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      Listening to Music Is Better When It’s a Conversation Among Friends

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      At group listening sessions, everybody gets a turn to speak by choosing a song.If you are the type of person who bides your time waiting for any conversation to pivot to music, who scrabbles through the dollar-record bins of junk shops or mudlarks around the streaming playlists of your favorite musicians hunting for rarities, you might be a Golden Ear. You almost certainly love music, but odds are, you are listening to it alone. The Golden Ears are devoted to listening to music together.Most weeks we gather in Tivoli, our little hamlet on the Hudson, to share songs. It began about 15 years ago, after a few music-minded friends moved up from the city. We schlepped book bags of precious vinyl and congregated around our hi-fi stereos. There would be casual chitchat, but once the needle descended, we would listen, quietly, to the end of each person’s carefully chosen song. This shared attentiveness — being social without talking, an intimate act usually reserved for married couples and Zen monks — felt precious. A surprising focus replaced the pressure to make conversation, like a shooting star silencing a cookout. At one of our first sessions, someone laid down a 45-r.p.m. record of Doris Troy’s “What’cha Gonna Do About It?”: one minute and 52 seconds of the purest, pulsing promise of American music, a jaunty, saucy, sashaying tiptoe of soul, almost impossible to not do the monkey to. When it ended, cheers erupted. By now we’re used to listening to music for one another, in a way that privileges adventure over taste.Certain norms have materialized. There is no set time limit between songs, and who gets to play what next is an open question (unless a member we call the Proctor is present, when a consistent order must be followed). Tracks are generally short, five minutes or less. No genre is verboten. Themes (“Songs About Songwriting,” “Beatles Adjacency,” “Songs You Want Played at Your Funeral”) emerge or don’t. Bold provocations and special prompts have led to an evolving nomenclature. For example, “the Sanborn” is the spinning of a song by an artist no one has heard of, while everyone pens a one-line review. There is plenty to exhort, and lots of talk between songs. For Golden Ears, talking about music is a sacred chance to kibitz over what we’ve stumbled upon in obtuse liner notes or an out-of-print autobiography. The pandemic was very hard on us. Of all the alonenesses the pandemic spawned, no longer listening with my friends was among the hardest. Once Dr. Fauci said we could, we went outside with Bluetooth speakers. Not wanting to bother anyone, we set up a fire pit deep in the woods and strung up lights. The first song we played there was Count Basie’s “Li’l Darlin’,” a tune so confident and leisurely that it felt as if Basie himself were leaning down from the bandstand, telling us in that dark moment that everything would be all right. We named the clearing after the song, and the music we play there trends toward emotional and contemplative uplift. Sitting by the fire after one of these gorgeous plays, someone will often break the silence with a sly, “Sorry, Officer!” — imagining a state trooper showing up to find a ring of middle-aged adults in Adirondack chairs listening to Jimmy Giuffre. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kali Malone Studied Farming. Fate Brought Her to Avant-Garde Music.

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      The 29-year-old musician grew up in Colorado and ended up in Sweden, where she fell in love with the organ. Her latest album, “All Life Long,” is out now.At the close of an organ concert in early February, Kali Malone, performing at Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, did something unusual: She turned off the instrument’s motor while she and Stephen O’Malley of the doom-metal group Sunn 0))) held down the keys. For nearly three minutes, as the air drained from the organ’s 5,000-odd pipes, the pair’s rich chords turned spectral as they faded to silence, wheezing and wavering, like a chorus of sleepy ghosts.The finale was a striking example of the way that Malone, 29, is rethinking the pipe organ for a contemporary context. Born in Colorado but based for more than a decade in Stockholm and Paris, she has emerged as an unusually versatile star of the avant-garde.In a video interview last month, Malone reflected on the path that led to her new album, “All Life Long,” a contemplative 78-minute suite for organ, brass quintet and chamber choir. She thinks of her early work — microtonal software creations that could run for hours — “as my cave man music,” she said. “It’s still exactly what I’m doing now, just my tools have become more sophisticated.”Malone’s fondness for drones hardly makes her a one-note composer. Before her 2019 breakout album, “The Sacrificial Code” — nearly two hours of minimalist, minutely textured organ studies — she was part of a shoegaze trio, conducted an ensemble playing the work of the “deep listening” pioneer Pauline Oliveros, and recorded strings and gongs in a decommissioned nuclear reactor. She flexed her compositional muscles on “Living Torch,” an electroacoustic work created for the Acousmonium, a multichannel setup developed in the 1970s at Groupe de Recherche Musicales, or GRM, in Paris.“There is something both spiritual and almost tactile in the way that she creates music,” François J. Bonnet, director of GRM, said in an email. “She charts her own personal and inspired path — a path influenced by almost nothing, and not the product of cultural trends or zeitgeist.”Malone began blazing her own trail early. Her parents split when she was a child; her father lived in the High Rockies, while Malone moved with her mother to Denver, where she was shuttled to and from choir practice by her grandparents. “I became a teenager when I was 10,” she said. “I grew up so fast, and didn’t have a lot of supervision.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Two Pianists Make a Life Out of an Intimate Art Form

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      Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy, partners onstage and off, began to play as a duo in school. Now, they are dedicating their careers to it.It looked like some kind of grand music exam. The pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy sat down at their instruments onstage at Wigmore Hall and began to play for an audience of two.The rest of their listeners were online. It was June 2020, and Kolesnikov and Tsoy were, like virtually every other musician at that time, playing a livestreamed concert. Despite the hall’s chilly emptiness, there was something heartening: Here were two musical and romantic partners sharing a bit of their domestic lives as they worked through a messy pile of sheet music spread out on a single Steinway piano.Now, things are more or less back to normal. When they sat for an interview at their elegant northwest London home recently, Kolesnikov had just returned from Copenhagen as a replacement soloist in Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto, and was about to jump in — in Copenhagen again — to play Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. (He could be heard frantically recapping the piece as he walked down the street. “It’s not something you can just pull out of your pocket,” he said.)The pandemic forced Kolesnikov, 34, and Tsoy, 35, to recalibrate. After so much time spent at home together, returning meaningfully to the genre of four-hands music — through which they had met — they emerged with a desire to dedicate themselves to playing as a duo. They signed to new management as both solo artists and partners last October, and will make their duo debut at Carnegie Hall on Feb. 13, with their first album together to follow this summer.“I consider this possibly the hardest form of chamber music,” Kolesnikov said of the piano duet. “This genre is a very interesting merge of something that is extremely homely, extremely intimate and private. Then one thinks, how do you take that onstage?”A Domestic Art FormThe piano duet has always been closely tethered to the home. Grove Music describes it as a “modest, essentially domestic branch of music,” more frequently associated with a student’s early experiences than with the public-facing openness of a concert hall.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Welcome to Japan, Taylor Swift Fans. Please Remain Seated as You Cheer.

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      Some Japanese spectators are grumbling that foreign concertgoers visiting Tokyo don’t share their rather restrained local approach to taking in a show.Taylor mania has landed in Tokyo. But the enthusiasm of some of the Swifties arriving with her has clashed with local sensibilities.Thousands of visitors from across Asia and beyond have flooded into Japan’s capital as Taylor Swift performs at the Tokyo Dome for four nights this week. The problem, as some domestic concertgoers see it, is that these foreign fans don’t share the rather restrained Japanese approach to taking in a show.In a post on the platform X, a Japanese holder of a V.I.P. ticket wrote that even paying 130,000 yen — about $870 — and being seated in the third row didn’t guarantee a clear view, given that so many foreign fans had stood up.“It’s too sad,” the post said. “It’s crazy that, if you follow the rules, you won’t be able to watch it.”While Japanese are praised abroad for their pristine behavior at soccer matches and other sporting events, their exacting standards at home can make them hostile to visitors. Another post on X, accompanied by a short video of audience members hoisting up their cellphones to capture the scene onstage, complained that “there were many foreigners who couldn’t respect manners.”The grumbling is in some ways a microcosm of Japan’s mixed reception to the international tourists who have helped restore the country’s economy, the world’s third largest, after the pandemic. More than 25 million people visited Japan last year, according to the Japan National Tourism Organization, nearly 80 percent of the number who visited in 2019.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Paul McCartney Talks About His Beatles Photos Coming to the Brooklyn Museum

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      Sixty years after the Beatles appeared live on “Ed Sullivan,” McCartney reflects on his photos capturing those halcyon days. The Brooklyn Museum will exhibit them, and some will be for sale later.They are now a collector’s trove — Paul McCartney’s own photos, shot 60 years ago, when the Beatles took Europe and America by storm: images of screaming fans (one carrying a live monkey); a girl in a yellow bikini; airport workers playing air guitar, and unguarded moments grabbed from trains, planes and automobiles.McCartney, now 81, doesn’t like to sit still and reminisce about the past, so he chatted while driving home from his recording studio in Sussex, England. ‘‘My American friends call these small, one-way lanes ‘gun barrels,’ ’’ he said, warning his interviewer that at any moment the signal might die (it did). In the end, it took two days to complete a coherent conversation about the breakthrough period when the Beatles went viral, captured in the traveling exhibition ‘‘Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-1964: Eyes of the Storm,’’ which features 250 of his shots. Currently it’s at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., and comes to the Brooklyn Museum May 3-August 18. (Don’t be surprised if the artist shows up for the opening.)It was McCartney’s archivist, Sarah Brown, who found 1,000 photographs the musician had taken over 12 weeks — from Dec. 7, 1963, to Feb. 21, 1964, — in the artist’s library.“I thought the photos were lost,’’ he said. ‘‘In the ’60s it was pretty easy. Often doors were left open. We’d invite fans in.” Even the recording studio wasn’t a safe space. “I was taking my daughter Mary to the British Library to show her where to research for her exams, and in one display case I saw the lyric sheet for ‘Yesterday,’” he said. A sticky fingered biographer had swiped the original from their studio.Rosie Broadley, a senior curator at the National Portrait Gallery in London, where the show was inaugurated, said, “His photographs show us what it was like to look through his eyes while the Beatles conquered the world.’’McCartney won an art prize at school and practiced photography with his brother, Mike (who later became a professional photographer). He graduated to a 35 mm SLR Pentax camera when the Beatles hit it big.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mojo Nixon, Who Mixed Roots and Punk Rock, Dies at 66

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      A self-styled voice of “the doomed, the damned, the weird,” he was known for satirical songs including “Elvis Is Everywhere” and “Destroy All Lawyers.”Mojo Nixon, the psychobilly musician and radio host who gained cult status for his rabble rousing and celebrity spoofs like the 1987 hit “Elvis Is Everywhere”, died on Wednesday aboard a country music cruise that he was co-hosting. He was 66.His death was confirmed by Matt Eskey, the director of a 2020 documentary film about Mr. Nixon. He said that Mr. Nixon had a “cardiac event” while he was asleep as the Outlaw Country Cruise was docked in San Juan, Puerto Rico.A statement posted by the film’s official Facebook page said that Mr. Nixon had died “after a blazing show, a raging night, closing the bar, taking no prisoners.”Mr. Nixon was best known for his celebrity spoofs, like “Don Henley Must Die” and “Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child,” and for satirical tirades like “I Hate Banks” and “Destroy All Lawyers.”“All of it was performed in maximum overdrive on a bed of rockabilly, blues, and R&B, which earned Nixon some friends in the roots rock community but had enough punk attitude — in its own bizarre way — to make him a college radio staple during his heyday,” the All Music Guide wrote.“I’m a rabble-rouser who does humorous social commentary within a rock-and-roll setting,” he told The New York Times in 1990. In another interview with the paper, he described himself as a voice of “the doomed, the damned, the weird.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      The Vocal Coach Who Keeps Broadway (and Patti LuPone) in Tune

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      “She saved my career,” Patti LuPone said of this indispensable vocal therapist and coach whose clients include Madonna and Billy Porter.For 41 years, Joan Lader has rented a slender studio apartment just west of Union Square in Manhattan. Through its door, a narrow entryway leads to a doll-size bathroom and an efficiency kitchen. In the main space, where a visitor might expect to find a bed, Lader has arranged the instruments of her trade — a piano, a keyboard, balance balls, straws, a box of tissues, a skeleton in a jaunty hat.Lader has never advertised, never solicited clients. But for two generations of Broadway stars, as well as dozens of opera singers and pop and rock luminaries, she remains an indispensable vocal therapist and vocal coach. She even received a Tony Award in 2016 for excellence in theater.And while proper breathing is fundamental to her practice, she has scarcely paused for breath since that award. She continues to work seven hours each day, seven days a week. (“I wish she would take a break,” Patti LuPone, a longtime student, told me.) For Lader, 77, the work is her calling, a synthesis of artistry, science and according to her clients and fans, something akin to magic.“I’ve called her a witch in front of people, many times,” the music director Rob Fisher said. “I’ve never seen anybody else do the hocus-pocus that she sometimes does.”The composer Tom Kitt can nearly always tell when a singer has been working with Lader. “They have opened up in the beautiful way,” he said. “They are empowered, and they feel confident.”I met Lader on a wintry afternoon last month. She had struggled to find time to see me, but a cancellation had opened a narrow window in her schedule. She showed me into her space, noting the eight-inch soundproofing along the wall that borders the apartment next door. “Cats” paid for that, she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love John Coltrane

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      Coltrane changed the game in American music a few times over. Here’s a guided tour to his career, courtesy of 15 musicians, scholars, poets, writers and other experts.Yes, it’s time for this series to focus on John Coltrane — perhaps the most sanctified musician in the whole Black American tradition, who other artists sometimes refer to simply as “St. John.”Born in Hamlet, N.C., and raised in High Point, Coltrane arrived on the New York scene in the 1950s, by way of Philadelphia and the Miles Davis Quintet. In the short years between that arrival and his death, in 1967, the world around Coltrane would change dramatically. He reached the peak of his creative forces as a saxophonist just as American society was bursting apart in the 1960s, and as freedom movements drummed colonialism out of the African continent. Though introspective and soft-spoken, singularly allergic to grandstanding, Coltrane felt powerfully concerned with the fate of the world, and he was sure that music had a role to play in turning the tides.He closely studied spiritual and musical systems from Africa and India, sensing that ancient, non-Western traditions might light the path toward a new creative approach. For many of his contemporaries, Trane’s saxophone became synonymous with a liberated mind and body. And, however ineffable, it carried a message. As A.B. Spellman wrote in a poem after the saxophonist’s death, “trane’s horn had words in it.”Coltrane changed the game in American music a few times over: first, with a style that felt like such a force of nature, one critic labeled it “sheets of sound,” as if he were commanding monsoon rains. Then, in 1960, the flipbook-fast harmonies of “Giant Steps” upped the expectations for jazz improvisers by a big margin. Swinging in the other direction, Trane brought his whirling-dervish attack to a more stationary style of music: raga-like, harmonically planted “modal” tunes such as “Impressions,” “Africa” and “India.”In the mid-60s, compelled by his own spirituality, by the outward-bound “free jazz” being made by artists like Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy, and by the music he’d been playing at home with his second wife, the pianist and composer Alice (McLeod) Coltrane, the saxophonist wrote and recorded his masterpiece, “A Love Supreme.” A paean to God, it also sounds like an attempt to unleash purifying flames on a world gone wrong. And from there, he went even further; his last two years saw Coltrane pushing rhythm and tone beyond their breaking points.Below you’ll find a guided tour of Coltrane’s career, courtesy of 15 musicians, scholars, poets, writers and other experts whose lives have been cleansed, and made brighter, by the sheets of sound.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More