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      in Music

      Annie Mac’s Before Midnight: A Dance Party With an Early Bedtime

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      The Before Midnight parties promise all the thrills of a hedonistic night out, but with a respectable finish time for older dance music fans.It was Friday night, in a 2,000-person capacity nightclub in London, and the dance floor was packed. A heavy-duty sound system pounded out house music and a huge disco ball turned overhead. Only one thing was off: It was 9.30 p.m.A woman in the crowd gleefully yelled to the throng of people around her: “I’m 15 weeks postpartum and I’m in the club!”The party, called Before Midnight, is organized by the Irish D.J. Annie Macmanus, who plays under the name Annie Mac: It promises all the thrills of a club — just with an early bedtime. Starting at 7 p.m. and wrapped up by 12, Before Midnight is one of several recent variations on the hedonistic all-night sessions in which dance music is usually enjoyed, aimed at older fans juggling children and careers.“There’s an inherent belief that clubbing is for young people,” Macmanus said recently by phone. “There’s now a generation of people who experienced clubbing in its most popular guise, and still want to do that, but don’t feel like they belong there anymore.”Macmanus explained that Before Midnight was born out of her desire to fit a music career around her duties as a mother of two children, ages 6 and 9. Late-night D.J. sets didn’t mix well with their weekend activities, she said.“It felt like I had jet lag,” Macmanus said. “It just wasn’t accommodating for where I’m at in my life right now.”Annie Macmanus, who D.J.s as Annie Mac. Before setting up Before Midnight, she fronted BBC radio’s flagship dance music show.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesMacmanus said this reckoning coincided with her decision, in 2021, to stand down as the presenter of the BBC’s flagship dance music show, on BBC Radio 1 — a gig she had held for 17 years and which cemented her name as a musical tastemaker in Britain.Before Midnight was her next act, she said, a fresh project to restore some work-life balance. The premise was simple, she added: “a definitive club night that’s just like a normal one, only earlier.”The first night, held last year at the Islington Assembly Hall, a London music venue, was a one-off experiment. It sold out, and, at the end of last year, Macmanus announced a 10-date Before Midnight tour of Britain and Ireland. The tour’s two remaining London dates are also taking place at Outernet, a new, subterranean nightclub in the city’s West End that is the largest live events space built in central London since the 1940s.Before Midnight is particularly popular with women, who Macmanus estimated make up about 75 percent of the crowd. Jodie Brooks, 44, who has attended every Before Midnight party in London to date, was in the crowd this past Friday. “I just didn’t want the night to start at 1 a.m. anymore,” Brooks, who works in advertising and like Macmanus has two children age 6 and 9, said later by phone. “I never wanted parenthood to change me in that way, but, inevitably, it just does. You have to get up and do the Saturday-morning football practice at 9 a.m.,” she said.The coronavirus lockdowns of 2022 and 2021, which took clubbing temporarily out of the mix, made many people in their 30s and 40s re-evaluate how they wanted to spend their weekends. Some, like Brooks, emerged determined to get back on the dance floor, but on new, more wholesome terms. With Before Midnight, she said, “You can go for a really lush dinner at six. By eight you’re in the club,” and “by 12 you’re out.”Before Midnight is particularly popular with women, who Macmanus estimated make up about 75 percent of the crowd.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesOthers realized that they liked dance music, but not nightclubs. Adem Holness, who leads the contemporary music program at the Southbank Center, a central London arts venue, said that many of the venue’s offerings suited electronic music enthusiasts at a more mature life stage: Performances are seated, and finish in time to catch the last Tube home.“We have a menu of different options for people,” he said. “It’s about making the model work for all kinds of people.”In the last year, D.J.s and dance music performers including Fabio & Grooverider, Erykah Badu and Peaches have all played gigs at the Royal Festival Hall, a concert hall managed by the Southbank. “I’m seeing people wanting to experience really great music that you might think or assume belongs in a club, somewhere else, or in a different way,” Holness said.Before Midnight’s London dates are at Outernet, a new, subterranean nightclub in the city’s West End.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesUpcoming parties are scheduled for Manchester in northern England, Glasgow and Dublin, among other cities.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesBefore Midnight was also influenced by the experience of bringing club culture into a more rarefied space, Macmanus said. In 2019, she recalled, she played in New York at MoMa PS1’s Warm Up, the art museum’s summer series that sets experimental and electronic music alongside contemporary art and design. There, she saw a multigenerational audience dancing together, she said. “It had a big effect on me as a D.J.,” she added. “I’m always going to try and reach that type of a dance floor.”The Before Midnight concept was simple, Macmanus said: “a definitive club night that’s just like a normal one, only earlier.”Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesMacmanus added that an early-starting dance party wasn’t a totally original idea. Tim Lawrence, a professor of cultural studies at the University of East London who researches nightlife has been running a monthly London dance party that starts at 5 p.m. since 2018; in an interview, he said that events like Before Midnight were a way to “pluralize the culture.” During a 2017 tour of the United States to promote his book “Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor,” Lawrence recalled, he attended an invite-only party in New York called Joy that started around dinnertime.Lawrence brought the concept back to London with him and co-founded his monthly dance party called All Our Friends. “It’s about confounding certain ideas that come with the all-night or late-night thing,” Lawrence said. The earlier timetable allows for a different approach to dancing, he said, which can “potentially be more expressive, more interactive and go a bit deeper on a social level.”But for Brooks, the advertising worker, the appeal of Before Midnight was much simpler: It was an opportunity to dance to the music that she loves, in a club like any other, and be home in time for bed.“You get all the joy and the love,” she said. “You get to be a part of something again. And you don’t feel out of place.”Confetti released just before midnight signaled the party was almost over.Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times More

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      in Theater

      Gabriel Byrne Reflects on the End of His Broadway Show, and Tells T a Joke

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      ‘Walking With Ghosts,’ which closed Nov. 20, allowed the Irish actor to showcase his passion for the humor of everyday life.Gabriel Byrne is well aware he is not a Disney franchise. “I’m just one person, writing about myself,” said Byrne, 72, in a video interview on a recent morning before one of the final performances of his autobiographical one-man Broadway show, “Walking With Ghosts,” which closed more than a month early on Nov. 20. “I understand the reality of the marketplace and at the same time feel profoundly grateful I got here at all.”Originally slated to run through the end of December at the Music Box Theater, the show closed after just 25 performances and eight previews amid — to put it kindly — ticket sales that were a few zeros away from “Hamilton” or “Lion King” territory. But Byrne, who with his tousled gray hair, serious face and bright blue eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses, cuts a grandfatherly figure — if the grandfather in question were a famous Irish actor with a Golden Globe and a tendency to quote James Joyce — is a good sport about his early eviction notice. “How long a thing lasts isn’t a reflection of its essential worth,” he said. “A relationship that lasts 18 months can contain more within it than relationships that last 10 or 15 years.”The show, which is based on Byrne’s 2020 memoir of the same name, certainly had its fans, particularly when he performed it to sold-out crowds in Ireland, where he was born and spent the first 11 years of his life, and then in London’s West End earlier this year. While the Broadway run received mixed reviews, the New York Times critic Alexis Soloski praised Byrne’s charisma and stage presence, calling him “compulsively watchable.” “Who wouldn’t want to spend a clinical hour with this man?” she wrote. “Or two, plus intermission.”Gabriel Byrne in his one-man show, “Walking With Ghosts,” at the Music Box Theater in New York.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesByrne, who last appeared on Broadway in 2016 in a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s 1956 play “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” is best known for his roles in the HBO show “In Treatment” and the 1995 film “The Usual Suspects.” Even after the latter became a sleeper hit, opening a new chapter in his career as a leading man — during which he starred in “Stigmata” (1999) and “End of Days” (1999) — he maintained the workmanlike ethos of his journeyman days, gaining a reputation as a fiercely private person reluctant to claim the spotlight.So it was perhaps surprising that he chose to publish a second memoir. (His first, “Pictures in my Head,” was published in 1994 and covered his childhood in Ireland and the start of his acting career.) The second book, which a Washington Post reviewer wrote “dazzles with unflinching honesty,” similarly focuses on Byrne’s upbringing in a working-class family on the rural outskirts of Dublin and his subsequent journey to Hollywood. But it also travels to darker places, like the period in the early 1960s when the 11-year-old Byrne was sexually abused by a priest at the Catholic seminary school he attended in England.The biggest challenge in adapting his latest memoir for the stage, he said, was trimming some of its reflective aspects to make space for moments that would be more compelling for a live audience. “If it doesn’t work dramatically — if it’s not propulsive, emotional — you get rid of it,” he said. “You can’t put big lumps of prose onstage.” He opted to perform the play on a nearly bare stage, wearing the same blue shirt, blue vest, blue blazer, gray slacks and black boots throughout and striding from one end to the other between scenes as the house went dark to indicate changes in time and location. “The anti-razzle dazzle allows you to concentrate on what’s being said,” he said.The cover of Byrne’s 2020 memoir, “Walking With Ghosts.”Courtesy of Grove PressGrowing up, Byrne wanted to be a priest. But after he was sexually abused, he renounced his faith, cycling through jobs as a dishwasher, a plumber and a toilet attendant before joining an amateur acting troupe in Dublin, where he rediscovered his boyhood love of theater.That led to his TV debut in 1978 in the soap opera “The Riordans,” then to his film debut in the 1981 retelling of the King Arthur legend “Excalibur,” and finally to Hollywood stardom, which brought him into the same circles as luminaries like Richard Burton and Vanessa Redgrave. But that’s not the part of his life he chose to highlight in either of his memoirs or his stage play, which essentially ignores the latter part of his life and acting career. “What you do is only a very small part of who you are,” he said. “Finding your identity through your work is a limited way of knowing yourself.”Instead, he said, he wanted to emphasize experiences people could relate to, themes that felt universal — for instance, that of searching for a sense of rootedness as an immigrant living away from his homeland (he moved to New York in the mid-1980s to be with his then partner, the actor Ellen Barkin; they divorced in 1999 but he remained in the States). “Every immigrant has a yearning to be at home,” he said. “But you can never be at home anywhere once you leave. You trade one place for another, but you don’t really belong in either.”Of course, he said, dredging up his memories of abuse or recounting the death of a boyhood friend every night is hardly enjoyable. But it is a willingness to explore those uncomfortable places, he said, that gives the show its power. “By going there, you’re opening the door for somebody else in the audience to maybe go there, too,” he explained.That is not to say there weren’t lighthearted moments. Among the dozens of characters from his past that Byrne embodies are friends, teachers, religious figures, family members and even the various actors in the amateur theater troupe he joined (Soloski wrote that the show “allows him to show a playful side and a gift, neglected in Hollywood, for physical comedy”). “You can’t just get up there and start telling serious stories,” Byrne said. “You have to leaven it with a spoonful of sugar.”Though he is finished with “Walking With Ghosts” — for now — he suggested that a return to the blue blazer and black boots may not be far off. He’s had offers to do the show in other cities — he has his eye on Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, he said — and international plans are in the works. “The producers want it to go to Australia and Canada,” said Byrne, who lives in Rockport, Maine, with his wife, Hannah Beth King, a documentary filmmaker, and their young daughter. (He has two adult children with Barkin.) “We’ll see. I don’t think Sunday night is the end of it.”In the meantime, he’s working on a new book, his first novel, which will explore themes of immigration and exile. He’s also looking forward to catching up on the movies he hasn’t had time to see and popping in and out of Broadway theaters — now as an audience member. (On his list: The recent revival of “Death of a Salesman.”) “I’ve been living in the world of books and the streets of New York, which is a continuous novel,” he said. “You never stop turning the pages.” More

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      in Music

      When Technology Makes Music More Accessible

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      In Britain and Ireland, a series of recent projects show the rich possibilities when disability and neurodiversity are considered in the creative process.LONDON — As the audience at Cafe OTO, a venue here, settled down to hear Neil Luck introduce his ambitious new piece, “Whatever Weighs You Down,” bemused smiles flickered across many faces.The evening’s performances had already featured an intriguing selection of musical technologies, including sensor gloves, text-to-speech software and recordings of bird song processed by artificial intelligence.So when Luck launched into a low-tech étude, raucously inflating a balloon while gasping into a microphone, audience members couldn’t help but laugh.A dark humor punctuated “Whatever Weighs You Down,” a bizarre, violent 40-minute work for piano, video, electronics and sensor gloves. It was the centerpiece of an evening that presented works made with Cyborg Soloists, a multiyear, 1.4 million-pound ($1.6 million) project, led by the pianist and composer Zubin Kanga, to advance interdisciplinary music-making through new interactions with technology.“Whatever Weighs You Down” is one of several experimental works that recently premiered in Britain and Ireland that show the rich musical possibilities when disability and neurodiversity are incorporated into the creative process. These works also point to newly developed technologies as both malleable tools for expressing diverse perspectives in experimental music, and as potentially enabling greater accessibility to composition, which traditionally has been a rarefied and exclusive world.In recent years, increasing attention has been paid, particularly in Britain, to making classical music more accessible. This includes the widespread adoption of what are called relaxed performances in concert halls — where audiences are allowed to make noise — and the creation of professional ensembles for disabled musicians, such as BSO Resound, part of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, and the Paraorchestra, which is based in Bristol, England.For “Whatever Weighs You Down,” Luck worked closely with the Deaf performance artist Chisato Minamimura, who in the piece appeared on a video screen and used sign language to retell her own dreams about falling, one of the main themes of Luck’s work.More About on Deaf CultureUpending Perceptions: The poetic art of Christine Sun Kim, who was born deaf, challenges viewers to reconsider how they hear and perceive the world. Language in Evolution: Ubiquitous video technology and social media have given deaf people a new way to communicate. They’re using it to transform American Sign Language. Seeking Representation: Though deafness is gaining visibility onscreen, deaf people who rely on hearing devices say their experiences remain mostly untold. Name Signs: Name signs are the equivalent of a first name in some sign languages. We asked a few people to share the story behind theirs.In “Whatever Weighs You Down,” Minamimura wanted to express a deaf perspective on sound and music. “I have hearing loss, but I can feel things — I can feel sounds,” she said in a recent video interview via an interpreter. Workshops to develop the piece involved Minamimura responding to vibrations wherever she could find them: pressing her full body against the lid of the piano, feeling the underside of the soundboard and even biting the strings of certain instruments.As the performance of “Whatever Weighs You Down” drew to a close, it reached a striking semi-synthesis. Onscreen, Minamimura’s gestures mirrored Kanga’s onstage hand movements. Both performers provided a kind of accompaniment for each other, experienced in entirely different ways by audience members, depending on their relationship to sound.“Traditionally, music is just heard in an auditory sense,” Minamimura said, “but, of course, we can see someone playing a piano or playing a flute. For me, technology means incorporating a film, visuals, or a general feeling of something else; we’re adding more sensory experiences for an audience.”Chisato Minamimura’s 2019 piece “Scored in Silence” was created with the aim of giving deaf individuals a comparable experience to hearing individuals.Mark PickthallZubin Kanga leads Cyborg Soloists, a multiyear, 1.4 million-pound project to advance interdisciplinary music-making through new interactions with technology.Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesCreating music that incorporates multisensory experience is just one of the areas Cyborg Soloists explores. The project, supported by the government-funded U.K. Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship, also involves new types of visual interactions, including virtual reality, the creation of new digital instruments and the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning.The next frontier for Kanga, he said, is finding a way to translate brain activity from electroencephalogram caps into sound. And in Ireland, a recent installation explores a similar process.The visual artist Owen Boss described the first time he heard the sonic reproduction of a brain mid-seizure as “an absolutely extraordinary moment,” describing “a very low-end bass sound, kind of rhythmic, it just emerges in these sweeping, intense bass noises that whoosh in and whoosh out.”The sound files were created by Mark Cunningham, a professor of neurophysiology of epilepsy at Trinity College Dublin, who analyzed slivers of removed brain tissue that had been put through a process that simulated a seizure. He translated the analysis into binary code, and then into sound. Inspired by those deeply jarring reverberations and his family’s own experience, Boss then began piecing together an installation, “The Wernicke’s Area,” which is named after the part of the brain involved in understanding speech. The installation is showing at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.In 2014, Boss’s wife, Debbie Boss, had surgery to remove a brain tumor. The procedure was successful — the tumor was removed from her brain’s Wernicke’s area — but there were some side effects: The former soprano developed epilepsy and also now finds communication challenging.The violist Stephen Upshaw and the mezzo-soprano Rosie Middleton took performance directions for “The Wernicke’s Area” from diaries Debbie Boss kept about her seizures.Pat RedmondWith his wife’s permission, Boss and the composer Emily Howard created what he calls “a portrait of Debbie,” a multimedia work including details from the diaries she kept of her seizures, images of her brain, warped snippets of her favorite Handel aria and a variety of electroacoustic music drawn from data produced by artificially induced brain seizures.For all involved, the first performance of “The Wernicke’s Area” was an extremely moving experience, particularly for the Boss family. Debbie Boss became emotional “watching people do what she couldn’t do anymore,” her husband said. Yet, because she wasn’t directly involved in shaping the work, there’s a slight distance to “The Wernicke’s Area.”Lived experience plays a large role in the work of the composer Megan Steinberg, which places neurodiverse and disabled practitioners in all aspects of the creative process.Steinberg’s “Outlier II,” created with the Distractfold ensemble and the artists Elle Chante and Luke Moore, explores, in musical form, how artificial intelligence, or A.I., can exclude disabled people by working off a generalized understanding of human experience. “Outlier II” involves an A.I.-generated melody that generalizes over time, gradually losing nuance before being disrupted by a series of chance-based improvisations.Steinberg considered accessibility from the start of the creative process, and produced scores that were tailored to each performer’s needs.“That’s so rare in arts environments,” said Chante, a vocalist with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a condition affecting her joints. “Normally, it’s like, ‘Oh, we’ve got this thing, and we want it to be accessible.’ Here, it’s, ‘We want to be accessible, and here’s this piece we’re trying to create.’ And that made a giant difference.”A graphic score created for Megan Steinberg’s “Outlier II.”via Megan SteinbergProjects like these also produce music that is more representative of the breadth of human experience, according to Cat McGill, the head of program development at Drake Music, an arts charity focused on music, disability and technology. These projects “force us to challenge our thinking around disability and neurodiversity,” she wrote in an email interview.“If we approach a situation with the assumption that each individual has a unique contribution to make, rather than feeling like we need to fix them,” McGill added, “we embrace the differences as a natural part of humanity.” More

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      in Theater

      In ‘Joyce’s Women,’ 2 Great Irish Writers Square Up

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      Edna O’Brien’s latest stage work, at the Abbey Theater in Dublin, imagines the inner lives of important female figures around James Joyce.DUBLIN — Toward the end of “Joyce’s Women,” the Irish writer Edna O’Brien’s ninth work for the stage, handwritten letters rain down from the ceiling and the scene is interrupted by anonymous voices. One calls James Joyce’s writing “beyond human comprehension.” Another labels it “ejaculatory smut.” Finally a man’s voice, unseen, disembodied, asks a question: “Who owns James Joyce?”Running through Oct. 15 at the Abbey Theater in Dublin, the play addresses the personal life of an author banned in his time but celebrated today, whose works are synonymous with Dublin, but who fled the city as a young man. It’s the product of O’Brien’s lifelong fascination with Joyce, her “ultimate hero” and the subject of her 1999 biography, “James Joyce.”In “Joyce’s Women,” we see the author through the eyes of the women who were his inspiration and his support network, including his lifelong partner, Nora Barnacle; his daughter, Lucia; and his patron, Harriet Weaver. They wait for news of Joyce from a hospital in Zurich; with the writer on his deathbed, the play weaves together scenes from a life marked by ambition and poverty, creativity and madness, attempting to capture what O’Brien called “the enormity of James Joyce’s personal and imaginative life.”Hulme-Beaman on top of Brid Ni Neachtain, who plays Joyce’s wife, Nora Barnacle, in rehearsal.Ellius Grace for The New York TimesRegarded as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, Joyce’s works continue to be widely read (“Dubliners,” his 1914 short story collection), widely attempted (“Ulysses,” his 700-plus-page epic of Dublin life) and widely speculated-upon (“Finnegans Wake,” the cryptic behemoth that was his final novel). The play brings Joycean language to life with music as well as the spoken word.“What I felt with Joyce, as I had never felt with another writer,” O’Brien said in an interview, was that “for all the boundaries he has broken, through language, he also speaks very truly, at least to me. There is always, without it being too demonstrative, an emotional pulse, an emotional engine behind what he says.”This year is the centennial of “Ulysses,” and many events, in Ireland and abroad, were clustered around Bloomsday, June 16, the date on which the novel unfolds. Nearing the end of this Joyce year, O’Brien’s dreamlike, reflective play is like a theatrical wake after the festivities. “This is one great writer squaring up to another,” said Conall Morrison, the director of “Joyce’s Women,” after a day of rehearsals at the Abbey Theater. “It is also, to a lesser extent, self-referential. It’s Edna’s meditation on the creative process, and the cost involved — the cost to the writer, and everyone around the writer.”Like Joyce, O’Brien has lived in literary exile. Her debut novel, “The Country Girls,” was the subject of a national scandal when it was published in 1960. It was banned in Ireland for its depictions of sex and female sexuality, as were its sequels, “The Lonely Girl” and “Girls in Their Married Bliss.” In 2015, President Michael D. Higgins issued a formal apology to O’Brien on behalf of the nation, and O’Brien was made a Saoi of Aosdana, the highest honor for an Irish artist.Left to right: Caitríona McLaughlin, the Abbey Theater’s artistic director; Edna O’Brien, who wrote “Joyce’s Women”; and Mark O’Brien, the theater’s executive director.Ste Murray“I think the fact that Edna O’Brien has chosen to write this, and that she’s someone whose genius has cost her throughout her life, makes for a fascinating prism to view this play through,” said Ali White, who plays Harriet Weaver. “What has been her own experience with success, failure, fame, notoriety and being banned?”In recent decades, plays, films, fiction and graphic novels have explored the lives of Joyce’s female family members, occasionally positioning them as each other’s rivals. Annabel Abbs’s novel “The Joyce Girl” (2016) is a fictionalized account of the life of Lucia, in which she is cast as Joyce’s muse and Nora’s adversary; Nuala O’Connor’s novel “Nora” (2021) is more sympathetic to its heroine.“There is this cottage industry of plays and novels and so on about Joyce’s family members,” said Sam Slote, a professor of Irish literature at Trinity College Dublin who has edited five books on Joyce. “What’s interesting is that the works are sacrosanct, but the contemporary imagination of artists is on the life of Joyce and his family members.”Little has survived of Lucia’s own voice; her nephew, Stephen Joyce, announced in 1988 that he had destroyed the letters she wrote to her family. Joyce’s famously pornographic “dirty letters” to Nora were published in 1975, but her side of the correspondence has never surfaced. Faced with these blank patches, “Joyce’s Women” imagines each character’s point of view, and allows them to narrate different sides of the same story. Nora is embattled, but resolute. Lucia drifts between fact and fiction. Later they are joined by Miss Weaver, the tireless activist and financial backer who funded Joyce’s lifestyle and helped secure his legacy.“While their allegiances, claims and counter claims differed,” O’Brien said, “I did not want to write a wrangling, bitter play, a relentless toll of enmity, accusation and intrigue. These women were crucial both in his life and in his work.”Sabine Dargent’s set design of “Joyce’s Women,” under construction in September.Ellius Grace for The New York TimesOne scene, incorporating dance, captures the rapport between Joyce (Stephen Hogan) and Lucia (Genevieve Hulme-Beaman). Then a screen unfurls across the stage, and a film is projected onto it that shows Lucia’s descent into psychosis. “She crept into her father’s work and her father’s psyche,” O’Brien said. “She adopted some of his more idiosyncratic words and, though doctors warned of alarming schisms in her behavior, Joyce believed that she was a genius, both of them being only a transparent leaf away from madness.”Another scene features May Joyce, the writer’s mother. An early supporter of his writing, May is believed to have had 15 pregnancies — 10 children survived — before her early death at the age of 44. Summoned home from Paris by telegram as she was dying, Joyce refused to pray at her bedside alongside other family members and wrote, in a letter to Nora, that when he saw her in her coffin, “I understood that I was looking on the face of a victim and I cursed the system which had made her a victim.”Joyce abandoned the Catholic church as a teenager; he wrote to Nora that his aim was to “make open war on it in what I write and say and do,” and they eloped in defiance of Ireland’s religious culture. Yet his work is haunted by a distinctly Catholic sense of guilt. “Catholic religion was embedded in Joyce’s thinking, not only by the church but by the long-suffering May,” O’Brien said. “His mother’s effect on him was deep but remained unfinished.” This early bond inspired a lifelong relationship to women split between reverence and torment: Joyce visited brothels from age 14, but found, in Nora, a partner who was as much a mother figure as a free spirit. “It was carnal love,” O’Brien said, “but also he saw within her a melancholy and an ancient knowledge that answered his deeper needs.”Stephen Hogan as James Joyce. The production features projected visuals and incorporates dance.Ros KavanaghIn a rehearsal in September, White (as Weaver) and Hogan (as Joyce) ran through a scene depicting the writer’s final hours. Joyce, wearing his familiar waistcoat and circular glasses, lay on a hospital bed and drifted in and out of lucidity. He sang an Irish rebel song, “The Sean-Bhean Bhocht,” then raged at Weaver, his patron, who had told him that he was wasting his genius on “Finnegans Wake,” the enigmatic dream-novel that took Joyce 17 years to complete. Weaver knelt at his bedside and asked for forgiveness.Weaver, who was raised a Quaker, and who later joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, bankrolled Joyce with an estimated equivalent of over $1.7 million today. “It became almost like her religion to support these people,” White said later of Weaver, who also quietly funded writers including T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis. Joyce’s charisma was “such that he entranced people, even if they weren’t getting much in return,” she added.“Joyce’s Women” dismisses present-day debate about separating art from the artist, arguing that to draw a line between Joyce’s life and his works would be impossible. Slote, the professor, quoted a line from “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” in which Joyce says a writer is “a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.” Slote said this was “a good capsule description; the artist takes their experience and refracts it, and turns it into something else.”The play explores that process in all its complexity. “He loved these women, not as muses but as beings who answered to the longings and anguish of his inner life,” O’Brien said. Yet Joyce’s greatest loyalty was to his work. “That’s where the writer really lives, and belongs,” O’Brien said. “With their words.” More

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      in Music

      How Kneecap Is Pioneering Irish-Language Rap

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      The trio Kneecap is pioneering Irish-language rap, a genre that barely existed a decade ago.BELFAST, Northern Ireland — On a recent evening in a small, rowdy, West Belfast bar, Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap, two members of the rap group Kneecap, were posing for photographs with fans. One of the bar’s patrons, tapping out a text message nearby, called out to the rappers, “How do you spell ‘ceart go leor’?” an Irish phrase meaning something like “OK.”It might seem like a weird question for hip-hop artists, but Kneecap’s members should know. They have found fame here in a genre they are pioneering: Irish-language rap.Since 2017, when Kneecap released “CEARTA” (the Irish word for “rights”), the band’s popularity has been growing on both sides of Ireland’s internal border and among the diaspora across the Irish Sea. The band’s signature blend of ramshackle rave and rudimentary hip-hop beats, mixed with republican politics — in the Irish sense of seeking unity for the island’s north and south — has brought Kneecap sold-out gigs in Belfast and Dublin, and a growing fan base in England and Scotland.Even a decade ago, the notion of Irish-language rap seemed fantastical. But something is happening in Ireland — north and south — which lately finds itself in the midst of a so-called Celtic revival, with questions of identity, place and culture being interrogated across the arts, politics, fashion and even spirituality.The Irish language is central to this resurgence. The dominance of English in Ireland is a legacy of British colonization, stretching to the 12th century. English became the language of opportunity, progress and employment, and Irish came to be seen as incompatible with modern life. But people carried on speaking Irish in some pockets of the island, and a boom in Irish-language schools from the 1970s raised new generations that viewed the language with pride and enthusiasm rather than shame and resistance.D.J. Próvaí showing a photo of his father’s arrest during the Bloody Sunday uprising of 1972.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesRepublican murals in the Falls Road district of Belfast.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesKneecap’s signature style blends ramshackle rave and rudimentary hip-hop beats with republican politics.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesKneecap was born out of an Irish-speaking west Belfast squat, whose all-night parties featured both techno and traditional Irish music on the sound system. “We felt there was something bubbling, and we wanted to represent that,” Móglaí Bap said.“Irish language and culture doesn’t necessarily have to be an image of rural traditional music,” Mo Chara said. “It can involve youth culture.”Kneecap’s lyrics feature republican slang and slogans — often used in a tongue-in-cheek manner — that have stirred controversy in Northern Ireland. D.J. Próvaí, the third band member, said he left a job as an Irish teacher in 2020 after his school objected to a Kneecap video in which an anti-British slogan — “Brits out” — appears drawn on his buttocks.“Republicanism is so vast, and on a spectrum,” Móglaí Bap said in an interview. “We like to toy with it. We like to take the irony on, and also not be dictated about what kind of republicanism we’re going to believe in.”Frequent references to taking drugs in the band’s lyrics have placed Kneecap at odds with republican dissidents, many of whom have a zero-tolerance policy toward drug use. (The band’s name comes from a form of torture that republican paramilitary groups would inflict on those they accused of drug dealing.) “We’re screaming about the ‘Ra,” Móglaí Bap said, using a familiar name for the Irish Republican Army, “even though the ‘Ra would probably shoot us for doing all of these sort of things.”Not all artists embracing the Irish language are motivated by politics, however: Often, it is as much about rediscovering the past as reckoning with the present. In summer 2020, Manchán Magan, a writer and broadcaster, published “32 Words for Field,” a catalog of lost words to describe the Irish landscape. The book recalled ancient Irish terms like “scim,” which can mean a thin coating of particles, like dust on a shelf, “but it can also mean a fairy film that covers the land, or a magical vision, or succumbing to the supernatural world through sleep,” Magan writes.“32 Words for Field” was an instant cult hit, and it became a mainstream one. Its initial print run sold out in pre-orders before it reached bookstores.Magan said the recent boom in Irish-language creativity was part of a continuing search for an Irish identity, unshackled from colonialism and Catholicism. “What we’re trying to do is rooting ourselves back to — not nationalism, but those things that came before the nation,” he said in an interview. “Connection with the spirit, or some sort of universal mythology, all of those things that bring us together, that make us realize we’re united.”Catherine Clinch, left, and Carrie Crowley in a scene from “The Quiet Girl,” an Irish-language movie that won two honors at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival. InscéalIn Irish-language cinema, barely a genre a few years ago, the latest hit is “The Quiet Girl” (“An Cailín Ciúin”), which last month won two honors at the Berlin International Film Festival, and this month beat the Academy Award-nominated “Belfast” to win best film at the Irish Film and Television Academy Awards. Adapted from a 2010 short story in The New Yorker by Claire Keegan, “The Quiet Girl” was partly funded by an initiative called Cine4, run by the Irish-language television station, TG4.The film’s writer-director, Colm Bairéad, said he looked forward to the film being screened around Europe, when audiences would hear “the Irish language bouncing around these auditoriums where the language just hasn’t been heard throughout the history of the medium.”Cleona Ní Chrualaoí, the producer of “The Quiet Girl,” said the current resurgence of Irish-language creativity was, in part, because of people who went through the Irish-language school system. “That has really helped our positive relationship with the language,” she said. “We have generations of children, who have become adults who really respect the language.”Móglaí Bap said Kneecap’s members came from “probably the first generation coming out of the Irish-language education system that developed their own sense of identity within the language.” For the band, rapping in Irish wasn’t just about lyricism, or even identity, Mo Chara said. It offered, he added, “a completely different understanding of the culture, and even of reality around you.”“We found this wee niche,” Móglaí Bap said. “The language is a way for us to bring people with us.”Kneecap has played sold-out gigs in Belfast and Dublin, and has a growing fan base in England and Scotland.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times More

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      New York’s Irish Arts Center Upgrades to a ‘Flagship Hub’

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      Irish Arts Center, a New York nonprofit devoted to championing the culture of Ireland and Irish Americans, is finally moving into a home as big as its aspirations.The organization, founded in the East Village in 1972, has been operating for decades out of a onetime tenement in Hell’s Kitchen. Now, wrapping up a pandemic-delayed construction project first set in motion 15 years ago, the center is moving just around the corner after converting a longtime tire shop into a state-of-the-art performance facility where it aims, starting in December, to present theater, dance, music, visual art and more.Ireland “still has these incredibly deep roots to its own artistic legacy, and it still fundamentally feels like a land of poets in its sensibility and its storytelling,” said Aidan Connolly, the center’s executive director. But, he added, “New Yorkers might not know how exciting the emerging contemporary dance scene in Ireland is; they might not know how Ireland’s cultural evolution in the last 20 years has yielded an exciting, dynamic, more diverse generation of musical artists, and on and on.”The centerpiece of the new building is a flexible theater space that can seat up to 199 people.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesFabric banners and black curtains can be used for acoustic purposes, modifying the way sound is heard in the theater.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe theater’s walls are covered in red oak plywood panels that have been stained and textured.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe four-story, 21,700-square-foot building on 11th Avenue, which retains its original brick repair shop facade, houses, at its center, a black box theater space that has 14 approved configurations, the largest of which will seat 199 people. The theater is a major technological upgrade for the center, with retractable seating, flexible lighting, sound, and set rigging, an overhead wire tension grid and the capacity for digital capture and streaming.On the ground floor, the building has a cafe, with blackened steel panels and a walnut bar, which will be run by Ardesia, a local wine bar. And above and below the theater are rooms that can be used for educational and community programs, as well as rehearsals and meetings.The $60 million building was designed by Davis Brody Bond, a New York-based architecture firm, in consultation with Ireland’s state architect. There are nods both to the industrial history of Hell’s Kitchen, and the Irish mission of the center — lots of brick and steel, and also lots of places to sit and talk, because the center sees hospitality as an Irish virtue.Irish Arts Center is led by the executive director Aidan Connolly, center, along with Rachael Gilkey, left, its programming director, and Pauline Turley, the vice chair.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThere are Irish touches throughout the building — most conspicuously, the main stairway will feature lines of Irish poetry on the risers, but also the signs throughout the building are in Irish as well as English, in a font created in collaboration with the Irish typographer Bobby Tannam. Much of the furniture is from an Irish craft furniture designer, Orior, which makes pieces “injected with Irish character.”The center plans to keep its offices in its existing building, on West 51st Street; at some point, it plans to redo that building and resume using its 99-seat auditorium for smaller-scale performances. Cybert Tire, which previously occupied the 11th Avenue site, by the way, still exists — founded in 1916, it claims to be the city’s oldest tire shop, and has simply moved around the corner, onto West 52nd Street.Irish Arts Center began its life as an Off Off Broadway theater that produced its own work, but over the last 15 years it has embraced a broader portfolio; Connolly often says he likes to think of the center’s programming as a hybrid of the 92nd Street Y and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Irish culture is represented in New York in any variety of ways — there are periodically Irish writers on Broadway, for example, and the Irish Repertory Theater presents often acclaimed productions of Irish drama, but Connolly argues that, until now, there has been “no flagship hub to celebrate and promote Irish culture in a way that is commensurate with its impact,” akin to institutions like the French Institute Alliance Française or Scandinavia House.The organization remains modestly sized, at least by the scale of New York City nonprofits, with an anticipated $7 million budget for its first year in the new building. But it has been growing at a steady clip — its operating budget was only $690,000 in 2006-07.Above the theater is a wire tension grid for lighting, sound and other technical equipment.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe lighting is meant to be easily adjustable.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe building also has infrastructure to allow video capture, broadcast and streaming.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIn a demonstration of the expanded work made possible by the new theater, the center plans next summer to stage its first musical, an adaptation of the 2012 film “Good Vibrations,” about the Belfast punk rock scene. The first year will also include a production of “The Same,” a play by Enda Walsh about two women in a psychiatric institution, and “Chekhov’s First Play,” via Dead Centre, an Irish/English theater company.The center will open with a monthlong run by the Irish-French cabaret singer Camille O’Sullivan, who said she would fondly remember the old building, where she performed several times.“They’re family, and they’re friends,” O’Sullivan said, “and they’re very much giving a home to people like myself.”There will also be dance programs from Oona Doherty; Mufutau Yusuf; and Sean Curran with Darrah Carr. And there will be an array of music, poetry, readings and visual art.There are 31.5 million Americans of Irish ancestry, but the center has a broad view of Irishness, and although its donor base is made up primarily of Irish Americans, its audience is varied.The theater retained the brick facade of the tire shop that previously occupied the site. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesMiranda Driscoll, an Irish curator, arranged an opening exhibition of visual art for the building.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe structure’s building materials are primarily wood, brick, glass and steel.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“They have a really inclusive way of thinking about the culture of the Irish diaspora,” said Georgiana Pickett, an arts consultant who staged several collaborations with the center when she was executive director of the Baryshnikov Arts Center. “They’ve done a lot to ensure that they’re linking the histories of the arts that come through Ireland to many other places in the world, and that’s allowed them to include Appalachian music, new immigrant communities in Ireland, people of Irish descent that collaborate with other cultures — it’s the Irish Arts Center, but has a really diverse definition of what that means.”The project is primarily funded by government largess in both the United States and Ireland — New York City, which has supported multiple arts institutions over time, set aside $37 million for the project.“This amazing building is so timely,” said Gonzalo Casals, the city’s cultural affairs commissioner, “because it brings down the barriers among disciplines, and offers an in-depth understanding of Irish culture.”The Irish government contributed $9 million, and the state of New York gave $5 million. Private donors contributed $15 million. That’s $66 million raised thus far — the money not spent on the new building will be used in part to support the operating budget.The Irish government continues to support the center through Culture Ireland, which promotes Irish culture around the world as part of an effort announced in 2018 to double the country’s global footprint. Irish Arts Center has been a significant beneficiary of that effort; Christine Sisk, the director of Culture Ireland, said her agency is making a “big investment” in the center.“New York is an amazing city for the arts, and we also see it as a gateway to the rest of the U.S.,” said Sisk, who said she expected that Irish artists whose work is presented at the center could then more easily tour the United States. “It’s a shop window, and a guaranteed space, to present Irish arts.” More

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      Paddy Moloney, Irish Piper Who Led the Chieftains, Dies at 83

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      The band he fronted for nearly 60 years toured the world, collaborated with rock stars and helped spark a renaissance for traditional Irish music.Paddy Moloney, the playful but disciplined frontman and bagpiper of the Chieftains, a band that was at the forefront of the worldwide revival of traditional Irish music played with traditional instruments, died on Monday in Dublin. He was 83.His daughter Aedin Moloney confirmed the death, at a hospital, but did not specify the cause.For nearly 60 years the Chieftains toured extensively, released more than two dozen albums and won six Grammy Awards. They were particularly known for their collaborations with artists like Van Morrison, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Nanci Griffith and Luciano Pavarotti.“Over the Sea to Skye,” the Chieftains’ collaboration with the flutist James Galway, peaked at No. 20 on the Billboard classical album chart in 1996.“Our music is centuries old, but it is very much a living thing,” Mr. Moloney told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1989. “We don’t use any flashing lights or smoke bombs or acrobats falling off the stage.” He added, “We try to communicate a party feeling, and that’s something that everybody understands.”In 2012, when he was vice president, President Biden told People magazine that his desire was to sing “Shenandoah” with the Chieftains “if I had any musical talent.” He invited them to perform at his inauguration this year, but Covid-related restrictions kept them from traveling.“Over the Sea to Skye,” the Chieftains’ collaboration with the flutist James Galway, peaked at No. 20 on the Billboard classical album chart in 1996.Mr. Moloney was a master of many instruments: He played the uileann pipes (the national bagpipes of Ireland), the tin whistle, the bodhran (a type of drum) and the button accordion. He was also the band’s lead composer and arranger.Asked in 2010 on the NPR quiz show “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me” what he thought was the sexiest instrument, he chose the pipes.“I often call it the octopus,” he said, “and so, I mean, that’s something that gets every part of you moving.”The Chieftains performed at the Great Wall of China, in Nashville and in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, joining with Roger Waters of Pink Floyd to play “The Wall.”Their best-known recordings included “Cotton Eyed Joe,” “O’Sullivan’s March,” “Bonaparte’s Retreat” and “Long Black Veil” (with Mr. Jagger). Their 1992 album “Another Country,” a collaboration with country artists like Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson and Chet Atkins, won the Grammy for best contemporary folk album.Their other Grammys included one for best pop collaboration with vocals for “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?,” a collaboration with Mr. Morrison from their album “The Long Black Veil,” released in 1995, and one for best world album, for “Santiago” (1996), consisting of Spanish and Latin American music.Mr. Moloney had an affinity for country music.“I always considered Nashville like another part of Ireland, down to the south or something,” he said on the website of the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in 2020. “When I’ve come over there and played with musical geniuses like Sam Bush or Jerry Douglas or Earl Scruggs, they pick everything up so easily. You don’t have to duck and dash.”The last track on “Another Country” — “Finale: Did You Ever Go A-Courtin’, Uncle Joe/Will the Circle Be Unbroken” — features Ms. Harris, Ricky Skaggs and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Rambles, a cultural arts magazine, described it as “the closest you will come to an Irish hooley on record,” a reference to an Irish party with music. The track, the magazine said, sounded like “a few pints were quaffed and the boxty bread was passed around before the assembled greats of music decided to have a musical free-for-all.”Mr. Moloney in 2012. That year, the 50th anniversary of their founding, the Chieftains embarked on a tour that ended on St. Patrick’s Day at Carnegie Hall.Greg Kahn for The New York TimesPatrick Moloney was born on Aug. 1, 1938, in Donnycarney, in northern Dublin. His father, John, worked in the accounting department of the Irish Glass Bottle Company. His mother, Catherine (Conroy) Moloney, was a homemaker.Paddy came from a musical family: One of his grandfathers played the flute, and his Uncle Stephen played in the Ballyfin Pipe Band. Paddy began playing a plastic tin whistle at 6 and began studying the uileann pipes shortly afterward, under the tutelage of man known as the “King of the Pipers.”He took to the pipes easily, gave his first public concert when he was 9 and performed on local streets.“There were five pipers around the Donnycarney area,” he told Ireland’s Own magazine in 2019. “I’d go around the cul-de-sac playing like the pied piper, and my pals would be following behind me.”After leaving school in the 1950s, he started working at Baxendale & Company, a building supplies company, where he met his future wife, Rita O’Reilly. He joined the traditional Irish band Ceoltóirí Chualann in 1960 and formed the Chieftains in 1962; the name came from the short story “Death of a Chieftain” by the Irish author John Montague.In the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Moloney was an executive of Claddagh Records, of which he was a founder, and produced or oversaw 45 albums in folk, traditional, classical, poetry and spoken word.The Chieftains — who hit it big in the mid-1970s with sold-out concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in London — were strictly an instrumentalist ensemble at first. But in the 1980s the band pivoted from their early purism, and Mr. Moloney emerged as a composer, writing new music steeped in Irish tradition.The Chieftains began to blend Irish music with styles from the Celtic diaspora in Spain and Canada as well as bluegrass and country from the United States. They collaborated with well-known rock and pop musicians and with an international assortment of musicians as far-flung as Norway, Bulgaria and China.On his own, Mr. Moloney branched into writing and arranging music for films, including “Barry Lyndon” (1975), “Babe: Pig in the City” (1998) and “Gangs of New York” (2002).In addition to his wife and daughter, he is survived by two sons, Aonghus and Padraig; four grandchildren; and a sister, Sheila.In 2012, on the 50th anniversary of their founding, the Chieftains teamed up with 12 folk, country, bluegrass, rockabilly and indie rock artists — including Bon Iver, the Decembrists, the Low Anthem and Imelda May — to record the album “Voice of Ages.” They also embarked on a tour that ended at Carnegie Hall on St. Patrick’s Day.“What’s happening here with these young groups,” Mr. Moloney told The New York Times at the time, explaining the album’s concept, “is they’re coming back to the melody, back to the real stuff, the roots and the folk feeling of them all. I can hear any of them singing folk songs.” More

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      It’s Time to Give Enya Another Listen

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      Even at her peak, she was hugely famous but never especially cool. But maybe we’re finally ready to heed her whispered call to awaken.On the long drives through Ireland that peppered my childhood like bouts of flu, my father played songs from a small a pool of classic albums. Many of these would be familiar to any Irishman from that time. The cheerful ribaldry of the Dubliners, Christy Moore’s “Live at the Point” and the earnest, heart-tugging confessionals of Eleanor McEvoy and Mary Black all soundtracked our winding trips through the unending swatches of green that formed the Irish countryside. But none of those artists struck me like my father’s personal favorite, Enya.My father’s fascination with Enya was mysterious. Her music wasn’t like anything else he listened to, but then, it’s not much like the music anyone else makes either. Enya’s music is suffused with an aura of mysticism so nebulous it borders on the occult; nevertheless it enraptured a man so Catholic he would interrupt family holidays with cheerful visits to Marian shrines. The global success of this mélange of Irish traditional music and new-age electronica was unlikely given that the bulwark of her fandom, in Ireland at least, appeared to be people like my father: rank traditionalists entering middle age, few of whom would have countenanced synthesizers, arpeggiated strings or heavy reverb in any other aural context.I, a youthful devotee of ambient music, loved Enya for her place in that genre’s canon. I was mesmerized by the folding synthscapes of “Caribbean Blue” or “Sumiregusa (Wild Violet),” which hit my childhood ears like probes from a far-flung planet. Her melodies recursed and interwound; her vocals shimmered and shone, at once new and old, alien and familiar. It just confused me to see my father similarly moved. After all, even Aphex Twin’s most soothing ambient works often made him unplug my CD player, as if their nontraditional musical forms might damage our wiring. How, then, could Enya reduce this same man to tears?It helped that she was local. As a child, Eithne Brennan grew up not far from Mullennan, my home, in one of the most prestigious families in the history of Irish traditional music. She departed from the Brennans’ band, Clannad, at a young age, boned up on Japanese synths and crafted a strange musical form that was all her own. By the time I was an adolescent, the shy little sister of Clannad had become one of the biggest-selling recording artists on Earth. Within the spiraling melody of ‘Aldebaran’ there is euphoria and gravitas, as well as something approaching dread.When I was a teenager, Enya was hugely famous but never especially cool, at least not among people my age. I adored Enya for the sonic worlds she charted for her listeners: filled with pomp and grandiosity, yes, but also rivers of deep and intense wonder. I found in her music that same pinch of the infinite I felt listening to “An Ending (Ascent),” by Brian Eno, or “Polynomial-C,” by Aphex Twin. Yet when I tried to posit her as a peer of those artists, the stares I received were blank and pitying. The images blaring out from Enya’s album covers and videos were unerringly earnest, simultaneously too camp to be serious and too serious to be camp. For all her peculiar complexity, my classmates wrote Enya off as easy listening, on par with panpipe Muzak.This skepticism was probably because of the mythological visual style that Enya built around herself: She lived in a castle, rarely gave interviews or performed live. Her videos present her as an ethereal being, surrounded at all times by 400 lit candles, wearing a wardrobe bequeathed to her by a faerie queen who had too many velvet capes lying around and hated to see them go to waste. This imagery made Enya a world unto herself. Nothing typifies this more than my favorite Enya track, the beguiling “Aldebaran.” It first found fame as part of the soundtrack she composed for the BBC documentary “The Celts,” a 10-episode series that told the story of the Celtic people from prehistory to 1987. Featuring Irish-language vocals delivered at Enya’s most breathy, “Aldebaran” marries the Irish past to the future through a bonkers tale of intergalactic travel. The production is beatless and ever-winding, girded by a coruscating, arpeggiated riff that tumbles through major and minor chords in a cycle of atmospheric tumult. Within its spiraling melody there is euphoria and gravitas, as well as something approaching dread (she dedicated the song to Ridley Scott). Beneath the song’s soaring chords and breathy vocals, an alien undercurrent has smuggled itself aboard — a reminder that, in space, no one can hear you sing. Enya’s music has other unique attractions. If you visit her Twitter page, you might be recommended not just Phil Collins and Tina Turner but also Bob Ross: Even the algorithm seems to know her work is contemplative and therapeutic. Enya’s hallmarks — the angelic wash of reverb, ASMR-ready vocals; her deeply textured and layered synths — were soothing for me on long journeys as a child. They still provide a portal to long-dead worlds and distant stars, but also a town a few parishes over from my own.Nowadays, when I recommend Enya, and “Aldebaran” in particular, ears aren’t quite as deaf as they once were. The cosmos may now be heeding her whispered call to awaken, whether she knows it or not. I hope she does, and that somewhere, dressed in velvet, Enya sometimes plays “Aldebaran” still. Bringing another candle to another window, might she look out from the stone walls of her castle, and once more point her face toward the stars? More