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      Karl Berger, 88, Who Opened Minds of Generations of Musicians, Is Dead

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      A vibraphonist, pianist, educator and musical thinker, he co-founded the Creative Music Studio to bring all kinds of musicians together to foster cross-pollination and improvisation.Karl Berger, a musician, composer, educator and author who taught improvisation and his concept of an attentive, collaborative “music mind” to generations of musicians and artists at his Creative Music Studio near Woodstock, N.Y., died on April 9 in Albany, N.Y. He was 88.Billy Martin, the studio’s executive director, said the death, at Albany Medical Center, was caused by complications following gastrointestinal surgery.Mr. Berger was a pianist and vibraphonist who performed and recorded with leading jazz musicians including Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, John McLaughlin, Carla Bley, Anthony Braxton, Jack DeJohnette, Pharoah Sanders, Dave Brubeck and Lee Konitz, among many others.Mr. Coleman, Mr. Berger and his wife, the singer Ingrid Sertso, founded the Creative Music Foundation in the early 1970s, to focus on improvisation and musical cross-pollination. The foundation ran the Creative Music Studio, in various locations in and near Woodstock, where Mr. Berger and other artists performed and taught. There, internationally known musicians from jazz and other traditions worked with musicians at all levels of skill, from amateur to virtuoso.Through the years, Mr. Berger played with small and large ensembles, recorded extensively, led university music departments, wrote arrangements for rock and pop albums, taught schoolchildren and adults, and developed his own techniques to unlock and encourage individual and collaborative musical thinking. His compositions often made connections with non-Western styles, and his musical practices drew on Eastern spirituality and meditation.“It’s not what you play, it’s how you play,” he often said.Mr. Martin said Mr. Berger’s musical approach was “not about genre.”“It’s about listening and making sound together,” he said, “starting from that fundamental place and building from there.”The jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, a frequent collaborator with Mr. Berger, with students at the Creative Music Studio in 1978.In his book, “The Music Mind Experience,” written with Rick Maurer, Mr. Berger insisted that “everyone is born with an abundance of musical talent,” and that all music shares fundamental common elements: rhythm, sound, space and dynamics. He sought to teach both players and listeners to escape routine and to concentrate their attention “fully in the moment.”Mr. Berger was born on March 30, 1935, in Heidelberg, Germany. He began studying classical piano at 10, but at 14 he heard a jazz jam session that made him decide to play his own music. In 1953, he joined a group that included Ms. Sertso, whom he would soon marry. She survives him along with their daughter, Savia.In the 1950s, as the house pianist at the Heidelberg club Cave 54, Mr. Berger learned modern jazz in late-night jams with American musicians from military bands stationed nearby. He earned a Ph.D. in musicology and philosophy in Germany in 1963 and held philosophy professorships at two universities in Germany. But by the mid-1960s he had turned to music.He moved to Paris and joined a group led by the trumpeter Don Cherry, who had been learning world-music melodies from shortwave radio broadcasts. In 1966, Mr. Cherry invited Mr. Berger to New York City to play on “Symphony for Improvisers,” a landmark free-jazz album.Mr. Berger made his debut album as a leader, “From Now On,” in 1967, and recorded with Mr. Cherry and others in the late 1960s. He went on to make more than two dozen albums as a leader and many others as a sideman. His lean, linear, freely melodic vibraphone playing repeatedly made him the top vibraphonist in the Down Beat magazine musicians’ poll.In 1971, Mr. Berger started the Creative Music Foundation with Ms. Sertso, Mr. Coleman and an advisory board that included John Cage, Gil Evans, Buckminster Fuller and Willem de Kooning. He moved to Woodstock in 1972 and inaugurated the Creative Music Studio, which settled into a nearby mountain lodge with residences and performance spaces.Leading musicians including Mr. Braxton, Mr. DeJohnette, Cecil Taylor and Dave Holland joined students in improvising groups. More than 550 performances were recorded and later digitized for an archive that was purchased by the Columbia University Library in 2012.During the 1980s, grant funding dwindled, and the studio curtailed its programs in 1984. But Mr. Berger remained active as a performer, touring Europe, Asia and Africa with Ms. Sertso.In the 1990s, he was also in demand as a string-section arranger. After working on Jeff Buckley’s 1994 album “Grace,” he wrote arrangements for albums by Natalie Merchant, Angelique Kidjo and others.Mr. Berger in 2008. The Creative Music Studio lost funding and curtailed its programs in the 1980s, but he continued to teach, perform and compose.Phil Mansfield for The New York TimesMr. Berger was a professor of composition and dean of music education at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts in Germany, and chairman of the department of music at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth during the early 2000s — although he objected to the department’s emphasis on classroom study rather than performance.He and Ms. Sertso opened Sertso Recording Studio in Woodstock in 2004. In 2010, with the help of musicians who had studied at Creative Music Studio decades earlier, they revived the organization. Mr. Berger led concerts in New York City and elsewhere by an Improvisers Orchestra, and in 2013 the studio restarted intensive semiannual workshops in the Catskills with musicians including Vijay Iyer, Henry Threadgill, Steven Bernstein and Joe Lovano.Mr. Berger relinquished the leadership of Creative Music Studio in 2017. But he continued to record and perform. His most recent release, in 2022, was a trio album, “Heart Is a Melody,” with Kirk Knuffke on cornet and Matt Wilson on drums. The album reached back to Mr. Berger’s free-jazz inspirations, with an Indian-inspired Don Cherry piece, “Ganesh,” and a tune called “Ornette.”“We all are infinitely more talented than we’ll ever realize in one lifetime,” Mr. Berger wrote in “The Music Mind Experience.” He continued, “Once we get in touch with our own voice, our own ways, we simply have to stay with it.” More

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      Harry Belafonte, Folk Hero

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      Cool and charismatic, Belafonte channeled his stardom into activism. He was a true people person, who knew how to reach, teach and challenge us.Of the many (many) job titles you could lay on Harry Belafonte — singer, actor, entertainer, talk show host, activist — the one that nails what he’s come to mean is folk hero.Not a title one puts on a business card or lists in, say, a Twitter bio. “Folk hero” is a description that accrues — over time, out of significance. You’re out doing those other jobs when, suddenly, what you’re doing matters — to people, to your people, to your country.Belafonte was a folk hero that way. Not the most dynamic or distinctive actor or singer or dancer you’ll ever come across. Yet the cool, frank, charismatic, seemingly indefatigable cat who died on Tuesday, at 96, had something else, something as crucial. He was, in his way, a people person. He understood how to reach, teach and challenge them, how to keep them honest, how to dedicate his fame to a politics of accountability, more tenaciously than any star of the civil rights era or in its wake. The forum for this sort of moral transformation probably should have been the movies. But the Hollywood of that era would tolerate a single Black person and, ultimately, it chose Sidney Poitier, Belafonte’s soul mate, sometime suitemate and fellow Caribbean American. Belafonte did make a handful of movies at the beginning of his career. “Odds Against Tomorrow,” a naturalist film noir from 1959, is the meatiest of them — and his last picture for more than a decade, too. Poitier became the movie star, during a dire stretch for this country. Belafonte became the folk hero.“Tonight With Belafonte,” a 1959 show that aired on CBS, featured work songs, gospel and moaning blues performed on spare sets.CBS Photo Archive/Getty ImagesIt began, of course, with the songs, actual folk music. Well, with Belafonte’s interpolation, which in its varied guises wed acoustic singing with Black spiritual arrangements and the sounds of the islands. He took his best-selling music on the road, to white audiences who’d pay a lot of money to watch him perform from his million-selling album “Calypso,” the one with “Day-O.” A major part of his knowing people was knowing that they watched TV. And rather than simply translate his hot-ticket cabaret act for American living rooms, Belafonte imagined something stranger and more alluring. In 1959, he somehow got CBS to broadcast “Tonight With Belafonte,” an hourlong studio performance that starts with a live commercial for Revlon (the night’s sponsor) and melts from the gleaming blond actor Barbara Britton (the ad’s pitchperson) into the sight of Black men amid shadows and great big chains.They’re pantomiming hard labor while Belafonte belts a viscous version of “Bald Headed Woman.” The whole hour is just this sort of chilling: percussive work songs, big-bottomed gospel, moaning blues, dramatically spare sets that imply segregation and incarceration, the weather system that called herself Odetta. Belafonte never makes a direct speech about injustice. He trusts the songs and stagecraft to speak for themselves. Folks — Black folks, especially — will get it. It’s their music.“The bleaker my acting prospects looked,” Belafonte wrote, in “My Song,” his memoir from 2011, “the more I threw myself into political organizing.” That organizing took familiar forms — marches, protests, rallies. Money. He helped underwrite the civil rights movement, paying for freedom rides. He maintained a life insurance policy on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with Coretta Scott King as the beneficiary, because Dr. King didn’t believe he could afford it. The building he bought at 300 West End Avenue in Manhattan and converted into a 21-room palace seemed to double as the movement’s New York headquarters. (“Martin began drafting his antiwar speech in my apartment.”) So, yes, Belafonte was near the psychic core and administrative center of the movement.But those bleak Hollywood prospects — some incalculable combination of racism and too-raw talent — kept Belafonte uniquely earthbound, doing a kind of cultural organizing. It wasn’t the movies that have kept him in so many people’s lives these many decades, though he never stopped acting altogether, best of all in a handful of Robert Altman films, particularly “Kansas City,” from 1996, in which he does some persuasive intimidation as an icy 1930s gangster named Seldom Seen. His organizing happened on TV, where he was prominently featured throughout the 1960s, as himself, and where his political reach was arguably as penetrating as his soul mate’s, on variety shows he produced that introduced America to Gloria Lynne and Odetta and John Lewis.There was also that week in February 1968 when Johnny Carson handed his “Tonight Show” over to Belafonte. The national mood had sunk into infernal tumult driven by the Vietnam War and exasperation with racist neglect, for starters. (It was going to be a grim election year, too.) Whether a Black substitute host of a popular talk show was an antidote for malaise or a provocative reflection of it, Belafonte went beyond the chummy ribbing that was Carson’s forte. He was probing. His guests that week included Poitier, Lena Horne, Bill Cosby, Paul Newman, Wilt Chamberlain, the Smothers Brothers, Zero Mostel and, months before they were murdered, Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. King. Belafonte turned the famous into folks, mixing the frippery of the format with the gravitas of the moment.Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was among the interviewees when Belafonte guest hosted Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” for a week in February 1968.Associated PressPaul Robeson preceded Belafonte in an activism partly born of artistic frustration. Robeson’s pursuit of racial equality, for everybody, won him persecution and immiseration and derailed his career. He personally warned Belafonte and Poitier of the damaging toll this country will take on Black artists who believe their art and celebrity ought do more than dazzle and distract. Belafonte watched the American government drag Robeson through hell and decided to help drag white America to moral betterment in any arena that would have him, somewhat out of respect for his elder. (“My whole life was an homage to him,” Belafonte once wrote about Robeson.) Those arenas included everything from “Free to Be … You and Me” and “The Muppet Show” to Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” and, on several indelible occasions, “Sesame Street.”With some artists, a legacy is a tricky reduction. What did it all come down to? And it just can’t be that the immense career of Harry Belafonte — with its milestones and breakthroughs, with its risks and hazards, with its triumphs and disappointments, with its doubling as a living archive of the latter half of a 20th-century America that he fought to ennoble — can be summed up by the time he spent talking to the Count.But that, too, is how a people person reaches people. That’s how Harry Belafonte reached a lot of us: little kids who were curious and naturally open to the wonders of the human experience. So it makes sense that the sight of this elegant man, reclined among inquisitive children and surly felt critters, speaking with wisdom in that scratched timbre of his about, say, what an animal is (and, by extension, who an animal is not), told us who we were. People, yes, but perhaps another generation of folks with this hero in common, learning through the osmosis of good television how to live their lives in homage to him. More

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      Harry Belafonte on His Artistic Values and His Activism

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      In interviews and articles in The New York Times, Mr. Belafonte, who died on Tuesday, spoke about the civil rights movement and his frustration with how Black life was depicted onscreen.Harry Belafonte, the singer, actor and activist whose wide-ranging success blazed a trail for other Black artists in the 1950s, died on Tuesday at age 96.A child of Harlem, Mr. Belafonte used his platform at the height of the entertainment world to speak out frequently on his music, how Black life was depicted onscreen and, most important to him, the civil rights movement. Here are some of the insights Mr. Belafonte provided to The New York Times during his many decades in the public spotlight, as they appeared at the time:His musicMr. Belafonte’s string of hits, including “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell,” helped create an American obsession with Caribbean music that led his record company to promote him as the “King of Calypso.”But Mr. Belafonte never embraced that sort of monarchical title, rejecting “purism” as a “cover-up for mediocrity” and explaining that he saw his work as a mash-up of musical styles.He told The New York Times Magazine in 1959 that folk music had “hidden within it a great dramatic sense, and a powerful lyrical sense.” He also plainly conceded: “I don’t have a great voice.”In 1993, he told The Times that he used his songs “to describe the human condition and to give people some insights into what may be going on globally, from what I’ve experienced.”He said that “Day-O,” for instance, was a way of life.“It’s a song about my father, my mother, my uncles, the men and women who toil in the banana fields, the cane fields of Jamaica,” he said. “It’s a classic work song.”His views on film and televisionMr. Belafonte’s success in music helped him become a Hollywood leading man. In the 1950s and 1960s, Mr. Belafonte and his friend Sidney Poitier landed more substantive and nuanced roles than Black actors had previously received.Nonetheless, Mr. Belafonte was left largely unsatisfied.Writing for The Times in 1968, he complained that “the real beauty, the soul, the integrity of the black community is rarely reflected” on television.“The medium is dominated by white-supremacy concepts and racist attitudes,” he wrote. “TV excludes the reality of Negro life, with all its grievances, passions and aspirations, because to depict that life would be to indict (or perhaps enrich?) much of what is now white America and its institutions. And neither networks nor sponsors want that.”Mr. Belafonte emphasized that his 10-year-old son saw few Black heroes on television.“The nobility in his heritage and the values that could complement his positive growth and sense of manhood are denied him,” he wrote. “Instead, there is everything to tear him down and give him an inferiority complex. He will see the Negro only as a rioter and a social problem, never as a whole human being.”Roughly 25 years later, Mr. Belafonte was circumspect, suggesting in an interview with The Times that little had changed.“Even today, on the big screen, the pictures that are always successful are pictures where blacks appear in the way white America buys it,” he said in 1993. “And we’re told that what we really want to express is not profitable and is not commercially viable.”His politics and activismEven as Mr. Belafonte was in the prime of his entertainment career, he was intently focused on activism and civil rights.“Back in 1959,” Mr. Belafonte told The Times in 1981, “I fully believed in the civil-rights movement. I had a personal commitment to it, and I had my personal breakthroughs — I produced the first black TV special; I was the first black to perform at the Waldorf Astoria. I felt if we could just turn the nation around, things would fall into place.”But Mr. Belafonte lamented that by the middle of the 1970s, the movement had ended.“When the doors of Hollywood shut on minorities and blacks at the end of the 70’s,” he said, “a lot of black artists had been enjoying the exploitation for 10 years. But one day they found the shop had closed down.”Mr. Belafonte remained outspoken about politics in his later years. In 2002 he accused Secretary of State Colin L. Powell of abandoning his principles to “come into the house of the master”; he called President George W. Bush a “terrorist” in 2006, and lamented in 2012 that modern celebrities had “turned their back on social responsibility.”“There’s no evidence that artists are of the same passion and of the same kind of commitment of the artists of my time,” he told The Times in 2016. “The absence of black artists is felt very strongly because the most visible oppression is in the black community.”In 2016 and again in 2020, he visited the opinion pages of The Times to urge voters to reject Donald J. Trump.“The vote is perhaps the single most important weapon in our arsenal,” Mr. Belafonte told The Times in the 2016 article. “The same things needed now are the same things needed before,” he added. “Movements don’t die because struggle doesn’t die. ” More

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      Tim Hecker Helped Popularize Ambient Music. He’s (Sort of) Sorry.

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      The artist’s phosphorescent electronic albums helped make way for the recent bloom of lifestyle playlists and background music. He’s turned on that trend to take on real life.Tim Hecker could not name his most streamed song on Spotify, even after several guesses.Was it “Chimeras,” the electronic musician guessed by phone before a recent Berlin performance, selecting a 2006 piece where prickles of electric guitar scatter like a galaxy around a lulling beat? (Not in the Top 10.) He tried “Sketch 3,” an 80-second piano reverie he considered “an oddball.” Closer, in second place.Informed that “Boreal Kiss, Pt. 1” — a deep cut from his obscure 2001 debut that sounds like a glass harp routed through a dial-up modem — had six million streams, far more than everything else in the Top 10 combined, he chuckled. “That is crazy, crazy,” he said slowly.He was an Ottawa civil servant then who had just finished a master’s in political philosophy and was making music on the weekends from his basement home. His ideas were inchoate, his approach innocent. “I was so optimistic about the tools I had,” Hecker, 48, said. “Those were first passes at chord progressions you’ve been playing your whole teenage life.”In the decades since, Hecker has become one of the most pre-eminent and nuanced electronic producers of his generation, his phosphorescent pieces constantly tunneling among bliss and terror, depression and wonder. His albums, including “Harmony in Ultraviolet” (2006), “Virgins” (2013) and “No Highs,” which arrived earlier this month, revel in ambiguity, conjuring dream states that make you wonder if you like dreaming at all.These meticulous instrumentals also helped reopen the gates for the tide of ambient music that has seeped into life’s quiet corners, whether soundtracking yoga classes, co-working spaces or meditation apps. The impressive stats of “Boreal Kiss, Part 1” stem from a popular playlist called “Ambient Essentials.” Hecker wants no part of it.“Ambient music is the great wellspring — but also the bane of my existence,” he said in a sudden rush weeks earlier, in a call from his Montreal studio. “It’s this superficial form of panacea weaponized by digital platforms, shortcuts for the stress of our world. They serve a simple function: to ‘chill out.’ How does it differ from Muzak 2.0, from elevator music?”Hecker described his early life outside of Vancouver as the “classic Canadian suburban experience.” He played trumpet and ran cross-country, occasionally went camping. When he was a dishwasher at a Canadian steakhouse chain called The Keg, a co-worker passed him cassettes of British post-punk and American folk. The long-running CBC radio show Brave New Waves became his “voice in the night,” he said, its experimental music fascinating him as he drifted to sleep. He began borrowing guitars and drum kits, exploring for himself.“What is the function of music? Is it to serve as a background for a WeWork, efficiency world, for someone who just wants to code?” Hecker asked. “Or is it for driving down a foggy road at night, wanting that experience amplified?”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesThere was a latent sadness, too: When Hecker was 12, his mother died. He suppressed the turmoil until after he became a father himself, going to years of intensive therapy recently, well into his 40s. Still, he admitted, the loss was “bound up in the melancholy of youth.”This multivalence seemed to follow Hecker. He would spend his collegiate summers in the British Columbia wilderness, planting as many as 4,000 trees each day in clear-cut forests. (Each sapling, strung to a hip belt, took five seconds to get into the ground.) As he worked, he dieted on psychedelics and early British electronica. Grizzly bears prowled near the planters’ camp at night. Danger, beauty and intrigue commingled, a fertile landscape for Hecker’s imagination.Later, frustrated by the exigencies of starting a band, like remembering what they’d played the day before, Hecker began experimenting with drum machines and samplers. He needed no one else. “The original impulse was this awe-struck excitement,” Hecker said, recalling his titanic computer tower, gargantuan monitor and pirated software. “Digital audio was a river of data you could shape, like liquid metal. Computers had this utopian promise.”Hecker first made techno under the alias Jetone, then slid into the sort of ambient music that is now a streaming commodity because it felt less dependent on being young or sticking to a scene. His sonics and sentiments quickly deepened, suggesting a constant and often very loud tug of war between anxiety and enlightenment. This reflected, he said, “the rainbow of possibility for people — extreme joys, incredible suffering.”To achieve that balance, Hecker has long relied on an iterative, labor-intensive process. When he’s found a motif he likes, maybe a delirious rhythm or entrancing melody, he repeatedly improvises over it, letting as many as 200 pieces pile up like strata of handbills amassed on a light pole. He excises bits that don’t fit, editing that mass of sound until all the layers interact.“There are different feelings in those different moments, and they each have their own ecosystem,” he said. “I’m using 24 channels of bleeding, contaminated, overloaded, feedbacking pieces that link to all the others. I don’t want a straightforward emotion — the best things for me are the ones that are confusing as to how I feel.”“Digital audio was a river of data you could shape, like liquid metal,” Hecker said of his early forays into electronic music. “Computers had this utopian promise.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesIn the early days of lockdown, Hecker, like so many, felt only confused and anxious, home-schooling kids and managing bills. He worried there would be no music industry on the pandemic’s other side, and he wondered what he was supposed to make. He turned down an offer to produce sounds for an upstart meditation app and instead focused on film and TV scores, including Brandon Cronenberg’s subversive thriller, “Infinity Pool.”He was grateful to respond to someone else’s cues rather than make decisions himself. “I had no music in the tank,” he admitted. “I was out of ideas.”Finally, in the winter of 2022, he fled Montreal for 10 days, taking suitcases crammed with keyboards, cords and small speakers to Oaxaca. He set up a makeshift studio in an apartment there, kneeling on pillows for hours on end as he built and broke rhythms, searching for moments that felt new, even hallucinatory. They became the core of “No Highs.”Soon after Hecker returned to cold Montreal, he asked his longtime friend, the powerhouse saxophonist Colin Stetson, to improvise alongside those still-nebulous pieces. “We didn’t discuss concept, theme — the tracks were just scaffolding,” Stetson recalled in an interview. “But one was madly exultant. Another was innocent, searching. A couple were relentlessly tense. He was not running down a single alleyway.”“No Highs” is a sly and discomfiting record, elements of unease lurking beneath a cool exterior and tongue-in-cheek titles like “Monotony” and “Living Spa Water.” Almost half the tracks circle the eight-minute mark, Hecker’s attempt to undermine streaming algorithms he believes prefer clarity and concision. “No Highs” is an attempt to give himself a playlist pink slip.“What is the function of music? Is it to serve as a background for a WeWork, efficiency world, for someone who just wants to code?” Hecker asked. “Or is it for driving down a foggy road at night, wanting that experience amplified?”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesHecker doesn’t doubt the salubrious value of pleasant instrumentals, whether called ambient, New Age or easy listening. And he understands the need to break from hectic social rhythms; “No Highs,” after all, stemmed from his own paradisiacal escape from new lockdowns back home.A long-lapsed Catholic, Hecker began studying Buddhism early during the pandemic and meditating in his studio nearly every morning. When touring for “No Highs” ends, he plans to return to the San Diego monastery of the Thai Forest monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu for a week, making breakfast for the monks and doing chores. That work reminds him of planting those trees after college. He’s started camping again and is interested in extended backpacking trips, inspired by Bhikku and Bill Bryson’s Appalachian Trail chronicle, “A Walk in the Woods.”“It’s not a panacea for living in the world,” he said of such resets. “But the frequency of the mind is slowed, less prone to flailing.”And many mornings, he looks at Apple Music to see if there’s something new from Michiru Aoyama, a beyond-prolific Japanese musician who sometimes releases an eight-track album of placid music every day. (By mid-April, he’d issued 93 in 2023.) Hecker called Aoyama the “ambient genre, par excellence.” These are calming but pointed reminders of what his own music isn’t, even if they sometimes share stylistic descriptors.“It is totally opposite from my own work — arguably overwrought, taking too long,” he said, laughing. “There’s something reassuring about waking up to a new Michiru album, like coffee being served. I want my spa music, too.” More

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      A New Show Celebrates the Guitar and Its Symbolism

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      Opening in May at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, the exhibition will delve into the instrument’s myriad representations and stars who have played it.This article is part of our Museums special section about how art institutions are reaching out to new artists and attracting new audiences.Guitarists and their music — from folk singers to rock ’n’ roll stars and protest songs — figure prominently in American history and culture, but the instrument has a notable heritage of its own.“The guitar itself can have meaning, other than simply being beautiful or making music,” said Mark Scala, chief curator at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, where “Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art,” on view from May 26 to Aug. 13, will explore the guitar’s symbolism in American art, from late 18th-century parlor rooms to today’s concert halls.On display will be more than 165 works: paintings, sculpture, photography, works on paper, illustrations, videos, music in multimedia presentations and musical instruments, including a rare cittern, a popular string instrument in the 18th and 19th centuries, and seminal guitars by Fender, Gibson and C.F. Martin & Company.Twelve thematic sections, with names like “Cowboy Guitars,” “Iconic Women of Early Country Music” and “Hispanicization,” will weave in how artists and photographers have used the guitar as a visual motif to express the American experience and attitudes, from thorny issues like race and identity to the aesthetics of guitars themselves.The guitar was seen as a symbol of cultivation and sophistication, as used in Thomas Cantwell Healy’s portrait of Charlotte Davis Wylie (1853). Estate of Mary Swords BoehmerArtworks in “Leisure, Culture, and Comfort: 18th and 19th Century America,” including a painting by Charles Willson Peale from 1771, the earliest image in the exhibition, will show old-fashioned scenes of women playing for pleasure or holding guitars passively.“The guitar was seen as a symbol of cultivation and sophistication, a sign of domestic achievement, like needlework or writing poetry,” Mr. Scala said. But throughout the show, many images of guitar-playing women counter this gender stereotype, he said, by signaling self-confidence, independence, creativity and even sexual liberation.“Guitars are kind of equal-opportunity story facilitators,” said Leo Mazow, curator of American art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, who organized “Storied Strings, where it recently closed. (The exhibition will be adapted for the Frist, mainly to reflect Tennessee culture.)He attributes the instrument’s popularity to its portability, affordability, easy to learn repertoire and ability to host many different genres: “One of the reasons guitars appear frequently in American art is they fit neatly within the picture plane, especially on the diagonal and one’s lap.”William H. Johnson’s “Blind Musician” was painted around 1940.Smithsonian American Art MuseumThe section “Blues and Folk” will focus on the role of both idioms “in the formation of a voice that comes up from the people, music that has often been conflated to express identity or to encourage change,” Mr. Scala said. Works featuring figures like Lead Belly, Odetta, and Josh White appear here. Romare Bearden’s 1967 collage, “Three Folk Musicians,” a nod to Picasso’s “Three Musicians,” Dr. Mazow said, “is a powerful work because it contrasts the guitar with its Western European origins to the banjo with its West African origins, but carries little to none of the racially vexed baggage that the banjo does.”Dr. Mazow said that one of his favorite works was Thomas Hart Benton’s “Jessie with Guitar,” of the artist’s daughter, from 1957. “Every birthday he would make a drawing or a painting of her,” he explained, “and this painting is based on sketches completed the morning of her 18th birthday.” Based on conversations with Jessie, who died in February, he said, “this guitar provided a way for the older dad to bond with his young, hip daughter, who was something of a folk sensation.”This photograph of the folk and protest singer Woody Guthrie was taken in 1943. Jessie Benton Collection. T.H. and R.P. Benton Trusts / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York“A Change is Coming” will highlight the guitar as a vehicle of political change, with images and videos of musicians — like Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez — who “protest the hypocrisy of America’s social and political systems,” Mr. Scala said. Dorothea Lange’s 1935 photograph “Coachella Valley” details a Mexican laborer playing a guitar at a camp in California, and Annie Leibovitz’s 1984 photo of Bruce Springsteen used to promote his “Born in the U.S.A.” tour will be on view.“Making a Living” will look at the role of money in music, “from historic paintings of blind street buskers to the ultrarich stars of today,” Mr. Scala said. Highlights include a 1912 oil painting by Robert Henri “Blind Singers,” a 1941 photograph by Walker Evans “Blind Man with Guitar,” and more recent images of Chet Atkins and the Carter Sisters performing at the Grand Ole Opry, and Dolly Parton on her tour bus.“Personification” will explore how the guitar is often associated with the human body, through words to describe it like “neck” and “waist” and at times, phallic connotations. A photograph of B.B. King hugging his guitar named Lucille reflects how the guitar can also be a kind of extension of, or an avatar for the human body, Mr. Scala said.“The Visual Culture of Early Rock and Roll” will feature electric guitars from the 1950s and ‘60s, including a 1959 Les Paul, instruments played by Eric Clapton, by Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones and footage of Sister Rosetta Tharpe playing electric guitar, a musician who is credited with transforming Black church music. “Most of the guitars in this section were played by male rock ’n’ roll stars,” Mr. Scala said. “I wanted to show her influence on the early development of rock ’n’ roll, puncturing the gender-specific notion of the ‘guitar god.’”This Gibson Explorer guitar was played by Eric Clapton and dates back to 1958.Private collection, TexasSeveral design milestones have contributed to the guitar’s appeal as a visual icon. “The first American guitar manufacturer, C.F. Martin,” right after he arrived from Germany in 1833, Dr. Mazow said, “is very concerned with aesthetics. There are several parts of early Martins, like the ornate deck decorations around the sound hole, that are not structural at all.” More than a century later, a 1954 Fender Stratocaster, which will be on view, is believed to be the first custom-painted model, he said. “It takes us back to a moment when one of the premier electric guitar makers decided that aesthetics count.”Paul Polycarpou, a guitar collector, whose rare pink Stratocaster appears in the show, said, “It’s art you can play.” Mr. Polycarpou, former editor and publisher of Nashville Arts Magazine, arrived in Nashville in the 1980s from England to play guitar on tour with Tammy Wynette. “It really is ground zero for guitar players,” he said of Nashville. “Not just in country music, but in all genres, whether it’s jazz, rockabilly, rock ’n’ roll or bluegrass.”The Frist recently opened a companion exhibition, “Guitar Town: Picturing Performance Today,” on view through Aug. 20, featuring works by 10 local photographers who celebrate Nashville’s music scene, with images of guitar players performing in venues across the city. “Anywhere in America, if you’ve got a story to tell, the guitar will help you tell it,” Mr. Polycarpou said. “That’s what makes it such a powerful symbol. Who can forget Elvis Presley, rocking with that guitar? You can’t forget that image of a young Bob Dylan singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ on a black-and-white television. You can’t forget that once you see it. It’s that powerful.” More

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      What Salt-N-Pepa and Issa Rae See in One Another

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      Cheryl “Salt” James: I remember Issa creating a Kickstarter account in 2011 to raise money so she could finish the first season of her YouTube series “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl” (2011-13). That always struck me as savvy and bold. I had the privilege of watching her build her audience, then take them with her to HBO for “Insecure.”When you’re an artist, people are always questioning your vision. Ideas can get stretched and pulled in different directions, and they can become diluted. Issa has always, from what I can see, followed her gut.On the CoverCheryl “Salt” James wears a Vince dress; Zana Bayne belt; Christian Louboutin boots; David Webb earrings, necklace and cuff; and Tabayer ring. Rae wears a Proenza Schouler dress; Stuart Weitzman sandals; Lisa Eisner earrings; Bulgari cuffs; and her own ring. Sandra “Pepa” Denton wears a Versace dress; Bottega Veneta shoes; Van Cleef & Arpels necklace and bracelet; and David Webb ring.Photograph by Renee Cox. Styled by Ian BradleySandra “Pepa” Denton: In her memoir [2015’s “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl”], Issa mentions struggling with not feeling Black enough. I can relate to that. When Salt-N-Pepa was selling millions of records, they called us “crossover,” which meant that we weren’t Black or hip enough. Now everyone wants to be pop. It means you’ve gone global. Like us, Issa stayed strong and was smart about her struggle, turning it into comedy. She kept it real, too.Issa Rae: I grew up on Salt-N-Pepa. I’ve always admired their collaboration as partners and the way they complement each other. It’s so hard for a group to last in this business, but they continue to be unapologetic about who they are and what they’re about. So much of my inspiration as a writer comes from female rappers. I write to rap music. When I was in middle school, I even tried to start rap groups because of Salt-N-Pepa. I had no business doing that, but they made me think I could.Photograph by Renee Cox. Styled by Ian BradleyPhotograph by Renee Cox. Styled by Ian Bradleyculture banner More

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      Lana Del Rey’s Private Audition With Joan Baez

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      Joan Baez: In 2019, Lana, whom I’d heard about from my granddaughter, Jasmine, invited me to sing with her in Berkeley. I said, “Why? Your audience could be my great-grandchildren.” And she said, “They don’t deserve you.”Lana and I are sort of opposites. When I was starting out, I wouldn’t let anyone else onstage. I had two microphones — one for me, one for my guitar — and I stood barefoot, singing sad folk songs. I didn’t even write for the first 10 years, and she’s a songwriter. On the CoverKaty GrannanI stopped singing three years ago; it was time to move on. After 60 years as a musician, I started painting. An artist friend said I need to loosen up and make mistakes so, if a painting isn’t working out, I dunk it twice in the swimming pool to see if it becomes something interesting. A hose will also do.If people want to learn from me, I tell them to look beyond the music to my engagement with human and civil rights. My voice was what it was, but the real gift was using it. A documentary has just been made about me [“Joan Baez I Am a Noise,” 2023]. There’s footage of me marching with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Grenada, Miss., in 1966. At another point in the film, I mention in a letter to my parents that I want to save the world. Lana doesn’t make such grand political statements — at Berkeley, she brought me out to do it for her. And yet, amid the colorful chaos and glitter of her show, she was at one point, I believe, barefoot.The singer delivers a joke in a Southern accent.Katy Grannan & Yumeng GuoLana Del Rey: I was having a show at Berkeley three years ago and wanted Joan to sing “Diamonds & Rust” (1975) with me. She told me she lived an hour south of San Francisco, and that if I could not only find her but also sing the song’s high harmonies on the spot, she’d do it. I was given a vague map to get to a house distinguishable only by its color and the chickens running in the yard. At one point during my audition, she stopped me with a steely look to let me know I didn’t get it right. By the end, she said, “OK, that’s good. I’ll sing with you.”culture banner More

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      Why Madhur Jaffrey and Michelle Zauner ‘Fell Toward Each Other’

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      Madhur Jaffrey: I learned about Michelle through my granddaughter. I read her book [“Crying in H Mart,” 2021] and listened to her music, and I thought she seemed like me. Our relationships to our mothers are in many ways similar — when she said in her book that her mother used to watch QVC and buy face creams, I thought of my own mother, who would have my sisters and me rub the cow’s milk from our own cows into our faces because she heard that Cleopatra bathed in the milk of an ass for her milky complexion. Our fathers were similar, too: Michelle’s father never took her music seriously, which reminded me of my father, who told the president of India that acting was just my hobby.culture banner More