innovations was Theatresports, an idea he began to develop in England when he and some colleagues at the Royal Court Theater took notice of the liveliness of audiences at professional wrestling matches.“Our Royal Court audiences were like whipped dogs in comparison,” he wrote in an essay about Theatresports, “probably because once an event is categorized as ‘cultural,’ it becomes a minefield in which your opinion can damn you.”So he began honing a sort of competitive event in which teams of improvisers would try to outdo each other, with audience howling and booing encouraged and judges rating the efforts.“The judges award points by holding up cards that range from one to five,” he wrote in another book, “Impro for Storytellers” (1999). “Five means excellent, one means bad, and a honk from a rescue horn means ‘kindly leave the stage.’”He introduced Theatresports once he had relocated to Canada, and the concept caught on; variations of the games were soon being performed all over the world.“If the performance has gone well,” he wrote, “you’ll feel that you’ve been watching a bunch of good-natured people who are wonderfully cooperative, and who aren’t afraid to fail. It’s therapeutic to be in such company, and to yell and cheer, and perhaps even volunteer to improvise with them. With luck you’ll feel as if you’ve been at a wonderful party; great parties don’t depend on the amount of alcohol, but on positive interactions.”Mr. Johnstone in the mid-1960s. Early in his career, he determined that theater and the people who practiced it could benefit from more spontaneity and creativity.Mary Evans/Roger Mayne, via Everett CollectionDonald Keith Johnstone was born on Feb. 21, 1933, in Brixham, on England’s southwestern coast, to Richard and Linda (Carter) Johnstone. When he was 9 or so, he decided to stop taking things at face value.“I began reversing every statement to see if the opposite was also true,” he wrote in his 1979 book. “This is so much a habit with me that I hardly notice I’m doing it anymore. As soon as you put a ‘not’ into an assertion, a whole range of other possibilities opens out.”He trained as a teacher at St. Luke’s College in Exeter and began teaching at a primary school in South London. When he won a prize in a short-story contest, the English Stage Company, a new troupe based at the Royal Court, invited him to write a play for it, which he did: “Brixham Regatta,” which Patrick Gibbs of The Daily Telegraph thought was, for a 25-year-old novice, “a creditable — and ambitious — first play.” More important, he joined a writers’ group at the Royal Court and found himself leading improvisational exercises for the group.Published in 1979, Mr. Johnstone’s “Impro” is among the most widely used texts in the world of improvisational theater.He spent 10 years at the Royal Court, leading classes and workshops, screening scripts and producing plays. In July 1959 Mr. Johnstone and William Gaskill produced a largely improvised one-night show called “Eleven Men Dead at Hola Camp,” featuring Black actors ad-libbing scenes about an infamous 1959 massacre of detainees by British troops in Kenya. Alan Brien, reviewing the performance in The Spectator, was not on board with the concept, saying that it “shows the Royal Court in its most militant, inept, radical, ambitious and pretentious mood.”“‘Eleven Men Dead at Hola Camp’ was neither good rhetoric nor good theater,” Mr. Brien wrote. “But if it sent the audience home to study the facts, it will have been worthwhile. And if it sent the producers home reconvinced that acting discipline and writing economy are the heart of drama, then it will also have been worth while.”It did not “reconvince” Mr. Johnstone of that. He continued to develop his improvisation exercises and in the mid-1960s formed an improvisational troupe, the Theater Machine, which performed all over England as well as abroad.In 1972 Mr. Johnstone was offered a two-year visiting professorship at the University of Calgary in Alberta. He ended up staying at the university for 23 years, taking emeritus status in 1995.An early performance by his Loose Moose company, in 1977, was a version of “Robinson Crusoe” that, from Louis B. Hobson’s enthusiastic review in The Calgary Albertan, sounds as if it came close to replicating that professional-wrestling excitement Mr. Johnstone had longed for.“The audience, which is seated in a semicircle, becomes everything from shark-infested waters to offstage spirit voices,” he wrote. “It is a stormy, noisy sea that surrounds Crusoe’s island, and one that never calms down for the play’s 40 minutes.”Mr. Johnstone’s marriage to Ingrid Von Darl ended in divorce in 1981. He is survived by a son from that marriage, Benjamin; a son from another relationship, Dan; and a grandson.Mr. Johnstone’s books and methods have been used in high school classrooms and drama clubs, professional acting workshops and anyplace else where creativity needs to be unlocked and spontaneity encouraged. A passage in his 1979 book describes what set him on the improvisational path.“I began to think of children not as immature adults,” he wrote, “but of adults as atrophied children.” More

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      in Movies

      Bill Butler, Cinematographer Best Known for ‘Jaws,’ Dies at 101

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      He came up with a mechanism that allowed Steven Spielberg to film underwater. His work on “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” earned him an Oscar nomination.Bill Butler, an Oscar-nominated cinematographer who played a prominent role in the American New Wave movement of the 1970s and whose credits included “Jaws,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and three of the “Rocky” sequels, died on Wednesday. He was 101.His death was announced by the American Society of Cinematographers, which did not say where he died.Mr. Butler worked with a number of directors credited with reimagining American filmmaking in the ’70s, including Steven Spielberg, for whom he was the director of photography on “Jaws,” the 1975 blockbuster about a man-eating great white shark that established Mr. Spielberg’s reputation and changed the way Americans looked at both film and the beach.Open-water shooting posed many challenges on what was a notoriously troubled set.The crew faced problems not only with their malfunctioning mechanical shark but also ‌with seasickness, uncooperative tides‌, random boats sailing into the frame and even sets that sank.From left, Mr. Spielberg, the camera operator Michael Chapman and Mr. Butler on the set of “Jaws.” Mr. Butler designed a submersible camera box and a platform that allowed for shooting both below the water and on its surface.Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesMr. Butler designed a submersible camera box and a platform that allowed for shooting both below the water and on its surface, to convey the viewpoint of a swimmer. The American Society of Cinematographers, which presented Mr. Butler with a lifetime achievement award in 2003, also credited him in 2012 in its magazine, American Cinematographer, with “heroically” saving footage from a camera that went down in the Atlantic Ocean. His calculation: that seawater would be similar to saline-based developing solutions.“We got on an airplane with the film in a bucket of water, took it to New York and developed it,” Mr. Butler recalled in his commentary for a 2012 release of “Jaws” on Blu-ray. “We didn’t lose a foot.”In a statement, Mr. Spielberg praised Mr. Butler’s work on “Jaws.” “Bill’s outlook on life was pragmatic, philosophical and so very patient,” he said, “and I owe him so much for his steadfast and creative contributions to the entire look of ‘Jaws.’”Over his six-decade career, Mr. Butler also shot several noteworthy television dramas, including “Raid on Entebbe” (1976) and “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1984), both of which won him Emmy Awards for outstanding cinematography; “The Thorn Birds” (1983), which earned him an Emmy nomination; and “The Execution of Private Slovik” (1974).For his work on “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975), Mr. Butler received an Oscar nomination that he shared with Haskell Wexler, a colleague with whom he had an unusual association: On two of his more influential and well-regarded films — Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” (1974) was the other — Mr. Butler was brought in as the director of photography only after the mercurial Mr. Wexler had been fired.Mr. Butler with Christopher Walken on the set of the 1988 film “Biloxi Blues.”Universal, via Everett CollectionWilmer Cable Butler was born on April 7, 1921, in Cripple Creek, Colo., and raised in a log cabin. His parents, Wilmer and Verca Butler, were farmers. After graduating from the University of Iowa with a degree in engineering, he started his career in broadcasting at WGN-TV in Chicago, where he was a camera operator for live programs and commercials.His first feature-length film, directed by his WGN colleague William Friedkin, was “The People vs. Paul Crump,” a 1962 documentary about an African American prisoner on death row who claimed his murder confession had been coerced through torture. Though the movie never aired — the contents were deemed too incendiary — it made its way to Otto Kerner, the governor of Illinois, who commuted Mr. Crump’s sentence to life without parole.“When you see the power a little piece of 16-millimeter film will bring to you, you are inspired to go ahead and pursue a career in the field,” Mr. Butler said in 2005 at a career retrospective at the Victoria Film Festival in British Columbia. “And that’s exactly what I did.”He was already 40 by the time he started shooting motion pictures. (“He reinvented himself multiple times,” said Michael G. Moyer, who worked alongside Mr. Butler as chief electrician on “Child’s Play” and other films.) But he immediately went to work for some of the period’s more promising young talents: Mr. Friedkin on “The Bold Men” (1965), Philip Kaufman on “Fearless Frank” (1967), Mr. Coppola on “The Rain People” (1969), and Jack Nicholson on “Drive, He Said” (1971), one of only three films he directed.“I did some work with director Phil Kaufman on the Universal Studios lot as a writer while I was still trying to get into the Los Angeles camera guild,” Mr. Butler said in a 2005 Moviemaker magazine interview. “That’s when I met Steven Spielberg. He had just finished his ‘Night Gallery’ projects. I shot ‘Savage’ and ‘Something Evil,’ a couple of one-hour TV movies, with him.”When work began on “Jaws,” it was Mr. Butler who convinced Mr. Spielberg that he could shoot in the water.“Panavision had just introduced a lightweight, smaller camera,” he recalled. “It was also quiet, so you could use it to cover dialogue. Steven thought it would be too shaky; I didn’t try to press the issue. If he hired me, I could show him when we got to Martha’s Vineyard.”Mr. Butler’s later credits included “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings” (1976); “The Sting II” (1983);“Graffiti Bridge,” starring and directed by Prince (1990); “Hot Shots!” (1991); and “The Chauffeur” (2008), as well as the TV series “Brooklyn Bridge” (1991). He remained active professionally well into his 80s, working in a variety of genres and often with fledgling directors.“The harder films are usually the big ones that require controlling a lot of people and a lot of cameras, and over a large area or sometimes many locations,” he said at the Victoria Film Festival. “Keeping that organized is something that some cinematographers are not capable of, so they do smaller films.”But smaller films can be just as difficult for them, he added, “because the pressure of a small film means that they may not have the time to properly gather their footage, and that’s another definite pressure that’s equally challenging.”Mr. Butler is survived by his wife, Iris (Schwimmer) Butler, whom he married in 1984, and their daughters, Genevieve and Chelsea Butler, both actresses, as well as three daughters from his marriage to Alma Smith, which ended in divorce: Judy Rawson, Patricia Pekau and Pam Fraser. He is also survived by a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.Mr. Butler never attended film school; when he started shooting movies, he said, he bought the manual of the American Society of Cinematographers (“the bible of filmmaking”) and would refer to it whenever he needed. But really, he said in 2005, the way he learned to shoot pictures “was to go directly to the movies and see what somebody else was doing onscreen, and then going out and trying to do it myself. And that was it.”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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      in Music

      Nora Forster, 80, Who Married (and Stayed Married to) a Sex Pistol, Dies

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      A German publishing heiress and music promoter, she settled in London in time for the 1970s punk-rock explosion and became the muse to its baddest boy.Nora Forster, a German-born publishing heiress and music promoter who gained fame as the wife of John Lydon — otherwise known as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols — and the mother of Arianna Forster, or Ari Up, the lead singer of the influential all-female punk band the Slits, died on Thursday. She was 80.Her death was announced by Mr. Lydon on Twitter. “Nora had been living with Alzheimer’s for several years,” the announcement said. “In which time John had become her full time career.” He did not say where she died.For more than four decades, music fans knew Ms. Forster as the emotional rock for the ever-volatile Mr. Lydon, who in the late 1970s became Public Enemy No. 1 in the eyes of British polite society for spitting invective in every direction, including the Queen’s, as the frontman for the incendiary punk progenitors the Sex Pistols.When the band imploded after its brief, explosive career, he scarcely mellowed; he continued on as the creative force of the fiery post-punk band Public Image Ltd., or PiL.Because of her husband’s enduring notoriety, particularly in England, Ms. Forster’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease unfolded as a public drama after he went public about her diagnosis in 2018.“It’s vile to watch someone you love disappear,” he said in an interview with The Sunday Times of London in February. “All the things I thought were the ultimate agony seem preposterous now.”Her illness, he said, had “shaped me into what I am.”“I don’t think I’ll ever get over it,” he added. “I don’t see how I can live without her. I wouldn’t want to. There’s no point.”The previous month, he had teared up when taking a more wistful turn in an interview on the television show “Good Morning Britain” about “Hawaii,” a haunting PiL ballad that he had written as a tribute to her and that was the Irish entry in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. (Mr. Lydon was born in England to Irish parents.) “Remember me,” Mr. Lydon sang, “I remember you.”“I can see her personality in her eyes,” he said. “She lets me know that it’s the communication skills that are letting her down.”Nora Maier was born on Nov. 6, 1942, in Munich. After the war, her father, Franz Karl Maier, was a prosecutor who helped bring wartime Nazis to justice. He was later the editor and publisher of the newspaper Tagesspiegel.Ms. Forster went on to work as a model and to marry the singer Frank Forster, who was “kind of a swing pop star, always appearing on TV back in the ’60s,” Arianna Forster said in an interview with the music site Pitchfork in 2009, a year before she died.Nora Forster’s survivors include her husband and three grandchildren.As the 1960s unfolded, Ms. Forster promoted West German tours for acts like Jimi Hendrix and Yes, which gave her prominence on the German rock scene. “People were walking around in the living room back then, like the Bee Gees and all these big groups,” her daughter recalled in the Pitchfork interview.The bohemian lifestyle of her rock friends eventually ran afoul of the local authorities. “In Munich, the police were knocking at the door every night because of the loud acid parties,” her daughter once said. “She was fed up with it. You have to go to London to live that lifestyle.”Ms. Forster did just that in about 1970, and by the middle of the decade she had become enmeshed in the punk-rock scene that was starting to roil Britain and the music industry as a whole. She became “a den mother to all the young punks,” said Arianna, who in 1976, at age 14, would rename herself Ari Up and join with a drummer called Palmolive to found the Slits, which became a leading female punk band of the era.In 1975, Ms. Forster met Mr. Lydon, who was nearly 14 years her junior, at Sex, the boundary-pushing clothing boutique on London’s King’s Road run by the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and the Sex Pistols’ manager, Malcolm McLaren.It was anything but love at first sight.“There was no physical attraction at first,” Ms. Forster said in a 2004 interview with The Sunday Mail of Britain. “I didn’t even think to be nice to him. I was at another gig and John passed by my table and said, ‘Drop dead.’”Despite the mutual hostility, Mr. Lydon was intrigued. “Her nose went 10 feet in the air in her ’40s film star outfit,” he said in the same Sunday Mail interview. “Long blond hair, padded shoulders — that entire femme fatale look, which I was a complete ham for.”Eventually she softened. “I fell in love with John because he surprised me,” she said. “He had a sweet attitude. He was more innocent and not like the rest of the group.”The couple married in 1979, to the horror of Ms. Forster’s father. And, to the likely amazement of those who considered Mr. Lydon a human mushroom cloud, the marriage endured.Even so, it might never have happened if Ms. Forster had listened to her friends’ advice in those early days. “One day he came up and asked why I had never invited him to my house,” she later said of Mr. Lydon. “I replied, ‘People told me you would destroy everything.’” More

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      in Television

      Harry Lorayne, Dazzling Master of Total Recall, Is Dead at 96

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      A memory expert and magician who was a favorite guest of Johnny Carson’s, he astonished audiences by reeling off the names of hundreds of people he had only just met.Harry Lorayne, who parlayed a childhood reading disability and the brutal punishment it engendered into an international career as a memory expert, summoning the names of roomfuls of strangers in a single sitting, rattling off entire small-town telephone books and telling astonished audiences what was written on any page of a given issue of Time magazine, died on Friday in Newburyport, Mass. He was 96.His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his publicist, Skye Wentworth, who did not specify a cause. He had lived in Newburyport, north of Boston.Fleet of mind and fleet of mouth, Mr. Lorayne was a sought-after guest on television shows and a particular favorite of Johnny Carson’s, appearing on “The Tonight Show” some two dozen times.Mr. Lorayne had begun his professional life as a sleight-of-hand artist and well into old age was considered one of the foremost card magicians in the country. As both magician and mnemonist, he was a direct, gleeful scion of the 19th-century midway pitchman and the 20th-century borscht belt tummler.By the 1960s, Mr. Lorayne was best known for holding audiences rapt with feats of memory that bordered on the elephantine. Such feats were born, he explained in interviews and in his many books, of a system of learned associations — call them surrealist visual puns — that seemed equal parts Ivan Pavlov and Salvador Dalí.Mr. Lorayne demonstrated his act on the night of July 23, 1958, when, in his first big break, he appeared on the TV game show “I’ve Got a Secret.”While the host, Garry Moore, was introducing members of the show’s panel, Mr. Lorayne was at work in the studio audience, soliciting the names of its members.He was then called onstage. Mr. Moore asked the audience members who had given Mr. Lorayne their names to stand. Hundreds did.“That’s Mr. Saar,” Mr. Lorayne began, pointing to a man in the balcony. (The transcriptions here are phonetic.)“Mr. Stinson,” he continued in his rapid-fire New Yorkese, gathering speed. “Miss Graf. Mrs. Graf. Miss Finkelstein. If I can see correctly, I believe that’s the Harpin family: Mr. and Mrs. Harpin; there was Dorothy Harpin and Esther Harpin. Mrs. Pollock. And way in the corner — it’s a little dark there — but I believe that’s Mrs. Stern.”And so it went, through scores of names, each impeccably recalled.How did he do it? “You have to take the name, make it mean something and then associate it to one outstanding feature on the person’s face,” he explained, indicating a man in the audience named Theus.“I thought of the United States: ‘the U.S.,’” Mr. Lorayne continued. “It’s spelled T-H-E-U-S. And I picked out his character lines, from the nose down to the corner of the lip, and just drew a map of the United States there.”Absent the time constraints of television, Mr. Lorayne often said, he could handily memorize the names of 500, or even a thousand, people in a single outing. Over the years, he said, he had met and recalled the names of more than 20 million people.To naysayers who contended that he routinely seeded his audiences with friends, Mr. Lorayne’s reply was unimpeachable: “Who’s got 500 friends?”Nor, as the skeptics sometimes suggested, was Mr. Lorayne a mnemonic freak, endowed with a preternaturally good memory. He was born with quite ordinary powers of recall, he often said, and that was precisely the point. Memory, he maintained, was a faculty akin to a muscle that could be trained and strengthened.Mr. Lorayne did not claim to have invented the mnemonic system that was his stock in trade: As he readily acknowledged, it harked back to classical antiquity. But he was among the first people in the modern era to recognize its use as entertainment, and to parlay it into a highly successful business.Mr. Lorayne ran a memory-training school in New York during the 1960s. via Skye WentworthAt the height of his renown, Mr. Lorayne traveled the country demonstrating his prowess on theater stages, at trade shows and in corporate training seminars. During the 1960s, he ran a memory-training school in New York. In later years, he starred in TV infomercials for his home memory-improvement system. His scores of books were translated into many languages.He was awash in celebrity friends, many of whom were reported to use his techniques. Among them were Anne Bancroft, who spoke of using Mr. Lorayne’s methods to learn lines, and the New York Knicks star — and memory expert in his own right — Jerry Lucas, with whom Mr. Lorayne wrote “The Memory Book” (1974), a New York Times best seller.For many years Mr. Lorayne lived in a gracious townhouse at 62 Jane Street in the West Village of Manhattan. (In sly tribute, his friend Mel Brooks planned to give that address as the home of the playwright Franz Liebkind in his 1967 film, “The Producers.” After Mr. Lorayne’s wife, Renée, objected that the moviegoing public would be banging on their door day and night, Mr. Brooks changed it to the fictional 100 West Jane Street.)Mr. Lorayne’s attainments are all the more noteworthy in light of the fact that he grew up in poverty, struggled academically as a result of undiagnosed dyslexia and concluded his formal education after only a single year of high school.Mr. Lorayne in 1986. As a boy he had an epiphany: If only he could learn to memorize, he realized, his problems with dyslexia would end and he’d avoid his father’s wrath over poor school grades. Stuart William MacGladrie/Fairfax Media, via Getty ImagesHe was born on May 4, 1926, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Benjamin and Clara (Bendel) Ratzer. His father was a garment cutter.The family was poor — beyond poor, Mr. Lorayne often said.“They were professional poor people,” he told an interviewer, invoking his parents. “I remember having a potato for dinner.”Benjamin Ratzer was a violent man, and whenever young Harry brought home failing grades on an exam — and because of his dyslexia, he often did — his father beat him.One day, Harry had an epiphany. If only he could learn to memorize, he realized, his problems would end. At the library, he found a shelf of dusty books on memory training, some dating to the 18th century. Most were beyond him, but he fought his way through.Using elementary versions of the techniques he would later employ professionally, he began earning perfect marks.“My father stopped hitting me for my grades,” Mr. Lorayne told The Chicago Tribune in 1988. “He hit me for other things.”When Harry was 12, his father, plagued by illness, died by suicide. Soon afterward, Harry left high school to work a series of odd jobs.“I was a Lower East Side ‘dese, dem and dose’ kid with no money, no prospects, no education, no nothing,” Mr. Lorayne wrote in a self-published memoir, “Before I Forget” (2013).He did not yet conceive of memory as a marketable skill: His professional aspirations lay in magic. As a child, he had watched, entranced, as neighborhood men did card tricks in Hamilton Fish Park, on the Lower East Side. He stole milk bottles, recouped the deposits, bought his first deck of cards and began to practice.He embarked on his magic career in the 1940s, adapting his stage name from the middle name of his wife, Renée Lorraine Lefkowitz, whom he married in 1948. He performed on local television in the early 1950s and did close-up magic at Billy Reed’s Little Club on East 55th Street.The actor Victor Jory, a keen amateur magician, visited the club often to catch Mr. Lorayne’s act. One night, performing at Mr. Jory’s table, Mr. Lorayne realized he had exhausted his vast repertoire of card tricks. Seeking to keep Mr. Jory entertained, he idly tossed off a stunt in which he recalled the location of all 52 cards in a shuffled deck.Mr. Jory raved so much about the feat, Mr. Lorayne wrote, that he realized his future lay in memory. He made it his act, beginning at Catskill hotels.Mr. Lorayne wrote a batch of books, including this one as well as “The Memory Book” (with the basketball star Jerry Lucas), “How to Develop a Super Power Memory,” “Miracle Math” and, his last one, “And Finally!”The bizarre visual associations at the heart of Mr. Lorayne’s system were good not only for remembering names and faces but also, he explained, for memorizing numbers, learning foreign-language vocabulary and the like. The more surreal the association, he said, the more tenacious its hold in the mind.“Take the French word for watermelon, which is ‘pastèque,’” he told the Australian newspaper The Sunday Mail in 1986. “When I wanted to learn this I visualized myself playing cards and saying, ‘Pass the deck; pass deck.’”It was essential to note, he added, that “I am playing cards with a watermelon. I ask the watermelon to pass the deck.”Mr. Lorayne’s wife, who assisted in his stage act for two decades, died in 2014. His survivors include a son, Robert, and a granddaughter.Mr. Lorayne in the early 1990s. He continued to perform as a magician throughout his career, but it was for his feats of memorization that he was, fittingly, remembered. via Skye WentworthHis other books include “How to Develop a Super Power Memory,” “Miracle Math” and “Ageless Memory.” In 2018, at the age of 92, he published his last book, “And Finally!”Throughout his career, Mr. Lorayne continued to ply the magician’s trade, for many years publishing Apocalypse, a magic magazine, and producing books and videos on card magic.But it was as a memory expert that he remained, fittingly, remembered, though his most important act of recall was one that audiences never saw.Before every performance, Mr. Lorayne, out of sight in the wings, would discreetly check to make sure his trousers were zipped.It was not merely a question of propriety, but also of credibility. For the man often billed as the world’s foremost memory expert to face an audience with fly unheeded, he explained, would be the poorest professional advertisement of all.Maia Coleman contributed reporting. More

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      in Music

      James Bowman, Who Helped Resurrect the Countertenor, Dies at 81

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      He took up the repertory for the highest male voice at a time when few were performing it. He was particularly known for two roles in Britten operas.James Bowman, a British countertenor who championed repertory for that voice at a time when few singers were attempting it and inspired more composers, including Benjamin Britten, to write for it, died on March 27 at his home in Redhill, south of London. He was 81.Terry Winwood, his civil partner, confirmed the death but said the cause had not yet been determined.When Mr. Bowman started singing professionally in the 1960s, the countertenor — the highest of the male voices, working the same range as female contraltos and mezzo-sopranos — was something of a rarity on opera and concert stages. Alfred Deller, who died in 1979, was the go-to countertenor of the day, but his voice and his acting ability were said to have been limited.“Bowman was a revolutionary talent,” the critic Rupert Christiansen, revisiting one of Mr. Bowman’s 1970s recordings, wrote in The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2019, adding that “his technique brought a new power to the countertenor repertory.”Mr. Bowman’s breakthrough came in 1967, when he was working as a teacher and was doing most of his singing in choirs. He described the moment to The Santa Fe Reporter in 1987.“A friend came up from London and told me that Benjamin Britten was holding auditions for ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’” Mr. Bowman said, referring to Mr. Britten’s 1960 opera, whose Oberon role had originally been written for Mr. Deller. “This is sort of a fairy story — I’d never done anything onstage in my life, but I wrote to Britten and I said, ‘I think I am eminently suited to the role of Oberon.’”He was invited to audition.“I knew that you could barely hear the people who had sung the part before,” he said. “So I went to Covent Garden and I made a big noise and socked them between the eyeballs — and it worked! The next thing I knew I was on tour.”Oberon became one of his signature roles. Mr. Britten wrote other works for him as well, including the part of Apollo in “Death in Venice,” the 1973 Britten opera.“James Bowman’s ringing Apollo sounded authentically unterrestrial,” Martin Cooper wrote in The Daily Telegraph, reviewing the world premiere of the piece at Snape Maltings in Suffolk, England.Mr. Bowman was heard frequently in concert settings as well, and he had a knack for deploying his musical gifts to striking effect in famed performance spaces. Tim Page, writing in The New York Times about a two-hour concert of works by Handel recorded at Westminster Abbey in 1985, called his voice “unusually versatile and pleasing.” Twenty years later, also in The Times, Bernard Holland, after catching him in a “Messiah” at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan, said that Mr. Bowman “sang the countertenor parts with a voice and a dramatic personality able to command attention in a crowd.”His performances and his dozens of recordings encouraged other singers to explore the countertenor repertory, and Mr. Winwood said he was always generous with advice and support for younger singers.“He would think nothing of hiring a studio and arranging a meeting with young singers who he had never even met,” Mr. Winwood said by email, “and I’m pretty sure he would never charge for his time.”In a tribute on the website of the London-based choir Tenebrae, Nigel Short, the choir’s director, recalled the crucial support Mr. Bowman gave him early in his career. He also shared fond memories of Mr. Bowman’s impish sense of humor.“He was such a brilliant, instinctive singer and musician, a huge character and incredibly kind and generous,” Mr. Short wrote, “but my fondest memories will always be of him giggling and snorting loudly at something totally outrageous he’d just whispered in the ears of anyone standing close by.”Mr. Bowman made for a lively newspaper interview as well. He was always eager to dispel stereotypes about countertenors, especially unflattering ones that branded them as effeminate and made them the target of jokes.“We’re a down-to-earth bunch who just happen to like singing in a high register,” he told The Sunday Telegraph of Britain in 1996. “When I look around at my colleagues, I’m struck by how normal most of them are.”When Mr. Bowman performed Handel’s “Messiah” with the St. Thomas Choir at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan in 2005, one critic wrote that he “sang the countertenor parts with a voice and a dramatic personality able to command attention in a crowd.”Jennifer Taylor for The New York TimesJames Thomas Bowman was born on Nov. 6, 1941, in Oxford, England, to Benjamin and Cecilia (Coote) Bowman. He attended the centuries-old school King’s Ely, beginning in 1951; originally a boy chorister there, he soon became head chorister. According to an obituary published by the school, he gave his first concert as a countertenor in 1959 to a small school group in a chapel at Ely Cathedral. The school now hosts an annual James Bowman Lecture promoting the creative and liberal arts.Mr. Bowman attended New College, Oxford, as an organ scholar and was a member of the New College and Christ Church choirs. In 1965 he met David Munrow, who invited him to join his Early Music Consort of London. He continued performing with that group well into the 1970s, and he was also a member of the early music choral group Pro Cantione Antiqua.Mr. Bowman and Mr. Winwood were together for 48 years. He leaves no other immediate survivors.Producing the countertenor voice, Mr. Bowman told The Sunday Telegraph, involved “using the edge of your vocal cords, and neglecting the central part, which is the bass area.”“I can sing bass,” he added. “I use my bass voice to warm up with, before I sing countertenor. But I can’t keep up a bass voice for long — it feels odd.”Although he was a champion of the countertenor and urged composers to write for it, not all of them hit the mark, he told The Independent of Britain in 1990.“People say, ‘I’ve written you an opera,’ and either the range is too wide or they want you to be something bizarre like a singing corpse,” he said. “I’ve spent my life fighting the idea of being a piece of exquisitery on a table — trying just to be a singer, not a countertenor.” More

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      Ryuichi Sakamoto, Oscar-Winning Composer, Dies at 71

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      Mr. Sakamoto, whose work with Yellow Magic Orchestra influenced electronic music, composed scores for “The Last Emperor” and “The Revenant.”Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of Japan’s most prominent composers, who scored the films “The Last Emperor,” “The Sheltering Sky” and “The Revenant” and was a founder of the influential Yellow Magic Orchestra techno-pop band, died on Tuesday. He was 71.His Instagram page announced the date of his death, but it did not provide further details. Mr. Sakamoto said in 2021 that he had received a diagnosis of rectal cancer and was undergoing treatment.Equally comfortable in futuristic techno, orchestral works, video game tracks and intimate piano solos, Mr. Sakamoto created music that was catchy, emotive and deeply attuned to the sounds around him. Along with issuing numerous solo albums, he collaborated with a wide range of musicians across genres, and received an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Grammy and two Golden Globes.His Yellow Magic Orchestra, which swept the charts in the late 1970s and early ’80s, produced catchy hits like “Computer Game” on synthesizers and sequencers, while also satirizing Western ideas of Japanese music.“The big theme of him is curiosity,” the musician Carsten Nicolai, a longtime collaborator, said in a phone interview in 2021. “Ryuichi understood, very early, that not necessarily one specific genre will be the future of music — that the conversation between different styles, and unusual styles, may be the future.”Mr. Sakamoto was beginning to achieve wide recognition in the early 1980s when the director Nagisa Oshima asked him to co-star, alongside David Bowie, in “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” a 1983 film about a Japanese P.O.W. camp. Mr. Sakamoto, having no background in acting, agreed under the condition that he could also score the film.The movie’s synth-heavy title track remained one of Mr. Sakamoto’s most famous compositions. He often adapted it, including for “Forbidden Colors,” a vocal version with the singer David Sylvian, as well as piano renditions and sweeping orchestral arrangements.Mr. Sakamoto in 1988. He won an Oscar for his work on “The Last Emperor.”Kyodo News, via Associated PressThen came music for films by the director Bernardo Bertolucci, including “The Last Emperor” (1987) “The Sheltering Sky” (1990) and “Little Buddha (1993). Mr. Bertolucci was demanding — he would shout “More emotional, more emotional!” at the composer, and made him rewrite music on the fly during recording sessions with a 40-person orchestra — but “The Last Emperor” won Mr. Sakamoto an Oscar in 1988. Mr. Sakamoto returned to his classical roots in the late 1990s with the album “BTTB,” or “Back to the Basics,” a collection of sentimental, delicate piano arrangements that evoked Claude Debussy, alongside more experimental wanderings into the innards of the piano in the spirit of John Cage.That release included “Energy Flow,” originally written for a commercial for a vitamin drink and released as a single after television viewers called in en masse to ask how they could find of the music. Amid Japan’s Lost Decade — a term for the economic stagnation that followed years of technology-driven growth — the tender piano ballad seemed to offer solace.“Perhaps it’s because people are looking for healing, for some answer to the stress of their country’s recession,” Mr. Sakamoto speculated, when “Energy Flow” became the first instrumental track to reach No. 1, in 1999, on Japan’s Oricon charts.After the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in 2011, Mr. Sakamoto became an activist in Japan’s antinuclear movement, organizing a No Nukes concert in 2012 at which a reunited Yellow Magic Orchestra, and the band Kraftwerk, one of Yellow Magic’s major influences, performed.The day before the concert, he spoke at a protest outside the residence of Japan’s prime minister. “I come here as a citizen,” he said. “It’s important that we all do what we can and raise our voices.”Mr. Sakamoto learned he had throat cancer in 2014. During treatment, he halted work but made an exception when the director Alejandro G. Iñárritu asked him to write music for his film “The Revenant.” With Mr. Nicolai, who performs under the name Alva Noto, Mr. Sakamoto produced a score of luminous dread that was widely acclaimed.He conceived a new project in homage to Andrei Tarkovsky, one of his abiding influences, which became the 2017 “async,” his first solo album in eight years and a summation of his career, with haunting chorales, ethereally synthesized soundscapes, and a recording of the writer Paul Bowles reciting a passage on mortality from “The Sheltering Sky.”Mr. Sakamoto, second from left, had a role in the film “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” and also wrote the music. With him, from left, are Jack Thomas, the film’s. producer; David Bowie, who starred, and Nagisa Oshima, the director.Jacques Langevin/Associated PressIn later years, Mr. Sakamoto’s music became increasingly spacious and ambient, attuned to the flow of time. In an interview with The Creative Independent website, he described why he played his older music so much slower than he used to. “I wanted to hear the resonance,” he said. “I want to have less notes and more spaces. Spaces, not silence. Space is resonant, is still ringing. I want to enjoy that resonance, to hear it growing.”Ryuichi Sakamoto was born on Jan. 17, 1952, in Tokyo. His father, Kazuki Sakamoto, was a well-known literary editor, and his mother, Keiko (Shimomura) Sakamoto, designed women’s hats.He began piano lessons at age 6, and started to compose soon after. Early influences included Bach and Debussy — whom he once called “the door to all 20th century music” — and he discovered modern jazz as he fell in with a crowd of hipster rebels as a teenager. (At the height of the student protest movement, he and his classmates shut down their high school for several weeks.)Mr. Sakamoto was drawn to modern art and especially the avant-garde work of Cage. He studied composition and ethnomusicology at Tokyo University of the Arts and began playing around with synthesizers and performing in the local pop scene.In 1978, Mr. Sakamoto released his debut solo album, “Thousand Knives,” a trippy amalgam that opens with the musician reciting a poem by Mao through a vocoder, followed by a reggae beat and a procession of Herbie Hancock-inspired improvisations. That year, the bassist Haruomi Hosono invited him and the drummer Yukihiro Takahashi to form a trio that became Yellow Magic Orchestra. (Mr. Takahashi died in January.)The band’s self-titled 1978 album was a huge hit, and influenced numerous electronic music genres, from synth pop to techno. The group broke up in 1984, in part because Mr. Sakamoto wanted to pursue solo work. (They have periodically reunited since the 1990s.) Mr. Sakamoto continued tinkering with outré, high-tech approaches in his 1980 album “B-2 Unit,” which included the otherworldly electro single “Riot in Lagos.”Mr. Sakamoto performing in Rome in 2009.Domenico Stinellis/Associated PressAfter the Bertolucci films, Mr. Sakamoto was seemingly everywhere — appearing in a Madonna music video, modeling for Gap, and writing music for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. His collaborators for the eclectic albums “Neo Geo” (1987) and “Beauty” (1989) included Iggy Pop, Youssou N’Dour, and Brian Wilson, and he toured with a world-fusion band from five continents. By the mid-1990s, Mr. Sakamoto had refashioned himself as a classical composer, touring arrangements of his earlier music in a piano trio. His work simultaneously became grandiose in scale and themes: he wrote a symphony, “Discord,” exploring grief and salvation (with spoken word contributions by David Byrne and Patti Smith), and an opera, “LIFE,” a meditation on 20th century history that received mixed reviews.Along with writing music for video games and designing ringtones for the Nokia 8800 phone, Mr. Sakamoto oversaw live streams of his concerts that featured a “remote clap” function, in which online viewers could press their keyboard’s F key to applaud. The strokes would be registered on a screen in the auditorium.In the 21st century, he began to focus again on more experimental work, inspired by a new generation of collaborators including the producer Fennesz and Mr. Nicolai, who layered glitchy electronics over Mr. Sakamoto’s piano.“He taught me that I should not be afraid of melody,” Mr. Nicolai said, “that melody has the possibility of experimentation as well.”Mr. Sakamoto became outspoken as an environmentalist, recording the sounds of a melting glacier for his 2009 record “Out of Noise.” For portions of “async,” he performed on an out-of-tune piano that had been partly submerged in the 2011 Tohoku tsunami. He recorded what became his final album, “12,” as a kind of diary of sketches, following a lengthy hospitalization, through 2021 and 2022. “I just wanted to be showered in sound,” he said of the record. “I had a feeling that it’d have a small healing effect on my damaged body and soul.”In December, he gave a career-spanning, livestreamed solo piano concert at Tokyo’s 509 Studio.Mr. Sakamoto married Natsuko Sakamoto in 1972, and they divorced 10 years later. His second marriage, to the musician Akiko Yano in 1982, ended in divorce in 2006. His partner was Norika Sora, who served as his manager. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Sakamoto greets fans after a performance in New York in 2010.Hiroko Masuike for The New York TimesMr. Sakamoto’s attention to sound suffused his daily life. After many years of eating at the Manhattan restaurant Kajitsu, he recalled in a 2018 interview with The New York Times, he wrote an email to the chef saying, “I love your food, I respect you and I love this restaurant, but I hate the music.” Then, without fanfare or pay, he designed subtle, tasteful playlists for the restaurant.He simply wanted better sounds to accompany his meals. More

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      Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Nun With a Musical Gift, Dies at 99

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      Born in Ethiopia, she seemed headed for a career as a concert pianist before she chose a monastic life. Her intricate piano recordings gained a cult following.“Honky tonk” and “nun” are words not often seen in combination, but in 2017, when the BBC broadcast a radio documentary about the pianist and composer Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, “The Honky Tonk Nun” was the title of choice.It was a testament to the music she made, both before and after she became a nun in the 1940s, music that drew on her classical training but seemed to partake of rhythm and blues, jazz and other influences. The relatively few who discovered it knew they had found their way to something singular.The musician Norah Jones was one who did, especially after hearing the album “Éthiopiques 21,” a collection of Sister Guèbrou’s piano solos that was part of a record series spotlighting folkloric and pop music from Ethiopia.“This album is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard: part Duke Ellington, part modal scales, part the blues, part church music,” Ms. Jones told The New York Times in 2020. “It resonated in all those ways for me.”The documentarian Garrett Bradley used Sister Guèbrou’s music in the soundtrack of “Time,” her acclaimed 2020 film about a New Orleans woman’s fight to get her husband out of prison. Alex Westfall, writing in Pitchfork about that movie and its soundtrack, called the music “the sonic equivalent to infinity — untethered by conventional meter or rhythm, as if Guèbrou’s instrument holds more keys than it should.”Fana Broadcasting, Ethiopia’s state-run news agency, announced on March 27 that Sister Guèbrou had died in Jerusalem. She was 99. The announcement did not specify when she died.“Hers were some of the most extraordinary 99 years ever lived on this earth,” Kate Molleson, who made “The Honky Tonk Nun” and wrote about Sister Guèbrou in her book “Sound Within Sound: Radical Composers of the 20th Century” (2022), said on Twitter.Sister Guèbrou (the title emahoy is used for a female monk) was born Yewubdar Guèbru on Dec. 12, 1923, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. (She changed her name when she became a nun.) Her father, Kentiba Gebru Desta, held several titles, including mayor of Gondar, and her mother, Kassaye Yelemtu, was socially prominent as well. At age 6, Sister Guèbrou was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland. There, she said in the BBC documentary, she saw a concert by a blind pianist that made a strong impression.“It remained in my mind, in my heart,” she said. “After that, I was captivated by music.”She studied violin and piano and then returned to Ethiopia in 1933 to attend the Empress Menen secondary school. After Italy, under Benito Mussolini, invaded Ethiopia in 1935 and forced its emperor, Haile Selassie, into exile, Sister Guèbrou and her family were deported to the Italian island of Asinara and then were relocated to Mercogliano, east of Naples.When the Italian occupation ended and Selassie was restored to power in 1941, Sister Guèbrou, still a teenager, accepted an offer to further her music studies in Cairo, though the Cairo climate did not agree with her. She eventually returned to Ethiopia, working for a time as an assistant in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Ms. Guèbrou in an undated photo. After studying music in Italy and Cairo, she underwent a spiritual reassessment and became a nun, joining a monastery in Ethiopia. “I took off my shoes and went barefoot for 10 years,” she said. via Buda MusiqueShe had a chance to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London and seemed on the way to a career as a concert pianist, the BBC documentary says, but that prospect fell through for reasons Sister Guèbrou would not detail. That led her to a spiritual reassessment of her life, and by her early 20s, she was a nun. She spent 10 years in a hilltop monastery in Ethiopia.“I took off my shoes and went barefoot for 10 years,” she told Ms. Molleson. “No shoes, no music, just prayer.”She returned to her family and by the 1960s was recording some of her music; her first album was released in Germany in 1967, according to the website of a foundation established in her name to promote music education.She made several other records over the next 30 years, donating the proceeds to the poor. In the mid-1980s, she left Ethiopia and settled into an Ethiopian Orthodox monastery in Jerusalem, spending the rest of her life there. Information on her survivors was not available.Sister Guèbrou came to much wider attention in 2006. The French musicologist and producer Francis Falceto, who had been releasing albums of Ethiopian music from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s in a series called “Éthiopiques” on the Buda Musique label, made a collection of her solo pieces No. 21 in that series.“While the sound of this musician’s pensive, repetitive drawing-room études owes something to Beethoven, Schumann and Debussy — although they are studded with little arpeggios special to Ethiopian music — there is a dusky, early-blues quality to much of it,” Ben Ratliff wrote in a review in The Times. “If you’ve heard some jazz, you could think it was written by Mary Lou Williams or Duke Ellington in their own moments of making their own quiet, original drawing-room music.”Ilana Webster-Kogen, an ethnomusicologist at SOAS University of London with an expertise in Ethiopian music, broke down one track from the “Éthiopiques” album, the inviting yet complex “The Story of the Wind,” which is less than three minutes long.“First, there is a lot of classical technique in there, particularly in the interplay between the right and left hands,” she said by email. “You might think you’re listening to a sonata for those first few seconds because there is so much harmony between the right and left hand. But then it becomes immediately clear that she’s improvising, so the genre signals jazz.”And then there’s the meter of the piece.“Most Ethiopian music is written in 6/8, which you can count either as duple meter or triple meter (1-2-1-2 or 1-2-3-1-2-3),” Dr. Webster-Kogen wrote. “If you try to count, you’ll see that she really fluctuates between duple and triple pulse. This would be innovative coming from any musician, and sure, there are other Ethiopian musicians who do this — now — but the idea that they got it from a woman who has dedicated her life to prayer and charity … anyone can see that this is unusual.” More

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      Seymour Stein, Record Biz Giant Who Signed Madonna, Dies at 80

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      Steeped in music, he championed Madonna, the Ramones, Talking Heads, the Pretenders and more on his Sire label, and helped found the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.It was early 1957, and a nervous teenager named Seymour Steinbigle sat in a midtown office with his father and a hard-bitten record producer who was offering to mentor the young man in the ways of the music business.“Listen,” the producer, Syd Nathan, told the skeptical parent. “Your son has shellac in his veins,” referring to the brittle material used in 78 r.p.m. records.“If he can’t be in the music business, it’s going to ruin his life,” Mr. Nathan added. “He’ll wind up doing nothing and will have to deliver newspapers.”The pitch worked. Mr. Steinbigle agreed to let his son spend the next two summers in Cincinnati at Mr. Nathan’s company, King Records, home to R&B stars like James Brown and Little Willie John.The experience at King proved formative, and the young Steinbigle — better known as Seymour Stein, a name he took at Mr. Nathan’s suggestion — would become one of the music industry’s most successful and most colorful executives, signing Madonna, the Ramones, Talking Heads and the Pretenders to his label Sire, and helping to found the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.He also worked with the Smiths, the Cure, Ice-T, Lou Reed, Seal, K.D. Lang and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys in a career that stretched well over 50 years. Mr. Stein died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles at age 80. The cause was cancer, his daughter Mandy said.Mr. Stein, left, with Hilly Kristal, owner of the club CBGB in Lower Manhattan, in the 1970s. Mr. Stein signed the punk rock group the Ramones after it made an appearance at the club in 1975. Joe StevensIn a business fixated on hits, Mr. Stein was a walking encyclopedia of 20th-century pop and more. He could rattle off the lyrics, chart positions and B-sides of seemingly any notable record going back to the 1940s, and lovingly sing their hooks in a nasal whine. A champion of punk rock in the 1970s, he would also tear up over “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem.“He knows all the lyrics to every song you’ve ever heard,” Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders once said.Even in the brusque world of old-school record executives, Mr. Stein could be startlingly impolitic. He sometimes told journalists — in jest, they hoped — that he would kill them if their work made him look bad. And while his memoir, “Siren Song: My Life in Music” (2018), written with Gareth Murphy, was filled with lighthearted anecdotes like the “shellac” scene with Syd Nathan, he also used the book to settle old scores with rivals like Mo Ostin (who died last year), the longtime, widely admired head of Warner Bros., which had acquired Sire.“Being liked was not my goal in life,” Mr. Stein wrote. “My business was turning great music into hit records.”Seymour Steinbigle was born on April 18, 1942, into an Orthodox Jewish family in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. His father, David, worked in the garment business in Manhattan; his mother, Dora (Weisberg) Steinbigle, had worked in a family market in Coney Island from a young age.As a child, Seymour took comfort and pleasure in pop music — listening to it as well as learning every detail he could about it. At age 8, while tuning in his favorite radio show, “Make Believe Ballroom,” he noticed that Martin Block, the announcer, saluted Patti Page on her 13-week run at No. 1 with her song “Tennessee Waltz” — an early sign of Mr. Stein’s lifelong obsession with music charts.In his early teens, he showed up in the Manhattan offices of Billboard, the music industry trade publication, with a request. He wanted to copy, by hand, the magazine’s pop, country and Black music singles charts for every week going back to his birth. The editors agreed, and were amazed to see him follow through.“He would come in every day after class and work on this project,” Tom Noonan, the magazine’s former chart editor, later told Rolling Stone. “It took him two years.”After graduating from high school, Mr. Stein took a junior position at Billboard, where in 1958 he was part of the team that introduced the Hot 100, which remains the magazine’s flagship singles chart. In the early 1960s, he worked at King and Red Bird, a short-lived label founded with the songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller; its first release, the Dixie Cups’ “Chapel of Love” (1964), went to No. 1.Richard Gottehrer and Mr. Stein in 2010. The two went into business together in 1966 and named their company Sire, a blend of their first names.Chad Batka for The New York TimesIn 1966, Mr. Stein went into business with Richard Gottehrer, a young producer and songwriter who had established himself with hits like the Angels’ “My Boyfriend’s Back” (1963). Mixing up the first two letters of each man’s given name — S, E, R and I — they called their new company Sire.Mr. Stein developed a specialty of licensing British and European songs for American release. At first, New York cheesecakes helped open the necessary doors. According to Mr. Stein, he would board trans-Atlantic flights carrying a stack of cakes packed in dry ice and serve them to salivating record executives in London. “The more we delivered, the easier it was to walk out with bargains,” he wrote.Sire had its first hit in 1973 with “Hocus Pocus,” a yodeling rock novelty track by the Dutch band Focus. It went to No. 9 in the United States and, according to Mr. Stein, sold a million copies.Mr. Gottehrer left the label in 1975. One night that year, Mr. Stein’s wife, Linda Stein, came home from a downtown Manhattan dive raving about a new band. The bar was called CBGB and the group was the Ramones. Auditioning the band the next day, Mr. Stein was amazed if bemused by the band’s blistering take on 1960s bubble-gum rock; he later described the Ramones’ sound as the Beach Boys put through a meat grinder.“Ramones,” the band’s debut album, was released in 1976 and established punk rock’s blueprint of songs that were brutish and short, though with a tunefulness and winking humor that few could match. Still, Mr. Stein wrote in his memoir, “radio stations wouldn’t touch the Ramones with a toilet brush.” It took 38 years for their first album to go gold.After the Ramones, Mr. Stein signed Talking Heads to Sire and soon also brought to the label Echo and the Bunnymen, the Pretenders and Soft Cell (“Tainted Love”). Sire had its first No. 1 hit in 1979 with “Pop Muzik” by M, a new wave touchstone.Mr. Stein in 2010. After taking an early interest in the music business, he went on to become one of its most successful and most colorful executives.Chad Batka for The New York TimesMr. Stein made his most successful signing while hospitalized for a heart condition in 1982. Madonna Ciccone, a young singer and dancer, was beginning to attract industry attention for a demo tape of a song she had written called “Everybody.” Fearing competition from other labels, Mr. Stein summoned her to his bedside at Lenox Hill Hospital.“Just tell me what I have to do to get a record deal in this town,” she said (using saltier language), according to Mr. Stein’s book.“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “You’ve got a deal.”Mr. Stein signed Madonna to a $45,000 contract for three singles, with an option for an album, and Sire released “Everybody” that fall. Madonna went on to sell more than 64 million albums in the United States alone, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.“Words cannot describe how I felt at this moment after years of grinding and being broke and getting every door slammed in my face,” Madonna said of her signing in a post on Instagram after Mr. Stein’s death. (“I am weeping as I write this down,” she said.) “Not only did Seymour hear me,” she wrote, “but he Saw me and my Potential! For this I will be eternally grateful!”In 1983, Mr. Stein was part of a group of music and media executives who created the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, and in 2005 he was inducted into the hall as a nonperformer.In the 1980s, he coaxed new albums from aging rock legends. He signed Brian Wilson for his first solo album, and Lou Reed for “New York,” the 1989 album that reestablished Reed’s credentials as a cold-eyed commentator on urban life. In later years, Mr. Stein remained at Warner Music while the Sire imprint shuffled between divisions and was inactive for a time. He retired in 2018.In addition to his daughter Mandy, a filmmaker whose projects have included a documentary about CBGB, Mr. Stein is survived by a sister, Ann Wiederkehr, and three grandchildren. His marriage ended in divorce. Ms. Stein, his former wife, was a co-manager of the Ramones who became a successful real estate agent in New York. In 2007, she was killed by her assistant, who was sentenced to 25 years to life for second-degree murder. His daughter Samantha Jacobs died of brain cancer in 2013.In his memoir, Mr. Stein discussed his sexuality, including his attraction to men and the gay subculture that permeated the entertainment world, particularly in London. “I somehow knew we’d make a rock-and-roll king-and-queen combo,” he wrote of his marriage to Linda, “even if the roles were a little confused.”Mr. Stein became a noted collector of art and antiques, which he often acquired while on scouting trips for new music. “The Siren,” a painting by the Pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse that Mr. Stein had owned for more than 30 years, was sold at Sotheby’s in London in 2018 for about $5 million.But Mr. Stein always maintained that the business of music was his true calling.“When I first got hired at Billboard, I went home and told my mother. I said, ‘Ma, they actually pay me!’” Mr. Stein told Rolling Stone in 1986, the year that Madonna’s album “True Blue” went to No. 1.“I just love music and love this business,” he added. “And you know what? I still don’t believe I get paid for it.” More