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      Broadway Meets the Avant-Garde in a Juilliard Music Festival

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      Focus, a weeklong event starting Sunday, delves into the broad range of American sounds in the first half of the 20th century.Does “People Will Say We’re in Love,” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1943 musical “Oklahoma,” have anything to, well, say to Lou Harrison’s shimmering Six Sonatas for Cembalo, completed the same year? How does Edgard Varèse’s pensive “Octandre” sound alongside Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag”?These aren’t questions most audiences have ever been asked to consider. But the answers might permit a fuller understanding of the broad range of American music in the first half of the 20th century, a period when this country began to export its own brand of sound.Unusual but telling juxtapositions abound in “The Making of an American Music, 1899-1948,” this year’s Focus festival at the Juilliard School, which opens for a week of performances on Sunday. Each year Focus zeros in on a specific topic in modern music; the 2022 iteration brings together — and demonstrates the substantial overlap between — worlds not often united in the history books or on concert programs: ragtime, jazz, Broadway, Americana, global music, dance and the Europe-descended avant-garde.Joel Sachs, the festival’s organizer and the longtime doyen of new music at Juilliard, said that “The Making of an American Music” emerged out of brainstorming for the 2021 festival. With a presidential inauguration then looming, he thought of 1921, the start of Warren G. Harding’s term, and its implications for international affairs.“Music in times of trouble” was to have been the theme, Sachs said by phone recently, with a week focusing on the two decades from the end of the First World War to the eve of the Second, including politically charged pieces by the likes of Charles Ives, Stefan Wolpe and Hanns Eisler. But Sachs hadn’t gotten past rough plans before the festival was canceled because of the pandemic.“Then came 2021,” he said, “and things beginning to look better, and a sense we might be getting out of this situation, which turned out to be not quite right. But I started to think that was too gloomy a subject.”He turned his attention specifically to the American repertory, and, using the enormous New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, put down all the composers writing in the first 50 years of the 20th century; there were almost 300 names. He and David Ludwig, the new dean and director of Juilliard’s music division, then independently drew on that for lists of 15 “musts” and 15 “maybes.” (Their top tiers, as it happened, were almost identical.)Mei-Ann Chen rehearses the Juilliard Orchestra in Ives’s Symphony No. 2, which they will play on the festival’s closing night.George Etheredge for The New York Times“It blossomed into a kind of monster,” Sachs said, chuckling. “The program book is 88 pages. But it’s a really interesting period.”These are the six Focus programs, starting on Sunday evening:SundayA set of Joplin’s rags — the phenomenally popular sheet music for “Maple Leaf Rag” helped put American music on the global map — leads directly into two of Ives’s bustling, changeable Ragtime Dances, performed by Sachs’ New Juilliard Ensemble. The rapidly shifting moods of the dances will offer a new context for the similarly jittery “Octandre,” written for a small group of winds and brasses and ending in a bright scream. Varèse, a native Frenchman, spent the last 50 years of his life in America, and his influence here made him a natural for this Focus.Sachs wrote a biography of Henry Cowell, who was part of a circle of experimental composers with Varèse, and whose brooding Sinfonietta follows “Octandre.” Ruth Crawford was also part of the group, and the program includes her angular “Three Songs to Poems by Carl Sandburg,” before closing with Ives’s Third Symphony, “The Camp Meeting,” a characteristically Ivesian explosion of European styles and 19th-century Americana.MondayThe military marches of John Philip Sousa, a major American presence in Europe during this period, are rarely heard alongside modernists like Milton Babbitt and Leon Kirchner, and Amy Beach’s String Quartet is rarely heard, period. Beach’s warm, thickly chromatic, intensely elegant single-movement quartet — which incorporates, after the model of Dvorak, the Native American melodies “Summer Song,” “Playing at Ball” and “Ititaujang’s Song” — looks both backward and forward.The quartet and chamber works by Babbitt, Kirchner, Conlon Nancarrow (best known for his wild player-piano studies) and Virgil Thomson lead, however unexpectedly, to Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” represented by Vladimir Horowitz’s virtuosic — and, in this company, truly progressive-sounding — piano arrangement.TuesdayAmong the week’s most intriguing rediscoveries is “Deep Song,” a Martha Graham solo that she first danced in 1937 as a cri de coeur during the Spanish Civil War. The score, by Cowell, was lost, so when the dance was revived in the 1980s, it was with another Cowell piece.Terese Capucilli dancing Martha Graham’s solo “Deep Song” in 1988. As part of this year’s Focus, Capucilli is helping to remount the dance with its original Henry Cowell score.Nan MelvilleThe correct music — created using an innovative technique that let the choreographer rearrange modular phrases as needed — was rediscovered in the early 2000s. So this collaboration with Terese Capucilli, a Graham expert who teaches at Juilliard, will be the modern premiere of a substantial re-creation of the original, set alongside chamber works by John Cage, Walter Piston, Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland.WednesdayA very brief history of the transition from ragtime to jazz — including pieces by Eubie Blake, Mary Lou Williams, James P. Johnson and Duke Ellington — is the climax of a program that also includes an aria from Gian Carlo Menotti’s popular opera “The Medium,” William Grant Still’s eloquent “Incantation and Dance” for oboe and piano, and works by Vincent Persichetti, Wolpe and Elliott Carter.ThursdayRefractions of other cultures by Colin McPhee (drawing on Balinese melodies) and Alan Hovhaness (on the kanun, an Armenian zither) join a two-piano arrangement of Carl Ruggles’s “Organum” and the slow movement of Samuel Barber’s Op. 11 String Quartet, which he later arranged as the famous Adagio for Strings.The “Festival Prelude” for organ by Horatio Parker, Ives’s teacher at Yale, is delightfully paired with Ives’s own nutty organ variations on “America”; Harrison’s cembalo sonatas; and a sampling of Broadway songs by Berlin, Kern, Porter and Rodgers — capped by a two-piano version of Gershwin’s variations on “I Got Rhythm.”FridayThe culminating event features, as usual, the Juilliard Orchestra, the school’s main symphonic ensemble; Mei-Ann Chen, the music director of the Chicago Sinfonietta, conducts. Joplin is once again on the program, in the form of the lively overture to his 1910 opera “Treemonisha,” which was first staged in 1972 and for which he was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize.Another long-overlooked composer, Florence Price, is represented by her lyrical Violin Concerto No. 1, with Timothy Chooi as soloist. And Ives, that great masher of genres, closes this genre-mashing festival with his grandly impassioned Second Symphony, which weaves American songs and hymns throughout. More

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      Singing Will Return to Tanglewood This Summer

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      The Boston Symphony Orchestra plans to go back to full-scale programming at its bucolic warm-weather home in the Berkshires.After three years, the “Ode to Joy” will be sung again at Tanglewood.In 2020 there was only silence at the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s annual warm-weather retreat in the Berkshires. And last year, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and its grand choral finale — the traditional ending of the summer there — weren’t heard. During a shortened 2021 season, with limited crowds and distancing requirements, no vocal music was programmed, to reduce the risk of aerosol transmission of the coronavirus.But with a surge of virus cases, driven by the Omicron variant, seeming to ebb in Massachusetts, Tanglewood is set to return this summer — at full length and in full cry, the Boston Symphony announced on Thursday.So Beethoven’s Ninth will be there on the official closing night, Aug. 28. And the main season, which opens July 8, will also feature concert performances of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and George Benjamin’s “Lessons in Love and Violence,” in that 2018 opera’s American premiere. Among the singers appearing over the summer will be Susan Graham, Christine Goerke, Nicole Cabell, Julia Bullock, Ying Fang, Shenyang, Ryan McKinny, Will Liverman and Paul Appleby — along with the return of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.The Boston Symphony said it would announce health protocols closer to the start of the season, when the state of the pandemic will be clearer.Andris Nelsons, the orchestra’s music director, is scheduled for frequent presences on the podium. John Williams, who turns 90 this year and served as director of the Boston Pops, will be feted with a gala performance on Aug. 20. Garrick Ohlsson plays Brahms’s complete works for solo piano over four programs; Paul Lewis joins the orchestra for all five Beethoven piano concertos. There will be a host of free concerts featuring the young fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center.Familiar guests like Emanuel Ax, Joshua Bell, Yo-Yo Ma and Michael Tilson Thomas will be joined by debuting artists such as the conductors JoAnn Falletta, Cristian Macelaru and Earl Lee, the pianist Alexander Malofeev and the violist Antoine Tamestit. Classics by Rachmaninoff and Ravel will be served alongside new music from composers including Helen Grime, Fazil Say, Richard Danielpour, Jessie Montgomery, Julia Adolphe, Caroline Shaw and Elizabeth Ogonek.Beginning on June 17 with Ringo Starr and ending on Sept. 3 with Judy Collins, pop artists return for the first time since 2019 — also including the Tanglewood favorite James Taylor, Brandi Carlile and Earth, Wind & Fire.The absence of Tanglewood, a regional staple and huge moneymaker for the Boston Symphony, which has summered there since 1937, was keenly felt in 2020, even by an orchestra with secure finances and the largest endowment in its field.The thinned-out 2021 season drew a respectable attendance of 148,000, versus more than 340,000 in 2019. But it is hoped that the bucolic campus will be altogether more alive this year. Ozawa Hall will reopen, joining the main concert space, the Shed. So will the Linde Center, which was inaugurated in 2019 as a site for master classes, lectures, rehearsals and recitals — among them, this summer, the pianist Stephen Drury playing the mighty set of variations on “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!” by Frederic Rzewski, who died in June.Full programming information is available at bso.org/tanglewood. More

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      Grammy Awards Move to April in Las Vegas

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      The 64th annual show, originally scheduled for Jan. 31 in Los Angeles, was postponed amid a spike in Covid-19 cases. It will now take place on April 3, and be broadcast live by CBS.The 64th annual Grammy Awards will take place on April 3 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, the show’s organizers announced on Tuesday.The Grammys, the music industry’s most high-profile media moment, had been scheduled for Jan. 31 in Los Angeles. Earlier this month the ceremonies were postponed amid a surge in Covid-19 cases, while organizers searched for a venue that could accommodate the show, which often requires more than a week of rehearsals and other setup.The show will be broadcast live by CBS. This is the first time the Grammys ceremony will be held in Las Vegas.This year the composer and bandleader Jon Batiste has 11 Grammy nominations, more than any other artist, and will compete for both album and record of the year. Other top nominees include Olivia Rodrigo, Justin Bieber, Billie Eilish and Doja Cat. No performers have been announced yet, but Trevor Noah will return as host.While the show’s date has been set, some details are still to be determined, including the parties, performances and charity events that usually lead up to the ceremony. This year, the Recording Academy, the organization behind the Grammys, had scheduled a tribute to Joni Mitchell to benefit its charity MusiCares, which helps musicians in need, featuring performers like James Taylor, Herbie Hancock, Brandi Carlile and Batiste.Plans for that event, and for the annual gala hosted by Clive Davis, the 89-year-old music executive, “will be announced soon,” the academy said.Last year, the Grammys were postponed by six weeks and took place largely outdoors in downtown Los Angeles. Reviews of the 2021 event were strong, but ratings fell by 53 percent to 8.8 million, according to Nielsen, a new low for the Grammys. More

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      Listen to Keyboard Music by Bach (No, Not That One)

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      The extraordinary range of C.P.E. Bach, a son of J.S., is on display in a new album from the pianist Marc-André Hamelin.The subject of the pianist Marc-André Hamelin’s latest album is Bach — no, not that one.Hamelin — ever inquisitive in exploring the outer reaches of the repertoire, with recent releases of music by Sigismond Thalberg, Samuil Feinberg and Erno Dohnanyi — has now turned to the extraordinary range of keyboard works by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Johann Sebastian’s second surviving son.C.P.E. Bach was a prolific composer and an important pedagogue, a significant influence on Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. (Hamelin’s new album is a welcome companion to the three volumes of solo Haydn that he set down, with ideal panache, a decade and more ago on the Hyperion label.) But if he was more widely appreciated than his father well into the 19th century, that has certainly not been the case more recently.In part, that’s because C.P.E.’s category-defying scores challenge preconceptions of the history of music as it has come to be written — coming off as stunningly, even unnervingly, experimental. When did the “Baroque” end, and the “Classical” begin? What constitutes “early music”? The work of C.P.E. Bach invites us to consider these questions anew, suggests the harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, who has recorded some of this music and wrote the booklet notes for Hamelin’s two-disc set.Hamelin is known for delving into rarely played corners of the keyboard repertory.Kayana Szymczak for The New York TimesHamelin takes us from a juvenile march C.P.E. wrote before 1725 to two of the extended, improvisatory fantasies he composed just before his death, in 1788. Asked in an interview to pick a favorite page from the scores, Hamelin chose the “Abschied von meinem Silbermannischen Claviere, in einem Rondo” (“Farewell to My Silbermannischen Clavier, in a Rondo”), a haunting tribute to a favorite clavichord in 1781. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Even for adventurous pianists like yourself, the music of C.P.E. Bach is not exactly common. How did you pick it up?My wife, Cathy Fuller, is one of the hosts at WCRB radio in Boston, and back in either 2008 or 2009 she played one cut from Mikhail Pletnev’s Deutsche Grammophon recording of C.P.E. Bach. It was a little sonata in E minor; it’s three movements, very compact, about seven or eight minutes. The piece ends suddenly, in the middle of a phrase. Bach just decides to end it on a tonic first inversion, which was a total shock to me. You just have to look at Gesualdo to see how far some composers could go even very early in history, but this was really quite a shock.By coincidence, I had just inherited a collection of scores which included six volumes of music that C.P.E. published very late in life, in the 1780s, for “connoisseurs and amateurs.” So I ran to the music, and, sure enough, that’s exactly what C.P.E. was asking for — no diminuendo, no rallentando, nothing. Naturally I wanted to find out more, so I started reading from the six volumes, and then I bought everything I could find. I became very, very enthusiastic; the idea to record some of these things was always in the back of my mind, but it took a while for me to get the wheels in motion.When I started talking about this project, with no recording date in mind, I got a very nice email from Paul Corneilson of the Packard Humanities Institute. He said, “We have an 18-volume set of the complete keyboard works in urtext editions; would you like one?” What had been a project involving one CD became two, because of the embarrassment of riches I was confronted with.Above everything else, I wanted to underline the richness of Bach’s imagination. I would like to plead with pianists to look him up; it’s never been easier.So what distinguishes his music?The element of angularity, and surprise, and constant delight in the unexpected was very much a part of Haydn, and he confessed that he owed a great debt to C.P.E. Bach. There are some extremely daring modulations, and what I mentioned before is not the only time he just decides to end a piece. In the slow movement of the F minor sonata I recorded, the middle section keeps modulating, keeps modulating, keeps modulating — and then suddenly cuts off at a very tense moment, very foreign to the home key. Then there’s three long beats of silence, and he just decides to go back to the beginning, with no clear relationship between the two keys.I’ve seen editions which have “corrected” this to make it more palatable, more normal. One that I found, actually, was by Hans von Bülow, and you wouldn’t believe the butchery job he performed on C.P.E.’s music; it’s unbelievable. For a while, there wasn’t much more than that available.Bach was writing at a time of great technological change, as harpsichords and clavichords were giving way to fortepianos, a shift that allowed composers to develop new means of expression. How would you respond to those who might argue that this music should therefore only be performed on the instruments of its time, rather than a concert grand?I grew up with the modern piano, and it affords me all the pleasure, all the fulfillment, all the musical results I want. So, as much as I appreciate sometimes playing an old instrument — and I have, not necessarily in public — the music survives being played on the modern piano. For me, that’s enough; I don’t need anything else. There are so many possible sonorities on the modern piano that, for me, that’s perfectly fulfilling.Technological change is in fact the subject of your favorite page, the middle page of a rondo that Bach wrote in 1781 as a farewell to his long-serving clavichord.It’s an extremely affecting piece; I remember during the recording session I must have been in a hurry to get to it, because it was the first piece that I put down.In the exact middle of it there is a moment: There’s a fermata, and then suddenly this E major chord. This E major chord is not something really outlandish, because you’re coming out of B minor. But if you leave the right amount of silence before it, and if you pay particular heed to the quality of the attack of this chord, that’s one of the most magical moments that I’m aware of in all of music.I read that C.P.E. apparently said to the gentleman to whom he gave this Silbermann clavichord it’s absolutely impossible even to play the piece on a clavichord other than this one. (C.P.E. had had it for around 35 years, I think, so it was a very sad farewell.) But fortunately I paid no attention to that. It’s interesting to know, and it shows you the power of his convictions, but it’s a denial of the possibilities that are obtainable on something like the modern piano, or any other instrument.Funnily enough, the score repeatedly notates an ornament that simply can’t be achieved on a modern piano: a bebung, which is a form of vibrato. Do you just have to ignore that, and accept that the piano will make amends in other ways?I just tried to compensate elsewhere. What carried me through is the image of C.P.E. possibly improvising this piece, and then later notating it, because it really does sound like an improvisation — like playing for himself. More

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      A Ban on 19 Singers in Egypt Tests the Old Guard’s Power

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      Leaders of a musicians’ licensing group are trying to curb mahraganat, a bold genre wildly popular with young people. It is not clear if they can.CAIRO — The song starts out like standard fare for Egyptian pop music: A secret infatuation between two young neighbors who, unable to marry, sneak flirtatious glances at each other and commit their hearts in a bittersweet dance of longing and waiting.But then the lyrics take a radical turn.“If you leave me,” blasts the singer, Hassan Shakosh, “I’ll be lost and gone, drinking alcohol and smoking hash.”The song, “The Neighbors’ Daughter,” has become a giant hit, garnering more than a half- billion views of its video on YouTube alone and catapulting Mr. Shakosh to stardom. But the explicit reference to drugs and booze, culturally prohibited substances in Egypt, has made the song, released in 2019, a lightning rod in a culture war over what is an acceptable face and subject matter for popular music and who gets to decide.The battle, which pits Egypt’s cultural establishment against a renegade musical genre embraced by millions of young Egyptians, has heated up recently after the organization that licenses musicians barred at least 19 young artists from singing and performing in Egypt.The organization, the Egyptian Musicians’ Syndicate, accused Mr. Shakosh and other singers of the genre, known as mahraganat, of normalizing, and thus encouraging, decadent behavior, of misrepresenting Egypt and of spoiling public taste.Hassan Shakosh appearing in the video for his song “The Neighbors’ Daughter.” Hassan Shakosh, vis YouTube“They are creating a chaotic movement in the country,” said Tarek Mortada, the spokesman for the syndicate, a professional union that issues permits for artists to perform onstage and that while technically not an arm of the state, is governed by state law and its budget is supervised by the state. “What we’re confronting right now is the face of depravity and regression.”The barred singers have been iced out of clubs, concerts and weddings. Some have continued to perform abroad or at private parties, but they have had to say no to advertising deals and other income opportunities.The syndicate’s stance has also cast a pall over Egypt’s cultural scene, sending a strong message that artists are not free agents and must still toe restrictive lines set by civil and state institutions. The musicians see the syndicate as an outmoded entity desperately clinging to a strictly curated vision and image of Egyptian culture that is smashing against an inevitable wave of youth-driven change.“They can’t get themselves to be convinced that we’re here to stay,” said Ibrahim Soliman, 33, Mr. Shakosh’s manager and childhood friend. “How can you say someone like Shakosh misrepresents Egypt when his songs are being heard and shared by the entire country?”Fans were incensed. One meme depicted the leader of the syndicate, a pop singer of love classics from the 1970s, ordering people to stop singing in the bathroom.The battle mirrors cultural conflicts across the region where autocratic governments in socially conservative countries have tried to censor any expression that challenges traditional mores. For example, Iran has arrested teenage girls who posted videos of themselves dancing, which is a crime there. And in 2020, Northwestern University in Qatar called off a concert by a Lebanese indie rock band whose lead singer is openly gay.But online streaming and social media platforms have poked giant holes in that effort, allowing artists to bypass state-sanctioned media, like television and record companies, and reach a generation of new fans hungry for what they see as more authentic and relevant content.Iran’s draconian restrictions on unacceptable music have produced a flourishing underground rock and hip-hop scene. The question facing Egypt is who now has the power to regulate matters of taste — the 12 men and one woman who run the syndicate, or the millions of fans who have been streaming and downloading mahraganat.Mahraganat first rose out of the dense, rowdy working-class neighborhoods of Cairo more than a decade ago and is still generally made in low-tech home studios, often with no more equipment than a cheap microphone and pirated software.The head of the Egyptian Musicians’ Syndicate, Hany Shaker, center, during voting for the group’s board members in 2019. Mahmoud Ahmed/EPA, via ShutterstockThe raw, straight-talking genre — with blunt lyrics about love, sex, power and poverty — mirrors the experience and culture of a broad section of the disenfranchised youth who live in those districts set to a danceable, throbbing beat.But its catchy rhymes and electronic rhythms quickly went mainstream and now echo from the glamorous wedding ballrooms of Egypt’s French-speaking elite to exclusive nightclubs in Mediterranean resorts to concert halls in oil-rich Qatar and Saudi Arabia.“Mahraganat is a true representation of this moment in time, of globalization and information technology, and of social media in directing our tastes,” said Sayed Mahmoud, a culture writer and former editor of a weekly newspaper called “Alkahera” issued by the Ministry of Culture. “If you remove the reference to drugs and alcohol, does it mean they don’t exist? The songs represent real life and real culture.”They are certainly more direct, avoiding the sanitized euphemisms and poetic hints of sexuality that characterize traditional lyrics.“We use the words that are close to our tongue, without embellishing or beautifying, and it reaches people,” said Islam Ramadan, who goes by the name DJ Saso, the 27-year-old producer of Mr. Shakosh’s blockbuster hit.Many lawyers and experts say the syndicate has no legal right to ban artists, insisting that Egypt’s Constitution explicitly protects creative liberty. But these arguments seem academic in the authoritarian state of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, which has stifled freedom of speech, tightened control on the media and passed laws to help monitor and criminalize so-called immoral behavior on the internet.The syndicate’s executive members have adamantly defended their move, arguing that a key part of their job is to safeguard the profession against inferior work that they say is made by uncultured impostors who tarnish the image of the country.And government authorities have reinforced the message.In 2017, a special division of the police that targets moral crimes arrested the makers of a mahraganat song, and promised to continue searching for work that “presents offensive content for the Egyptian viewer or contains sexual insinuations.”A wedding in 2015 in Salam City, a suburb on the outskirts of Cairo.Mosa’ab Elshamy/Associated PressIn 2020, after a video circulated showing dozens of students at an all-girls high school singing along to “The Neighbors’ Daughter,” the Ministry of Education warned schools against the “noticeable” spread of songs that incite “bad behavior.”A short time later, the minister of youth and sports vowed to “combat depravity” by banning mahraganat music from being played in athletic arenas and sports facilities.The head of the syndicate, Hany Shaker, defended the ban on a late-night television show, saying, “We can’t be in the era of Sisi and allow this to be the leading art.”So far, the syndicate claims to be winning the fight.“We have in fact stopped them because they can’t get onstage in Egypt,” said Mr. Mortada, the organization’s spokesman, adding that it went so far as to ask YouTube to remove videos of the banned singers. It has not received a response from YouTube, he said.But who will win in the long run remains to be seen.The syndicate’s very structure smacks of a bygone era. To be admitted and allowed to sing and perform onstage, an artist must pass a test that includes a classical singing audition. The test is anathema to a genre that relies on autotune and prioritizes rhythm and flow over melody.While the syndicate’s efforts may be keeping mahraganat out of clubs and concert halls, the music has never stopped.Mr. Shakosh’s popularity continues to rise. He has more than six million followers on Facebook and over four million on Instagram and TikTok, and his music videos have exceeded two billion views on YouTube.He is one of the Arab world’s leading performers. Since he was barred, he has performed in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iraq, and “The Neighbors’ Daughter” has become one of the biggest Arabic hits to date.“It’s not the same old love songs,” said Yasmine el-Assal, a 41-year-old bank executive, after attending one of Mr. Shakosh’s concerts before the ban. “His stage presence, the music, the vibe, it’s fresh and it’s all about having fun.”Mr. Shakosh would not agree to be interviewed, preferring to keep a low profile, his manager said, rather than to appear to publicly challenge the authorities. The ban has been harder on other artists, many of whom do not have the wherewithal or the international profile to tour abroad.They have mostly kept quiet, refusing to make statements that they fear could ruffle more feathers.Despite the squeeze, however, many are confident that their music falls beyond the grip of any single authority or government.Kareem Gaber, a 23-year-old experimental music producer known by the stage name El Waili, is still burning tracks, sitting in his bedroom with a twin mattress on the floor, bare walls and his instrument, a personal computer with $100 MIDI keyboard.“Mahraganat taught us that you can do something new,” he said, “and it will be heard.” More

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      He Makes Justin Bieber and the Bee Gees Go Viral on TikTok

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      Griffin Haddrill is a founder of VRTCL, an agency hired to turn hit songs into memes.Name: Griffin HaddrillAge: 24Hometown: Bozeman, Mont.Currently Lives: In a four-bedroom house in Las Vegas with walls covered in street art.Claim to Fame: Mr. Haddrill is a co-founder of VRTCL, an agency hired by major record labels to make songs go viral on TikTok through remixes, mash-ups, meme-able chorus snippets, creator partnerships and other algorithmic alchemy. “I usually start with the lyric sheet to see if there is maybe a trend we can capitalize on or maybe a creative idea around the beat,” he said. For Lil Nas X’s “Montero,” that meant devil-themed makeup tutorials and interpretive dance routines set to the track. He also works with vintage hits like the Bee Gees’ “More Than a Woman,” which thanks to his efforts, has been featured in more than 279,000 TikTok videos including sunset selfies, boba tea tutorials and cyst removals. The right music “makes influencers feel part of a cool and cultured moment, and they like showing that off to fans,” he said.Big Break: Mr. Haddrill has always had an ear for music and business. At 12, he handed his father a business plan for high-tech earbuds. At 16, he was a music manager for Gregory Lake, an underground hip-hop artist, and 100Tribn, a D.J. act, while he was completing rehab in Salt Lake City for cocaine addiction. At 20, he dropped out of San Jose State to pursue music management full-time in Las Vegas. In 2019, he and Sean Young, a former influencer on Vine, saw how social media algorithms were starting to mold the habits of young listeners, and founded VRTCL.Latest Project: VRTCL, which Mr. Haddrill said brings in $1 million in monthly revenue and employs 18 people, was acquired in July by Create Music Group, a data-driven music company in Los Angeles. Mr. Haddrill, who is staying on as chief executive, is guarded about the terms of the deal. “With earning potential, the acquisition is in the eight figures,” he said.Next Thing: Mr. Haddrill helped turn “Stay” by Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber and “Best Friend” by Saweetie and Doja Cat into TikTok earworms last year. But his dream client list skews older: Duran Duran, Billy Joel and other cassette-era acts. “One song that I always thought could really blow up again is Cher’s ‘Believe,’” he said.Unlimited Data: He recently hired Conover Wang, a former roommate and software engineer at Reddit, to develop a program to analyze TikTok song data, including views, comments and shares. “The software is really a core part of our business, although it doesn’t have a name yet,” he said. “We should probably call it something cool.” More

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      How Disney Created the Hit Single 'We Don't Talk About Bruno'

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      “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” from “Encanto” is a surprise chart topper and TikTok darling. Here’s how Disney created its biggest smash since “Let It Go.”“A seven-foot frame! Rats along his back!” a curly-haired teenager draped in a cloak lip-syncs for the camera.“I associate him with the sound of falling sand,” a busy mom nods appreciatively, bopping along with a vacuum as she embarks on a kitchen dance break.“I’m sorry, mi vida, go on!” a pair of sisters screech, perilously off-key.“Encanto” cautioned against talking about Bruno, but a whole lot of people are obsessed with a song about him.Since that animated Disney film opened in theaters in November and arrived on Disney+ on Christmas Eve, its playful song “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” has steadily grown into an international hit. Unlike most Disney breakouts, “Bruno” is not a wistful hero’s solo or a third-act power ballad. It’s a Broadway-style ensemble track that revels in gossip about a middle-age man.Yet the song recently topped the Spotify, Apple Music and iTunes charts in the United States, reached No. 1 on the global YouTube music videos chart and currently sits at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 — the first original song from a Disney animated film to rank that high since the “Frozen” anthem “Let It Go” in 2014. Other “Encanto” tracks, like “Surface Pressure” and “The Family Madrigal,” are also rising. And this week, the film’s soundtrack bumped Adele’s “30” from the top spot on the Billboard 200.“Bruno” has been bolstered by its popularity on TikTok, where tribute clips from the likes of that cloaked teenager, those screeching sisters and that bopping mom have racked up millions of views.“I could look at the TikToks all day,” one of the “Encanto” directors, Jared Bush, said in an interview. “Everyone is finding a different entry point, whether it’s a specific moment or character dynamic. There’s something in it for everybody and, honestly, it’s just delicious.”Explore the World of ‘Encanto’Disney’s new film, about a gifted family in Colombia, pairs stunning animation with spellbinding songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda.Review: “Encanto” charms with its focus on family dynamics, fantastic feats of wizardry and respect for Latino culture, writes our film critic.The Voice of Mirabel: Stephanie Beatriz, who won over fans with her role in “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” discusses taking on the lead role in the film.An Enchanting Soundtrack: The film’s album of music recently climbed to the top of the Billboard 200, displacing Adele’s “30.”A Slice of His Homeland: A Times reporter watched “Encanto” with her Colombian father. Here’s what they thought.In the movie about a Colombian teenager named Mirabel Madrigal (voiced by Stephanie Beatriz) and her supernaturally gifted family, Bruno (John Leguizamo) is a mysterious, outcast uncle whose ability to see the future earns the abject scorn of all those receiving bad news. His family and the townspeople share their colorful, often bitter, anecdotes about his prophecies in the song.Germaine Franco provided the “Encanto” score, while “Bruno” and the rest of the songs were written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who had worked with Disney on the soundtrack of the 2016 film “Moana.” The “Encanto” filmmakers said he had delivered the infectious “Bruno” virtually on command.In spring 2020, the directors Bush and Byron Howard; the co-director Charise Castro Smith; and Tom MacDougall, then head of music at Walt Disney Animation Studios, hopped on one of their weekly video chats with Miranda to brainstorm an ensemble track about Bruno that could provide a jolt of energy midfilm.“We could see Lin thinking, and he looked at us and said, ‘It feels like a spooky ghost story, like a spooky montuno,’” Howard said, referring to a Cuban musical pattern. “And he turns to the piano and plays the first three chords. We literally saw him put it together and compose in that very moment. I’ve never had that happen before.” (Miranda was unavailable for an interview.)The character of Bruno had already evolved during the film’s creation. In an early iteration, he was much younger, someone Mirabel’s age. He was also originally named Oscar, but Bush said a legal snag over the existence of a number of real-life Oscar Madrigals in Colombia, led them to explore other name options. He sent Miranda a list of five alternatives, to which the songwriter replied, “Definitely Bruno.”“I couldn’t figure out why he was so definitive,” Bush said, “until two days later when we heard, ‘Bruno, no, no, no.’”Miranda then recorded a demo track in which he sang all 10 parts. “It was like Lin-Manuel on steroids,” said Adassa, the singer-songwriter who voices Dolores, the Madrigal cousin with exceptional hearing. (That demo has not been released, though a popular Miranda impressionist has taken a stab at what it might sound like.)With only storyboard sketches and Miranda’s audio to guide them, the film’s choreographer, Jamal Sims, and his team spent about two weeks in a Los Angeles studio creating the “Bruno” dance moves for the animators to render digitally. Incorporating elements of cumbia, the Colombian national dance that features African, Indigenous and European influences, along with salsa and rumba, they mapped out every moment of the song and shot a reference video in one take as if part of a live musical. Even Bruno’s rats perform intricate steps. (The animation team would later film the dancers from different camera angles.)“We had to build this all from our imagination,” the assistant choreographer, Kai Martinez, said. “What helped make this piece unique is that we had a group of Latinx dancers from Colombia, from Cuba, from Puerto Rico — people who understood the assignment.” (Clips of their choreography shared by Martinez on TikTok have amassed more than 23 million views.)Martinez, who is a first-generation Colombian American, also served as an animation reference consultant and provided the filmmakers with crucial insights into cultural nuances and mannerisms.“It was bigger than a job,” she said. “Being a Colombian woman, this is the kind of film that I would have wanted to watch when I was a kid.”Meanwhile, because of Covid precautions, the voice actors recorded their parts separately in studios across the United States and Colombia. Rhenzy Feliz sang the shapeshifting cousin Camilo’s lines in a rented space near San Luis Obispo, Calif., and said he channeled “theater kid” energy in his character’s dramatic delivery. Adassa recorded in her home studio in Nashville.“At first my rap was going to be an octave higher,” she said of her whispery bars. “I thought, she’s such an intimate speaker, I’m going to do it an octave lower. And it worked.”Despite its huge popularity, “Bruno” won’t get any Oscar love: The studio submitted only “Dos Oruguitas,” an emotional Spanish ballad performed by Sebastián Yatra, for awards consideration. That song, while not as ubiquitous as “Bruno,” made the academy’s best original song short list last month. Should it go on to take the statuette, it would make history as Disney’s first non-English-language winner.“‘Dos Oruguitas’ was so central to the emotional theme of the movie,” Howard said when asked if they had considered submitting “Bruno.” He added, “It’s probably the most critical bit of musical storytelling in the whole film because it has to do with the history of the family and Mirabel understanding her grandmother.”In fact, betting on “Bruno” would have been a bold strategic departure. You’d need to look as far back as “Under the Sea” from “The Little Mermaid” (1989) to find a Disney Oscar winner with a similar theatrical quirkiness. Since then, when the studio has wowed the academy, it has been overwhelmingly for ballads, including “A Whole New World” (“Aladdin”), “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” (“The Lion King”), “Colors of the Wind” (“Pocahontas”), “Let It Go” (“Frozen”) and “Remember Me” (Pixar’s “Coco”), along with the occasional Randy Newman ditty.Besides, multiple submissions could have risked the possibility of splitting votes, and Miranda lacks only an Oscar to achieve the rare career E.G.O.T. This wouldn’t be his first nomination: His “Moana” track, “How Far I’ll Go,” lost to “City of Stars” from “La La Land.” (In addition to his work on “Encanto,” he also directed “Tick, Tick … Boom!” and could potentially land a nomination for that film.)Beyond awards season, the “Encanto” directors said they were open to the possibility of a sequel, stage show or spinoff series. “I would love for there to be continuing stories of these characters because they’re real people to us,” Bush said. “Ninety minutes is not enough time to spend with the Madrigals.”And despite some fans’ theories that “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” — and the repeated reprimand “Silenzio, Bruno!” in the Pixar film “Luca” — show Disney has an anti-Bruno agenda, the filmmakers insist it isn’t so.“At the end of ‘Encanto,’ Bruno turns out to be a great guy,” Bush said. “So, you know, we’ve resurrected that name. I think Bruno should be proud of that.” More

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      He Was an Important Conductor. Also a Great One.

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      Hans Rosbaud was renowned as a modern-music specialist. But newly released archival recordings demonstrate his gifts were far broader.There is precisely one famous story about Hans Rosbaud — though, like its subject, it is not quite as famous as it ought to be.This Austrian conductor was asleep at his home in March 1954 when the telephone rang. On the line was a producer at Hamburg Radio, a little desperate. Could Rosbaud come to cover for the injured Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, and oversee the premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron,” a gargantuan opera unperformed since being left unfinished in 1932?Rosbaud had never seen the score. His mind likely drifted to the 1930s: Back then Schoenberg had told Rosbaud forebodingly that he had “not imposed at all any reserve concerning difficulties of execution” in writing the opera. He clearly assumed no one would dare perform it.When was the premiere scheduled, Rosbaud asked the radio producer, fearfully? In exactly one week.This was a difficult prospect, but not the impossible one it would have been for almost anyone else. “One is almost forced to apply the word genius to Hans Rosbaud’s masterful control of the work,” The New York Times later reported of the performance. Genius enough, indeed, that the broadcast was released on record in 1957, the year Rosbaud led the staged premiere of “Moses und Aron” in Zurich — surpassing “even himself,” as a critic wrote.The recording still holds up, a fire coruscating through its lucidity. Had Schoenberg lived to hear it, he might have repeated the thanks he had offered Rosbaud in 1931 for a performance of his “Variations for Orchestra,” when he wrote in awe at having heard his work performed “with clarity, with love, with design.”Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron”NDR Symphony Orchestra, 1954 (Sony)No musician of Rosbaud’s generation did more to canonize its avant-garde. Igor Stravinsky offered a letter of recommendation for “this high-minded musician, this aristocrat among conductors.” Paul Hindemith was a classmate and lifelong friend. Anton Webern was a house guest.“When a composer speaks of Rosbaud the conductor,” Pierre Boulez wrote of the man to whom his masterpiece, “Le Marteau Sans Maître,” is dedicated, “he is speaking in the first place of a friend.”Joan Evans, a musicologist and Rosbaud biographer, has listed 173 premieres that he gave from 1923 until his death in 1962, the beneficiaries running from Fritz Adam to Bernd Alois Zimmermann by way of Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Gyorgy Ligeti and Luigi Nono. The Musical Times of London eulogized him simply as “the greatest conductor of contemporary music.”Webern’s “Sechs Stücke” (Op.6, No. 4)SWF Orchestra Baden-Baden, 1957 (Universal Music France)But this “dream figure” who would “always give the future the benefit of the doubt,” as Boulez wrote, chafed at his formidable reputation.“I am not a modern music specialist,” Rosbaud told a German newspaper in 1956. “In Aix-en-Provence I am characterized as a Mozart expert; in Munich, I am regarded as a specialist of Bruckner. It is dangerous to classify musicians in this manner.”Particularly so, for Rosbaud’s own fate. His public stature has never approached the private respect in which musicians held him, in part because of his advocacy for music that has never really caught on. Quiet and scholarly, this “grim, Lincolnesque” man, as a writer once described him, seemed to be the antithesis of a celebrity maestro. His major positions were not with big-name symphonies, but less-prominent radio ensembles. He made few commercial records, superb though those few were. He had no interest in fame.Few conductors, then, have more to gain from an opening of the vaults. More than 700 of Rosbaud’s performances have been languishing in archives, most of them at SWR, the successor to Southwest German Radio in Baden-Baden, his artistic home after 1948.Rosbaud leading his radio orchestra in Baden-Baden, his artistic home after 1948.SWRSince 2017, SWR has released 59 CDs from those tapes, in a project that covers Rosbaud’s work in composers from Mozart to Sibelius. Much remains still to materialize, not least what should be essential boxes of 20th-century music. But despite variable, usually mono sound, what has already emerged is plenty to prove he was far more than his legend. Without question one of the most important conductors of his century, Rosbaud was also one of the finest.He saw his task as primarily to help composers state their own case. But unlike others who have aimed for a similar interpretive modesty, Rosbaud’s approach was never clinical or didactic. It always had at its core that love that moved Schoenberg. His Bruckner had humanity as well as structure; he took Haydn seriously, early and late alike; his Schoenberg, Berg and Webern were not just intelligible, but blazed with intensity.Claudia Cassidy put her pen on Rosbaud’s typical style in 1962. “Rosbaud gave us a blueprint,” this ordinarily truculent Chicago Tribune critic wrote after hearing him lead Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” “Not the kind that lies inert on the drafting table, but the kind that sets skyscrapers soaring, flings bridges into space and sends imagination spinning into orbit.”Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7SWF Orchestra Baden-Baden, 1957 (SWR)Rosbaud had music in his blood. He was born in Graz, Austria, on July 22, 1895, to Anna Rosbaud, a piano teacher who had taken lessons from Clara Schumann. A single mother who died in 1913, Anna never told her four children who their father was; Arnold Kramish, the biographer of Hans’s brother, Paul, traced their paternity to Franz Heinnisser, at one point the choirmaster of the Graz cathedral.Growing up in a musical family, if a destitute one, Hans played at least four instruments. He attended the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, and his first appointment as a conductor came in 1921. He later recalled getting used to “the whistling, ranting and raging” with which audiences would greet his Hindemith, Stravinsky and Schoenberg with the Mainz Symphony in Germany.Rosbaud’s main task in Mainz was to run its music school, and he continued this educational approach to his career after 1929, as conductor of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. Rosbaud gave talks on the orchestral instruments, writing pieces like a fughetta for three bassoons as illustrations, and he lectured on Wagner before giving act-by-act broadcasts of the “Ring.” Bartok, Stravinsky and other composers came to perform; Schoenberg spoke on his “Variations,” with Rosbaud giving examples, and also sent in thoughts on “Brahms the Progressive.”Stravinsky, left, and Rosbaud, who was one of that composer’s most devoted interpreters in the Germany of his era.SWREven before Hitler took power in 1933, Rosbaud’s tastes were drawing the attention of what he told Stravinsky was a “chauvinistic movement.” Forced to enlist a family friend in Graz as a fake father to demonstrate his Aryan ancestry, Rosbaud found his once-lauded support for a certain strand of new music now brought him trouble, not least when a disgruntled subordinate reported him to the Gestapo in 1936 for seeing music “in a Jewish sense.” He reassured banished composers that he remained on their side, and tried, without success, to find a job in the United States. He left Frankfurt in 1937 for Münster.Rosbaud despised Nazism, and he likely knew that Paul, his brother, was spying on the German nuclear program for Britain. Still, Hans put his abilities to work for the Nazis, reconciling himself to that service with small acts of resistance. To Berlin, he seemed sound enough to be appointed general music director of occupied Strasbourg, a city that the Nazis sought to turn into a colony for their idea of German art, in 1941. But Rosbaud endeared himself to the Alsatians, speaking French, protecting the musicians and acting with sufficient decency that even Charles Munch, the fiercely antifascist Strasbourgian conductor, thought him beyond reproach.Despite Rosbaud’s work in occupied territory, the American military rushed to clear him in denazification proceedings. Shorn of any unfortunate ideological associations in either his politics or his aesthetics, he was general music director in Munich before 1945 was over: a brief, frantic tenure that saw him give Beethoven and Bruckner cycles in bombed-out halls, and reconnect German musical life to its international context, with Schoenberg, Shostakovich and Stravinsky given pride of place.That work would go on, but not primarily in Munich. An offer in 1948 from Baden-Baden could not be refused, coming as it did with the opportunity to imagine an ensemble from scratch and to fulfill a special mandate for new music, which after 1950 included the Donaueschingen Festival, a hotbed of the avant-garde. An energetic Beethoven Violin Concerto with Ginette Neveu from 1949, as well as a lacerating Hartmann Second and a courageous Messiaen “Turangalîla” shortly after, show that Rosbaud quickly brought the orchestra to a high standard.Haydn’s Symphony No. 104SWF Orchestra Baden-Baden, 1952 (SWR)But he never aspired to the ensemble virtuosity of the more commercially-driven orchestras of the day. His vivacious 1957 account of Haydn’s “London” Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic might be crisper than his 1952 and 1962 efforts in Baden-Baden, but what matters about them all is how their warmth and drive enliven Haydn’s structures, without drawing attention to themselves.The joys of what SWR has unearthed are subtle, not sensational. Those who need grand statements in their Beethoven might be disappointed, whatever the grinding insistence of his Fifth Symphony, the liquid flow of his Sixth, the effervescence of his Eighth. Those who want bombast in their Tchaikovsky will doubt his unmissable Fifth, so full of dark psychological shadows that it is almost redolent of Mahler. And in Mahler, Rosbaud’s early advocacy for whom was characteristic of a conductor so often half a beat ahead of his time, he comes close to ideal.“Mr. Rosbaud does not cut it to pieces or disguise it by ‘interpretation,’” Cassidy wrote of a Mahler Ninth in Chicago in December 1962, in words that also apply to Rosbaud’s Baden-Baden recording from 1954. “He gives it clarity, precision and understanding, which is to shed light on it without blinding its mysteries.”Mahler’s Symphony No. 9SWF Orchestra Baden-Baden, 1954 (SWR)The Chicago Symphony, where Rosbaud had long spells as a guest conductor between 1959 and 1962, considered him to succeed Fritz Reiner as music director. This offered American recognition for the first time, and a chance to develop a craft honed not just in Baden-Baden, but also in Zurich, where he held positions with the Tonhalle Orchestra, and in Aix-en-Provence. There he directed the annual summer festival from 1948, leading operatic Mozart that Virgil Thomson once called “perfection” in its “animation and orchestral delicacy,” and venturing into Gluck and Rameau.But Chicago was not to be. Rosbaud had been weakening since kidney surgery several years before, and after that Mahler Ninth and a brief stop in Baden-Baden, where he gave a serene farewell with Brahms’s Second, he died on Dec. 29, 1962, near Lugano, Switzerland. He was 67. More