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      Super Mario Bros. and Daddy Yankee Added to Recording Registry

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      The Library of Congress has designated 25 recordings, including Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” as “audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time.”Super Mario Bros. are currently ruling the box office. Now, they have also been designated an unlikely national treasure by no less than the Library of Congress.The composer Koji Kondo’s 1985 theme for the video game is among the 25 recordings just added to the National Recording Registry, joining Madonna’s 1984 album “Like a Virgin,” Daddy Yankee’s 2004 hit “Gasolina” and some of the earliest known mariachi recordings as “audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time.”The registry, created in 2000, designates recordings that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant,” and are at least 10 years old. This year’s entries were selected from more than 1,100 nominees submitted by the public. They bring the total number of titles on the registry to 625 — a tiny but elite slice of the nearly 4 million songs, speeches, radio broadcasts, podcasts and other recorded sounds in the library’s collection.This is the first time a video game soundtrack has been selected, according to the library. In the decades since the game’s release, Kondo’s “jaunty, Latin-influenced melody” (as the library describes it, calling it “the perfect accompaniment to Mario and Luigi’s side scrolling hijinks”) may have been driven permanently, or perhaps annoyingly, into the collective brain.But its creator remains relatively unknown. Kondo, who was born and raised in Japan, wrote the ditty — officially known as “Ground Theme” — in the 1980s, after seeing a recruiting flyer from Nintendo on a university bulletin board in Osaka.In a statement, Kondo, 61, who still works for Nintendo, said he was delighted by the designation. “Having this music preserved alongside so many other classic songs is such a great honor,” he said. “It’s actually a little difficult to believe.”And its significance, according to the library, goes far beyond the song itself, which was inspired in part by the music of the Japanese jazz fusion band T-Square. According to the library, Kondo’s soundtrack “helped establish the game’s legendary status and proved that the five-channel Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) sound chip was capable of a vast musical complexity and creativity.”This year’s list is heavy on familiar pop hits, including Madonna’s 1984 album, “Like a Virgin.”Library of CongressThis year’s list is heavy on familiar pop hits, including Led Zeppelin’s single “Stairway to Heaven,” Queen Latifah’s album “All Hail the Queen,” Mariah Carey’s single “All I Want for Christmas is You,” Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville,” and John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”Many are deemed significant not just for their musical contribution, but for the broader cultural shifts they exemplify. With “Gasolina,” the first reggaeton recording on the registry, the library notes that its “aural dominance” ushered in “a full reggaeton explosion and even saw various radio stations switching their formats,” including some from English to Spanish.The earliest item added to the registry is “The Very First Mariachi Recordings,” a compilation of recordings (including “The Parakeet”) made in 1907-9 by a group from the rural state of Jalisco, Mexico. The four musicians, led by the vihuela player Justo Villa, are credited with having introduced the style of music to the capital city — and eventually the world — a few years earlier.The most recent is the Northwest Chamber Orchestra’s recording, released in 2012, of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s “Concerto for Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra,” which was inspired by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.The registry also includes some spoken-word recordings. The journalist Dorothy Thompson’s radio commentaries on “the European situation,” made between Aug. 23 and Sept. 6, 1939, are cited as a “unique broadcast record” of the period right before the outbreak of World War II.The library’s list also recognizes Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot,” a short 1994 recording of him explaining the ideas behind his book of the same title. It was inspired by a famous photograph of the Earth taken by the space probe Voyager 1 during its final mission, which Sagan describes as revealing how the Earth was “a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos.” More

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      Sean Hayes Returns to the Piano in Broadway’s ‘Good Night, Oscar’

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      The version of Sean Hayes who arrived at a Midtown Manhattan rehearsal space on a Wednesday morning last month was the one everyone knows from his years as a television star on the series “Will & Grace” and as an entertainer. The effervescent Hayes tossed off a quip about the perceived snobbishness of the Hamptons. (“It’s like Shake Shack,” he said. “Anybody can go. It’s not that fancy.”) With similar ease, he sat at a piano and played a few measures of “Rhapsody in Blue.”But the Hayes who a short while later entered through the door of a set made to look like a 1950s-era TV dressing room was markedly different. His eyes were squinted and his posture was hunched. He occasionally twitched his head or shook his hands. He spoke with the defeated voice of a jowly man, sometimes dropping a one-liner (“Gee, I wonder who died,” he said, contemplating the flowers in his room) and sometimes becoming so vehement that his face turned red and a vein bulged from his neck.This is how Hayes alters himself to play Oscar Levant, the pianist and raconteur, in the new Broadway play “Good Night, Oscar,” which opens on April 24 at the Belasco Theater. Levant, who died in 1972, was as renowned for his interpretations of George Gershwin’s music and his roles in films like “An American in Paris” as he was for his dyspeptic appearances on TV game shows and talk shows, jesting ruefully about his struggles with mental health and prescription drug addiction.The play, written by Doug Wright and directed by Lisa Peterson, imagines Levant on a fateful day in 1958 when he has finagled his way out of a psychiatric hospital to be interviewed on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show.”Beneath its Eisenhower-era period details, “Good Night, Oscar” sets out to comment on enduring ideas about the burdens of celebrity and creative genius. Whether it succeeds will depend largely on Hayes’s ability to embody the dour Levant, a sort of public neurotic who may no longer be familiar to contemporary audiences.Oscar Levant circa 1947. He’d crack wise about the fragile state of his mental health, and once said, in answering a question about what he did for exercise, “I stumble and then I fall into a coma.”FPG/Archive Photos, via Getty ImagesBut as Hayes explained, these kinds of challenges are exactly what makes the play compelling to him.“If you’re not scaring yourself as an actor, what are you doing?” he said. “If everything’s safe, then the results will show that.” With this play, he added, “I’m going to swing for the fences. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, I’m still alive, right?”Hayes, 52, was sitting in a small room at the rehearsal space. He wore a zip-up sweatshirt and playfully shook his hair, a mixture of copper and silver strands, which he has grown out so it can be styled like Levant’s wavy coif.Though he rose to fame in his Emmy Award-winning role as Jack McFarland, the irrepressible “Will & Grace” sidekick, Hayes has his own complicated history as a pianist. When people in the industry are surprised to discover his musical roots, Hayes reminds them — with mock chagrin — that he played piano when he hosted the 2010 Tony Awards. “I’m like, did you not watch the Tonys?” he said. “I thought we all watched them together.”The youngest child of a mother who raised him on her own, Hayes started receiving piano training at age 5 from a neighbor in Glen Ellyn, Ill. (When his mother asked if he wanted lessons, Hayes said he replied, “I’m not doing anything else.”)By his teens, Hayes was playing Mozart sonatas and performing in competitions. But during high school and college (and a stint as music director at a dinner theater), he could feel himself being pulled away by the allure of acting — and weighed down by the pressure of classical performance.During concerts, Hayes said he found himself thinking: “The notes are the notes. These are the notes Beethoven wrote. These are the notes Chopin wrote. These are the notes Rachmaninoff wrote. And if you miss one of those notes, everybody notices.”With acting, he said, “I released myself of that pressure — and found a new pressure of always having to deliver on good material.”Similar anxieties — though amplified — prey upon the Levant depicted in “Good Night, Oscar.” Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “I Am My Own Wife,” described his incarnation of Levant as a Jazz Age Salieri, in thrall to George Gershwin and crushed by a self-imposed perception that he never measured up to his idol.Levant’s interviews with Paar are their own little sliver of TV history — shocking to audiences in their day and still potent for their candor. Levant would crack wise to Paar about his hospitalizations, the prescriptions he was taking or abusing, and the fragile state of his mental health. In a 1963 appearance, Paar asked him what he did for exercise. Levant answered, “I stumble and then I fall into a coma.”When Levant returned to the program a few months later, the host opened the show by telling his audience that Levant was “much better now” and that he would never “use or bring somebody out on this stage who was not completely well.”During that interview, Levant said his recent behavior had been “impeccable”: “I’ve been unconscious for the past six months,” he explained. “I’ve been doing extensive research in inertia.”Hayes starred with Debra Messing, left, and Eric McCormack, center, in “Will & Grace,” playing the irrepressible Jack McFarland.THOUGH FRIENDS HAD SUGGESTED he consider playing Levant, Hayes was not especially familiar with the pianist. As it emerged in 2009 that DreamWorks was developing a possible Gershwin biopic, intended for the director Steven Spielberg, in which Levant was a minor character, Hayes said he went so far as to commission his own hair and makeup test to see if he could at least look like Levant. (The film was not produced.)As he learned more about Levant, Hayes said he began to feel an affinity for him. “The mental health issues are in my family,” Hayes said. “Addictions are in my family. I thought, maybe I can wrap my head around this thing. As an actor, that’s what we do.”After Hayes’s Tony-nominated run in the 2010 Broadway revival of “Promises, Promises,” he and the show’s executive producer, Beth Williams, began discussing a possible Levant project for the stage. They later brought in Wright, who had been the screenwriter of the Gershwin film.Wright said he, too, was fascinated by Levant, having grown up with “a really entertaining, outrageous, brilliant father who was severely bipolar and refused medication, so Oscar’s mood swings were really familiar to me.”After a lunch meeting where Hayes demonstrated how he would play Levant, Wright said, he left “more passionate about it than ever before.”Asked how he gets himself into character, Hayes told a story of himself as a novice actor, playing an elf in a Kenny Rogers Christmas stage show. As the director increasingly asked the elf-actors to take on more of the duties of stagehands, Hayes said he told her, “You know we’re not really elves — we’re just playing elves.”In similar fashion, Hayes said, “I’m not really Oscar Levant. I’m playing Oscar Levant. This is my interpretation of Oscar Levant.”Long before the play’s 2022 debut at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, Hayes said he had been working on Levant’s voice, mannerisms, tics and physical bearing. He continues to refresh himself on those elements even now, though Hayes said he is not one of those actors who remains in character outside of rehearsals and performances.Reviewing that production for the Chicago Tribune, Chris Jones wrote that Hayes “displays talents here most of his fans will have no idea he had at his disposal,” adding that he delivers “a stunner of a lead performance: moving, empathetic, deeply emotional and slightly terrifying.”The announcement last year of the play’s Broadway transfer drew a rebuke from the playwright David Adjmi, who wrote in a Facebook post that he had persuaded Hayes to take on Levant and was commissioned by Williams to write a play for the actor.When Adjmi refused to “lighten the material,” he said Williams and Hayes replaced him with Wright while using their option on Adjmi to prevent him from further developing his play.At that time, the “Good Night, Oscar” producers said Hayes and Adjmi had parted ways over “different creative visions.” Hayes, in his interview, declined to revisit the matter. “We’ve already responded to that,” he said.Wright said that he had spoken with Adjmi “to ensure that it would not be awkward if I proceeded with the project, and he couldn’t have been more generous.”“I have to now perform in front of a live audience,” Hayes said of playing the piano onstage. “But it’s different this time. Because I don’t care if I miss a note.”Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesAdjmi wrote in an email that though he felt Hayes and Williams’s actions were “morally objectionable,” he told Wright that “it was not my place to tell him or any writer what job to take.” Adjmi said he later learned from his agents that Wright had taken the job.THERE REMAINS THE QUESTION of whether Hayes felt a personal connection to Levant that made him want to play him, but the actor seemed comfortable cultivating this air of ambiguity.Jason Bateman, a longtime friend of Hayes’s and a co-host of their popular SmartLess podcast, said he did not necessarily notice that Hayes was striving to play damaged dramatic figures.“If you’re asking, have I sensed a darker, more mysterious side of him, I would say no,” Bateman said. “Being able to sincerely be in a place of joy, openness and honesty already takes a great deal of emotional and spiritual intelligence.”Having made his own transition from comedies like “Arrested Development” to thrillers like “Ozark,” Bateman said it can be sufficiently satisfying for an actor “just sticking around long enough to show audiences the rest of what’s in your trick trunk.”Wright proposed an explanation rooted in a connection he felt he shared with Hayes. “We both have cultivated some pretty affable, convivial exteriors,” Wright explained. “But I think that’s a survival mechanism, being gay men in a hostile world and needing to be liked, to keep ourselves safe a lot of times. That conviviality conceals some darker waters, and that’s how he accesses Oscar.”Hayes remained coy. “In order to play the darker side of Oscar, I do tap into certain aspects and experiences of my life,” he said, “but those are between me and Oscar.”In the rehearsal studio, Hayes said he found it fitting and illuminating that, having set aside his musical career so long ago, he should choose a role that requires him to play piano in the guise of someone filled with self-doubt about his own proficiency with the instrument.“I have to now perform in front of a live audience,” he said. “But it’s different this time. Because I don’t care if I miss a note.”If Hayes makes a mistake, he can always say that he was doing it in character. “It’s organic to the material in the play,” he said. “And I’ve finally realized, nobody’s perfect.” More

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      Mötley Crüe Guitarist’s Lawsuit Says He Was Kicked Out

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      Mick Mars accused his bandmates of gaslighting him and cutting him out of future profits after he said he was retiring from touring.Mick Mars, the guitarist for the veteran hair-metal band Mötley Crüe, filed a lawsuit this week accusing his bandmates of pushing him out of the group and cutting him out of its future profits.The lawsuit, filed on Thursday in Superior Court in Los Angeles County, details a falling out that the band had with Mars after he announced in October that he was retiring from touring, citing chronic pain from an inflammatory disease that affects the spine.The rest of the band responded, the suit says, by convening an emergency shareholders’ meeting of Mötley Crüe’s main corporate entity to throw Mars out of the band, fire him as a director of the corporation and take away his shares. The lawsuit says Mars has a 25 percent stake in each of the band’s affiliated business entities.“It is beyond sad that, after 41 years together, a band would try to throw out a member who is unable to tour anymore because he has a debilitating disease,” said Edwin F. McPherson, Mars’s lawyer. “Mick has been pushed around for far too long in this band, and we are not going to let that continue.”Mötley Crüe formed in Los Angeles in 1981 and became one of the most popular of the so-called hair-metal bands. Mixing glam-rock theatrics, heavy metal riffs and radio-friendly pop hooks, they were fixtures on MTV in the 1980s and, by that decade’s end, had topped the Billboard 200 chart with their 1989 album, “Dr. Feelgood.” The band’s tell-all memoir, “The Dirt,” which chronicled their rise to fame and rocky history, was adapted into a Netflix biopic in 2019.Mars, 71, whose real name is Robert Alan Deal, joined Mötley Crüe shortly after it was founded and, according to the lawsuit, came up with the band’s name. He was diagnosed at 27 with ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory disease that can cause the vertebrae to fuse over time. The disease has caused his spine “to seize up and freeze completely solid,” the suit says, adding that he is in chronic pain and is not able to move his head in any direction.Last fall, Mars told his bandmates that, because of his “debilitating” ankylosing spondylitis, he couldn’t physically “handle the rigors of the road” and would no longer tour with the band, the suit says. Mars, who last performed with Mötley Crüe in Las Vegas on Sept. 9, 2022, said he would still record and perform with the band in a “residency situation.”After Mars publicly announced the change on Oct. 26, the band issued a separate statement saying that he had “retired” and that a guitarist named John 5 was replacing him.The other band members — Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil and Tommy Lee — called the emergency shareholders’ meeting, where they sought to fire Mars from seven band-affiliated corporations and limited-liability corporations, the lawsuit says. Those entities — Mötley Crüe Inc.; Mötley Crüe Touring Inc.; Red, White and Crue Inc.; Masters 2000 Inc.; Cruefest LLC; Mötley Records LLC; and Masters 2008 LLC — are listed as defendants in the lawsuit, which demands that Mars be allowed to review the band’s business records. He is also seeking reimbursement for his legal fees.Mars claims in his lawsuit that the band also demanded that he sign an agreement that his share of future touring profits and sales of merchandise featuring the band’s name and logo be reduced to 5 percent from 25 percent, and that he receive no income from sales of merchandise that “named or depicted” his replacement in the band.Sasha Frid, a lawyer for the band, said the lawsuit was “unfortunate and completely off base.” He said that Mars and other band members signed an agreement in 2008 that nobody would receive money from performances if they resigned.“Despite the fact that the band did not owe Mick anything — and with Mick owing the band millions in advances that he did not pay back — the band offered Mick a generous compensation package to honor his career with the band,” Frid said in an emailed statement. “Manipulated by his manager and lawyer, Mick refused and chose to file this ugly public lawsuit.”The lawsuit sheds light on the band’s tumultuous personal relationships, accusing Sixx, Mötley Crüe’s bassist, of making decisions on the band’s behalf without consulting his bandmates. Sixx also “gaslighted” Mars in recent years, the suit says, telling him that his guitar playing was subpar, that he often played the wrong chords onstage and that he had “some sort of cognitive dysfunction.”Frid provided The New York Times with signed declarations from seven members of the band’s crew, including the band’s production manager, who said Mars’s performance on Mötley Crüe’s 2022 stadium tour was “by far the worst I have ever seen in my years with the band.”“Mötley Crüe always performs its songs live, but during the last tour Mick struggled to remember chords, played the wrong songs and made constant mistakes which led to his departure from the band,” Frid said. “The band did everything to protect him, tried to keep these matters private to honor Mick’s legacy and take the high road.”In his lawsuit, Mars acknowledged occasionally playing the wrong chords on tour, but said it was because of a faulty in-ear monitor that made him unable to hear his guitar. Instead, he accused the other band members, including Sixx, of miming to recordings onstage. More

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      As Florence Price’s Music Is Reconsidered, She Turns 135. Again.

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      The work of Florence B. Price is having a renaissance, and new, foundational details about her life and racial identity are still being discovered.By any measure, a Florence B. Price renaissance is well underway.Seven decades since her death, and nine since the groundbreaking premiere of her Symphony in E minor, her luminous music is enrapturing audiences worldwide. Most recently, the London-based Chineke! Orchestra highlighted that symphony on its debut North American tour, which has included stops at Lincoln Center and Jordan Hall in Boston, where Price herself performed as a New England Conservatory pupil. She has amassed a recorded catalog that includes recent Grammy Award-winning albums by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Youth Symphony.This excitement stems from a half-century of scholarly and artistic work built on foundations laid by the late musicologists Barbara Garvey Jackson and Rae Linda Brown. A fluke discovery of dozens of Price’s unpublished scores at her abandoned Illinois summer home in 2009, which was then publicized in 2018, added significant momentum that has grown unabated since.While the explosion of attention is welcome, it has far outpaced a careful assessment of the historical record that may reshape how we view Price and her world. Brown, the leading authority on Price, died in 2017, before she could fully integrate the new discoveries into her magisterial biography that was published in 2020. But, knowing that there was still a great deal more to uncover, she remarked in a 2015 speech, “It is for the next generation of music scholars to tell the rest of the story.”As we take up the task of writing a new Price biography that draws on materials that were once lost, we have responded to Brown’s invitation by starting at the beginning. Here are just a few of the revelations that have led us to rethink what we know of Price, her music and the world she inhabited.To start, April 9 happens to be Price’s 135th birthday — again. The current scholarly consensus holds that she was born in Little Rock, Ark., in 1887. We believe that a preponderance of evidence, corroborated by a recently uncovered government document housed in the Library of Congress, now points to her true birth year as 1888.This small change would be a significant inconvenience for those invested in complete biographical accuracy, such as library cataloging teams. Yet such an otherwise slight discrepancy articulates the broader reality that basic facts about Price remain vexingly difficult to grasp and have emerged only through painstaking analysis of scattered and often disorganized records. Four decades ago, the historian Deborah Gray White described this dimension of Black women’s historiography as “mining the forgotten.”Through our meticulous research, we have also created a new sketch of the winding and at times traumatic multigenerational experience of racial ambiguity for Price and her family.Newly available photographs whose labels include Price’s maternal grandmother, Mary McCoy, and great-grandmother, Margaret Collins, appear to confirm that they would have been perceived as white according to post-bellum racial thought. Although no photograph of Price’s maternal grandfather, an Indianapolis barber named William Gulliver, is known to survive, local newspapers described him as “colored.” Curiously, the 1860 census lists the entire Gulliver family as “mulatto,” while the 1870 census lists them as “white.”That year, Gulliver sued Indianapolis City Schools for rejecting his daughter, Florence Irene (Price’s mother), from the white high school on racial grounds. Rather than seeking racially equitable admission, he argued that she was white by virtue of mixed European, African and Cherokee ancestry. The court disagreed, and a photograph from the time suggests that her racially ambiguous appearance placed her in the fissures of a hardening color line.In 1876, Florence Irene married a prominent dentist named James H. Smith and moved with him to Little Rock, where they both lived openly as members of the city’s Black elite. Despite their racial ambiguity, the Smiths clearly aligned themselves with Black political causes and at times continued to use the courts to resist tightening Jim Crow constructions of race, largely without success.After Dr. Smith died in 1910, however, Florence Irene deserted the family altogether to pass as white, entering what the historian Allyson Hobbs has called “a chosen exile.” The musicologist Michael Cooper has recently uncovered that she likely passed as white until she died in 1948, only five years before her daughter’s own death.One of Florence B. Price’s two daughters, Florence Louise, openly resented that sense of abandonment, passed down in family lore. Florence Irene “wasn’t the one who shouldn’t have married my grandfather,” she once wrote, “just the opposite.” No evidence currently suggests any reconnection between Florence Irene and the rest of the Price family.Price herself was well aware of racial interstices. In her final year of conservatory study in Boston, she falsely registered as a Mexican resident to avoid harassment from vocally segregationist, Southern white students — a longstanding problem for students of color.Much later in her career, on July 5, 1943, race, gender and American identity all ran through Price’s mind. In a now-famous letter to Serge Koussevitzky — her second to the influential Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor — she closed with a contemplative assertion, “I have an unwavering and compelling faith that a national music very beautiful and very American can come from the melting pot just as the nation itself has done.” And, repeating a hitherto unanswered call, “Will you examine one of my scores?”Earlier in the letter, she had written of the “two handicaps of sex and race,” the “Negro blood in my veins,” and how her Arkansas upbringing had shaped her understanding of African American folk music. Knowing of Koussevitzky’s keenness to champion American composers in wartime, Price then introduced the melting pot, not as an idealistic metaphor, but as her reality. He declined to program any of her music.Here and elsewhere, Price’s vocabulary paints a distinct self-understanding. In a document in Price’s handwriting, likely dating from 1939, she describes her maternal ancestry as “French, Indian and Spanish,” obscuring William Gulliver’s African descent. In contrast, she labeled her paternal ancestry as “Negro, Indian and English.” From this perspective, to tell Koussevitzky that she had “some Negro blood” was a sensible turn of phrase embracing an unclassifiable racial identity.In our reading, Price’s description punctured “one-drop” ideologies while affirming the creolization of her background. She wanted to complicate rigid conceptions of race, following the stance that her family had clearly taken for generations. As Hobbs has argued, the mutability of racial self-identification open to racially ambiguous people “reveals the bankruptcy of the race idea” while “offering a searing critique of racism” and “disarming racialized thinking.”And so, as we work to construct Price’s genealogical portrait and her recognition as the first African American woman composer of her stature, we consider how the dynamics of racial passing, ambiguity, colorism and — most important — her self-definition, factored into the path she charted as a creative artist.Notably, Price explained her musical style to Koussevitzky in terms of ambiguity and fusion. “Having been born in the South and having spent most of my childhood there,” she told him, “I believe I can truthfully say that I understand the real Negro music. In some of my work I make use of this idiom undiluted. Again, at other times it merely flavors my themes. And at still other times thoughts come in the garb of my mixed racial background.”Price’s capacious sense of self generated an equally capacious horizon of expression captured most clearly in her series of four solo piano works called “Fantasie Nègre.” From the first in the set, which draws upon the spiritual “Sinner, Please Don’t Let This Harvest Pass,” to the last, which weaves an original theme into rhapsodic declamations, each uses different strategies for sounding the folkloric and the fantastical of Black pasts, presents and futures.Price’s engagement with Black folk idioms in her symphonies and chamber music has also entered the spotlight as listeners have encountered these works for the first time. Often extracted for family performances, her dance-inspired “Juba” movements are especially popular. But limiting engagement to Price’s folkloric music is a mistake. As the composer George E. Lewis has argued, expanding conceptions of the possibilities in Black music must accompany an expanding understanding of Black life.A prolific song composer, Price was deeply inspired by the outstanding Black poets of her era, including Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson and Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr. She even set some of her own poetry. She was a voracious and eclectic reader who could bring extraordinary musical dynamism to texts across styles and themes. Her setting of “Debts,” by Jessie Belle Rittenhouse, is a profound meditation on the inward experience of love, while “Tobacco,” her setting of a comic poem by Graham Lee Hemminger, shows off her dry wit.Price’s approaches to the piano and organ, her principal instruments, were equally voluminous. Large-scale works like her Piano Concerto and organ suite display her virtuosic skills as a performer. Her picturesque character pieces — such as “Flame,” “Clouds” and “In Quiet Mood” — reveal a supreme colorist with an imaginative harmonic vocabulary and firm narrative sense.While recordings of these pieces display the breadth of Price’s creativity, many of her compositional ambitions went unfulfilled at the time of her death, in 1953. Drafts of two symphonies (one of which formed the basis of her tone poem “The Oak”), two piano concertos and a handful of chamber pieces are incomplete, while other major scores for chorus, piano and solo voice remain unpublished. Even so, as Price’s life and works come into sharper focus, the world will continue to find that her music cannot be contained. More

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      Ryuichi Sakamoto, Oscar-Winning Japanese Composer, Dies at 71

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      Mr. Sakamoto, whose work with Yellow Magic Orchestra influenced electronic music, composed scores for “The Last Emperor” and “The Revenant.”Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of Japan’s most prominent composers and a founder of the influential Yellow Magic Orchestra techno-pop band who scored films including “The Last Emperor,” “The Sheltering Sky” and “The Revenant,” died on Tuesday. He was 71.His Instagram page announced the date of his death, but it did not provide further details. Mr. Sakamoto said in January 2021 that he had received a diagnosis of rectal cancer and was undergoing treatment.Equally comfortable in futuristic techno, orchestral works, video game tracks and intimate piano solos, Mr. Sakamoto created music that was catchy, emotive and deeply attuned to the sounds around him. Along with issuing numerous solo albums, he collaborated with a wide range of musicians across genres, and received an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Grammy and two Golden Globes.His Yellow Magic Orchestra, which swept the charts in the late 1970s and early ’80s, produced catchy hits like “Computer Game” on synthesizers and sequencers, while also satirizing Western ideas of Japanese music.“The big theme of him is curiosity,” the musician Carsten Nicolai, a longtime collaborator, said in a phone interview in 2021. “Ryuichi understood, very early, that not necessarily one specific genre will be the future of music — that the conversation between different styles, and unusual styles, may be the future.”Mr. Sakamoto was beginning to achieve wide recognition in the early 1980s when the director Nagisa Oshima asked him to co-star, alongside David Bowie, in “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” a 1983 film about a Japanese P.O.W. camp. Mr. Sakamoto, having no background in acting, agreed under the condition that he could also score the film.The movie’s synth-heavy title track remained one of Mr. Sakamoto’s most famous compositions. He often adapted it, including for “Forbidden Colors,” a vocal version with the singer David Sylvian, as well as piano renditions and sweeping orchestral arrangements.Mr. Sakamoto in 1988. He won an Oscar for his work on “The Last Emperor.” Kyodo News, via Associated PressThen came music for films by the director Bernardo Bertolucci, including “The Last Emperor” (1987) “The Sheltering Sky” (1990) and “Little Buddha (1993). Mr. Bertolucci was demanding — he would shout “More emotional, more emotional!” at the composer, and made him rewrite music on the fly during recording sessions with a 40-person orchestra — but “The Last Emperor” won Mr. Sakamoto an Oscar in 1988. Mr. Sakamoto returned to his classical roots in the late 1990s with the album “BTTB,” or “Back to the Basics,” a collection of sentimental, delicate piano arrangements that evoked Claude Debussy, alongside more experimental wanderings into the innards of the piano in the spirit of John Cage.That release included “Energy Flow,” originally written for a commercial for a vitamin drink and released as a single after television viewers called in en masse to ask how they could find of the music. Amid Japan’s Lost Decade — a term for the economic stagnation that followed years of technology-driven growth — the tender piano ballad seemed to offer solace. “Perhaps it’s because people are looking for healing, for some answer to the stress of their country’s recession,” Mr. Sakamoto speculated, when “Energy Flow” became the first instrumental track to reach No. 1, in 1999, on Japan’s Oricon charts.After the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in 2011, Mr. Sakamoto became an activist in Japan’s antinuclear movement, organizing a No Nukes concert in 2012 at which a reunited Yellow Magic Orchestra, and the band Kraftwerk, one of Yellow Magic’s major influences, performed. The day before the concert, he spoke at a protest outside the residence of Japan’s prime minister. “I come here as a citizen,” he said. “It’s important that we all do what we can and raise our voices.”Mr. Sakamoto learned he had throat cancer in 2014. During treatment, he halted work but made an exception when the director Alejandro G. Iñárritu asked him to write music for his film “The Revenant.” With Mr. Nicolai, who performs under the name Alva Noto, Mr. Sakamoto produced a score of luminous dread that was widely acclaimed.He conceived a new project in homage to Andrei Tarkovsky, one of his abiding influences, which became the 2017 “async,” his first solo album in eight years and a summation of his career, with haunting chorales, ethereally synthesized soundscapes, and a recording of the writer Paul Bowles reciting a passage on mortality from “The Sheltering Sky.”Mr. Sakamoto, second from left, had a role in the film “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” and also wrote the music. With him, from left, are Jack Thomas, the film’s. producer; David Bowie, who starred, and Nagisa Oshima, the director.Jacques Langevin/Associated PressIn later years, Mr. Sakamoto’s music became increasingly spacious and ambient, attuned to the flow of time. In an interview with The Creative Independent website, he described why he played his older music so much slower than he used to. “I wanted to hear the resonance,” he said. “I want to have less notes and more spaces. Spaces, not silence. Space is resonant, is still ringing. I want to enjoy that resonance, to hear it growing.”Ryuichi Sakamoto was born on Jan. 17, 1952, in Tokyo. His father, Kazuki Sakamoto, was a well-known literary editor, and his mother, Keiko (Shimomura) Sakamoto, designed women’s hats. He began piano lessons at age 6, and started to compose soon after. Early influences included Bach and Debussy — whom he once called “the door to all 20th century music” — and he discovered modern jazz as he fell in with a crowd of hipster rebels as a teenager. (At the height of the student protest movement, he and his classmates shut down their high school for several weeks.)Mr. Sakamoto was drawn to modern art and especially the avant-garde work of Cage. He studied composition and ethnomusicology at Tokyo University of the Arts and began playing around with synthesizers and performing in the local pop scene.In 1978, Mr. Sakamoto released his debut solo album, “Thousand Knives,” a trippy amalgam that opens with the musician reciting a poem by Mao through a vocoder, followed by a reggae beat and a procession of Herbie Hancock-inspired improvisations. That year, the bassist Haruomi Hosono invited him and the drummer Yukihiro Takahashi to form a trio that became Yellow Magic Orchestra. (Mr. Takahashi died in January.)The band’s self-titled 1978 album was a huge hit, and influenced numerous electronic music genres, from synth pop to techno. The group broke up in 1984, in part because Mr. Sakamoto wanted to pursue solo work. (They have periodically reunited since the 1990s.) Mr. Sakamoto continued tinkering with outré, high-tech approaches in his 1980 album “B-2 Unit,” which included the otherworldly electro single “Riot in Lagos.”Mr. Sakamoto performing in Rome in 2009.Domenico Stinellis/Associated PressAfter the Bertolucci films, Mr. Sakamoto was seemingly everywhere — appearing in a Madonna music video, modeling for Gap, and writing music for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. His collaborators for the eclectic albums “Neo Geo” (1987) and “Beauty” (1989) included Iggy Pop, Youssou N’Dour, and Brian Wilson, and he toured with a world-fusion band from five continents. By the mid-1990s, Mr. Sakamoto had refashioned himself as a classical composer, touring arrangements of his earlier music in a piano trio. His work simultaneously became grandiose in scale and themes: he wrote a symphony, “Discord,” exploring grief and salvation (with spoken word contributions by David Byrne and Patti Smith), and an opera, “LIFE,” a meditation on 20th century history that received mixed reviews.Along with writing music for video games and designing ringtones for the Nokia 8800 phone, Mr. Sakamoto oversaw live streams of his concerts that featured a “remote clap” function, in which online viewers could press their keyboard’s F key to applaud. The strokes would be registered on a screen in the auditorium.In the 21st century, he began to focus again on more experimental work, inspired by a new generation of collaborators including the producer Fennesz and Mr. Nicolai, who layered glitchy electronics over Mr. Sakamoto’s piano.“He taught me that I should not be afraid of melody,” Mr. Nicolai said, “that melody has the possibility of experimentation as well.”Mr. Sakamoto became outspoken as an environmentalist, recording the sounds of a melting glacier for his 2009 record “Out of Noise.” For portions of “async,” he performed on an out-of-tune piano that had been partly submerged in the 2011 Tohoku tsunami. He recorded what became his final album, “12,” as a kind of diary of sketches, following a lengthy hospitalization, through 2021 and 2022. “I just wanted to be showered in sound,” he said of the record. “I had a feeling that it’d have a small healing effect on my damaged body and soul.” In December, he gave a career-spanning, livestreamed solo piano concert at Tokyo’s 509 Studio.Mr. Sakamoto married Natsuko Sakamoto in 1972, and they divorced 10 years later. His second marriage, to the musician Akiko Yano in 1982, ended in divorce in 2006. His partner was Norika Sora, who served as his manager. Information about his survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Sakamoto greets fans after a performance in New York in 2010.Hiroko Masuike for The New York TimesMr. Sakamoto’s attention to sound suffused his daily life. After many years of eating at the Manhattan restaurant Kajitsu, he recalled in a 2018 interview with The New York Times, he wrote an email to the chef saying, “I love your food, I respect you and I love this restaurant, but I hate the music.” Then, without fanfare or pay, he designed subtle, tasteful playlists for the restaurant.He simply wanted better sounds to accompany his meals. More

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      Keith Reid, Who Brought Poetry to Procol Harum, Dies at 76

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      He did not perform with the group, but his impressionistic words made it one of the leading acts of the progressive-rock era.Keith Reid, whose impressionistic lyrics for the early progressive rock band Procol Harum helped to fuel emblematic songs of the 1960s, most notably “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” has died. He was 76.His death was announced in a Facebook post from the band. The announcement did not say where or when he died or cite a cause, but according to news media reports he died in a hospital in London after having been treated for cancer for two years.During its heyday in the late 1960s and ’70s, Procol Harum stood out as musically ambitious, even by prog-rock standards — as demonstrated by its 1972 album, “Procol Harum Live: In Concert With the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.”The band’s music, which at times bordered on the sepulchral, required lyrics that soared along with it. Mr. Reid was happy to oblige. “I always write them as poems,” he said of his lyrics in a 1973 interview with Melody Maker, the British music magazine. Indeed, with Procol Harum, the words tended to come first.As the lyricist Bernie Taupin has long done for Elton John, Mr. Reid generally submitted his lyrics to the band’s singer, pianist and primary songwriter, Gary Brooker, or sometimes the band’s guitarist, Robin Trower, or organist, Matthew Fisher, who also wrote songs.While Mr. Reid was a founding member of the group, he was more a rock star by association, since he did not sing or play an instrument and thus did not record or perform with Procol Harum. Still, he rarely missed a gig.“If I didn’t go to every gig, I would not be part of the group,” he told Melody Maker. Touring, he said, helped him write: “I find it much easier to shut myself away in a hotel room for two hours than to work at home, where there are far too many distractions.”Procol Harum showcased its musical ambitions on the 1972 album “Procol Harum Live: In Concert With the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.”The results of such focus were apparent with “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” the first single off the band’s debut album, released in 1967. The song, which hit No. 1 on the British charts and No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States, sold around 10 million copies worldwide. And it endured long after the ’60s drew to a close.By the ’80s, it had achieved canonical status. It was often used to underscore the wistful memories of veterans of the flower-power era in films like Lawrence Kasdan’s 1983 hippies-to-yuppies midlife crisis tale, “The Big Chill,” and Martin Scorsese’s May-December romance installment in the 1989 film “New York Stories,” which also included short films by Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola.The song’s famous opening lines (“We skipped the light fandango/Turned cartwheels ‘cross the floor”) conjure bawdy images of drunken debauchery at a party, illuminating a failing romantic relationship. They are set to a haunting chord progression with echoes of Bach, rendered in ecclesiastical fashion by Mr. Fisher’s organ, and sung by Mr. Brooker in a raspy voice, soaked with longing and regret.She said “There is no reasonAnd the truth is plain to see.”But I wandered through my playing cardsWould not let her beOne of sixteen vestal virginsWho were leaving for the coastAnd although my eyes were openThey might have just as well’ve been closed.“I had the phrase ‘a whiter shade of pale,’ that was the start, and I knew it was a song,” Mr. Reid said in a 2008 interview with the British music magazine Uncut.“I was trying to conjure a mood as much as tell a straightforward, girl-leaves-boy story,” he continued. “With the ceiling flying away and room humming harder, I wanted to paint an image of a scene.”Keith Stuart Brian Reid was born on Oct. 19, 1946, in Welwyn Garden City, north of London, one of two sons of a father from Austria and a mother who had been born in England to Polish parents. His father, who was fluent in six languages, had been a lawyer in Vienna but was among more than 6,000 Jews arrested there in November 1938. He fled to England upon his release.His father’s experiences at the hands of the Nazis left emotional scars that Mr. Reid said influenced his worldview, and his writing.“The tone of my work is very dark, and I think it’s probably from my background in some subconscious way,” Mr. Reid said in an interview with Scott R. Benarde, the author of “Stars of David: Rock ’n’ Roll’s Jewish Stories” (2003).In 1966, Mr. Reid was introduced by a mutual friend to Mr. Brooker, who was with a band called the Paramounts, whose members also included Mr. Trower and the drummer B.J. Wilson. Mr. Reid and Mr. Brooker became friends and started writing together; they, Mr. Trower, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Fisher would all eventually form Procol Harum.Mr. Reid, fourth from left, made a rare on-camera appearance when the 1970 version of Procol Harum posed for a group photo. With him were, from left, Gary Brooker, B.J. Wilson, Robin Trower and Chris Copping.Mike Randolph/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesProcol Harum never again scaled the heights it achieved with its first single, but it continued to be a major act through the mid-1970s, regularly releasing albums and scoring the occasional hit single; a live orchestral version of “Conquistador,” a song from the band’s first album, reached the Top 20 in 1972.Mr. Reid said he felt lost after the band broke up in 1977 (it would reform, in various incarnations, over the years). In 1986 he moved to New York, where he started a management company and composed songs (music as well as lyrics) for other artists.That year, he collaborated with the songwriters Andy Qunta, Maggie Ryder and Chris Thompson of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band on “You’re the Voice,” which was recorded by the Australian singer John Farnham, and topped the charts in several countries, although it made little impact in the United States.During the 1990s, Mr. Reid wrote songs for Annie Lennox, Willie Nelson, Heart and many others. He would eventually turn the focus on his own talents, releasing two albums by what he called The Keith Reid Project, “The Common Thread” (2008) and “In My Head” (2018), which included artists like Southside Johnny, John Waite and Mr. Thompson.Mr. Reid’s survivors include his wife, Pinkey, whom he married in 2004.Unlike the rock luminaries he came of age alongside, Mr. Reid did not bask in the lights of the stage. Even so, he experienced his own form of glory, gazing on as the members of Procol Harum brought life to his words at shows he refused to miss.“You wouldn’t expect a playwright not to attend the rehearsals of his play,” he told Melody Maker in 1973. “My songs are just as personal to me. They’re a part of my life. They are not gone from me.” More

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      Teyana Taylor’s Pivot to Acting: ‘It Was a Real-Life Faith Walk’

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      As an R&B singer, producer, dancer, music video director, choreographer and fashion designer, Teyana Taylor is no stranger to the spotlight. She’s known for her sultry singing, sexy dance moves and edgy turns on the red carpet — at this year’s Vanity Fair Oscar party, it was a sheer dark suit with a metallic gold bra. At New York Fashion Week in February, it was an avant-garde suit by Thom Browne. To it all, she brings a touch of the theatrical.But in the film “A Thousand and One,” Taylor gives an entirely different performance. Here, she plays Inez, a woman orphaned at a young age who is struggling to rebuild her life after a stint at Rikers Island. With an aim to be a better provider, she kidnaps her six-year-old son, Terry, out of New York City’s negligent foster care system.Over the course of the film, which covers a decade in gentrifying Harlem from the 1990s to the early 2000s, Taylor, who is a Harlem native, strips Inez to her core: A single Black mother trying to create a quality life for Terry while carrying the weight of the city on her shoulders. It’s the first feature film written and directed by A.V. Rockwell, and it won the grand jury prize in the U.S. dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Taylor received acclaim for her unadorned performance, with The New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis calling her “terrific” in a notebook from the festival.With Aaron Kingsley Adetola in “A Thousand and One,” which won the grand jury prize in the U.S. dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival.Focus Features“This is the story of a street woman, and I think you needed to feel her rawness,” said Rockwell in a video interview. “One of the things that I told Teyana in terms of preparing for the role was, ‘I hope you’re ready to forgo your glam.’”Life transitions gave Taylor, 32, a head start down that road. During filming, she was six months postpartum after giving birth to her second daughter. “You don’t feel beautiful, you don’t feel confident,” she said of that time, in a video interview. She also attended the funerals of three different friends, all in Harlem, including one she grew up with as a child. “Having to see your friends lying in caskets. Going to wakes on my lunch break. I had a lot to cry about,” she said.But in “A Thousand and One,” the character Inez hardly cries, despite her hardships. Even at her most vulnerable, when it seems the men for whom she has sacrificed have abandoned her, she cracks a smile. “She’s able to have this strength even through her tears,” Taylor said. “It made me respect A.V. on a whole other level.”When Taylor watched the final cut, she remembered filming scenes of emotive crying. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh no, this is my Viola moment! Why are you not using the snot? I’m going in right now, I killed this scene.’ And A.V.’s like, ‘No, that’s just not who Inez is.’ She’s always in survival mode to people.”Taylor understood what it’s like to be in survival mode. She drew parallels to her professional life, saying she suffered abandonment by people she trusted to protect her. With her mother, Nikki Taylor, as her manager, she entered the music business at age 15. She has choreographed music videos for Beyoncé and appeared in other videos by Jay-Z and Kanye West. Her single, “Gonna Love Me,” has been streamed more than 167 million times on Spotify, and her three studio albums all reached the Billboard 200 chart.Then in late 2020, she announced in an Instagram post that she was retiring from music. She was signed with G.O.O.D. Music/Def Jam at the time and had released “The Album” earlier that year. In her post, she mentioned “feeling super under appreciated” and “constantly getting the shorter end of the stick.” She also hinted at the time “that when one door closes another will open,” and the first opportunity that came along afterward was the role of Inez.“I didn’t have that Inez role locked in before I retired, so it was a real-life faith walk,” Taylor said.“It’s realizing that the things that I’ve been through and the amount of time that it took was not a punishment,” Taylor said. “It was preparation.”Erik Carter for The New York TimesNow, she’s forging ahead as an actor, director and producer. She has roles in two other upcoming films, “The Book of Clarence” and “The Smack,” and said she has plans to direct her first feature, a project from the production company she co-founded, the Aunties.Later this year, she’ll also release her own Air Jordan sneaker called, fittingly, “A Rose From Harlem.” It features a rose-colored, thorn-trimmed swoosh on the right sneaker, and a black swoosh with jagged stitching on the left. Taylor sees both herself and Inez as roses from Harlem. “This sneaker is a love letter to all the roses who grow out the concrete, from their own hoods, really making it out and putting on for their city, putting on for their neighborhood and really just making the hood proud,” she said.According to her, the wait was long for her own Air Jordan, and for the collaboration to launch the same year as the release of “A Thousand and One” seemed predestined. Taylor felt at peace with the past, and with any feelings of frustration and resignation in her career.“I always say, grace over grudges. Because what’s for me is already written,” she said. “So if it was meant for me to be abandoned or maybe mistreated, that gave me the strength to be able to tap into this character, Inez. It’s realizing that the things that I’ve been through and the amount of time that it took was not a punishment. It was preparation.”In the film, Inez tells Terry she’ll go to war for him. She defers her dream to be a hairstylist, instead keeping a steady job as a cleaner to pay the rent. It mirrored some of the experiences Taylor’s own mother contended with.“It was rough, but I had to do what I had to do,” Teyana’s mother, Nikki, said in a phone interview. She worked two corporate jobs and went to college while raising a young child mostly on her own, sometimes with the help of family members. “The way I looked at it, I’m going to always go above and beyond to take care of my kid. I always made sure she never needed for anything or wanted for anything.”Playing a single mother in the film, Taylor tapped into her experience being raised by a single mother.Erik Carter for The New York TimesTaylor herself now has two daughters with her husband, Iman Shumpert, the basketball player who is also a winner of “Dancing With the Stars.” The children are Iman Tayla, nicknamed Junie, age 7, and Rue Rose, age 2 (“going on 22,” Taylor said). During the film shoot, Junie was the same age as Aaron Kingsley Adetola, the actor who plays the young version of Terry, and in real life, the two children became best friends. Junie wanted to be on set and part of it all. “They let her call ‘Action!’ a few times. She’s following in my footsteps. She’s literally a mini me,” Taylor said.There’s no obvious trace of Taylor’s music and dance skills in her performance as Inez, but her background in these disciplines influenced her approach. For one, she was very in touch with her body, an important part of any performance, according to Rockwell, the director. “She has such a unique timbre to her voice,” Rockwell said, so they played around with how Inez talks and moves as she matures in the film. “Teyana was able to dig into these parts of herself. To see her find those steps was exciting for me, and really inspiring to see this performer come to life in a way that I don’t think anybody was expecting.”The way a musician records a verse or song 50 times to get it right, Taylor gave her performance the same level of specificity. “Detail is a skill, and I’m a very detailed person,” Taylor said. For her, the stakes were high. She didn’t want to continue making work in which she was just dancing or looking glamorous. She had entered a new phase and wanted to be taken seriously. “I had a story to tell,” she said. “In a lot of ways, Inez’s story was my story.” More