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      Frederic Rzewski, Politically Committed Composer and Pianist, Dies at 83

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      Known for his anti-establishment views, Mr. Rzewski created works inspired by the Attica prison uprising and a Chilean protest song.Frederic Rzewski, a formidable composer and pianist who wrote and performed music that was at once stylistically eclectic and politically committed, died on Saturday at his summer home in Montiano, Italy. He was 83.The cause was cardiac arrest, the publicist Josephine Hemsing said in an email.Mr. Rzewski’s anti-establishment thinking stood at the center of his music-making throughout his life. It was evident in the experimental, agitprop improvisations he created in the 1960s with the ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva; in “Coming Together,” the Minimalist classic inspired by the Attica prison uprising; and a vast catalog of solo piano works, several of which have become cornerstones of the modern repertoire.His approach was epitomized in his best-known piece, “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!,” an expansive and virtuosic set of 36 variations on a Chilean protest song.Composed for the pianist Ursula Oppens in 1975, the piece, an hour long, is a torrent of inventive and unusual techniques — the pianist whistles, shouts and slams the lid of the instrument — and has been compared to canonic works like Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations” and Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.”“Stylistically, it goes through everything,” Ms. Oppens said in a recent interview. “It’s pointillistic and minimalistic and really quite varied.” At the same time, she noted, Mr. Rzewski’s mastery of traditional counterpoint was a major draw for pianists. “There’s a logic to the relationship of the notes to one another,” she added.“The People United” has captured the imagination of virtuosos including Marc-André Hamelin and, more recently, younger pianists like Igor Levit and Conrad Tao. It is the closest thing to a war horse in the contemporary piano repertory.In 2015, Mr. Rzewski performed the entire work at the Pittsburgh fish market Wholey’s, a fabled event in contemporary music circles.Mr. Rzewski’s musical approach favored intuition over cerebral composition. “The one thing that composers in the 20th century don’t do is to simply write down the tunes that are going through their heads,” he told the magazine NewMusicBox in 2002. “I just write down what’s in my head.”Frederic Anthony Rzewski was born on April 13, 1938, in Westfield, Mass., to Anthony Rzewski, a Polish émigré, and Emma Buynicki, who were both pharmacists. He began playing piano and composing from a young age.Following the advice of a teacher, he checked out albums by Shostakovich and Schoenberg at a record store and began to immerse himself in musical modernism.After graduating from Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, Mr. Rzewski studied music at Harvard with the tonal composers Randall Thompson and Walter Piston. He earned his master’s at Princeton.In 1960 and 1961, he studied with Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence on a Fulbright scholarship. In Europe, he gained renown performing music by luminaries like Karlheinz Stockhausen and, after a stint in Berlin studying with Elliott Carter, settled in Rome.In a rehearsal for the Atonal Music Festival in 1963, Mr. Rzewski plays a typewriter and squeezes a baby doll that says “Mama.”Allyn Baum/The New York TimesThe European avant-garde had fallen under the sway of John Cage’s experimentalism, and Mr. Rzewski wrote heady music like his “Composition for Two Players,” an unconventional score that he once interpreted by placing sheets of glass on the strings of a Steinway.In 1966, he and the composer Alvin Curran assembled a group of musicians, including the electronic composer Richard Teitelbaum, to perform in the crypt of a church in Rome. The collective became Musica Elettronica Viva, an act that used homemade electronics setups for visceral improvisations. Mr. Rzewski, for instance, scraped and drummed on a piece of glass that had been cut into the shape of a piano, to which he had attached a microphone. (“By the grace of God, we didn’t get electrocuted,” he later said.)Rejecting the dense, modernist scores of his previous academic environs, Mr. Rzewski became preoccupied with spontaneity.“The sublime mingled freely with the base,” he once wrote of “Spacecraft,” one of the sets of trippy instructions that guided Musica Elettronica Viva’s performances. “Climaxes of exhausting intensity alternated with Tibetan drones, ecstatic trances gave way to demonic seizures in rapid succession.”The collective gave more than 100 performances across Europe in the late 1960s, and its raucous concerts drew increasingly politicized listeners. As students agitated, the group joined in, inviting audiences to play with them in anarchic improvisations — a kind of avant-garde Summer of Love. The group also performed in factories and prisons.“The most important thing was the connection of community and the political,” the composer and scholar George E. Lewis, who performed in later iterations of the collective, said in a recent interview. “Music gave people choices and options, and collectively creating music together allowed everyone to rethink their situations.”In 1971, Mr. Rzewski moved to New York and resumed a more routine concert life, playing recitals of new music and joining the downtown improvisation scene.And he began to bring his politics to bear on works he created alone. “It is fairly clear that the storms of the ’60s have momentarily subsided, giving way to a period of reflection,” he wrote that year. First was “Les Moutons de Panurge,” which asks an ensemble to play a tricky, ever-shifting 65-note melody. “Stay together as long as you can, but if you get lost, stay lost,” the score impishly indicates.Then came “Coming Together,” in which a speaker recites a letter written by Sam Melville, a leader of the 1971 Attica prison uprising, over a chugging, minimalist bass line as instrumentalists contribute quasi-improvised interjections. Mr. Rzewski would occasionally perform “Coming Together” himself, playing and speaking simultaneously.The music is at once calculated and urgent; Mr. Rzewski described the Attica rebellion, in which 43 people died, as an “atrocity that demanded of every responsible person that had any power to cry out, that he cry out.” Its many interpreters have included the performance artist Steve Ben Israel, the composer-performer Julius Eastman and Angela Davis, the professor and political activist.During this period Mr. Rzewski became involved in the Musicians Action Collective, a coalition that organized benefit concerts for United Farm Workers, a defense fund for Attica inmates and the Chilean solidarity movement. He was soon drawn to the song “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido,” which had become an anthem for the Chilean resistance through performances by the exiled group Inti-Illimani. Written by Sergio Ortega and Quilapayún, the song served as the basis for Mr. Rzewski’s set of variations, commissioned for the United States Bicentennial and first performed by Ms. Oppens at the Kennedy Center in Washington in 1976.“People always say, ‘Well, how can music be political if it has no text?’ Mr. Rzewski told an interviewer that year. “It doesn’t require a text. It does, however, require some kind of consciousness of the active relationship between music and the rest of the world.”Returning to Europe in the late 1970s, Mr. Rzewski split his time between Italy and Liège, where he was a professor at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique until his death, and he made regular visits to the United States to perform and teach.After “The People United,” Mr. Rzewski largely focused on solo piano music, like the “North American Ballads” (1979), which bring together Baroque counterpoint, minimalist improvisation and leftist folk song. Subsequent major solo works include the theatrical “De Profundis,” in which a pianist plays while reciting Oscar Wilde’s infamous prison manifesto; the polystylistic, 10-hour-plus cycle “The Road”; and a sprawling series of miniature “Nanosonatas.”“Opera houses don’t come asking me to write operas,” he told The New York Times in 2008. “Symphony orchestras don’t come asking for symphonies. But there’s this piano player I see every day who keeps asking me for music. So that’s what I do.”Much of the music encourages improvisation, and, in performances of canonic works like Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata, Mr. Rzewski would create his own elaborate cadenzas.He remained true to his iconoclastic roots. In 2001 he released his scores as free downloads on the internet, and many are now available on the online Petrucci Music Library.There was, though, a darker side to his ornery personality. Mr. Rzewski could be exceedingly harsh to students in educational settings. After his death was announced, several musicians noted on Twitter that he had a reputation for inappropriate flirtation and sexual innuendo toward younger women.Mr. Rzewski married Nicole Abbeloos in 1963, and they later separated. His partner for many years was Françoise Walot; they separated around 2008. Survivors include six children, Alexis, Daniel, Jan, Noemi, Esther and Noam, and five grandchildren.Wary of the present, Mr. Rzewski also refused to dwell in nostalgia. “Free improvisation was going to change the world,” he told The New York Times in 2016, referring to his early days with Musica Elettronica Viva. “It was going to create an entirely new language, so that people could come together from different parts of the planet and instantly communicate.”After taking a beat, he added, “Well, of course, we were wrong.” More

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      Jon Hassell, Trumpeter and ‘Fourth World’ Composer, Dies at 84

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      Blending modern technology with traditional instruments, Mr. Hassell created a genre he described as “coffee-colored classical music of the future.”Jon Hassell, a composer and trumpeter who blended modern technology with ancient instruments and traditions to create what he called Fourth World music, died on Saturday. He was 84.His death was announced in a statement from his family released by his record label, Ndeya. It did not specify where he died or the immediate cause.Mr. Hassell’s music floated outside the genre boundaries of classical music, electronica, ambient music or jazz. He described Fourth World as “a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques” and, elsewhere, as “coffee-colored classical music of the future.”His music could be contemplative and atmospheric, darkly suspenseful or abstractly funky. On the 20 albums Mr. Hassell made as a leader, his trumpet usually had an eerily disembodied sound, one that was processed through electronics and enfolded in shadowy reverberations, sometimes using harmonizers to multiply each note in parallel lines.He played vocalistic phrases that invoked the bluesy intimacy of Miles Davis along with the Indian classical music that Mr. Hassell studied with the raga singer Pandit Pran Nath. Around his trumpet, as foreground and background coalesced, there might be drone tones, global percussion, wind or string ensembles, washes of synthesizer, samples, distorted guitar, voices and more.He delved into calm and aggression, reflection and propulsion, serenity and suspense. His polymorphous, layered, ambiguous yet sensual music helped shape decades of electronic experimentation from acts like Oneohtrix Point Never, Arca and Matmos.In a tribute in The Guardian in 2007, the musician and producer Brian Eno wrote, “He looks at the world in all its momentary and evanescent moods with respect, and this shows in his music. He sees dignity and beauty in all forms of the dance of life.”Through the years, Mr. Hassell collaborated repeatedly with Mr. Eno and the American musician Ry Cooder. He also recorded with musicians from Africa, Brazil, India and Europe; composed a piece (“Pano da Costa”) for the Kronos Quartet; and played recording sessions with Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, k.d. lang, Baaba Maal, David Sylvian, Tears for Fears, Bono and others.In a 1997 interview with the online magazine Perfect Sound Forever, Mr. Hassell said he wanted to create “music for above and below the waist simultaneously.” He added that Fourth World music was “about heart and head as the same thing. It’s about being transported to some place which is made up of both real and virtual geography.”Mr. Hassell was born on March 22, 1937, in Memphis. He picked up the instrument his father had played in college, a cornet, and studied music and played in big bands as a teenager. He attended the Eastman School of Music, exploring modern classical composition and earning a master’s degree. To avoid being drafted, he joined the Army band in Washington, D.C.Fascinated by the emerging field of electronic music, he made tape collages and won a grant to study with the avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen for two years in Cologne, Germany. His classmates included musicians who would go on to start the German band Can; he took LSD with them.He received a fellowship at the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at SUNY Buffalo. There, he composed music on one of the early Moog synthesizers. He also met the composer Terry Riley, who first recorded his Minimalist landmark “In C” in 1968 with musicians at SUNY Buffalo, including Mr. Hassell.Mr. Hassell performed in concerts with Mr. Riley and in the drone group Theatre of Eternal Music, which was led by another pioneering Minimalist, La Monte Young. Like them, Mr. Hassell became a student of Mr. Nath, the Indian singer whose subtleties of pitch and inflection would profoundly influence Mr. Hassell’s music; he applied raga singing to his trumpet playing.“It’s about making a beautiful shape in air. I call it calligraphy in sound,” he said in a 2009 interview with All About Jazz.Mr. Hassell’s musical direction was already clear on his 1977 debut album, “Vernal Equinox.” His electronically altered trumpet is joined by African mbira (thumb piano), Indian tabla drums, maracas, tropical bird calls, electronic drones, ocean waves and crickets.“This record fascinated me,” Mr. Eno wrote in 2007. “It was a dreamy, strange, meditative music that was inflected by Indian, African and South American music, but also seemed located in the lineage of tonal Minimalism. It was a music I felt I’d been waiting for.”In New York City, where in the late 1970s art-rock, punk, pop and jazz shared a creative flux, Mr. Eno sought out Mr. Hassell, and they collaborated on “Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics” (1980). As the marketing category “world music” arose, its sounds and ideas strongly influenced musicians like Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel. Mr. Eno was also producing Talking Heads, and Mr. Hassell’s ghostly trumpet is prominent in “Houses in Motion” on Talking Heads’ 1980 album, “Remain in Light.”Mr. Hassell helped conceptualize the 1981 Byrne-Eno album “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” which merged found recordings with studio rhythm tracks and introduced a broad audience to ideas of sonic and cultural collage. But Mr. Hassell later said that he could not afford the airfare to join the recording sessions, and he told Billboard magazine that he considered the results “too poppy.”Writing in 1982 for the science-fiction magazine Heavy Metal, Mr. Hassell championed both preserving and extending local traditions, in order “to understand which music made sorrows bearable and expressed the mystery of creation before the entry date of the first transistor radio into the village.”Through the decades, Mr. Hassell continued to record, experiment and recombine far-flung musical elements.He collaborated with the African percussionists and singers of Farafina, from Burkina Faso, for “Flash of the Spirit” in 1988. He wrote theater music for “Sulla Strada,” an Italian stage adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” He recorded with Mr. Cooder and Indian musicians — Ronu Majumdar on bansuri, a wooden flute, and Abhijit Banerjee on tabla drums — on the 2000 album “Hollow Bamboo.” In 2005 he began touring internationally with a group called Maarifa Street, which he named after a street in Iran; “maarifa” means knowledge or wisdom.Mr. Hassell learned evolving technology and made it speak for him, incorporating samples and complex signal processing. He also held on to the physicality of breath and lips on the trumpet.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Hassell conceived his two final albums, “Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One)” (2018) and “Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two)” (2020), as “pentimento,” a visual-arts term for the reappearance of images an artist had painted over.He described his approach to the music as “seeing it in terms of a painting with layers and touch-ups and start-overs with new layers that get erased in places that let the underlying pattern come to the top and be seen (or heard).”He had also been working on a book titled “The North and South of You,” he said in a 2018 interview with Billboard.“It’s the analysis of our current situation in terms of our overemphasis on the north of us, the rational and technological, instead of the south of us,” he said. “North is logic, south is the samba — and how much more of each would you rather have when the time comes to depart the planet?” More

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      Bruce Springsteen Reopens Broadway, Ushering In Theater’s Return

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      On Saturday, “Springsteen on Broadway” became the first full-length show to take the stage since the Covid-19 pandemic forced performances to shut down in March 2020.I have seen the return of Broadway, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.In a city whose cultural soul had been shuttered for more than a year with boarded up windows and empty streets, it was Springsteen who called it back to life on Saturday night, his gruff and guttural rasp the first to echo across a Broadway stage to a paying audience in 471 days.Of course, “Springsteen on Broadway” is no traditional Broadway production — no mesmerizing choreographed musical numbers, no enchanted sets, no multi-page bios of cast members in the Playbill. The show consists of a man alone onstage; his ensemble a microphone, a harmonica, a piano and six steel strings stretched across a select slab of spruce wood.“I am here tonight to provide proof of life,” Springsteen called out early on. It was a line from the monologue of his original show — which ran for 236 performances, in 2017 and 2018 — and now it carried extra weight. That proof, he continued, was “to that ever elusive, never completely believable, particularly these days, us.”For the “us” that packed inside the St. James Theater — 1,721 filled seats, very few masked people, all vaccinated — that first arpeggiated three-note chord from “Growin’ Up” was indeed proof that the rhythms that moved New York City were emerging from behind a heavy, dark and weighty curtain.The 15 months that Broadway had been shuttered was its longest silence in history. In years past, strikes, hurricanes, blizzards and blackouts had managed to tamp down the lights on Broadway only for a few days, weeks or a month. But the pandemic forced the Theater District into an extensive darkness on March 12 of last year, as New York was quickly becoming the epicenter of the epidemic in the United States.And while marquee shows like “Hadestown,” “Hamilton” and “Wicked” are still awaiting their September reopenings, it was Springsteen who took one of the most meaningful strolls to center stage in Broadway history, and sang.Bruce Springsteen, left, and his wife, Patti Scialfa, taking a bow at the St. James Theater. They sang together on “Fire,” one of the new additions to the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThough the show largely hewed to the original incarnation, there were some notable additions, and new phrases, soliloquies and tales woven into the performance. Springsteen mentioned his new record, “Letter to You”; his new film of the same name; and his dismissed drunken-driving charges. (He was arrested after taking two shots of tequila with fans in Sandy Hook, a public beach that does not allow alcohol, and then hopping on his motorcycle.)But he also tried to make sense of the moment, of a long year filled with loss and isolation during the pandemic.“It’s been a long time coming,” Springsteen said to the crowd after finishing the first song, stepping away from the microphone and speaking directly to the crowd. “In 71 years on the planet, I haven’t seen anything like this past year.”He spoke at length of his mother, Adele Springsteen.“She’s 10 years into Alzheimer’s,” he said. “She’s 95. But the need to dance, that need to dance is something that hasn’t left her. She can’t speak. She can’t stand. But when she sees me, there’s a smile.”And he addressed the civil unrest throughout the country.“We are living in troubling times,” Springsteen said. “Certainly not in my lifetime, when the survival of democracy itself, not just who is going to be running the show for the next four years, but the survival of democracy itself is deeply threatened.”He then launched into one of three new songs to the show, “American Skin (41 Shots),” a ballad written about Amadou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant, who was fatally shot in 1999 by New York City police officers.Amid the new material (including a new duet, “Fire,” with his wife, Patti Scialfa), the rhythms that marked the initial run of “Springsteen on Broadway” were quickly finding their groove. Hours before the show, a crowd amassed outside the side stage door, a relic of Springsteen’s earlier Broadway run when fans clamored for a glimpse of the rock star’s arrival every night.“It’s just epic to have the Boss open us back up,” said Giancarlo DiMascio, 28, who drove down from Rochester to see the show (his 49th Springsteen concert). “It’s big for New York, its big for arts and culture here, and to have this open up is a sense of normalcy.”A line began to form at the theater and eventually snaked down 44th Street, as fans clad in vintage Springsteen paraphernalia — old concert T-shirts, Stone Pony shirts and a few Springsteen face masks — were eager to get inside and see a stage in person for the first time in months. But, true to Broadway form, plenty of theatergoers staggered in just as the house lights were dimming, including Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey and Steven Van Zandt, the actor and guitarist for Springsteen’s E Street Band.The transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, standing left, and Steven Van Zandt, seated center, were among the famous faces in the crowd at Saturday night’s performance.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I’ve been a Broadway fan for as long as I can remember, and this has been a challenging year,” said Jacob Persily, 26, from Monmouth County, N.J. He said he had been to “hundreds” of Broadway plays but had never seen Springsteen (though he lives around the corner from Springsteen’s gym in New Jersey). “I’m also a health care worker, so it’s been a challenging year in many other ways.”Outside the theater, dozens of anti-vaccination protesters gathered, shouting and harassing attendees. A similar group had come to protest the Foo Fighters concert at Madison Square Garden last week. Both performances required proof of vaccination to attend.But for many in the audience, it felt good to be back in the theater, back to live music, and just simply “back.” But other fans, for whom music — and particularly Springsteen’s music — brings an irreplaceable form of comfort, the show felt especially important.Kathy Saleeba, 53, drove from Rhode Island for the show. A self-described “No. 1 Bruce fan,” Saleeba said she had seen 51 Springsteen shows, many with her childhood friend Jane.In 2005, Jane was diagnosed with breast cancer, Saleeba said, but the two continued to go to as many Springsteen shows as possible, and they even met the Boss in Connecticut in 2008 before his show. He ended up playing a song for her, “Janey Don’t You Lose Heart.”On Saturday, Saleeba brought a picture of Jane, who died in 2016, along with the lyrics printed out from “Land of Hope and Dreams.” She hoped to give it to Springsteen in person.A line stretched down 44th Street as ticket holders waited to enter the St. James Theater. Audience members were required to provide proof of Covid-19 vaccination, and entry times were staggered.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Springsteen on Broadway” is part concert, part comedy, part tragedy, part therapy, but also so much more in an undefinable sum. It’s a performance and a conversation, with a hero and an icon baring himself onstage, offering a portrait of his life through his own eyes, his own voice, and how he has seen the world.It’s a show that reckons so rawly with loss and change in an unfair world, and even Springsteen at one point choked up, tears winding down his face as he recalled all those he’s lost: his father, his bandmates, his friends.“I’m glad to be doing this show again this summer because I get to visit with my dad every night that I’m here, and it’s a lovely thing,” he said, wiping his eyes.Though through somber resilience, Springsteen also finds ways to celebrate.In paying tribute to Clarence “Big Man” Clemons, the larger-than-life saxophone player from the E Street Band who died 10 years ago this month, Springsteen recalled when “Scooter and the Big Man” took the city on and whispered rock ’n’ roll stories into the ears of millions. “He was elemental in my life,” Springsteen said, softly vamping through the chords of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” “And losing him was like losing the rain.”Like so many in the audience, I too lost a “Big Man” in the pandemic. My cousin Big Nick, who had a heart so big it could have been the inspiration for Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart,” was one of the more than 600,000 American people who succumbed to the coronavirus.And so has this city grappled with extraordinary loss, where almost every street, block and building, every inhabitant and every visitor has been forever changed by the pandemic.As I, and so many others, shared the pain of Springsteen as he recounted the death of his friend, and promised to “see ya in the next life, Big Man,” there was also comfort in seeing him onstage again, on Broadway again, and all of us, strangers and not, together again in music.And when Springsteen belted out the climactic third verse to “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” — “Well the change was made uptown and the Big Man joined the band” — the only audible sounds were cheers. More

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      Jeanne Lamon, Who Led an Early-Music Ensemble, Dies at 71

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      A violinist, she directed Tafelmusik for 33 years, striving not only to present centuries-old music as it was originally heard but also to reach modern audiences.Jeanne Lamon, an accomplished violinist who was music director of the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Chamber Choir for 33 years, helping to build it into one of the world’s most acclaimed baroque ensembles, died on June 20 in Victoria, British Columbia. She was 71.A spokeswoman for the ensemble said the cause was cancer.Ms. Lamon, who lived in Victoria, took the helm of Tafelmusik in 1981, just two years after the group, based in Toronto, was founded by Kenneth Solway and Susan Graves. Under her guidance — and with her often leading from the first-violin chair — the group developed an international reputation, performing all over the world in major concert halls, at universities, in churches, even in pubs.Tafelmusik also became known for its recordings, releasing dozens of albums on Sony Classical and other labels during her tenure.Ms. Lamon and the ensemble pursued a goal of rendering the works they played as their composers would have envisioned them, employing period instruments in the process. One of Tafelmusik’s earliest New York appearances was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Ms. Lamon played the museum’s 17th-century Stradivarius.The results could be striking, as in a 1995 recording of Bach violin concertos.“Beyond its impeccable discipline and luminous textures, the group displays an expressive sensibility that transcends the instruments, whether strung with gut or wire,” Lawrence B. Johnson wrote in a review of that album for The New York Times. “That expressive empathy is most powerfully conveyed in the Adagio of the E major Concerto, where, over a measured tread, Jeanne Lamon spins out a radiant, sad line that might be a wordless aria from a Bach Passion.”Yet Ms. Lamon was not content simply to recreate centuries-old music; she wanted to make it appealing to a modern audience.Never was that more evident than in “The Galileo Project: Music of the Spheres,” a multimedia performance piece featuring the music of Vivaldi and others, projections of astronomical and other scenes, an actor providing narration, and an unfettered orchestra. For the piece, conceived and scripted by Alison Mackay, the ensemble’s bassist, and unveiled in Calgary in 2009, which the United Nations had declared the International Year of Astronomy, Ms. Lamon had her players memorize their parts so they could move around the performance space, including into the audience, while playing.“Simply put, this is one of the best, most imaginative shows based on classical music seen here in years,” John Terauds wrote in The Toronto Star when the work was performed in that city later that year. “Including intermission, these two hours pass as if they were 10 minutes. There isn’t a single dull moment or off note.”Ms. Lamon, foreground, performing the multimedia piece “The Galileo Project: Music of the Spheres” with Tafelmusik in 2010. “There isn’t a single dull moment or off note,” one reviewer wrote of the two-hour work.Glenn Davidson, via TafelmusikMemorizing a full evening’s worth of music was a tall order for Ms. Lamon and the other players, but she found the experience liberating.“I’m starting to see music stands as a wall between myself and the audience,” she told The Houston Chronicle in 2014, the year she stepped down as music director, when “The Galileo Project” was performed at the Wortham Theater Center in Houston.The piece also traveled to Pennsylvania State University that year. In a video interview pegged to that performance, Ms. Lamon said she thought the work showed a path to broadening the audience for early music and other classical genres.“You don’t just have to play pops concerts, which is what some symphony orchestras resort to when they want to fill the seats,” she said.“I believe dumbing it down is not the way to go,” she added. “I think people just want to feel more a part of it.”Jeanne Lamon was born on Aug. 14, 1949, in Queens and grew up in Larchmont, N.Y. Her father, Isaac, was in real estate, and her mother, Elly, was a teacher. Ms. Lamon said whatever musical genes she had probably came from her mother, who played piano.She was entranced by the violin at an early age.“I remember at the age of 3 seeing Isaac Stern playing on television,” she told The Toronto Star in 1986, “and I wanted to do what he was doing. I told my parents immediately I wanted a violin.”She had to wait until she was 6 before her parents bought her an instrument, and it was a recorder, not a violin. But she kept after them, and at 7 she got the instrument she wanted.“Learning to play an instrument is very much like learning a foreign language,” she said. “If you learn it young, it becomes part of your body.”“I remember at the age of 3 seeing Isaac Stern playing on television,” Ms. Lamon once said, “and I wanted to do what he was doing.” She got her first violin when she was 7.Dean Macdonell, via TafelmusikHer father, though, thought a general education was important, so instead of going to a conservatory she attended Brandeis University in Massachusetts, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in music. Then she went to Amsterdam to hone her violin skills, studying under Herman Krebbers, concertmaster of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. While there she heard a concert by baroque players.“I instantly fell in love,” she said.She began to study with Sigiswald Kuijken, one of the world’s leading baroque violin players.Back in the United States, she was performing with various ensembles when Mr. Solway and Ms. Graves asked her to come to Toronto to direct a guest program with their new group. They made her music director.Among her legacies is the Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Institute, which trains musicians in baroque performance. In 2006 the organization established the Jeanne Lamon Instrument Bank, which loans period instruments to students.Ms. Lamon’s many awards included the Order of Canada. She is survived by her partner of many years, the cellist Christina Mahler; a brother, Ed; and a sister, Dorothy Rubinoff.Ms. Lamon said part of the appeal of playing early music was that it involved a certain amount of detective work and guesswork, since composers of old often left only the sketchiest of scores.“We are expected to do a lot of interpreting, such as adding dynamics, phrasings and ornaments,” she told The Globe and Mail in 2001. “That’s what attracts a lot of us to playing this music. It’s a very creative process. You do a lot of research to figure out what a composer might have done, but in the final analysis you do what you do, because no two people would do it alike.” More

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      Grammys Settle With Ousted C.E.O.

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      The settlement between the Recording Academy, which runs the Grammy Awards, and Deborah Dugan, its former chief executive, came just weeks before arbitration over her dismissal was to begin.The Recording Academy, the organization behind the Grammy Awards, has reached a confidential settlement with Deborah Dugan, its ousted chief executive, just weeks before arbitration hearings over her dismissal were set to begin.In a joint statement issued late Thursday, the two sides said: “The Recording Academy and Deborah Dugan have agreed to resolve their differences and to keep the terms of their agreement private.”By settling, the Recording Academy avoids what could have been a rare glimpse at its opaque internal politics. The arbitration was set to begin on July 12 in Los Angeles, and despite earlier promises to make the hearings open to the public, the academy had in recent weeks been pushing to keep the proceedings secret.The settlement closes a contentious period in Grammys history. Ms. Dugan, a former media executive who had led Red, the nonprofit co-founded by Bono of U2, was brought in to the academy in 2019 as a change agent. The academy had for years faced complaints about its voting process and its poor record of recognizing women and people of color in many of the top awards, and in 2018, Neil Portnow, Ms. Dugan’s predecessor, was criticized for suggesting that women should “step up” to be recognized at the Grammys.But Ms. Dugan spent only five months at the helm. In January 2020, just 10 days before the ceremony that year, Ms. Dugan was placed on administrative leave — and later fired — over what the academy said were “concerns raised to the Recording Academy board of trustees, including a formal allegation of misconduct by a senior female member of the Recording Academy team.”In a discrimination complaint lodged with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Ms. Dugan said her dismissal was an act of retaliation after she challenged the “boys’ club” that she said dominated the academy. It also came a few weeks after she wrote a detailed letter to the academy’s human resources department alleging voting irregularities, financial mismanagement and conflicts of interest.Perhaps most shocking to music insiders, Ms. Dugan also accused a prominent outside lawyer for the academy of making unwanted sexual advances toward her shortly after she got the job. (That lawyer, Joel Katz, disputed Ms. Dugan’s account.)The academy denied her allegations and portrayed her as a disruptive force at the organization, which sees itself as a home for the entire music community.“What we expected was change without chaos,” Christine Albert, the academy’s board emeritus at the time, said in an interview with The New York Times after Ms. Dugan was dismissed but before she filed her discrimination complaint.Lawyers for Ms. Dugan declined to comment further about the settlement. Representatives of the Recording Academy did not respond early Friday to requests for comment. More

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      ‘Summer of Soul’ Review: In 1969 Harlem, a Music Festival Stuns

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      Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Mavis Staples and others shine in a documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival from Questlove.There’s no shortage of system shocks in “Summer of Soul.” This is a concert movie that basically opens with a 19-year-old, pre-imperial-era Stevie Wonder getting behind a drum kit and whomping away — sitting, standing, kicking, possessed. It’s a movie that nears its end with Nina Simone doing “Backlash Blues” in a boxing match with the keys of her piano, her hair indistinguishable from the conical art piece affixed to her head.The movie’s got Sly and the Family Stone and B.B. King and Ray Barretto and Gladys Knight & the Pips, in top, electric form. But no jolt compares to what happens in the middle of this thing, which is simply — though far from merely — footage from the 1969 edition of the Harlem Cultural Festival, footage that Ahmir Thompson, better known as Questlove, has rescued and assembled into nearly two-hours of outrageous poignancy. It’s all been cooking before this midway moment. But it’s once you’re there, engulfed in it, that you trust Thompson’s strategy.Sometimes these archival-footage documentaries don’t know what they’ve got. The footage has been found, but the movie’s been lost. Too much cutting away from the good stuff, too much talking over images that can speak just fine for themselves, never knowing — in concert films — how to use a crowd. The haphazard discovery blots out all the delight. Not here. Here, the discovery becomes the delight. Nothing feels haphazard.After the energetic asides about Mayor John Lindsay’s earnest support of the festival and Maxwell House’s sponsorship; after an exuberant montage of the outfits and stage patter of the festival’s charismatic and, it must be said, dashing mastermind, Tony Lawrence; after a poignant, illuminating passage on the overlooked, much fretted over quintet the Fifth Dimension, Thompson plunks us down in the middle of a meaty gospel passage.The Edwin Hawkins Singers kick it off with their rendition of “Oh Happy Day,” which at the time was a massive hit. Then the Staple Singers — Pops and his daughters Cleotha, Yvonne and Mavis — come on and dress “Help Me Jesus” in rockabilly robes. Not far behind is the pulpit dervish Clara Walker, whose exhortative way with a tune doubles as furnace and fan.Now, these performances took place over six summer Sundays. So I don’t know what any particular day’s official, chronological lineup was, but Thompson and his editor, Joshua L. Pearson, have done some mighty hefty truncation. Minutes after Walker and her Gospel Redeemers, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson appears, looking as beatifically beatnik as he’d ever get. Backing him is the Breadbasket Orchestra and Choir, and he begins to tell the many Harlemites densely packed before him that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last words were to the Breadbasket’s leader, Ben Branch. King told him that he wanted him to play the gospel pillar “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” And here now to grant that wish is Mahalia Jackson, who many a time sang it at King’s request.Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson, performing at the festival, which took place over six summer Sundays.Searchlight PicturesIt’s important to note, that during this passage, Mavis Staples and Reverend Jackson have also been narrating the scene from the present. Speaking today, using her front-porch husk, Staples remembers that Mahalia Jackson, her idol, leaned over and asked for her accompaniment. Mavis Staples was around 30; Mahalia Jackson was in her late 50s and wasn’t feeling well.Staples goes first, alone and a-blast. Jackson follows her with equal force and in defiance of whatever had been ailing her. Then together — Jackson refulgent in a fuchsia gown with a gold diamond emblazoned below her bosom; Staples in something short, lacy, belted and white — they embark on the single most astounding duet I’ve ever heard, seen or felt. They share the microphone. They pass it between them. Howling, moaning, wailing, hopping, but well within the song’s generous contours and, somehow, in control of themselves. My tears weren’t jerked as I watched. The ducts simply gave way, and the mask I wore at the theater where I sat was eventually covered in runny, viscous salt.They’re singing for the festival’s attendees. They’re mourning all of the death — of leaders, of followers, of troops and civilians. They are, if you’re willing to see it this way, lamenting what is obviously a generational transition from one phase of Black political expression to another, from resolve to anger, from the grandiloquence of Jackson’s pile of hair to Staples’s blunter Afro. They are singing this cherished classic of bereavement in order to mourn the present and the past. Listening to them now, in the summer of 2021, plumb earth and scrape sky, you weep, not only for the raw beauty of their voices but because it feels as if these two instruments of God were also mourning the future.I don’t remember how long this performance lasts. It doesn’t really even have an ending, per se. It just simply concludes, with each woman heading back to Reverend Jackson, into the band. But when it’s over you don’t know what to do — well, besides never forget it. It’s an extraordinary event not just of musical history. It’s a mind-blowing moment of American history. And for five decades, the footage of it apparently just sat in a basement, waiting for someone like Thompson to give it its due.The whole movie is dues-giving. It’s true that nothing matches the high of Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples. Yet nothing that surrounds them feels puny or like an afterthought. Thompson has an assortment of people watch footage from the festival — attendees who were kids and teenagers at the time, performers who were there, folks like Sheila E., who learned her craft from some of these artists. And I was almost as devastated by the sight of Marilyn McCoo’s putting her hands to her face as she watches her younger self with the rest of the Fifth Dimension, recounting how in-between they felt as Black artists who Black people didn’t always think were Black enough. Their sound was light and round and reliant upon strings and harmonies that were commercial for 1969 but not cool. In this film, among Simone and Max Roach and Hugh Masekela, the Fifth Dimension don’t at all seem like outsiders. They seem like family.Throughout this thing, Thompson is dropping explanatory information and montages that are crosscut with more information. A passage about the national climate of ’69, for instance, is mixed in with the Chambers Brothers’ festival performance. And you’re sitting there in awe at how the film hasn’t lost you. It’s got its own rhythm. The images, the music, the news, the reminiscences, the commentary often come at you at once. And with another director what you’d be left with is noise, with mess. This is certainly where Thompson’s being a bandleader — a band-leading drummer; a band-leading drummer who D.J.s — matters. The onslaught operates differently here. The chaos is an idea.On one hand, this is just cinema. On the other, there’s something about the way that the editing keeps time with the music, the way the talking is enhancing what’s onstage rather than upstaging it. In many of these passages, facts, gyration, jive and comedy are cut across one another yet in equilibrium. So, yeah: cinema, obviously. But also something that feels rarer: syncopation.This festival took place the same summer that Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon. The movie deftly accounts for the dissonance between the two events. It’s the answer to the brief, shrewd passage in Damien Chazelle’s “First Man” that intercuts the landing with Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon.” These two movies would make a searing double feature of the same moment in American progress, on the ground and up in space. Of course, it’s hard not to leave this movie fully aware that, at that point, in 1969, with the country convulsed by war, racism and Richard Nixon, the power of those artists assembled in New York right then makes a firm case that Harlem was the moon.But the movie’s sense of politics isn’t so despondent. Thompson winds things down with Sly and the Family Stone doing “Higher.” That band was male and female, Black and white — weird, rubbery, ecstatic, yet tight, hailing from no appreciable tradition, inventing one instead. It’s been more than half a century, and I still don’t know where these cats came from. They simply seem sent from an American future that no one has to mourn.Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)Rated PG-13 (some cursing and lustiness, lots of spirit catching). Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More

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      A Race ‘Report Card’ Measures Whether the Music Industry Changed

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      The Black Music Action Coalition issued a 37-page report examining if powerful companies followed through on diversity commitments made last summer.A new “report card” on race in the music business takes many of the industry’s most powerful companies to task, urging them to follow through on diversity commitments made last summer amid nationwide protests over the murder of George Floyd.The 37-page “Music Industry Action Report Card,” by the Black Music Action Coalition, was issued over the weekend to coincide with the Juneteenth holiday. The group took its hardest look at the three major record companies, which announced large financial donations last year — Sony and Warner Music each pledged $100 million, and Universal $25 million — and doled out middling-to-poor grades to them.Only a portion of those donation pledges has been paid out so far, and in its report the coalition — a group of artist managers, lawyers and others in the business that was formed a year ago — pressed the companies to hire more people of color in top executive jobs.The report graded the labels in four categories, including their initial commitments and subsequent follow-through, and the companies mostly got B’s and C’s. None earned an A, and one, Warner, even got a D in the category of representation at the executive level.Last week, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California released a detailed report of its own, noting that, among 4,060 executives at 119 music companies of various kinds, 7.5 percent were Black. (At record companies, that number was 14.4 percent.)“Our hope is that the MIA Report Card, especially coming on the heels of the Annenberg study, will spur more conversations and efforts towards, in some cases, disruptive change,” Naima Cochrane, a journalist and former label executive who was the author of the Black Music Action Coalition’s study, wrote.Most companies named in the report, including each of the three major record conglomerates, declined to comment about it. But some within the industry privately complained that the study was inconsistent or incomplete.A total of 18 companies were examined in the report. While record labels were given letter grades, other types of companies, like streaming services, talent agencies and concert promoters, were rated on whether their efforts were “satisfactory.” Whole areas of the business, including radio and artist management, were not addressed. The coalition said the study would be expanded in coming years.“Our data is only as good as the record industry’s willingness to cooperate in providing information,” Binta Niambi Brown, the coalition’s co-chairman, said in a statement.Pandora, the internet radio giant that is owned by SiriusXM, was one of the few whose efforts were deemed “unsatisfactory,” although scant reasons were given for that rating. “Because Pandora has traded on its familiarity with Black and Latinx listeners and their impact on culture,” the report said, “we expected a more significant commitment from them.”In response, Nicole Hughey, the head of diversity and inclusion at SiriusXM, said the company has given money to organizations and pursued specific campaigns against racism in the audio business.“We support BMAC’s mission, but were disappointed and surprised by the Unsatisfactory rating given to Pandora in their recent report card, given our strong passion and commitment to fighting racism and promoting racial equality,” Ms. Hughey said in a statement.“There is always more work to be done, within our company and across the music industry,” she added, “and we will continue that work tirelessly.” More