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      Larry Harlow, Influential Figure in Salsa, Dies at 82

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      He was born into a family of Jewish musicians, but he made his mark in Latin music, as a pianist, bandleader and producer.Born into a family of musicians, Larry Harlow was probably destined for a music career from the start. But it was his walks to class at the High School of Music and Art in Upper Manhattan that put him onto his lifelong passion.“When I got out of the subway, I would walk up this huge hill and hear this strange music coming from all the bodegas,” he told The Forward in 2006. “I thought, ‘What kind of music is this? It’s really nice.’”What he was hearing was early recordings by Tito Puente, the Pérez Prado mambo hit “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” and other energetic new Latin sounds. Soon Mr. Harlow, a Brooklyn-born Jew, was fusing those and other influences into a career as a major figure in salsa, as a pianist, bandleader, songwriter and producer.In the 1960s and ’70s, onstage and in the production studios of Fania Records, a label often described as the Motown of Latin music, he would help define salsa and spread it throughout the United States and around the world. He was affectionately known in the Latin music world as “El Judío Maravilloso” — the marvelous Jew.Mr. Harlow, who lived in Manhattan, died on Aug. 20 at a care center in the Bronx. He was 82. His son, Myles Harlow Kahn, said the cause was heart failure related to kidney disease.As a bandleader Mr. Harlow was most identified with salsa dura, or hard salsa — brass-heavy, bebop-influenced and danceable. He performed in small clubs and on big stages, including for an audience estimated variously at 30,000 to 50,000 at Yankee Stadium in 1973 as a member of the seminal group the Fania All-Stars, a show that proved to any doubters that there was a vast audience for Latin music.He was just as influential behind the scenes at Fania, the Latin label formed in 1964 in New York by Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci. Mr. Harlow was one of the first artists the label signed — his first Fania album, “Heavy Smoking,” came out soon after — but he also became part of the Fania brain trust, helping to sign numerous up-and-coming artists and producing some 250 records.Aurora Flores, a music journalist and composer who was working with him on his memoir, said Mr. Harlow had displayed an acerbic wit, an acid tongue and a willingness to defy conventions.Mr. Harlow was one of the first artists signed to Fania Records, often described as the Motown of Latin music. His first Fania album came out soon after.FaniaMr. Harlow was not just a Fania artist; he was also part of the Fania brain trust, helping to sign numerous up-and-coming artists and producing some 250 records.Fania“He’d always side with the underdog,” she said by email. “His first recording, ‘Heavy Smoking,’ featured his girlfriend Vicky singing lead and playing congas, unheard-of in the Cuban patriarchy, where women were not allowed to touch the drums. He produced the all-female orchestra Latin Fever and later, when other bandleaders refused to accept Rubén Blades into the scene because he was too white and middle class, it was Harlow who took him under his wing, letting him front his big band.”She added simply, “Larry Harlow broke the mold.”Lawrence Ira Kahn was born on March 20, 1939, in Brooklyn. His mother, Rose Sherman Kahn, was an opera singer, and his father, Nathan, was a bass player and bandleader who used the stage name Buddy Harlowe, from which Larry later derived his own stage name, dropping the E.He began studying piano when he was about 5, and he also absorbed musical influences by lingering backstage at the Manhattan nightclub the Latin Quarter, where his father led the house band. The club was owned by Lou Walters, whose daughter would also sometimes hang out there — Barbara Walters, the future television journalist.“When I was a kid, 10 or 11 years old, Barbara and I used to sit in the booth next to the spotlight,” Mr. Harlow told The New York Times in 2010, “and we saw every show that came in there, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Joe E. Brown, Sophie Tucker.”His first interest wasn’t Latin music. It was jazz. But, he said, he wasn’t welcomed in jazz circles. “So I went into the next closest thing,” he told The South Florida Sun-Sentinel in 2009, “where I could still improvise and stretch — Latin music — and I got really good at it.”But that took some time. Mr. Harlow had been introduced to Latin music as a boy, when his father would play the Catskills, where the Jewish vacationers loved to dance the cha-cha and mambo. But by the time he was walking to high school, the music he was hearing coming from those bodegas was growing more complex. While he was still a teenager, a bandleader named Hugo Dickens invited him to play piano in his Latin band, but the first time Mr. Harlow took a solo, Mr. Dickens gave him a blunt review: He was terrible.So Mr. Harlow committed to getting better, buying up records and studying what the musicians on them were doing. While in high school he traveled to Cuba on Christmas break, and after graduating he returned there to immerse himself in Afro-Cuban music and culture, in the process expanding the Nuyorican Spanish he had picked up on the streets of New York.Mr. Harlow at the piano in an undated photo. He was introduced to Latin music as a boy when his bandleader father played the Catskills, and he became immersed in it as a teenager during a trip to Cuba.Fania Records“He was there with his reel-to-reel tape recorder taking it all in when the bombs started falling,” his son said in a phone interview — the bombs of the Cuban revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power at the beginning of 1959. That drove Mr. Harlow back to New York, but the music stayed with him.“There was no turning back,” he told The Miami New Times in 2000. “I was salsafied.”But the style that would become known as salsa was still evolving at that point. The music represented a mix of Afro-Cuban, Spanish and other influences, tempered with American jazz and refined by Cuban, Puerto Rican and other musicians living in New York. Mr. Harlow was an influential part of that swirl, first as a sideman in other people’s orchestras and then as the leader of his own groups.“Nobody was using a trumpet-and-trombone sound,” he told Latin Beat magazine in 2006, describing what he brought to the salsa mix. “It was my dream to use these instruments because then you could have a piano bass line, and then have the horns play counterpoints. So we had three to four layers of different things going on at the same time.”In addition to the many records he made and produced at Fania, Mr. Harlow was instrumental in pushing Mr. Masucci, who died in 1997, and Mr. Pacheco, who died in February, to back a documentary directed by Leon Gast called “Our Latin Thing” (1971), which chronicled a performance by the Fania All-Stars at the Midtown Manhattan nightclub Cheetah. (Mr. Gast died in March.)The film became a word-of-mouth hit among fans of Latin music and boosted the profiles of everyone involved.“We used to sell 25,000 copies of an album, and suddenly we’re now selling 100,000 copies individually, as bandleaders, and a million or more as the All-Stars,” Mr. Harlow told The New York Times in 2011, when a 40th-anniversary DVD of the film was released. “We were just playing around the ghetto, and all of a sudden we’re playing in soccer stadiums all over the world.”Mr. Harlow conducting a rehearsal of his suite “La Raza Latina” in 2010 for a Lincoln Center performance that included the singer Rubén Blades.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesOther career highlights included “Hommy: A Latin Opera,” which Mr. Harlow, inspired by the Who’s “Tommy,” created and presented in a concert version at Carnegie Hall in 1973. In 1977 he branched out from the snappy dance numbers he was known for to record “La Raza Latina,” an ambitious suite.He later led an all-star group he called the Latin Legends.Mr. Harlow earned a bachelor’s degree in music at Brooklyn College in 1964 and later received a master’s degree in music from the New School. His marriages to Andrea Gindlin, Rita Uslan, Agnes Bou and Wendy Caplin ended in divorce. In addition to his son, from his first marriage, he is survived by his wife, Maria del Carmen; a daughter, Haiby Rengifo; a brother, Andy Harlow Kahn; and three grandchildren.Late in his career Mr. Harlow would sometimes turn up on the records or in the shows of younger musicians and bands, including the alternative rock act Mars Volta. He found such homages gratifying.“When someone comes up to me and says, ‘Thanks for the music, thanks for the memories,’” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1999, when the Latin Legends played that city, “that’s worth a million bucks to me.” More

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      Michael Morgan, Adventurous Oakland Maestro, Dies at 63

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      As music director of the Oakland Symphony, he sought diversity in his audiences as well as in his programming.Michael Morgan, the music director of the Oakland Symphony, who in his 30 years in that post sought to bring orchestral music to a broader audience, particularly young people and people of color, died on Aug. 20 in Oakland, Calif. He was 63.The cause was complications of an infection, the orchestra said. Mr. Morgan had received a kidney transplant in May and had just resumed conducting last month.As one of the few Black maestros leading a substantial professional orchestra, Mr. Morgan was eager to diversify the symphony’s programming and its audience.“My main goal,” he told the weekly newspaper The California Voice in 1991 as he was beginning his Oakland tenure, “is to show the rest of the field of orchestra music that you can make an orchestra relevant and of interest to the community, especially to Black youngsters who some may think are not interested in anything.”He made countless visits to schools in the area. He brought in an eclectic list of guest artists to the Paramount Theater, the orchestra’s home base, including Isaac Hayes in 2001 and Carlos Santana in 2010. He initiated a program called “Playlist” in which guests including the comedian W. Kamau Bell and the labor activist Dolores Huerta selected and introduced pieces to be performed.Colleagues said Mr. Morgan was interested in more than simply putting on an entertaining program.“Michael wasn’t afraid to address social issues head-on, and we (the Oakland Symphony) were the tools he used to bridge the gap between races and different political beliefs,” Dawn Harms, co-concertmaster of the symphony, said by email. “There was nothing like an Oakland Symphony concert with Michael at the helm. The audience was so incredibly diverse, joined together under one roof, rocking the Paramount Theater with such a joyful, enthusiastic noise.”A feature article about Mr. Morgan in The San Jose Mercury News in 2013 bore a telling headline: “Nobody Falls Asleep When Michael Morgan’s Conducting.”Mr. Morgan in an undated photo. “When I began my career, I was not involved in the idea of being a role model or increasing minority numbers in the field,” he once said. “I came to realize, however, that someone has to take responsibility.”Oakland SymphonyMichael DeVard Morgan was born on Sept. 17, 1957, in Washington. His mother, Mabel (Dickens) Morgan, was a health researcher, and his father, Willie, was a biologist.He grew up in the city, where he started taking piano lessons when he was 8. By 12 he was conducing his junior high school orchestra.Mr. Morgan studied composition at Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. At 22 he entered the international Hans Swarowsky conducting competition in Vienna — just for the experience, he said later — and ended up winning. That earned him a chance to conduct Mozart’s “The Abduction From the Seraglio” at the Vienna State Opera in 1982.Georg Solti made him assistant conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1986. In his seven years there he also regularly directed the Civic Orchestra of Chicago and the Chicago Youth Symphony. And he began to develop a sense of mission.“When I began my career, I was not involved in the idea of being a role model or increasing minority numbers in the field,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 1993. “I came to realize, however, that someone has to take responsibility.”Mr. Morgan was a guest conductor with numerous major American orchestras, as well as with New York City Opera, Opera Theater of St. Louis and the Washington National Opera. When he conducted the New York Philharmonic in 1992, news accounts said he was only the fifth Black conductor to do so.At the time, he told The New York Times that he felt his race was both a help and a hindrance.“I have a very nice little career now,” he said, “but I also know that sometimes that’s because it has been to the advantage of an organization to have me, an African-American, around. I see what others my age do, and that there are more star-studded careers that I have no doubt I would have if I were not Black.”Lack of diversity has long characterized the classical music world. A 2014 study found that only 1.8 percent of the players in top ensembles were Black and just 2.5 percent were Latino.Mr. Morgan’s last two years in Chicago overlapped with his tenure in Oakland. By then he was fully committed to getting more young people, especially young Black people, interested in orchestra music.“It could add one more piece to the puzzle of their lives,” he told The California Voice in 1991.A high point of any Oakland season was Mr. Morgan’s annual “Let Us Break Bread Together” concert, held late in the year and featuring a musical cornucopia that might include gospel singers, choruses of various kinds, a klezmer band and high school students. Each year had a theme, and the range was wide — Pete Seeger music in 2014; Frank Sinatra the next year; music related to the Black Panthers the next.“In Oakland, we’re very conscious of social justice issues,” Mr. Morgan told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2016. “Oakland has always been about, and continues to be about, social change.”James Hasler, president of the symphony’s board, said that outlook defined Mr. Morgan.“His vision of orchestras as service organizations was a beacon locally and nationally,” he said in a statement. “This vision is his legacy.”Mieko Hatano, the Oakland Symphony’s executive director, promised to continue Mr. Morgan’s vision.“Michael challenged us to speak directly to our community,” Dr. Hatano said by email. “‘It’s not what we talk about,’ he would say. ‘It’s who is in the room when we’re taking about it.’ He wasn’t a conductor who also had a social conscience. To Michael, it was one and the same. And this is how the Oakland Symphony will carry on.”Mr. Morgan, who lived in Oakland, is survived by his mother and a sister, Jacquelyn Morgan.In late July Mr. Morgan made a guest-conducting appearance with the San Francisco Symphony, delivering a striking program that included an overlooked female composer, Louise Farrenc, and a dash of 1920s jazz.“For San Francisco audiences,” Joshua Kosman wrote in a review in The Chronicle, “the whole evening felt like a little burst of vitality from across the bay.” More

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      in Music

      Inge Ginsberg, Holocaust Survivor With a Heavy Metal Coda, Dies at 99

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      Her rich life, spanning three continents and 11 decades, entailed wartime espionage, volumes of poetry, songwriting and a late-career turn as a rock band’s frontwoman.Inge Ginsberg, who fled the Holocaust, helped American spies in Switzerland during World War II, wrote songs in Hollywood and, in a final assertion of her presence on earth, made a foray into heavy metal music as a nonagenarian, died on July 20 in a care home in Zurich. She was 99.The cause was heart failure, said Pedro da Silva, a friend and bandmate.In a picaresque life, Ms. Ginsberg lived in New York City, Switzerland, Israel and Ecuador. She wrote songs and poetry, worked as a journalist and refused to fade into the background as she aged, launching herself, improbably, into her heavy metal career.She was the frontwoman for the band Inge and the Tritone Kings, which competed on television in “Switzerland’s Got Talent,” entered the Eurovision Song Contest and made music videos. Whatever the venue, Ms. Ginsberg would typically appear in long gowns and pearls and flash the two-fingered hand signal for “rock on” as she sang about the Holocaust, climate change, mental health and other issues.In the 2017 music video for the band’s song “I’m Still Here,” Ms. Ginsberg stands in front of a screen showing filmed images of refugees. She sings — in a manner reminiscent of spoken-word poetry — about her grandmother and four young cousins, all of whom were killed in German camps. At the end, she slices the screen and walks through it, singing as she joins the other band members amid a roar of electric guitars, drums and a pounded piano.“All my life, I fought for freedom and peace,” she sings. In the last chorus, Ms. Ginsberg, who was in her 90s at the time, screams, “I’m still here!”The band grew out of a friendship between Ms. Ginsberg and Lucia Caruso; they had met in the audience of a concert in 2003 at the Manhattan School of Music. Ms. Caruso, a student there, was watching the performance of a doctoral composition by her boyfriend, Mr. da Silva. The couple married, went on to performing and teaching careers in classical music and stayed close to Ms. Ginsberg.One day in 2014, Ms. Ginsberg read out loud to Mr. da Silva the words of a children’s song she was writing. “She wrote these lyrics about worms eating your flesh after you die,” Mr. da Silva said. That had the ring of heavy metal to him, and he suggested building a band around her.The band began rehearsing and filming music videos later that year, the productions paid for by Ms. Ginsberg. She wrote the lyrics to their songs and performed them, with Mr. da Silva and Ms. Caruso and others accompanying her on various instruments, including the guitar, piano, drums, organ and oud.A short documentary video in 2018 for The New York Times Opinion section by the filmmaker Leah Galant recounted Ms. Ginsberg’s story. It shows scenes of her performing on “Switzerland’s Got Talent” and auditioning to appear on the NBC show “America’s Got Talent.” Speaking on camera, she said she wanted to prove through her performing that elderly people could still contribute to society.“In American and even European culture, the old people are excluded from life,” Ms. Ginsberg said in the Op-Doc. “You have to have the chance to be heard.”A 96-year-old who fled the Holocaust finds a new way to be heard.Leah GalantMs. Galant said in an interview, “We felt energized by her as much she felt energized by us.”Ingeborg Neufeld was born in Vienna on Jan. 27, 1922, to Fritz and Hildegard (Zwicker) Neufeld. Her father ran a freight company, and her mother was a homemaker.Ms. Ginsberg described herself as a “Jewish princess” in her youth; she and her brother, Hans, had been afforded every luxury. But that changed with the rise of the Nazi Party.Ms. Ginsberg would tell Ms. Caruso and Mr. da Silva stories of the persecution of Jews in pre-World War II Vienna. In one instance, she said, she hid all night behind a grandfather clock in a building in town to evade Nazi paramilitary forces targeting Jews. Her mother assumed the worst, but Inge returned the next morning to a tearful reunion.After the war had begun her father was arrested and sent to the Dachau concentration camp but was freed, Ms. Ginsberg said, after he bribed Nazi officials. Her mother, meanwhile, using money from the sale of her jewelry, fled to Switzerland in 1942 with Inge, Hans and Inge’s boyfriend, Otto Kollman, who would become Inge’s husband.The family lived in refugee camps in Switzerland, and Ms. Ginsberg managed a villa in Lugano, which was used as a safe house for Italian resistance members; there, she said, she and Mr. Kollman would pass messages from the resistance to the American O.S.S., the precursor of the C.I.A.After the war, she and Mr. Kollman made their way to Hollywood, where they worked as a songwriting duo. The couple divorced in 1956.Ms. Ginsberg in an undated photo. “In American and even European culture, the old people are excluded from life,” she said. “You have to have the chance to be heard.”Inge GinsbergMs. Ginsberg said in the Times documentary that she eventually found Hollywood “all fake” and returned to Europe the year of her divorce. She worked as a journalist in Zurich, wrote a German-language memoir of her time at the villa and published several books of poetry. She had invested successfully in the stock market, which kept her wealthy throughout her life and allowed her to pursue writing.In 1960, she married Hans Kruger, who ran a luxury hotel in Tel Aviv, where the couple lived. They divorced in 1972. That same year, she married Kurt Ginsberg, and they mainly lived in Quito, Ecuador.Ms. Ginsberg is survived by her daughter with Mr. Kollman, Marion Niemi, and a granddaughter.After Mr. Ginsberg’s death, Ms. Ginsberg split her time among homes in New York, Tel Aviv and Zurich. By the spring of 2020, she was living in the Zurich care facility when she contracted the coronavirus. Pandemic restrictions often kept residents from seeing one another or from entertaining visitors, and the isolation took its toll.“We have no doubt whatsoever that she died because of boredom, loneliness and depression,” Mr. da Silva said.He and Ms. Caruso kept in touch with her over the phone, and the three began writing another song for the band called “Never Again,” also drawing on Ms. Ginsberg’s experience during the Holocaust.“Each one of my songs has a message,” Ms. Ginsberg said in the documentary. “Don’t destroy what you can’t replace.” She added a second message: “You can’t avoid death, so laugh about it.” More

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      in Theater

      At Two Summer Festivals, Offerings That Are Gloomy and Grim

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      The Salzburg Festival and the Ruhrtriennale host a series of theatrical pieces, both old and new, that seem to reflect our troubled time.ESSEN, Germany — In the constellation of Europe’s performing arts festivals, few make a more contrasting pair than the Salzburg Festival and the Ruhrtriennale.The differences begin with the events’ settings. Salzburg, Mozart’s picturesque hometown, nestled in the Alps, lies at the geographical center of Europe. The Ruhr region, Germany’s rust belt, is comparatively isolated. Salzburg boasts stunning mountain vistas, an old town and a fairy-tale castle. The Ruhr region is a linked network of drab postindustrial cities.The Salzburg Festival usually plays host to well-heeled visitors from over 80 countries, while the Ruhrtriennale caters heavily to locals with subsidized tickets.Yet for all their differences, the two festivals share some DNA.When the Flemish impresario Gerard Mortier founded the Ruhrtriennale in 2002, he was coming off a decade of shaking things up as the Salzburg Festival’s artistic director. Although his time there is now seen as a golden age, Mortier’s attempts to nudge the festival in a more artistically daring direction proved wildly contentious at the time. When Mortier arrived in the Ruhr region, his new festival gave him the opportunity to realize large-format experiments that he could never pull off at Salzburg.Two decades later, the Salzburg Festival’s roster of operas and concerts has recaptured something of the boundary-pushing and avant-garde flair of the “Mortier era.” The festival’s dramatic program, however, has struggled to keep up.A silent chorus of nude male performers in Friedrich Schiller’s “Maria Stuart” in Salzburg.Matthias Horn/Salzburg FestivalSalzburg’s outdoor production of “Jedermann,” a morality play written by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, one of the festival’s founders, is the event’s oldest tradition. In recent years, little of the Austrian poet and dramatist’s other work has been staged there. This summer, however, as part of the festival’s ongoing centenary festivities, Hofmannsthal’s “The Falun Mine” has taken center stage.Written in 1899, though never performed during its author’s lifetime, “The Falun Mine” is a ghost story composed in the pungently lyrical language of Hofmannsthal’s best early work. It tells the story of a miner beset by strange apparitions and swallowed up by a mountain on his wedding day, and is choked with symbolism, much of which remained inscrutable in the dreary production by the Swiss director Jossi Wieler.The actors declaimed their lines in a highly mannered tone from a rotating stage littered with cinder blocks. It often seemed that the play itself was buried alive under the rubble.A theatrical death knell also sounded for Salzburg’s new production of Friedrich Schiller’s “Maria Stuart.” Despite some powerful images, thanks to a silent chorus of 30 nude male performers, or a single swinging light bulb, Martin Kusej’s stripped-down staging, a coproduction with Vienna’s Burgtheater (where Kusej is the artistic director) fell flat, sabotaged by hammy overacting from nearly every member of the cast.The atmosphere of gloom and doom seemed to spread like a fog from Salzburg to the Ruhr, where a number of the region’s “cathedrals of industry” — the disused factories that have been repurposed as theaters — had a haunted quality at the start of the Ruhrtriennale.From left, Annamária Láng, Katharina Lorenz, Deborah Korley, Michael Maertens, Jan Bülow and Markus Scheumann in Barbara Frey’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” part of the Ruhr Triennale.Matthias Horn/Ruhrtriennale This summer’s program is the first of three to be overseen by Barbara Frey, a Swiss director and the second consecutive woman to run the festival after Stefanie Carp, whose troubled tenure was cut short by the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on Frey’s work so far, she seems set on restoring the Ruhrtriennale to the provocative and artistically unpredictable spirit of its founder.In her own production of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the edifice in question was the Maschinenhalle Zweckel, the electrical center of a former coal mine in the city of Gladbeck. In this sinister show, another coproduction with the Burgtheater, a close-knit group of eight performers narrated five of Poe’s spine-tingling tales in German, English and Hungarian. With ritualistic precision, they luxuriated in the American writer’s melancholy prose.This atmosphere of suffocating sadness turned gleefully macabre with “The Feast of the Lambs,” a musical theater work written by the Nobel Prize-winning author Elfriede Jelinek and the composer Olga Neuwirth. Based on a play by the British writer Leonora Carrington, it is, like “Usher,” a tale of madness and familial decay.Elfriede Jelinek’s “The Feast of the Lambs.”Volker Beushausen/Ruhrtriennale The directors Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, of the Dublin-based theater company Dead Center, filled the cavernous Jahrhunderthalle, a former gas power plant in the city of Bochum, with an eye-popping production, complete with trippy video projections, falling snow and a blood-red lake, effectively blurring the boundaries between domestic and outdoor horrors, as well as between human and animal savagery. (You can watch a streamed performance on the festival website).As in “Usher,” the oddball spirit of “Lambs” was tethered to artistic seriousness and skill. Things looked very different for “A Divine Comedy” by Florentina Holzinger. This young Viennese choreographer has gained fame for extreme performances that deconstruct dance history and sexualized representations of the female body.Florentina Holzinger’s “A Divine Comedy” in the city of Duisburg.Katja Illner/RuhrtriennaleHer latest, Dante-inspired outing combines onstage hypnosis, athletic performances, slapstick routines, action painting and pornographic situations to no apparent end. Using the Kraftzentrale, an enormous former power plant in the city of Duisburg, Holzinger and a score of naked female performers ran riot for the better part of two hours, often to seat-rumbling music.Holzinger is part of the incoming artistic team at the Berlin Volksbühne, where “A Divine Comedy” will transfer in late September. It’s a full-on three-ring circus of horrors that was mostly just tedious. I didn’t buy Holzinger’s willfully transgressive spectacle, but apparently I was in the minority: The only thing that truly shocked me about “A Divine Comedy” was how much the audience loved it.I felt there was one artistic work at the Ruhrtriennale that connected to humanity — and it wasn’t in a theater.An installation view of Mats Staub’s “21 — Memories of Growing Up” in a turbine hall in Bochum.Sabrina Less/RuhrtriennaleOver the past decade, the Swiss artist Mats Staub has conducted hundreds of interviews with individuals of various ages and backgrounds for “21 — Memories of Growing Up,” which has been installed in a turbine hall in Bochum. Spread over 50 different stations, the video interviews provide varied reflections on maturity, independence and happiness. The project feels like an archive of human strivings and the possibility for rebirth.Renewal was the watchword at the founding of both the Salzburg Festival and the Ruhrtriennale. In 1920, that meant reclaiming and safeguarding European culture after the Great War and the loss of the Habsburg Empire; at the turn of the millennium, it meant rejuvenating a depressed, postindustrial corner of Germany.If the onstage offerings at both events this year have seemed unrelentingly grim, they have at least reflected the struggles of our time. Yet, as we cautiously adjust to living with a pandemic for the foreseeable future, we could desperately use some renewal, too.The Salzburg Festival continues through Aug. 31.The Ruhrtriennale continues through Sept. 25. More

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      in Television

      Micki Grant, Groundbreaking Broadway Composer, Dies at 92

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      With “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope,” she became the first woman to write the book, music and lyrics of a Broadway musical.Micki Grant, who in the early 1970s became the first woman to write the book, music and lyrics of a Broadway musical, “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope,” a soulful, spirited exploration of Black life, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 92.Her death, at Mount Sinai Morningside hospital, was announced by Joan Allen, a family spokeswoman.Ms. Grant, an actress, composer, playwright and musician, had developed “Don’t Bother Me” for two years with the director Vinnette Carroll, taking it to small theaters in New York, Philadelphia and Washington before opening on Broadway in April 1972.She would also be known for her work on another Broadway musical, “Your Arms Too Short to Box With God,” and for her seven years on the NBC soap opera “Another World.”Set in New York City, “Don’t Bother Me” explored topics like ghetto life, Black power, feminism and student protests with an all-Black cast performing songs — all by Ms. Grant — that drew from rock, jazz, funk, blues calypso and other musical genres.Ms. Grant recalled in 2018 that she and Ms. Carroll had wanted audiences of the musical to recognize the similarities among races, not the differences.“And I think that’s expressed when you find out in the end that the audience is willing to reach out and take someone’s hand,” she said in an interview with The New York Amsterdam News. “Some people in the audience never held the hand of a person of a different race before, and all of the sudden, they’re holding another person’s hand.”The musical got rave reviews, including one from Clive Barnes of The New York Times, who wrote: “It is the unexpected that is the most delightful. Last night at the Playhouse Theater a new musical came clapping, stomping and stamping in. It is fresh, fun and Black.”The show received Tony nominations for best musical, best original score, best book (also by Ms. Grant) and best direction. It won a Grammy for best musical theater album, making Ms. Grant the first female composer to win in that category.“Don’t Bother Me” was revived in 2016 as a concert performance by the York Theater Company in Manhattan and two years later by the Encores! Off-Center series at New York City Center, directed by Savion Glover.Amber Barbee Pickens, foreground, in the Encores! production of “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope” at New York City Center in 2018. One critic said of the original Broadway production: “A new musical came clapping, stomping and stamping in. It is fresh, fun and Black.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJames Morgan, York’s producing artistic director, said in a phone interview that Ms. Grant had “wanted a say in everything and would say, ‘No, that’s not how that goes.’ I’d tell her, ‘We want this to be your version of the show.’”He had been hoping to stage a full Off Broadway production of “Don’t Worry,” he said, but couldn’t raise the money. “I so wanted it for her, because there’s still a big audience for it,” he said.Ms. Grant was born Minnie Louise Perkins on June 30, 1929, in Chicago to Oscar and Gussie (Cobbins) Perkins. Her father was a barber and a self-taught pianist, her mother, a saleswoman for Stanley Home Products.Minnie was smitten by theater and music at a young age. At 8 she played the Spirit of Spring, touching flowers to bring them to life, in a community center production. She began taking piano and double-bass lessons at about the same age.And, she recalled in an interview with The Times in 1972: “I was busy writing poetry and walking around the house reciting it. My family always listened and said what nice poetry it was.”Ms. Grant began writing music at 14 or 15 and acting in community theater at 18. She studied at the Chicago School of Music and later attended the University of Illinois, Chicago.But one semester shy of graduating, she left to perform in Los Angeles, where, in 1961, she appeared in a musical revue, “Fly Blackbird,” a social satire about the evils of segregation. She moved with the show to its Off Broadway production in 1962.By then, she had changed her name to Micki.Ms. Grant made her Broadway debut a year later in a supporting role in “Tambourines to Glory,” a short-lived “gospel singing play” — written by the poet Langston Hughes with music by Jobe Huntley — about two female street preachers in Harlem. It also starred Robert Guillaume and Louis Gossett Jr. A year later she appeared in a revival of Marc Blitzstein’s musical play “The Cradle Will Rock,” set in 1937 during the Great Depression.She turned to television in 1965, beginning a seven-year run on “Another World” playing a secretary-turned-lawyer, Peggy Nolan. She is believed to have been the first Black contract player in soaps. She later had roles in the soap operas “Guiding Light,” “Edge of Night” and “All My Children.”Ms. Grant in the NBC soap opera “Another World” in 1968. She had a seven-year run on the show playing a secretary-turned-lawyer.Fred Hermansky/NBCCasey Childs, the founder of the Primary Stages Company in New York, recalled directing her in one soap opera episode. “She was an absolutely lovely actress, who understood the need on a soap to move quickly and make fast choices,” he said in an interview.During her long run on “Another World,” Ms. Grant was building a theatrical legacy with Ms. Carroll, who in 1967 founded the Urban Arts Corps to provide a showcase for Black and Puerto Rican performers.They put together the first production of “Don’t Bother Me” in 1970 at the company’s theater on West 20th Street in Manhattan. Ms. Grant also wrote the music and lyrics for a song and dance version of the Irwin Shaw novel “Bury the Dead” and for a children’s show called “Croesus and the Witch.”Working with Ms. Carroll, she said, was a “magical” experience.“It all came together so perfectly,” Ms. Grant told American Theater magazine in an interview this year. “It was a fortunate meeting between us: I needed somewhere to present my work, and she needed the new work to present because of who she was — having original works brought out her creativity, rather than trying to repeat something that was already done.”The two women also collaborated on “Your Arms Too Short to Box With God,” an acclaimed gospel-infused musical that opened on Broadway in 1976 and ran for 429 performances. Ms. Carroll wrote the book, and music and lyrics were by Alex Bradford, with additional songs by Ms. Grant.Two years later, Ms. Grant was one of the five songwriters behind the musical “Working,” which was based on the writer Studs Terkel’s book of interviews with everyday people about their jobs. The group was nominated for a Tony for best original score.In one of Ms. Grant’s songs in “Working,” a woman laments: “If I could’ve done what I could’ve done/I could’ve done big things./With some luck to do what I wanted to do/I would’ve done big things./Swam a few rivers/Climbed a few hills/Paid all my bills.”She returned to Broadway one last time, with a musical, “It’s So Nice to Be Civilized” (1980), which closed after eight performances.Her other credits include the English-language lyrics to songs in “Jacques Brel Blues,” which debuted in East Hampton, N.Y., in 1988, and “Don’t Underestimate a Nut,” a musical based on the life of George Washington Carver, the agricultural scientist who promoted the cultivation of peanuts. It was commissioned by a children’s theater in Omaha, Neb., in 1994.In the late 1990s, Ms. Grant spent two years with Lizan Mitchell on a tour of the United States and South Africa as they played the centenarian Delany sisters in “Having Our Say,” Emily Mann’s Tony Award-winning play.Ms. Grant had no immediate survivors. Her marriages to Milton Grant and Ray McCutcheon ended in divorce.When Encores! revived “Don’t Bother Me,” Ms. Grant, reflecting on its creation, said that her and Ms. Carroll’s goal had not been to produce an incendiary musical about the difficulties faced by Black people in America.“There was a lot of angry theater out there at the time, especially in the Black community — Bullins, Jones,” she said, referring to the playwrights Ed Bullins and LeRoi Jones, who became known as Amiri Baraka. “I wanted to come at it with a soft fist. I wanted to open eyes but not turn eyes away.” More

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      Aretha Franklin and the Futility of Trying to Portray Her Onscreen

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      The new film “Respect” is one of three recent attempts to understand the artist. Only the one that focuses solely on her music comes close.Early on in “Respect,” the latest onscreen retelling of Aretha Franklin’s story, the aging jazz and R&B star Dinah Washington asks her protégée, “Child, are you ever going to tell us who the daddy is?”Otherwise timid or thankful, Franklin (Jennifer Hudson) responds to Washington’s probing about the paternity of her sons, the first born when she was only 12, with a mix of incredulity and imposing silence. Suddenly what starts off as one of the film’s main mysteries and perhaps Franklin’s biggest childhood trauma ends up as a throwaway line, never to be revisited again.Instead, “Respect,” the debut film by the renowned theater director Liesl Tommy, ends up heeding the advice Washington gives Franklin about her music: “Honey, find the songs that move you.” The biopic is less a movie about Franklin’s interior life or the origins of what her character insists are the “demons” that haunt her, and more about how she as a prodigious vocalist and brilliant pianist and songwriter channeled her pain into songs that moved not just her, but the entire world. In the end, those gaps in the plot are distracting and keep Franklin at arm’s length, rendering her as elusive on the screen as she was in public in real life.A musical moment from “Respect,” with, from left, Henry Riggs, Jennifer Hudson, Hailey Kilgore, Saycon Sengbloh, Alec Barnes, John Giorgio, Marc Maron and Joe Knezevich.Quantrell D. Colbert/MGM“Respect” is part of a larger trend of films and TV series — including the National Geographic mini-series “Genius: Aretha,” starring Cynthia Erivo, and the Sydney Pollack documentary “Amazing Grace” (filmed in 1972 but released in 2018) — that all try to capture Franklin’s virtuosity. In their own way and to varying degrees of success, each struggles with how best to showcase her as a singular artist while expanding our understanding of a woman so intent on privacy.The upside of “Respect” is that it truly focuses on the intricacies of her music-making. The most riveting scenes are when we see her really play: in a recording studio turned jam session with the all-white Muscle Shoals band in Alabama, turning a sleepy “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” into a sultry, soulful confession. Or when she wakes up her sisters, Erma (Saycon Sengbloh) and Carolyn (Hailey Kilgore) in the middle of the night to rearrange the Otis Redding classic “Respect,” with her siblings adding the famous “Re-re-re” riff and forever transforming the song into a Black woman’s anthem.Given how electrifying those moments were, I found myself wanting more and more music, a feat achieved by Hudson’s own riveting take on Franklin’s classics as well as my memory of hearing Franklin’s powerhouse voice for the first time. In this sense, “Respect” gives us the biopic I always thought I was looking for — a portrait of a Black woman whose musical genius remains front and center without being sidelined or overshadowed by her personal struggle with trauma. Though the movie does show Aretha battling depression or her husband, Ted White, such agony never overtakes the story or our sense of her musicality the way it does in other biopics about iconic Black women performers, like Billie Holiday or Tina Turner. Instead, “Respect” treats trauma as a string of unresolved secrets, the source of which neither the film nor Franklin herself ever felt compelled to share with her audience.Hudson with Forest Whitaker as Franklin’s father in “Respect.”Quantrell D. Colbert/MGMThe result is a movie that skews too closely to Franklin’s own self-image, a narrative that she tightly controlled during her lifetime as a matter of privacy and as a way to assert her own power in an industry, and country, dominated by sexist and racist stereotypes about Black women’s sexuality and intelligence.The biographer David Ritz wrote of this distance in “Respect,” his second book on Franklin, saying, “In spite of my determination to be a compassionate listener, someone whose gentle persistence would allow her to reveal all her sacred secrets, my technique ultimately did not work. In the end, I didn’t make a dent in her armor.”Further reflecting on his first biography, “Aretha: From These Roots,” which he wrote based on interviews with Franklin, and which thus had her blessing, he said, “She got the book she wanted. To this day, Aretha considers her book an accurate portrait.”Franklin’s imprint is all over the film “Respect” as well. She handpicked Hudson, a move that set music as the center of the movie but risked the appearance that Hudson’s depiction might be too dependent on Franklin’s own self-image. In other words, as good as the music sounds (and it sounds soooooo very, very good), the plot holes about her past, which seemed to inform much of her character’s decision-making, kept nagging at me as I watched.Why did her mother, Barbara (Audra McDonald), leave her children behind with her domineering husband, the Rev. C.L. Franklin (Forest Whitaker), only to show up, after her death, as an angelic force in Aretha’s life?Why doesn’t Aretha remember having to rush to the roof and sing loudly with her sisters as children in order to drown out her parents fighting?And what is the shame the film keeps hinting at, but, like Aretha, never wants to confront?What does she need music to save her from?In one notable scene in “Respect,” her friend the Rev. James Cleveland says to Aretha, “There are no demons. Just the pain you’ve been running from your whole life.” Reassuring her more, Cleveland notes, “He knows it wasn’t your fault.”Cynthia Erivo as the singer in “Genius: Aretha.”Richard Ducree/National GeographicAnd because we aren’t quite sure if he is referring to her pregnancy, her mother’s departure or something else, we applaud Aretha’s catharsis while wondering about the cause.The mini-series “Genius: Aretha,” written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, however, is more forthcoming. By showing a young Aretha as the victim of sexual assault and attributing her parents’ breakup to her father’s own impregnating of a 12-year-old girl in his congregation, potential explanations of her childhood trauma are revealed but do not dominate its depiction.But even in this version, Aretha is a somewhat muted presence, and Erivo (a powerhouse vocalist herself) sometimes seems constrained by the need to toggle back and forth between Franklin’s introverted nature at home and her iconic status onstage.A scene from the documentary “Amazing Grace,” which the singer didn’t want released.Amazing Grace Film, LLCMaybe this is why I still find myself obsessed with the one movie that she never wanted to be seen onscreen: the documentary “Amazing Grace.” Filmed ​​by Pollack over two nights in a Los Angeles Baptist church in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Watts, “Amazing Grace” is all gospel, a cinematic capturing of spiritual ecstasy and religious exaltation, and a Franklin who surrenders her voice to God, and is at her most sublime.Dismissing the documentary in 1999 in her memoir, she told Ritz, “When I saw what had been done in one section of the film, I was appalled.” She went on, referring to the gospel singer Clara Ward, “One of the cameramen kept shooting straight up underneath Clara’s dress. She was in the front row. Talk about bad taste!” (Franklin would later say her aversion to its release had nothing to do with its content, which she claimed to have “loved.”) Her disdain for the project led her to sue repeatedly to block its release, though it finally found its way to theaters a few months after her death in 2018.This is perhaps why both “Respect” and “Genius: Aretha” felt compelled to include Pollack’s shoot in their narratives. For “Amazing Grace” had the privilege of giving us Franklin on her own musical terms without having to contend with the singer’s self-portrait. And in that freedom, it was able to share itself as one of Franklin’s best kept secrets. More

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      Larry Harlow, a Salsa Revolutionary

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      The musician, who died on Friday, was a true originator of the genre. An outsider, he lived a Latin music life by immersing himself in Afro-Caribbean culture.In many ways, Larry Harlow — one of the central figures of salsa and its defining label, Fania Records — was a master at mixing the diverse musical connections between New York and the Caribbean. In a career that spanned six decades, he stitched together overlapping genres like rock, jazz and R&B and various Cuban genres like rumba, son and guaracha through intimate, soulful knowledge of both musical traditions.Harlow grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and studied classical piano. His father, Buddy Kahn, was a Jewish mambo musician who led the house band at New York’s Latin Quarter club. The musician and scholar Benjamin Lapidus writes in his new book that Jews were sponsoring Latin dances with live bands as early as the 1930s in New York City. Harlow came out of a tradition of mamboniks, Jews who danced mambo at spaces like Midtown’s Palladium, various spots in Brooklyn and the Catskills hotel circuit. Jewish musicians like Marty Sheller often wrote arrangements, and radio D.J.s like “Symphony” Sid Torin and Dick “Ricardo” Sugar promoted the music. Immortal Latin band leaders like Tito Puente regularly played the Catskills, a space where young musicians like Alfredo “Chocolate” Armenteros, who became a Harlow collaborator, cut their teeth.Yet Harlow, who died on Friday at 82, wanted to go beyond the Europeanized mambo performance styles heard in the Catskills and be true to the music’s African roots. He traveled to pre-Castro Cuba in the 1950s and returned determined to combine what he learned with what was happening in New York, creating a modern synthesis of the traditional and the avant-garde. Seeking acceptance among core post-mambo musicians, he even went so far as to become initiated to the Afro-Caribbean religion of Santería to stake his claim to authenticity and earn respect from the music community.“Here was a Jewish guy hanging out with all these Cubans and Afro-Caribbeans,” he told me in a 2004 interview. “I figured when in Rome, do like the Romans do.”Harlow never tried to pretend he was not who he was. Even after achieving insider status in the Santería community, he was often photographed wearing a Star of David around his neck. He was affectionately known by Spanish-speaking audiences as El Judío Maravilloso (the Marvelous Jew), a sobriquet given to him because of his devotion to the music of the blind Afro-Cuban bandleader and mambo progenitor Arsenio Rodríguez, known as El Ciego Maravilloso (the Marvelous Blind Man). When he chose, in the early 1980s, to release an album called “Yo Soy Latino” (“I Am Latino”), the lead vocalist who delivered the lyrics was the much-loved Puerto Rican singer Tito Allen.Beyond immersing himself in Afro-Carribean spirituality, Harlow was directly involved in the evolution of salsa music, collaborating with Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci, the founders of Fania. According to Alex Masucci, Jerry’s surviving brother, Harlow was the first artist contracted to record for Fania. His first few albums, “Bajándote: Gettin’ Off,” “El Exigente” and “Me and My Monkey,” which includes a version of the Beatles song “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” traded on the bilingual, R&B-influenced bugalú sound, which united Black and Latino listeners.Harlow’s move away from búgalu to a jazz-influenced update on Rodríguez’s more Africanized conjunto sound — which added more trumpets and percussion like conga and cowbell — was crucial for salsa’s gestation. His blend of jazz, mambo and conjunto would become one of the primary influences on the emerging idea of salsa. While Eddie Palmieri and Willie Colón’s innovative use of trombone gave the horn sections a more aggressive, urban sound, Harlow and Pacheco’s influence was also decisive. Harlow’s early ’70s releases, “A Tribute to Arsenio Rodríguez,” “Abran Paso” and “Salsa,” crystallized his new aesthetic. He pioneered recording with both trumpets and trombone. He gave the Cuban charanga sound, which featured flutes and violins, new life. And he incorporated the batá drum, used in religious ceremonies, into his decidedly secular project.Harlow exulted in the spirit of the late 1960s — Rubén Blades told me he was the “Frank Zappa of salsa” — and was a voracious collaborator. His bilingual Beatles cover and the album artwork for “Electric Harlow” flaunted psychedelic style. He played piano for Steven Stills and Janis Ian, and had a rock-jazz project with the Blood, Sweat & Tears keyboardist Jerry Weiss. In 1972, after Miranda left his band temporarily, he painstakingly adapted the Who’s “Tommy” as the salsa opera “Hommy,” transferring the original British characters to New York’s Latino barrios.Although salsa’s burst in popularity during the mid- to late 1970s was organic, feeding off the hip young Latino audiences from the Bronx and Uptown, Harlow helped it blow up by taking a major producing role in Leon Gast’s vérité concert film “Our Latin Thing.” The film was a breakout party for the Fania All-Stars, a supergroup featuring Ray Barretto, Colón, Cheo Feliciano, Pacheco and many others, with Harlow on piano. Last week Masucci told me that Harlow was the connection to both Gast’s involvement and the appearance of authentic Santería devotees that appear late in the film. In 1976, he recorded a celebratory musical history, “La Raza Latina Suite,” with Blades singing in English.Though Harlow wasn’t born into the traditions that birthed salsa, throughout his career he was widely accepted as a pillar of the music. He was one in a long line of Jewish musicians who have played a key role in Afro-Caribbean music, going all the way back to Augusto Coén, a Jewish Afro-Puerto Rican who led a Latin big band in 1934 that was a predecessor to the mambo kings Puente, Machito and Tito Rodríguez. (The exchange went both ways: Even the Queen of Salsa, Celia Cruz, recorded the Jewish folk song “Hava Nagila” with her band La Sonora Matancera.)For Harlow, blending cultures and genres was simply second nature. In 2005, he contributed a wide-open keyboard solo to “L’Via L’Viaquez,” on the Texas psychedelic punk band the Mars Volta’s album “Frances the Mute” — a choice that shouldn’t be considered out of the ordinary. Several musicologists and writers have recognized the influence of Cuban bass patterns, called tumbaos, as well as cha cha cha patterns, on early rock hits like “Twist and Shout,” and “Louie Louie.” To Harlow, the connection between rock and Latin, funk and salsa was natural, a product of the era when he came of age.“It was revolution time,” he once told me. “People were writing songs about protest, and me and Eddie and Barretto were changing the harmonic concept of Latin music. I was the one who psychedelicized them a little bit.” More

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      R. Murray Schafer, Composer Who Heard Nature’s Music, Dies at 88

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      He delved into the relationship between sound and the environment. Many of his compositions incorporated the music of the natural world.R. Murray Schafer, a Canadian composer and writer who brought the concept of the “soundscape” to widespread recognition and pioneered the field of acoustic ecology — the relationship between sound, people and the environment — died on Aug. 14 at his home near Peterborough, Ontario. He was 88. The cause was dementia, his wife and collaborator, the mezzo-soprano Eleanor James, said.Mr. Schafer was already an inventive avant-garde composer when he began researching the relationship between sound and the environment in the late 1960s. He had joined a noise abatement society but disagreed with its treatment of noise as a negative phenomenon.“The sounds of the environment were changing rapidly, and it seemed that no one was documenting the changes,” he recalled in his 2012 memoir, “My Life on Earth and Elsewhere.” “Where were the museums for disappearing sounds? What was the effect of new sounds on human behavior and health?”With funding from UNESCO and the Donner Canadian Foundation, Mr. Schafer formed the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. His team of researchers compiled information about noise bylaws, conducted interviews about sounds of the past and tallied car horns honking at street intersections around the world.“It’s quite the task for people to understand that listening can be a very active and inspiring activity,” the composer Hildegard Westerkamp, who was a researcher for the project, said in an interview. “A socially conscious ear, and a culturally conscious ear, and a politically conscious ear — that’s all the legacy that he has given to us.”In 1977, Mr. Schafer published “The Tuning of the World,” a treatise on acoustic ecology, which has influenced generations of scholars and musicians. Drawing on poetry, biology and myth, the book provides a history of the world through its soundscapes while offering instructions in “ear cleaning” and sound walks to reconnect readers with their sonic environments.His immersion in environmental listening changed his compositional interests. In 1979, he composed “Music for Wilderness Lake,” in which 12 trombonists played around the shore of a small lake at dusk and dawn; floating on a raft, Mr. Schafer conducted them with colored flags.Such experiments formed the basis for “Patria,” a cycle of 12 theatrical works composed over 40 years that mingles world mythologies. In one installment, audience “initiates” chant in ancient Egyptian as part of an overnight performance; another of the works unfolds as a carnival.For the cycle’s epilogue, a “co-opera,” several dozen participants have for more than 30 years made a weeklong pilgrimage each August to Ontario’s Haliburton Forest and divided into clans to create collaborative theatrical rituals.Mr. Schafer at the Haliburton Wilderness Reserve in Canada, the site of a performance in 2005. “The world is a huge musical composition that’s going on all the time,” he said, “without a beginning and presumably without an ending.” Steve Payne for The New York TimesRaymond Murray Schafer was born July 18, 1933, in the Lake Huron city of Sarnia, Ontario, to Harold Schafer, an accountant for an oil company, and Belle Anderson Rose. He was born blind in one eye and, following a pair of operations at age 8, was given a glass eye, for which he was bullied in school in Toronto. He took piano lessons starting at 6 but was intent on being a painter.Discouraged by others from pursuing a career in art because of his eye condition and failing out of high school, Mr. Schafer ended up at the University of Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music, where he studied with the composer John Weinzweig and attended classes taught by the media theorist Marshall McLuhan.Already a keen intellectual, he preferred reading Rousseau to practicing piano; he angered one choir director by perusing art books during rehearsal. After several such incidents, he was thrown out of the school (though it later awarded him an honorary doctorate).Intent on studying composition in Vienna, Mr. Schafer worked as a deckhand on an oil tanker to raise travel funds. He roamed Europe — interviewing British composers for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, learning medieval German, attending a folk music conference in Romania — without a clear plan for his musical future.In Italy, Mr. Schafer convinced Ezra Pound to allow him to revive the poet’s little-known opera, “Le Testament de Villon,” which became a major BBC broadcast in 1962. (Pound gave him an envelope containing his final series of “Cantos” and asked him to deliver it to T.S. Eliot in London.)On his return to Toronto, Mr. Schafer in 1962 co-founded the innovative concert series Ten Centuries, which presented new and rarely heard music.As his career picked up, he answered requests for new works with irreverence, composing “Son of Heldenleben,” a parodic riff on the tone poem by Richard Strauss, and “No Longer Than Ten (10) Minutes,” in which an orchestra tunes up, a conductor walks on and offstage, and the players crescendo each time the audience tries to applaud. His 1966 “Requiems for the Party-Girl,” written for the mezzo-soprano Phyllis Mailing, is a darkly virtuosic monodrama in which a woman sings of her impending suicide.Mr. Schafer married Ms. Mailing in 1960, and they divorced in 1971. His second marriage, to Jean Reed, from 1975 to about 1999, also ended in divorce. He married Ms. James in 2011 after a long partnership. Along with her, he is survived by his brother, Paul.Mr. Schafer began his research on soundscapes after joining the faculty at Simon Fraser University in 1965. He also invented a radical approach to teaching, calling it “creative music education.” In a series of influential booklets, he provided exercises to encourage children’s creativity, asking them to “bring an interesting sound to school” or hum along with a tune that they had heard on a street corner.Alongside the mythic theater of “Patria,” Mr. Schafer composed more conventional scores, among them 13 string quartets and “Letters from Mignon,” a neo-Romantic song setting of love letters written to him by Ms. James. His genre-spanning oratorio “Apocalypsis” was first performed with a cast of more than 500 in 1980; it received a triumphant, career-capping revival at the Luminato Festival in Toronto in 2015.In a 2009 short film directed by David New, Mr. Schafer offers philosophical musings on listening amid the snowy soundscape outside his home, a remote farmhouse in the Indian River area in southern Ontario.“The world is a huge musical composition that’s going on all the time, without a beginning and presumably without an ending,” he said.“We are the composers of this huge, miraculous composition that’s going on around us. We can improve it, or we can destroy it. We can add more noises, or we can add more beautiful sounds. It’s all up to us.” More