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      Hipgnosis Made Mega Deals for Song Catalogs. Its Future Is Unclear.

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      The company’s shareholders on Thursday rejected a $440 million divestment plan and voted against maintaining its current structure.The future of Hipgnosis Songs Fund, the British company that helped kick off the music industry’s trend of top-dollar deals for artists’ song catalogs, is in question after its shareholders on Thursday rejected a $440 million divestment plan and voted against maintaining the company’s current structure.Hipgnosis, founded by Merck Mercuriadis, a former manager of stars like Beyoncé and Elton John, was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2018 and pitched investors on music rights as a special kind of financial asset that is “more valuable than gold or oil.” Since then Hipgnosis, along with a sister fund backed by the private equity giant Blackstone, have spent more than $2 billion to acquire music catalogs from Neil Young, Shakira, Justin Bieber, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blondie and other artists and songwriters.But in recent months Hipgnosis has come under increasing pressure from dissatisfied investors who have seen the company’s share price drop in comparison to its so-called net asset value, an estimate of its catalogs’ worth prepared by an independent firm. Its share price closed at 74.20 pounds on Thursday, down about 43 percent from a high of 129.20 in November 2021. Its market capitalization is about $1.2 billion.The company also shocked investors last week by suspending its quarterly dividend, after saying that Citrin Cooperman, the independent firm that values its assets, had reduced the amount the company was expected to receive as a result of an industrywide royalty rate adjustment in the United States. Citrin Cooperman, the company said, had calculated that Hipgnosis would receive $21.7 million in retroactive payments, but recently reduced that to $9.9 million, and Hipgnosis said it had suspended the dividend payment — which had been announced at 1.3125 pence, or about 1.6 cents, per ordinary share — to remain compliant with its debt covenants.The global rise in interest rates has altered the calculus of many top-dollar catalog deals, but the investors in Hipgnosis have also grown concerned about the company’s management.“No investor ever knew that the fund was being managed so close to the edge that they were very close to tripping the debt covenant,” Sachin Saggar, a research analyst at Stifel, said in an interview.Hipgnosis recently proposed selling 29 catalogs for $440 million to the Blackstone-backed fund, which is managed by a company led by Mercuriadis. The proceeds were to help pay off Hipgnosis’ debt and buy back shares. But many investors balked, calling the price too low.At the company’s general meeting on Thursday, shareholders rejected the catalog sale and voted against maintaining the company’s structure as an investment trust, a decision that must be renewed every five years. According to an announcement by Hipgnosis, the company’s board now has six months to introduce proposals for future plans, which “may or may not involve winding-up the company or liquidating all or part of the company’s existing portfolio of investments.”The chairman, Andrew Sutch, and two other directors will leave the board.One possibility is that the assets could be sold to Hipgnosis Song Management, the advisory firm led by Mercuriadis, who has that right through an agreement known as a call option.In a statement on Thursday, Mercuriadis said: “Our conversations with shareholders have revealed a consensus that they are enthusiastic about the quality of the company’s iconic portfolio of songs, however it is also clear that they are asking for change and we respect that feedback.” More

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      ‘Make Noise Enough’: Excavating Shakespeare’s Songs

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      In Shakespeare, music is an integral part of the action. But the First Folio, which turns 400 this year, failed to transmit how it should sound.Musicians from the early-music ensemble Collectio Musicorum were practicing a 17th-century round on a recent afternoon in Manhattan. The tune was jaunty, full of the cantering rhythms and mimetic horn calls that fit a song about hunting. But sung in canon, some of the notes bumped roughly against one another in daring dissonance. The singers broke off, looking at their conductor for guidance.Jeff Dailey, the group’s director, glanced up encouragingly from his music stand. The dissonances they were hearing were not a mistake, he said, then added: “If you want to make it any more chromatic, like you’ve just killed a deer, you could do even more shouting than singing. Remember, you’re drunk at this point.”The performers were preparing a program of songs, ballads and rounds from Shakespeare plays that brings to life the tunes scholars think might have been part of the earliest productions. Some of the numbers that will be featured in a concert on Friday at the Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church on the Upper West Side are exquisite settings for voice and lute by composers like Robert Johnson and Thomas Morley.But there are also humble songs laced with innuendo, the kind that would have appealed to the groundlings in the cheap section of the Globe Theater, like the one Dailey and his singers were rehearsing, “What shall he have that kill’d the deer?” from “As You Like It.” A nobleman commands a forester to “Sing it: ’tis no matter how it be in tune, so it make noise enough.”This year is the 400th anniversary of the publication of what is known as the First Folio, which comprises 36 Shakespeare plays, half of which had never been published previously. Put out by members of his company only a few years after his death in 1616, in the weighty format normally reserved for important religious works or histories, the First Folio determined how Shakespeare’s writings would be transmitted.Dailey leads singers in a rehearsal. From left, Christopher Preston Thompson, Chad Kranak and Alex Longnecker.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesBut the folio failed to transmit one vital part of Shakespeare’s vision: the music. His plays are punctuated by drum rolls, fanfares and dances, indicated in stage directions. And they are teeming with verses meant to be sung. In the First Folio these verses are clearly marked as “song” in the stage instructions and set apart typographically with italics. Singing is essential for rendering Ophelia’s madness, Ariel’s magic and the inebriated antics ratcheting up the comic confusion in “Twelfth Night.”In much of Shakespeare, Dailey said in an interview, “music is an integral part of the action.” But figuring out what it sounded like is another matter.Music printing was a specialized craft, and it would have been too expensive for even a luxury edition like the First Folio to include notated music. And though settings of Shakespeare lyrics appear in many 17th-century English song collections and lute books, these often date to later decades, making it difficult to determine their origin. A few popular songs can be traced back to Shakespeare’s time, but even then, Dailey said, “it’s a chicken and egg question: Did Shakespeare include them because they were famous, or did they become famous because they had been in his plays?”Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesMaansi Srivastava/The New York TimesIn 2004, the musicologist Ross W. Duffin published “Shakespeare’s Songbook,” which sets hundreds of lyrics to tunes he identified as likely matches. Among them is the hunting round “What shall we have” that was first published, with textual variants, in a collection from 1652. In a manuscript in the Folger Library, Duffin found a version appearing to date back as far as 1625, with a text that more closely aligns with the First Folio. That’s nearly contemporaneous with the play’s publication, but it’s still a quarter century off from 1599, when scholars think Shakespeare first wrote “As You Like It.” In the play, moreover, a single forester is bidden to sing it, whereas this is a round for four voices. Which characters would have joined in onstage?Another song from the play, “It was a Lover and his Lass,” survives in a setting by Morley printed in 1600, which some see as evidence that it was the original song, perhaps even commissioned by Shakespeare. Yet even such a seemingly clear attribution raises questions in performance. Morley’s setting is for a solo voice, whereas in the play it is sung by two pages.“How do you then perform it?” Dailey asked. “Do you have two singers sing it in unison? Do you have two actors alternate verses? Or do you compose an additional part for the second singer?”In concert, Dailey will have his performers take turns with the verses and then sing the refrain in unison. But Duffin, in a recent article, makes a case for reconstructing the song as a duet. He argues that the lute accompaniment in Morley’s printed version is so unusually awkward that it was probably adapted from a previous version for two voices.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesMaansi Srivastava/The New York TimesRecords show that Shakespeare and Morley were neighbors, leading some to conjecture that they were friends and collaborators. But Duffin sees no reason to believe that Shakespeare ever commissioned specific music. The clues linking him to Johnson, a master lutenist and the author of artful settings in the plays, are also inconclusive. “The evidence that he was the composer of the King’s Men is so circular,” Duffin said in an interview, referring to Shakespeare’s company of actors. “Everybody wants him to be. The songs are beautiful, but were they the original songs? Probably not.”Much of Duffin’s research has focused on the humble tunes that were the currency of popular culture in Shakespeare’s time. He said ballads in particular were so ubiquitous that an actor presented with a particular meter and rhyme schema would have known which tune to supply. Looking into the names of actors listed in the First Folio, he said he found evidence that many were “tumblers, jugglers and song-and-dance men,” adding that they would have brought their musical skills into the theater.A few popular songs can be traced back to Shakespeare’s time. But, Dailey said, “did Shakespeare include them because they were famous, or did they become famous because they had been in his plays?”Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesDuffin believes that there is even more music in Shakespeare’s works than is evident from the italicized lines in the First Folio. He has identified dozens of what he calls “snatches” of songs embedded in dialogue that turn out to be the opening lines or key phrases of popular songs. These would have sparked a shower of associations in contemporary audiences.In “Winter’s Tale,” a brief allusion to a ballad about a murderously jealous husband would have raised the stakes for an audience following the play about a jealous king. In “Twelfth Night,” an otherwise out-of-context reference to “The 12th Day of December” would have been recognized as the title of a famous ballad about a battle, evoking the noise of war in a scene of domestic mayhem.“Everybody would have known these ballads from down the pub,” Duffin said, “so when he quotes a line everybody would have made the connection.”Part inside jokes, part cryptic crossword clues, these brief references would have made performances interactive experiences for contemporary audiences. In 1623, the readers of First Folio would have still been able to listen between the lines, as it were. But over time, the brilliance of Shakespeare’s imagination would come to be defined by what the First Folio was able to capture: the language, divorced from the real and imagined music of the plays. More

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      Five Places to Visit in Dakar, Senegal, With Singer Baaba Maal

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      Had everything gone to plan, the singer-songwriter Baaba Maal’s move to Senegal’s capital from the northern hinterlands would have ended up differently — specifically, with a law degree. “When I first came to Dakar, I was supposed to study at the university because that was the wish of my parents,” he said, while a pair of sculptures, as if on cue, eyed him sternly.I met Mr. Maal — the “voice of Wakanda” to fans who know him from the soundtracks of “Black Panther” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” — at Dakar’s Museum of Black Civilizations. As we roamed the galleries, he explained that he loved this place for its efforts to repatriate plundered African treasures and its power “to make the young ones interested in arts.” Now 70, he recalled being an artsy young one himself. “What was really, deeply strong inside me — which is to be a singer, to be a performer — came out when I got to Dakar,” he said. “If I wanted to be an artist, I said, ‘This is where I’m going to start a career.’”Baaba Maal, 70, released “Being,” his 14th studio album, this year.Matthew DonaldsonSo there went his parents’ plan, but his own has worked out nicely. This year alone, he released his 14th studio album, “Being,” to critical acclaim, became a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification — a continuation of the work of his nonprofit Nann-K — and began preparations for his arts and culture Blues du Fleuve festival in early December. While he still travels often, he said, “I’ve always wanted Dakar to be where I start my work, get ready for my tours — and come back.”The appeal was clear. Since he’d moved to Dakar, the city had instituted renowned biennales and fashion weeks. And just the small stretch of the thoroughfare where we stood featured not only the museum, but also the Grand Théâtre National and the restored Art Nouveau commuter rail station. “This is a new dynamic,” he said, pointing out a spot where hip-hop artists now draw thousands of young people to open-air performances. Reveling in the energy, he added, “I often pass by here, open the car window, look at the people coming out of the train and say to myself, ‘Yes, this is the kind of Senegal I want to see.’”Here are five of his favorite places in and around Dakar.1. Daniel Sorano National TheaterMusicians practicing during a ballet rehearsal at the Daniel Sorano National Theater.Carmen Abd Ali for The New York Times“I love to see tradition alive,” said Mr. Maal of the theater, inaugurated in 1965 by Senegal’s first president, the poet-philosopher Léopold Sédar Senghor. “And the tradition is still there — the national ballet, the lyrical ensemble, a lot of traditional African music.” He also loves the theater’s soul: “You can see the portraits of all the artists who passed away a long time ago, and who represent a lot to Senegalese people.”Pictures of artists who have performed at the Daniel Sorano National Theater, which was inaugurated by Léopold Sédar Senghor, a poet as well as Senegal’s first president, in 1965.Carmen Abd Ali for The New York Times2. Amadou Barry StadiumWatching a soccer team train at Amadou Barry Stadium in the suburbs of Dakar, where singing and drumming often accompany games and wrestling matches.Carmen Abd Ali for The New York TimesSports fan or not, any music lover will enjoy a match at this soccer and wrestling stadium, where singing and drumming accompany the action. Mr. Maal has a particular fondness for wrestling, the national sport. “It’s not just the sport itself; it’s the dramas, the singers, the costumes — all the culture around the wrestling,” he said. Amadou Barry is also a music venue, where Mr. Maal is a beloved veteran performer. To visit this suburban stadium, you may want a guide.3. Hotel Sobo BadeThe Hotel Sobo Bade near Dakar features thatched domes, mosaic archways and lush vegetation.Carmen Abd Ali for The New York TimesThe tranquil view of the ocean from the Hotel Sobo Bade, about an hour southeast of Dakar.Carmen Abd Ali for The New York Times“When friends come, it’s their favorite place to stay,” said Mr. Maal of this dreamy hotel — all thatched domes, mosaic archways and bougainvillea blossoms — in the suburb of Toubab Dialaw, about an hour outside Dakar, where the tranquillity-inducing views of the ocean and city lights inspired his iconic song “Dakar Moon.” He also recommends the nearby African dance institute École des Sables, where anyone can attend the performances at the end of each multiweek session.A room at the Sobo Bade. “When friends come, it’s their favorite place to stay,” Mr. Maal said of the hotel.Carmen Abd Ali for The New York Times4. Soumbedioune Fishing Beach and MarketFishermen at Soumbedioune Beach, a traditional fishing area in Dakar.Carmen Abd Ali for The New York TimesAs much as Mr. Maal is an artist, by birthright, he said, “I’m a fisherman.” And his favorite local connection to those roots is Soumbedioune, where the beach and market are “full of life, noise and energy — with all the boats going out early in the morning, the young people pulling them from the ocean and the women waiting to sell the fish in the markets.”Lobsters at the Soumbedioune market. The beach and market are “full of life, noise and energy,” Mr. Maal said.Carmen Abd Ali for The New York Times5. Galle Niwa RestaurantGalle Niwa, a restaurant on Gorée Island, is owned by “a friend who loves to feed people,” Mr. Maal said.Abbie KozolchykGorée Island, about two miles off the coast, was the site of the largest slave-trading center on the African coast for centuries, according to UNESCO, which lists it as a World Heritage site.Carmen Abd Ali for The New York Times“It’s beautiful, and owned by a friend who loves to feed people,” said Mr. Maal of this restaurant that’s part of a colonial estate turned hotel on Gorée Island, 25 minutes off the coast. His song “Fatmata” is dedicated to the proprietor, whose kitchen’s thieboudienne (fish, herby tomato sauce and rice), kaldou (garlicky fish and rice) and c’est bon (grilled fish and seafood with an oniony sauce) are favorites of his. And UNESCO-listed Gorée Island, ringed in aquamarine waters, is considered a must for any visitor, as is its Maison des Esclaves, a testament to the horrors of slavery. While the island’s beauty and brutality feel decidedly at odds, you can, in Mr. Maal’s view, “go from very hard, very sad experiences to see that after all, there is hope, there is light, and we can build something from that.”Gorée Island is considered a must-see for any visitor to Dakar. Its brutal history in the slave trade feels at odds with its natural beauty.Carmen Abd Ali for The New York TimesFollow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023. More

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      Book Review: ‘Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography,’ by Staci Robinson

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      Access to the late rapper’s journals gives Staci Robinson’s authorized biography a rare intimacy, without delving deeply into his music.TUPAC SHAKUR: The Authorized Biography, by Staci RobinsonLast month, after 27 years, a suspect was charged in the murder of Tupac Shakur. A firecracker and crusader as sharp as he was brusque, Tupac reached megastar status in 1996, when his fourth studio album, “All Eyez on Me,” went five times platinum. Often hailed as one of the greatest rappers of all time, he was a magnet for controversy during his life, and became a martyr for hip-hop militance after his death.Though anticipated by those familiar with the case, the arrest may provide long-awaited closure that aptly comes in conjunction with Staci Robinson’s poignant “Tupac Shakur.”The Tupac story has been told many times over, but this is the only authorized biography, meaning Robinson was granted nearly unprecedented access to the Shakur family and to Tupac’s many journals and notebooks. Along with scores of interviews, the book is stuffed with photocopies of the rapper’s personal writings. As if tucked between the pages, these hand-scrawled poems, raps and musings provide windows into his mind.For Robinson, this is a personal undertaking. She and Tupac were in the same high school social circle in Northern California, and over time she fielded calls to work on writing projects for him. With Shakur’s aunt she collaborated on “Tupac Remembered,” a 2008 collection of interviews, and was an executive producer on “Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur,” the 2023 docuseries about the rapper and his mother.Robinson writes in an introduction that she took up the biography at Afeni’s request in 1999, but that the project was put “on hold” a few weeks after she submitted the manuscript. Called on decades later to complete the work, Robinson spends its pages advocating not only for Tupac’s integrity, but for the spirit of Black resistance he embodied.“He wanted to relay stories that needed to be told,” she writes. “It was time to tell the truth about America’s history, about its dark past and especially about the oppression and disparities that were plaguing communities.”“Tupac Shakur” is a touching, empathetic portrait of a friend. Even familiar stories achieve new intimacy at closer range. And small moments help clarify longstanding narratives, coloring in the outlines of this well-known tale of the actor-rapper-activist who died at 25. The book attempts to contextualize the sadness and paranoia beneath the charisma; throughout his life, we learn, “van Gogh would come to be a touchstone for Tupac.”As in “Dear Mama,” Robinson’s biography sees the rapper’s legacy as inextricable from his mother’s, and the book begins not with Tupac, but with Afeni — her exposure to racism in the Jim Crow South, her arrest in New York as a member of the Black Panthers and her standing trial while pregnant.Afeni, we are told, was the bedrock of Tupac’s moral mission. “Ingrained from birth and into his upbringing were both Afeni’s fears and her dreams for her son — the expectation that he would carry on her dedication to the Black community and the will to help others achieve freedom from oppression,” Robinson writes.The book posits that Tupac inherited an antagonistic relationship with the police from the Shakurs — his mother, her first husband, Lumumba, and Tupac’s stepfather, Mutulu. Yet it astutely chronicles his life as a microcosm of the ongoing Black American struggle. Robinson often draws direct parallels between Tupac’s creative life and his run-ins with law enforcement. She notes that he was assaulted by Oakland police officers only weeks after shooting the video for “Trapped,” a diatribe against police brutality; filming on the 1993 movie “Poetic Justice,” in which he starred, was put on pause during the L.A. riots.Black cultural responses to injustice were early fuel for a sensitive, boisterous would-be artist. We hear of him furiously riding his tricycle around the apartment as Gil Scott-Heron plays on the turntable; he “entered a new realm” portraying 11-year-old Travis Younger in “A Raisin in the Sun” at a Harlem fund-raiser for Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign.We get what feel like firsthand peeks into his turbulent rise to stardom, too; Robinson recounts how his mother would send Tupac traveling with care packages that included condoms, vitamins, prayer cloths and phone numbers for bail bondsmen.Though there are frequent references to his prolific output, “Tupac Shakur” doesn’t focus much on music, which undersells him as an artistic genius. The book mostly considers his songs as ways to explain his behavior; it is not overly concerned with how they were made or whether they succeeded aesthetically. Lyrics either underscore a caring nature or are vehicles for public controversy.In this way, the narrative plays into a longstanding Tupac binary — the sensitive revolutionary and the hair-trigger thug — though it insinuates the latter was primarily a construction of a sensationalist press. And while offering a valiant defense, Robinson excuses Tupac of many provocations. It spends very little time on his 1994 sexual-abuse conviction, and absolves the rapper in an earlier incident at an outdoor festival that left a 6-year-old boy dead, even though the gun in question was registered to him. It doesn’t even consider that he might be culpable, accidentally or by proxy.Robinson does not stand at a historian’s distance. Her writing radiates admiration, and at times she even speaks on Tupac’s behalf. Even so, this is far from hagiography. At its best, the book feels like a plea to re-examine the world that made Tupac Shakur so angry.TUPAC SHAKUR: The Authorized Biography | By Staci Robinson | 406 pp. | Crown | $35 More

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      Kenneth Force, the ‘Toscanini of Military Marching Bands,’ Dies at 83

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      Captain Force was part of the pomp and ceremony at 10 presidential inaugurations, and for 45 years he taught midshipmen to revere traditional military music.Kenneth Force, who as the leader of the Merchant Marine Academy Regimental Band from 1971 to 2016 was one of the nation’s foremost experts in the art of military pomp, died on Oct. 7 in Rye, N.Y. He was 83.A former student of his, Marianne Lepre, said the death, at a long-term nursing facility, was caused by respiratory failure brought on by chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Military music arose historically as a means of communicating orders to troops, but it has long since become a ceremonial custom, with trumpet-tooting and drum-rolling tunes like “Hail to the Chief” and “The Red, White and Blue.”A military man might say that Captain Force exerted full-spectrum dominance over this territory.At one time or another, he conducted the U.S. Marine Corps Band, which performs for the president; the band of the Black Watch, a Scottish infantry battalion; the bands, in Britain, of Her Majesty’s Grenadier Guards, Welsh Guards and Royal Marines; and the Dutch Royal Military Band.He performed at 10 presidential inaugurations, from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s to George W. Bush’s.“It’s not likely anyone is keeping score,” Peter Applebome of The New York Times wrote in an Our Towns column in 2009, “but there can’t be too many people who have participated in more inaugurations than Captain Force, now 68 and something of a Toscanini of military marching bands.”Captain Force at the Merchant Marine Academy on Long Island in 2009. He lived on its grounds for decades.Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesHe earned that distinction principally as director of music at the Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, N.Y., on Long Island. His band members were not aspiring musicians; they were midshipmen training to receive Bachelor of Science degrees, U.S. Coast Guard licenses and officers’ commissions. At inaugurations, the student musicians got to play while marching past a presidential reviewing stand.“I always tell the midshipmen that you will never forget the memory of passing the president of the United States,” ” Captain Force told The Times.At each inauguration, his band blared the classic 19th-century song of the marines, “A Life on the Ocean Wave.”“What we do doesn’t change,” he said. “In many ways we’re a walking museum, something from another age.”Captain Force kept tradition alive in several ways. He rearranged old band tunes for modern instruments — work he compared to repairing antiques — and he composed new political homages, including “First Lady March” and “Presidential Pets March” (which includes barks and meows).Captain Force composed marches of his own, including the “Presidential Pets March,” complete with barks and meows.Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesHe and his band were sought after by organizers of great American events. They played at Miss America pageant parades, atop the Brooklyn Bridge for its 100th anniversary, on the field during World Series, on the courts of the U.S. Open after 9/11, and aboard the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2 when it carried World War II veterans to Normandy in 1994 for the 50th anniversary of D-Day.In 1989, The Times credited Captain Force with making his band sound like “a giant walking organ.”Kenneth Richard Force was born on March 24, 1940, in Queens, where he grew up, to Alvina and George Force. His father was a banker.Ken got his musical training playing trumpet in the Radio City Music Hall Orchestra, in Broadway pit bands and in the band of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus.His fascination with military music dated to one night in 1959, when he was in the First Army Band, headquartered on Governors Island in New York. His bandmaster instructed the group to play louder than usual, since three British bands were coming to visit. They began blasting away on “Colonel Bogey on Parade.”Over the din, Captain Force clearly heard a British drum major shout, “By the cen-terr! Quick march!”Then a band of Royal Marines appeared in pith helmets, each stomp of their marching feet clearly audible.Captain Force was in awe, he later told The Times. He asked a British band director if he had a manual.“Manual?” the man responded. “It’s 300 years of tradition!”Captain Force received a bandsman’s diploma from the U.S. Naval School of Music in Washington in 1958, a bachelor of music degree from the Manhattan School of Music in 1964, and a master’s degree from the same institution the next year. He wrote his master’s thesis on British military bands.Captain Force in an undated photo. “In many ways we’re a walking museum, something from another age,” he said. United States Merchant Marine AcademyOn one occasion, in the late 1990s, he waged a battle that united his passions for military music history, preservation and teaching.He had long considered “Over There,” George M. Cohan’s ode to the American doughboys of World War I, the second-best patriotic song of the 20th century, behind only Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” As it happened, Cohan’s former home, where he had written “Over There,” lay just a few minutes away from the Merchant Marine Academy — but the old mansion was about to be demolished.Captain Force began what Newsday in 1999 called a “zealous campaign” to have Cohan’s home designated a landmark.“If you tear down the house, you’d be tearing down part of the soul of America,” he told The Times the same year.He had the midshipmen play “Over There” in view of people filing into a local landmarks commission hearing, and he inspired his students to show up at meetings to espouse his cause.They saved the property.“Now I can take my kids here someday when I come back for homecoming,” Lester J. Snyder, a senior from Illinois and a midshipman trumpeter, told The Associated Press shortly afterward. “I’ll be able to share this with the next generation, and maybe they will get to know something about the feeling of duty and honor to your country.”Captain Force’s three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by a stepson, John Uribe, and two step-grandchildren. He lived on the grounds of the Merchant Marine Academy for decades and in recent years lived in an apartment across Long Island Sound in Port Chester, N.Y.Captain Force generally did not criticize United States leaders in public. But he did make an exception for Jimmy Carter’s decision in 1977 to abjure the traditional pomp of an inauguration parade by walking along Pennsylvania Avenue rather than riding in a limousine.“I know he didn’t want ruffles and flourishes and ‘Hail to the Chief,’” Captain Force told The Times in 2009. “He said it was too pompous. And the country didn’t like that. People think the president deserves special music.“People like ceremony,” he continued, “and no one does it better than a band. When you lose your ceremony, you lose a lot.” More

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      The 45 King, Who Produced for Jay-Z and Eminem, Dies at 62

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      The 62-year-old Bronx native infused a distinctive jazzy flavor in his beats. He contributed tracks to Queen Latifah’s debut album and produced Eminem’s “Stan,” among other hip-hop classics.The 45 King, the influential New York City hip-hop producer who worked with Queen Latifah, Eminem and Jay-Z, died on Thursday. He was 62.Born Mark Howard James, he took the moniker The 45 King because of his fondness for sampling old, obscure records. His death was announced on social media Thursday afternoon by a fellow hip-hop producer, DJ Premier.Information on the cause or place of death were not immediately available. An inquiry sent to James’s manager was not immediately returned.“His sound was unlike any other from his heavy drums and his horns were so distinct on every production,” DJ Premier wrote, referring to James as DJ Mark The 45 King.James, born on Oct. 16, 1961 in the Bronx, was a pioneer in the 1980s New York hip-hop scene and worked with early rap stars like the Funky 4, according to his website. He was known for his jazzy beats, showcased on his first hit track, the highly sampled “The 900 Number,” released in 1987. He slowed down a saxophone solo, “dropped the results over an irresistibly funky break” and the result exploded, according to AllMusic, adding that the horn line was “forever ingrained in the collective hip-hop psyche.”James worked closely with Queen Latifah, a fellow member of the music crew known as the Flavor Unit. James produced the hit song “Wrath of My Madness” on her debut album “All Hail the Queen” in 1989 and also contributed other tracks.“Thank you for teaching me taking me under your wing, teaching me about this thing called hip-hop, and so much more,” Queen Latifah wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday.James also produced Eminem’s “Stan,” released on the 2000 album “The Marshall Mathers LP.” The rap tells the story of a perturbed superfan named “Stan” and is set to a throbbing beat sampling Dido’s 1998 track “Thank you.”“I took a first verse and made into an eight-bar hook for Eminem,” James said in a 2021 interview clip posted to social media by Eminem on Thursday.“Legends are never over,” Eminem wrote on X, formerly Twitter.James’s other hits included Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem),” which sampled the musical “Annie” and a remix of Madonna’s “Keep It Together.”James credited much of his success and production style to the time he spent in the 1980s working for DJ Breakout, a Bronx hip-hop luminary.“I like to say I got lucky,” James said in the 2021 interview with the YouTube channel Unique Access Ent. “I was in the right place at the right time.” More

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      ‘Free Your Mind’ Does Little to Challenge the Brain

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      A huge new performance space in Manchester, England, opened with a show that trumpets the building’s possibilities, but doesn’t push any boundaries.There was a sense of momentous occasion on Wednesday at the opening of the new Aviva Studios performance space in Manchester, England. Political and cultural figures made sweeping declarations: This was Britain’s most significant cultural project since the Tate Modern opened in London over 20 years ago; the largest government investment in the arts since forever; the most important new theater space in Europe; and a generator of work, well-being and regeneration in Britain’s underserved north.“It’s a big day not just for Manchester, but for the U.K.,” said Lucy Frazer, Britain’s culture secretary, at a news conference several hours before the opening performance of “Free Your Mind,” a large-scale spectacle directed by Danny Boyle that inaugurated the building.The 144,000-square-foot Aviva Studios (named for an insurance company that gave around 35 million pounds, or $43 million, to the project) is the new home of Factory International, the organization that produces the Manchester International Festival. The building was designed with multipurpose and multidisciplinary intent by Ellen van Loon from the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the Dutch firm founded by Rem Koolhaas, costing “around £240 million,” or $290 million, according to a spokesman for the venue.There is a conventional 1,600-seat theater (“the Hall”) and a 700-foot long, 226-foot high performance space (“the Warehouse”) that can accommodate 5,000 people. The spaces can be used individually, combined or divided to create several distinct, acoustically isolated performance areas.The seats in the theater can be taken out for gigs; the floors can flood and drain; you could hang 100 cars from the ceiling of the Warehouse. “We want people to imagine seemingly impossible things,” said John McGrath, Factory International’s artistic director, during a tour of the building.The massive 144,000-square-foot space hopes to revitalize the arts scene in Manchester.Marco Cappelletti, via OMA and Factory InternationalLiving up to these ambitions in an opening show is a tall order, even for Boyle, the Academy Award-winning film director (“Trainspotting,” “Slumdog Millionaire”) who masterminded the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. For “Free Your Mind,” he teamed up with the hip-hop choreographer Kenrick “H2O” Sandy, the composer Michael “Mikey J.” Asante, the designer Es Devlin and the writer Sabrina Mahfouz to create a show loosely based on the “Matrix” movies, with their prescient themes of artificial intelligence taking over human life.At the news conference, Boyle talked about using “The Matrix” (directed by the Wachowski siblings) and its sequels as a widely available cultural reference, and “Free Your Mind” is mostly interesting as a statement of intent. It’s accessible, fun, visually spectacular and entirely unchallenging. But on the evidence of opening night, the show draws an impressively young, hip and diverse audience.“Free Your Mind” opens in the Hall, with a lecture delivered via an old-fashioned television screen and new-fashioned technology by the mathematician Alan Turing, who developed an early vision of modern computing. There is a quick history of Manchester as the home of the machine, and a question asked early: “Should we be worried that machines could think?”Dancers in trench coats appear, moving with robotic jerkiness and Neo (Corey Owens), the hero of “The Matrix,” emerges from the front row and is confronted by a dark-glasses-wearing, sinister group, before the scene changes to a cluster of faceless figures encased in stretchy white fabric that is attached to the ceiling. As they move in a circle, the tubes of fabric entwine like a maypole; visually arresting and oddly old-fashioned, reminiscent of the choreographer Alwin Nikolais’s experiments with form and fabric in the 1950s and 1960s.The show begins with a monologue delivered by an avatar of the mathematician Alan Turing, which the visual effects company Union VFX created from a photograph.Tristram KentonThe show’s movements are directed by the hip-hop choreographer Kenrick “H2O” Sandy.Tristram KentonThese figures are presumably the humans whose energy is being harvested by an evil artificial intelligence: the truth revealed by the omniscient Morpheus to Neo in “The Matrix.” A series of episodes move us through a meeting between Neo and the female warrior Trinity (Nicey Belgrave), confrontations with the police and the machine Agents who guard the Matrix, and the trial of the first robot to kill a human.Sandy’s movement language, drawn from hip-hop and street dance vocabularies, is boldly graphic, and he adeptly moves the 50-dancer cast in crisp, cascading formations, but there is little subtlety or variety either here or in Asante’s serviceable atmosphere-creating score. (The sound system, however, is fab, as is Lucy Carter’s lighting.) The only standout dance moment comes in part two, when Sandy himself, as Morpheus, performs a compelling solo of sweeping, martial arts-inflected motion, legs kicking high as his body arches backward.In the intermission, Matrix-agent figures were suspended around the huge lobby and bar space (rather more effectively Matrix-y than anything onstage), and white rabbit-headed figures danced with audience members. (A reference to the message, “Follow the white rabbit,” that appears on Neo’s computer screen in the movie, but surely also to the Jefferson Airplane song, “White Rabbit,” with its lyrics about mind-bending pills.)Part two, in the Warehouse, is more abstract, with Devlin’s spectacular set as the star: a huge cocoon of white Manchester cotton rounding out the angles of the space and enclosing the audience, mostly standing on each side of an enormous catwalk. Long narrow screens above this stage offer a montage of Manchester cultural history — footage of millworkers, British soap operas, references to pop bands like Joy Division — then show an incessant stream of images that blur into a kind of visual wallpaper as one scene after another plays out beneath.The show’s sets are by the designer Es Devlin.Tristram KentonPart two of “Free Your Mind” plays out on an extended catwalk in a part of Aviva Studios called the Warehouse.Tristram KentonThis section is presumably our present in which data, rather than energy, is being harvested from us humans. Amazon packages are delivered, Twitter ticks, the Apple logo and Google are referenced in Gareth Pugh’s costumes; dancers move while unable to take their eyes off their phones. Finally we get the battle between Neo and Smith, with a re-enactment of the famous bullet-stopping sequence in the original film, before a group finale to Asante’s portentous chords. The final image is of the screens, showing human figures effaced by vertical lines of code. (Oh dear.)The audience, which clearly knew and loved “The Matrix,” didn’t seem depressed by that, and gave the show a rousing ovation. “Free Your Mind” is a good night out and a decent demonstration of the new building’s capacities, even if its muddled mix of pure-dance display and clumsy propositions don’t say much about what it means to be human. Something stranger and more genuinely boundary-pushing would have been a welcome opening salvo from the often-visionary minds at Factory International. Perhaps that’s next.Free Your MindThrough Nov. 5 at Aviva Studios, in Manchester, England; factoryinternational.org. More