music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Fred Parris, Creator of a Doo-Wop Classic, Is Dead at 85

      by

      His “In the Still of the Night” (originally “Nite”), recorded with his group the Five Satins, came to define a sort of dreamy 1950s nostalgia.Fred Parris, who was a love-struck 19-year-old missing his fiancée while serving in the Army when he wrote one of pop music’s most enduring songs, the wistful doo-wop ballad commonly known as “In the Still of the Night,” and recorded it with his group the Five Satins in 1956, died on Jan. 13 in New Haven, Conn. He was 85.His current group, Fred Parris and the Five Satins, posted news of his death on its Facebook page, saying only that he had died after a short illness.Over the years Mr. Parris varied the story of his signature song a bit, but this was the gist of it: He had met the “girl of my dreams,” as he put it, at the Savin Rock amusement park in West Haven, Conn., in 1954, and by the next year they were engaged. On the train ride back to his Army base in Philadelphia after a particularly nice visit with her, he reminisced about their first night together and began thinking about lyrics and tunes.“When I arrived at camp, I went straight to the day room,” he told Smithsonian magazine in 2004. “There was a piano there, and I started playing the chord in my head and the words in my heart.”But soon he had to report for his shift. That’s when the song really came together.“Before I realized it,” he said, “it was time to go to guard duty. It was a cold, black night, and the stars were twinkling.”The result was a song that was originally titled “(I’ll Remember) In the Still of the Nite,” to distinguish it from Cole Porter’s “In the Still of the Night,” said Ralph M. Newman, an R&B historian who filled in some of the details of Mr. Parris’s life. In February 1956, again on leave from the Army, Mr. Parris and three pals, backed by some local musicians, recorded the song on a relatively primitive two-track system in an echoey, frigid basement room at St. Bernadette’s Church in New Haven.Somehow they captured acoustical magic.“Because we did it at the church,” Mr. Parris said in a 2013 interview with the Florida radio show “Doo Wop Revival,” “I think the song was blessed. And so was I.”Though it was originally only a minor hit, “In the Still of the Night” (as the title is now commonly rendered) achieved doo-wop immortality, thanks to cover versions by Boyz II Men, the Beach Boys and others; its use in “Dirty Dancing,” “The Irishman” and other movies; and its tuneful timelessness. Mr. Newman, a former editor of the R&B history magazine Bim Bam Boom and a former executive with Broadcast Music Inc., traced the record’s slow ascent in an email:“After this icon of vocal group harmony was recorded and first released by the local Standord record label in New Haven, the master was leased to the larger Ember label, which in 1956 landed it on Alan Freed’s nightly radio show on WINS in New York. There it became, for years, the No. 1 listener-requested song of the period, with which Freed often closed the show with a long list of dedications, and went on to become the perennial No. 1 song on oldies stations around the country.”Mr. Parris later in his career. In 1982 he and the Five Satins returned to the charts for the first time in more than 20 years with “Memories of Days Gone By.”Debra ReedMr. Parris kept writing, performing and recording for more than a half century with an ever-changing lineup, mostly under the Five Satins name. When the oldies boom hit, the song came to define the doo-wop era. The critic Greil Marcus included it in his 2014 book, “The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs.”“Though he continued to record new songs well into the 1980s,” Mr. Marcus wrote, “Parris and different versions of the Five Satins never played a show, whether in clubs around New Haven, for rock ’n’ roll revival concerts in New York, on PBS doo-wop fund-raisers, without ‘In the Still of the Nite’ being the reason the audience was there at all.”Mr. Newman said he once produced a show featuring the Five Satins on the excursion ship Bay Belle.“At that time I asked Fred whether he ever tired of singing that song, night after night, year after year,” Mr. Newman said, “to which he replied: ‘No way; I never stop loving doing that song for people who tell me that it occupies a special place in their lives. I consider it a privilege.’”The 1972 version of the Five Satins at Madison Square Garden. Mr. Parris once said of the group’s signature song: “I never stop loving doing that song for people who tell me that it occupies a special place in their lives. I consider it a privilege.”Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesFrederick Lee Parris was born on March 26, 1936, in Milford, Conn., to Ferdinand and Edna Parris, Mr. Newman said. He grew up in the New Haven area and attended Hillhouse High School. He was a decent baseball player; an entry on the Five Satins in Jay Warner’s “The Billboard Book of American Singing Groups: A History, 1940-1990” says he once had a tryout with the Boston Braves.Apparently he was a better singer than ballplayer, and he was in several groups before forming the Five Satins. One, which he formed with other Hillhouse students, was called the Scarlets, and in 1954 the group recorded “Dear One,” a song Mr. Parris had written, for the Red Robin label; it received some airplay in the New York market.The Scarlets cut several other records, but in 1955 military service split up the group. Mr. Parris ended up in Philadelphia and, during trips home to Connecticut, formed a new group. He had admired a doo-wop act called the Velvets and “liked the idea of something soft and red,” as the Billboard book put it; he chose the name the Five Satins.But despite that name, Mr. Newman said, there were only four Satins at the 1956 recording session: Mr. Parris, who sang lead on “In the Still of the Night,” Al Denby (low tenor), Eddie Martin (baritone) and Jim Freeman (bass). The group, usually with five members, continued on, even recording a minor 1957 success, “To the Aisle,” with Bill Baker singing lead because Mr. Parris, still in the service, was stationed in Japan. Two other records made the Billboard charts in those early years, with Mr. Parris as the lead singer: “Shadows” (1959) and “I’ll Be Seeing You” (1960).Mr. Parris, when telling the story of “In the Still of the Night,” usually didn’t identify the young woman who inspired the song, though in the Smithsonian article he said her name was Marla. In any case, there was no marriage; shortly after he wrote the song, he told The Hartford Courant in 1982, “she went to California to visit her mother.”“She never came back,” he said.Mr. Parris was married several times, most recently to Emma Parris, who survives him. Other survivors include three children, Shawn Parris, Rene Parris Alexandre and Freddy Parris, and eight grandchildren.“In the Still of the Night” endured, and for a time Mr. Parris and various versions of the Satins toured on the strength of it, but in the mid-1960s the British Invasion shoved the doo-wop era aside. He told The Courant that over the years he worked at the Olin and High Standard gun-making plants in Connecticut and delivered food at Southern Connecticut State University.“You do a lot of stuff to eat,” he said.But beginning in the 1970s he tapped into the rock ’n’ roll revival market, performing at oldies shows, and in 1982, for the first time in more than 20 years, he and the Satins landed briefly on the charts again with “Memories of Days Gone By,” a medley made up of snatches of “Sixteen Candles,” “Earth Angel” and other classics, including, of course, “In the Still of the Night.” More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      A New Coalition Amplifies Disability Culture in the Music Industry

      by

      RAMPD, an organization of professional disabled musicians, will push for accessibility in the music industry, including adding visible ramps to awards show stages.For the singer, songwriter and producer Lachi, the acronym was everything.She helped start the organization that would become RAMPD — Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities — in July 2021, but it was a few months earlier, after moderating a panel for the Recording Academy about disability inclusion, that she came up with the name.“After that aired, musicians with disabilities were coming out of the woodwork and following me on Instagram, DMing me going, ‘What are we going to do? Are you going to lead this charge? What’s next?’” Lachi said in an interview. “Everyone was energized. And that’s when the spark came, of the acronym.”RAMPD, which Lachi co-founded with the singer-songwriter and violinist Gaelynn Lea, alongside a dozen or so founding members, works to amplify disability culture and advocate for accessibility in the music business. One of its main goals, fittingly, is to make accessibility ramps visible on TV during awards shows to help normalize disability in the entertainment industry.The coalition’s kickoff will be a virtual event at 5 p.m. on Friday, with opening and closing remarks live from the Grammy Museum Experience at the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J. (The Grammy Awards, originally scheduled for Jan. 31, have been pushed back to April 3.) Adrian Anantawan, a classical violinist; Eliza Hull, an indie rock singer-songwriter; and Molly Joyce, an organist and songwriter, will perform, alongside other disabled musicians, and professional membership applications for the group will open.“Our professional membership have awards, have toured, have worked with big names, are big names themselves,” said Lachi, who is based in New York. “And we’re not here to make folks feel warm and gushy. We’re not here to get handouts. We’re here to get gigs. We’re here to get on stages, we’re here to get paid.”“Disability isn’t ‘despite this, they did this,’” said the singer-songwriter and violinist Gaelynn Lea, a RAMPD co-founder. “It’s more like, ‘because of their identity as a disabled artist, you are enjoying this art in this form.’” Paul VienneauIn October, RAMPD partnered with the inaugural Wavy Awards for an event celebrating women, L.G.B.T.Q. artists, nonbinary musicians, artists of color, performers who identify as having a disability and allies. The organization advised the show on American Sign Language interpretation, captioning, audio description and ensuring the inclusion of people with disabilities on-camera and behind the scenes.Perhaps Lachi’s favorite part, though, was promoting the use of what she calls “self description,” known widely as visual description, which is added as audio to television programs and movies to help people with low vision and people who are blind, like herself.“My name is Lachi, she/her, Black girl, cornrows,” she said as an example. “So that’s what I go by. And that’s all it is.”She underscored how racism, sexism and homophobia compound the discrimination disabled people face. “It’s paramount for folks to recognize that disability has color, that disability has gender, that disability has sexual preference and that disability is not straight, white, middle-America male,” she said.Lea, who was born with osteogenesis imperfecta and is based in Minnesota, pointed out that she wouldn’t make the same music — which won NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2016 — if not for her life experience.“Disability isn’t ‘despite this, they did this,’” she said in an interview. “It’s more like, ‘because of their identity as a disabled artist, you are enjoying this art in this form.’”She added, “Disability culture and the movement that we’re starting I think really is actually up there in terms of cultural shifts with all the other diversity movements we’re talking about.”Through the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council in Duluth, Minn., Lea received the Arts Ecosystem Grant, which will allow RAMPD to build a membership database of professional disabled artists — something that never existed until now. RAMPD also recently secured a fiscal sponsor, Accessible Festivals, a nonprofit organization that will help manage RAMPD’s grants and donations, and allow for the group to grow beyond Lachi and Lea.“We want to see more leaders emerge out of this and people recognize them in the community, because sometimes it feels like I get asked to do so many events, and it’s partly because I feel like people don’t know anyone else to ask,” Lea said. “That’s something that we have to fix.” More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Broadway Meets the Avant-Garde in a Juilliard Music Festival

      by

      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

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Singing Will Return to Tanglewood This Summer

      by

      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

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Grammy Awards Move to April in Las Vegas

      by

      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

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Music

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

      by

      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

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Music

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

      by

      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

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Music

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

      by

      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