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      Sandra Trehub, Pioneer in the Psychology of Music, Dies at 84

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      She showed that basic musical ability is present in infants across cultures, laying a foundation for a growing field of study.Sandra Trehub, a psychologist and researcher whose work helped illuminate how children perceive sound, and how lullabies and music fit into their cognitive and social development, died on Jan. 20 at her home in Toronto. She was 84.The death was confirmed by her son Andrew Cohen.Over a half-century as a psychologist at the University of Toronto, where she began working in 1973, Dr. Trehub produced seminal work in the field that is now known as the psychology of music.“Back then, there were very few people in psychology and neuroscience who were studying music at all as a human behavior,” Laurel Trainor, a psychologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said in a phone interview. “Sandra said, look, music is universal, we spend a lot of time and energy on music — what is its purpose? Why do we do this?”Dr. Trehub’s research found that there are indeed universally shared responses to music among infants, beginning with sing-song-y baby talk by parents across different cultures.She found that infants prefer certain melodic intervals over others and can grasp the contour and shape of a lullaby. She further established that infants and toddlers can — better than adults — notice differences in some elements of music from other countries and cultures, both tonal and rhythmic. That finding suggested that as people get older, their ability to distinguish discrepancies in unfamiliar music decreases while their ability to notice nuance in familiar music increases.“Sandra was the first psychologist to study musical abilities for their own sake in infants,” Isabelle Peretz, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal, wrote in an email. Before Dr. Trehub, she added, many researchers thought “that musicality was a pure cultural product which was acquired and possessed by a few select people: the musicians.”It is now widely accepted that music is an important developmental tool for everyone, starting in infancy, and that musical fluency among parents can deeply affect their children’s long-term health and mental development.“Her work helps to legitimize early childhood music education, which basically didn’t exist before the 1980s,” Samuel Mehr, a psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and director of the Music Lab at Haskins Laboratories, Yale University, said by email.Dr. Trehub’s findings might seem intuitive or even obvious now, he added, but that only highlights the importance of her work. “Every bit of research in the psychology of music over the past 40 years can be traced back to Sandra Trehub,” he said.Sandra Edythe Trehub was born on May 21, 1938, in Montreal. She earned her bachelor’s degree in economics at McGill University in Montreal in 1959 and her master’s in psychology there in 1971.After completing her doctorate, also at McGill, she began her career as an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Some of her earliest work showed how infants as young as one month old could distinguish between speech sounds; in a paper, she wrote that babies would increase their “sucking rate” on an artificial nipple when new vowels were introduced.Using the same methodology, Dr. Trehub went on to show in another paper how babies can distinguish between sounds in some foreign languages better than adults. That finding, said Janet Werker, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, provided the groundwork for a large body of subsequent research demonstrating that babies are born with the ability to pick up on the basic acoustics of any of the world’s languages. The research has served to heighten the importance of early exposure to foreign languages, with continuing ramifications in education.As Dr. Trehub earned tenure at the University of Toronto, her work shifted from speech to music. She published prolifically in journals, including two influential papers in 1977. One showed that the heart rates of five-month-old infants changed when exposed to different rhythms. The other showed that infants can sense the relationships between notes — they can tell when the same melody is transposed to a different key. Dr. Trehub’s research was inspired in part by her own love of music; two of her favorite singers were Leonard Cohen and David Bowie.Dr. Trehub’s marriage to Norman Cohen in 1957 ended in divorce in 1968. She married Ronald Matthews in 1970; he died in 2007. In addition to her son Andrew, she is survived by two more children, Dana and Ira Cohen; her sisters, Estelle Ebert and Maxine Seidman; 18 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.She also leaves an intellectual lineage of psychologists who studied with her and went on to head some of the most active psychology of music labs in the world.Dr. Trainor, one of Dr. Trehub’s early graduate students, remembered going to talks on the psychology of music in the 1980s and ’90s with little more than 10 people in the audience. Now there are conferences with thousands of researchers.“Part of that is a testament to Sandra, and the quality of her work — she couldn’t be ignored,” said Dr. Trainor.Glenn Schellenberg, a psychologist at the University of Toronto who wrote more than 30 articles with Dr. Trehub, agreed. “She was like Joni Mitchell,” he said by phone. “In the end, she really got every credit that she deserved.” More

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      For Burt Bacharach, ‘Promises, Promises’ Was One Broadway Hit Too Many

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      The perfectionist composer was content with being a one-hit musical-theater wonder, calling the experience the hardest thing he had ever done.In the late 1960s, when Broadway show tunes and popular music were veering in opposite directions, the producer David Merrick, one of the most hidebound curmudgeons on Broadway, reached out to one of the most successful American pop composers of the time: Burt Bacharach.Bacharach (who died on Feb. 8 at age 94) already had more than a dozen international hits with his lyricist partner, Hal David, including “Walk on By,” “Alfie,” “I Say a Little Prayer” and “The Look of Love.” That last song was introduced in the spy parody “Casino Royale,” and, in fact, Bacharach had met Merrick at that movie’s London premiere in 1967. They agreed to work together if the right project came along.Bacharach wasn’t exactly bedazzled by the bright lights of Broadway. “When I was getting successful with pop songs, and having hits, there wasn’t something burning inside me that said, “Boy, I need to write a Broadway show,’” he said in an interview for the 1985 book “Notes on Broadway.” “I was quite content being in the studio and making my records.”It just so happens that when Merrick eventually wrangled the playwright Neil Simon to adapt Billy Wilder’s 1960 Academy Award-winning film “The Apartment” as a musical, it was Simon who pushed for Bacharach and David, as he wanted to update the material and incorporate a sound that might reach contemporary audiences. “Promises, Promises,” as the show would be called, centered on a well-meaning milquetoast accountant in a New York insurance firm who essentially pimps out his apartment to his superiors in exchange — so he is promised — for a series of promotions. Merrick, a master of the Show for Tired Businessmen (“Do Re Mi,” “Hello, Dolly!,” “How Now, Dow Jones”), assembled the perfect team for a show about tired businessmen.The material was beautifully tailored for Bacharach and David’s sensibilities — urban, witty, rueful, alienated but passionate — and the songwriters were faithful to the tone of Simon’s book: a savvy mix of wisecracks, romantic heartbreak and contemporary satire.But one early aspect of this collaboration was telling: While Simon and David crafted the text together in New York, Bacharach remained deeply involved with other studio projects in Hollywood, setting his music to David’s lyrics from afar. He would not arrive in New York until September 1968, with the first Broadway preview just two months away.Orbach, background center, in one of the “Promises, Promises” production numbers. He won a Tony Award for playing the nebbish accountant, Chuck.Getty ImagesDespite the distance, Bacharach was already demonstrating how his command of the pop charts could pay dividends — even before the show went into rehearsals. “I thought it would be great if the music came out a couple of months before, so [theater audiences] would have some familiarity with the work,” he recounted in the liner notes to a 1989 three-CD set of his music. His eternal muse, Dionne Warwick, recorded two songs from the incipient score, while Bacharach worked his usual meticulous magic in the protected confines of the recording studio, getting his complicated rhythms just right. Warwick’s single of the “Promises, Promises” title number hit No. 19 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.“As musicals go, it couldn’t have been easier,” Bacharach recalled in “Notes on Broadway.” “The financing, getting it done, getting it in the theater — it just went with lightning speed.”Then came the November tryout in Boston, where Merrick’s usual boorish behavior was on display. He apparently demanded a hit song for the second act, so that the nebbish hero, Chuck, could connect romantically (however tenuously) with Fran, the elevator operator for whom he pines.Bacharach would have gladly obliged, but he was sent to Massachusetts General with pneumonia. Merrick stomped around and cursed the songwriters and supposedly threatened to hire Leonard Bernstein to replace them, but David beavered away and came up with wistful lyrics to a duet called “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.” He even incorporated Bacharach’s malady: “What do you get when you kiss a guy?/You get enough germs to catch pneumonia./After you do/he’ll never phone ya.”When he was released from the hospital, Bacharach found the melody to match the malady: “Maybe because I was still not feeling all that well, I wrote the melody faster than I had ever written any song before in my life,” Bacharach wrote in his 2013 memoir, “Anyone Who Had a Heart.”Ahead of the New York opening, Bacharach wanted a sound more like what he was used to in a recording studio, so he brought in his frequent recording engineer Phil Ramone and had the Shubert Theater’s sound system redesigned. The orchestra was divided into small groupings (separated by fiberglass panels), each surrounding a microphone that would relay the sound to be mixed live at the back of the theater. And the orchestrator Jonathan Tunick (in one of his first Broadway jobs) added two guitars — one acoustic, one electric — and a quartet of female singers, billed as Orchestra Voices. The technical virtuosity of these innovations unnerved Merrick so much that, according to a New York Times article about the arrangements, he admonished Ramone and Bacharach: “I don’t want the audience walking out of the theater saying, ‘It’s a recording.’”But even Merrick fell in love again after “Promises, Promises” opened on Dec. 1, 1968, to rapturous reviews. On opening night, he told a reporter that Bacharach was “the first original American composer since Gershwin.” In an article in The Times, John S. Wilson wrote, “The tight Bacharachian rhythmic patterns keep bouncing around in your head as you walk into the night, songless but pulsing with a busy little beat.”Sean Hayes and Kristin Chenoweth in the 2010 Broadway revival of “Promises, Promises” at the Broadway Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut the experience didn’t make Broadway burn any brighter inside Bacharach. “Somehow I lived through it, and I’m still alive,” he told Rex Reed in a Times interview before the show opened. “But this has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’m wiped out by this show, man. I’ll be in Palm Springs on Wednesday.” And he was as good as his word — joining his wife, the actress Angie Dickinson, in a newly-rented desert home with a tennis court and a swimming pool.A week or so later, a phone call to Palm Springs from Merrick confirmed that there were limits to what Bacharach could control in a live production, eight times a week. “He called me and said ‘Eight subs [substitute players] in the orchestra last night, including the drummer’ and guess who was in the audience? Richard Rodgers! This great, great composer. Richard Rodgers!,” he recounted in “Notes on Broadway.” “It made me feel just terrible, because my music is not that easy to play. A song like ‘Promises, Promises’ changes time signature in almost every bar. And I’ve got … a drummer who’s sight-reading, who’s never played it before.”“Promises, Promises” was hardly an irreparable disappointment for Bacharach: The original Broadway production ran for 1,281 performances (and Jerry Orbach, who played the accountant, won a Tony Award for the role); there was a robust West End run; and a Broadway revival (sized and trimmed for contemporary tastes) in 2010 starred Kristin Chenoweth and Sean Hayes. And “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” would become a smash single for Warwick in 1970, hitting No. 1 on Billboard’s adult contemporary chart; it would also be the last time a song originating on Broadway reached the top spot on any of the Billboard charts.That was probably cold comfort to Bacharach. Looking back on his Broadway experience for the CD liner notes decades later, he was definitive: “If you’re doing a musical, it’s going to change every night,” he wrote. “If you’re doing something on record, it doesn’t get changed every night. So that’s what I prefer to do.”David, also quoted in the liner notes, said about his collaborator and the reality of Broadway: “If you’re a perfectionist, it can drive you crazy.”Sixteen months after “Promises” opened, Stephen Sondheim’s “Company” arrived on Broadway and the modernity of its sound would have been unthinkable without Bacharach’s innovations. Indeed, many of them were reintroduced by Tunick, the “Promises” orchestrator, when he took on the orchestrations for “Company.”“If I were hearing ‘Another Hundred People’ for the first time,” the music critic Will Friedwald said in an interview for this article, “I would have guessed it was Bacharach and not Sondheim.”Chenoweth with Bacharach, far right, and Simon, center, at the curtain call for the revival’s opening night performance in April 2010.Charles Sykes/Associated PressBacharach was initially philosophical about “Promises, Promises” — “If we knocked down a few doors with my rhythms or the new sound in the show, great,” he told Reed — but the theatrical magic he created for his only Broadway score is so apposite and hip and melancholy and sweet that it makes one ache for what might have been.Laurence Maslon is an arts professor at New York University. His latest book, “I’ll Drink to That! Broadway’s Legendary Stars, Classic Shows, and the Cocktails They Inspired,” will be published in May. More

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      Burt Bacharach, Composer Who Added a High Gloss to the ’60s, Dies at 94

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      His sophisticated collaborations with the lyricist Hal David — “The Look of Love,” “Walk On By,” “Alfie” and many more hits — evoked a sleek era of airy romance.Burt Bacharach, the debonair pop composer, arranger, conductor, record producer and occasional singer whose hit songs in the 1960s distilled that decade’s mood of romantic optimism, died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94.His publicist Tina Brausam confirmed the death. No specific cause was given.A die-hard romantic whose mature style might be described as Wagnerian lounge music, Mr. Bacharach fused the chromatic harmonies and long, angular melodies of late-19th-century symphonic music with modern, bubbly pop orchestration, and embellished the resulting mixture with a staccato rhythmic drive. His effervescent compositions epitomized sophisticated hedonism to a generation of young adults only a few years older than the Beatles.Because of the high gloss and apolitical stance of the songs Mr. Bacharach wrote with his most frequent collaborator, the lyricist Hal David, during an era of confrontation and social upheaval, they were often dismissed as little more than background music by listeners who preferred the hard edge of rock or the intimacy of the singer-songwriter genre. But in hindsight, the Bacharach-David team ranks high in the pantheon of pop songwriting.Bacharach-David songs like “The Look of Love” (Dusty Springfield’s sultry 1967 hit, featured in the movie “Casino Royale”), “This Guy’s in Love With You” (a No. 1 hit in 1968 for Herb Alpert), and “(They Long to Be) Close to You” (a No. 1 hit in 1970 for the Carpenters) evoked an upscale world of jet travel, sports cars and sleek bachelor pads. Acknowledging this mystique with a wink, Mr. Bacharach appeared as himself and performed his 1965 song “What the World Needs Now Is Love” in the 1997 movie “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery,” which spoofed the swinging ’60s ambience of the early James Bond films. He also made cameo appearances in its two sequels.Mr. Bacharach with Hal David, his most frequent collaborator, and Dionne Warwick, the pair’s definitive interpreter. Together they turned out a steady stream of pop hits.Frank Driggs Collection/Getty ImagesMr. Bacharach collaborated with many lyricists over the years, and even wrote some of his own words. But his primary collaborator was Mr. David, seven years his senior, whom he met in a music publisher’s office in 1957. The team’s artistic chemistry solidified in 1962, beginning with the hits they wrote and produced for Dionne Warwick, a gifted young gospel-trained singer from East Orange, N.J.Mr. Bacharach met Ms. Warwick at a recording session for the Drifters that included “Mexican Divorce” and “Please Stay,” two songs he wrote with the lyricist Bob Hilliard. Hearing Ms. Warwick, a backup singer, Mr. Bacharach realized he had found the rare vocalist with the technical prowess to negotiate his rangy, fiercely difficult melodies, with their tricky time signatures and extended asymmetrical phrases.The artistic synergy of Mr. Bacharach, Mr. David and Ms. Warwick defined the voice of a young, passionate, on-the-go Everywoman bursting with romantic eagerness and vulnerability. Their urbane style was the immediate forerunner of the earthier Motown sound of the middle and late 1960s.Mr. Bacharach and Mr. David worked in the Brill Building, the Midtown Manhattan music publishing hub, and they are frequently lumped together with the younger writers in the so-called Brill Building school of teenage pop, like the teams of Carole King and Gerry Goffin or Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. But they rarely wrote explicitly for the teenage market. Their more sophisticated songs were closer in style to Cole Porter, and Mr. Bacharach’s fondness for Brazilian rhythms recalled lilting Porter standards like “Begin the Beguine.”Hits and a MissBeginning with “Don’t Make Me Over” in 1962, the team turned out a steady stream of hits for Ms. Warwick, among them “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” “Walk On By,” “Alfie,” “I Say a Little Prayer” and “Do You Know the Way to San Jose.” Accepting the Academy Award for the score of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” in 1970. Mr. Bacharach also won the Oscar for best song that year, for the film’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”Associated PressMr. Bacharach’s success transcended the Top 40. He won two Academy Awards for best song: for “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” written with Mr. David, in 1970, and “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do),” written with Peter Allen, Carole Bayer Sager and Christopher Cross, in 1982. His original score for the 1969 film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” which included “Raindrops” (a No. 1 hit for B.J. Thomas), won an Oscar for best original score for a nonmusical motion picture. And the Bacharach-David team conquered Broadway in December 1968 with “Promises, Promises.”Adapted by Neil Simon from “The Apartment,” Billy Wilder’s 1960 film about erotic hanky-panky at a Manhattan corporation, “Promises, Promises” was one of the first Broadway shows to use backup singers in the orchestra pit and pop-style amplification. Along with “Hair,” which opened on Broadway that same year, it presaged the era of the pop musical.“Promises, Promises” ran for 1,281 performances, yielded hits for Ms. Warwick in the catchy but fiendishly difficult title song and the folk-pop ballad “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” and was nominated for seven Tony Awards. (Two of its cast members won, but the show itself did not. Both “Promises, Promises” and “Hair” lost in the best-musical category to the much more traditional “1776.”) It was successfully revived on Broadway in 2010.At the piano in 1968 with the “Promises, Promises” team, from left: the actor Jerry Orbach, who won the Tony for his role; the actress Jill O’Hara; the director Robert Moore; the playwright Neil Simon, who adapted the musical from Billy Wilder’s 1960 film “The Apartment”; the producer David Merrick; and the actor Edward Winter.Bob Wands/Associated PressWith success both in Hollywood and on Broadway, as well as a high-profile movie-star wife, Angie Dickinson, whom he had married in 1965, Mr. Bacharach entered the 1970s not just a hit songwriter but a glamorous star in his own right. It seemed as if he could do no wrong. But that soon changed.In 1973, Mr. Bacharach and Mr. David wrote the score for the movie musical “Lost Horizon,” adapted from the 1937 Frank Capra fantasy film of the same name. The movie was a catastrophic failure. Shortly after that, the Bacharach-David-Warwick triumvirate, which had already begun to grow stale, split up acrimoniously amid a flurry of lawsuits.Reflecting on his split with Mr. David in 2013 in his autobiography, “Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music,” written with Robert Greenfield, Mr. Bacharach acknowledged that “it was all my fault, and I can’t imagine how many great songs I could have written with Hal in the years we were apart.”A New PartnershipMr. Bacharach endured several fallow years, personal as well as professional — his marriage to Ms. Dickinson was over long before they divorced in 1981 — but experienced a commercial resurgence in the 1980s through his collaboration with the lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, whom he married in 1982.Mr. Bacharach and Ms. Sager hit their commercial peak in 1986 with two No. 1 hits: the Patti LaBelle-Michael McDonald duet “On My Own” and the AIDS fund-raising anthem “That’s What Friends Are For,” which went on to win the Grammy for song of the year. Originally recorded by Rod Stewart for the soundtrack of Ron Howard’s 1982 movie “Night Shift,” and redone by an all-star quartet billed as Dionne and Friends (Ms. Warwick, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and Elton John), “That’s What Friends Are For” was Mr. Bacharach’s last major hit. He and Ms. Sager divorced in 1991.Mr. Bacharach married the actress Angie Dickinson in 1965; they divorced in 1981. At the time of their marriage, he was not just a composer but a debonair, glamorous star in his own right. Associated PressBurt Freeman Bacharach was born in Kansas City, Mo., on May 12, 1928. His father, Bert Bacharach, was a nationally syndicated columnist and men’s fashion journalist who moved his family to Forest Hills, Queens, in 1932. His mother, Irma (Freeman) Bacharach, was an amateur singer and pianist who encouraged him to study music. He learned cello, drums and piano.While still underage, he sneaked into Manhattan jazz clubs and became smitten with the modern harmonies of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, which would exert a huge influence on him.After graduating from Forest Hills High School, he studied music at several schools, including McGill University in Montreal and the Mannes School of Music in New York. Among his teachers were the composers Henry Cowell and Darius Milhaud. While serving in the Army in the early ’50s, he played piano, worked as a dance-band arranger and met the singer Vic Damone, with whom he later toured as an accompanist.He became the German actress and singer Marlene Dietrich’s musical director in 1958 and toured with her for two years in the United States and Europe. Other performers he accompanied in the 1950s included the Ames Brothers, Polly Bergen, Georgia Gibbs, Joel Grey, Steve Lawrence and a little-known singer named Paula Stewart, who in 1953 became his first wife. (They divorced in 1958.)Mr. Bacharach spent the 1950s accompanying famous performers, including the German actress and singer Marlene Dietrich, pictured with him in 1960.Werner Kreusch/Associated PressThe Bacharach-David songwriting team enjoyed immediate success in 1957 with Marty Robbins’s “The Story of My Life” and Perry Como’s “Magic Moments.” Mr. Bacharach’s emerging melodic signature was discernible in early 1960s hits like Chuck Jackson’s “Any Day Now” (lyrics by Mr. Hilliard) and “Make It Easy on Yourself” (lyrics by Mr. David), a success for Jerry Butler in the United States and the Walker Brothers in Britain. In their Gene Pitney hits “(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance” and “Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa,” the team adopted a swaggering quasi-western sound.All the elements of Mr. Bacharach’s style coalesced in Ms. Warwick’s recordings, which he produced with Mr. David and arranged himself. In the typical Warwick hit, her voice was surrounded by strings and backup singers, the arrangements emphatically punctuated by trumpets echoing the influence of Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass.Among the other artists who had hits with the team’s songs were Jackie DeShannon (“What the World Needs Now Is Love”), Dusty Springfield (“Wishin’ and Hopin’,” “The Look of Love”), Tom Jones (“What’s New Pussycat?”) and the 5th Dimension (“One Less Bell to Answer”). But Ms. Warwick was their definitive interpreter.A ReunionAfter the “Lost Horizon” debacle, Mr. Bacharach worked predominantly as a concert performer, conducting his own instrumental suites and singing his own songs in an easygoing voice with a narrow range. He periodically released solo albums, of which the most ambitious was “Woman” (1979), a primarily instrumental song cycle recorded with the Houston Symphony. But these records had a negligible commercial impact.Time eventually healed the wounds from Mr. Bacharach’s split with Mr. David and Ms. Warwick, and he reunited first with Ms. Warwick (most notably for “That’s What Friends Are For”) and later with Mr. David (for “Sunny Weather Lover,” recorded by Ms. Warwick in the early 1990s). He found his greatest interpreter since Ms. Warwick in the pop-soul balladeer Luther Vandross, whose lush 1980s remakes of “A House Is Not a Home” and “Anyone Who Had a Heart” transformed them into dreamy quasi-operatic arias decorated with florid gospel melismas.He married Jane Hansen, his fourth wife, in 1993. She survives him, along with their son, Oliver; their daughter, Raleigh; and a son, Cristopher, from his marriage to Ms. Sager. Nikki Bacharach, his daughter with Angie Dickinson, committed suicide in 2007.Mr. Bacharach accompanied the singer-songwriter Elvis Costello at Radio City Music Hall in New York in 1998.James Estrin/The New York TimesIn his 60s, Mr. Bacharach found himself regarded with awe by a younger generation of musicians. Bands like Oasis and Stereolab included his songs in their repertoire. The British singer-songwriter Elvis Costello, a longtime admirer, collaborated with him on the ballad “God Give Me Strength” for the 1996 film “Grace of My Heart,” loosely based on the life of Carole King. That led them to collaborate on an entire album, “Painted From Memory” (1998), arranged and conducted by Mr. Bacharach, for which they shared music and lyric credits.A track from that album, “I Still Have That Other Girl,” won a Grammy for best pop vocal collaboration. It was the sixth Grammy of Mr. Bacharach’s career; he would win one more, in 2006, when his “At This Time” was named best pop instrumental album, as well as a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2008. The Bacharach-David team was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972. Forty years later, shortly before Mr. David died at age 91, the two received the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song from the Library of Congress.Mr. Bacharach in 2007. “Most composers sit in a room by themselves and nobody knows what they look like,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I get to make a direct connection with people.”Lisa Maree Williams/Getty ImagesMr. Bacharach remained in the public eye until the end. In December 2011, “Some Lovers,” a musical for which he wrote the music and Steven Sater wrote the lyrics, opened at the Old Globe in San Diego. “What’s It All About? Bacharach Reimagined,” a New York Theater Workshop production built on his songs, opened Off Broadway in December 2013. (An earlier revue based on the Bacharach-David catalog, “The Look of Love,” had a brief Broadway run in 2003.) As recently as 2020, Mr. Bacharach was still writing new music, releasing a collaboration with the singer-songwriter Melody Federer.In 2013, Mr. Bacharach began collaborating with Mr. Costello, Mr. Sater and the television writer and producer Chuck Lorre on a stage musical based on the “Painted From Memory” album but also including new songs. That project never came to fruition, although some of the new material ended up on Mr. Costello’s recent albums. All the music from the “Painted From Memory” project is included in “The Songs of Bacharach & Costello,” a boxed set that also includes Mr. Costello’s recordings of Bacharach songs, which is scheduled for release next month.Looking back on his career in his autobiography, Mr. Bacharach suggested that as a songwriter he had been “luckier than most.”“Most composers sit in a room by themselves and nobody knows what they look like,” he wrote. “People may have heard some of their songs, but they never get to see them onstage or on television.” Because he was also a performer, he noted, “I get to make a direct connection with people.”“Whether it’s just a handshake or being stopped on the street and asked for an autograph or having someone comment on a song I’ve written,” Mr. Bacharach added, “that connection is really meaningful and powerful for me.”Alex Traub More

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      Laraaji Conjures a Baptism in Sound

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      The pioneer of ambient music, now 79, rediscovered some of his earliest recordings for a new four-disc set.Laraaji, a pioneer of ambient music, barely remembers recording most of “Segue to Infinity,” a four-disc trove of his early studio sessions. In the decades since he started recording, Laraaji has made dozens of albums and cassettes, both solo and collaborative. He has played concerts, festivals, webcasts, collaborations with musicians and dancers, yoga classes, meditation gatherings and more.The collection, due Friday, reissues “Celestial Vibrations,” the small-label 1978 debut album that Laraaji made under his birth name, Edward Larry Gordon, and adds six extended tracks — each the length of an LP side — from the same era. Its recordings were rediscovered by Jake Fischer, a college student who bought them on eBay in 2021 for $114.01; they were acetate recordings that had been found in a storage locker. Many tracks on “Segue to Infinity” begin with the voice of the recording engineer announcing the take, sounding fairly jaded. Then the music scintillates, dances and reverberates on its own long time frames.“I just vaguely remember doing the recordings, and I forget who was doing the business dealings with the record at the time,” Laraaji, 79, said via video chat from his apartment in Harlem. He was dressed in orange, the color he has been wearing for decades, with an orange tapestry on the wall behind him. It’s the hue, he has said, of fire and transformation, of sunrise and sunset, which “drives the energy toward creativity and self-realization.”What Laraaji does remember is that the sessions were performed live in real time: “I was using loops at the time, but it was all straight in the moment.” He recorded most of the music solo, but the title track is a duet with a jazz flute player, Richard Cooper, whom Laraaji has been unable to find now that their music is being released.At the time, Laraaji was playing for passers-by in parks and on sidewalks, performing hypnotic, billowing, open-ended improvisations with mallets on an electrified zither, an autoharp without its chord bar. He discovered the instrument in a Queens pawnshop when “a mystically intimate voice” advised, “‘Don’t take money for the guitar,’ which I was trying to pawn,” he recalled. “It said, ‘Swap it for that autoharp in the window.’”It was ideal for a musician drawn to bell-like, consonant sounds. “I explored the autoharp and was surprised where it took me,” he said. “It gave me an instrument that I could perform from meditative states. It was exotic and it was like a miniature keyboard. It was quality controllable. It was portable. It was new. It was different.”In 1979, the British musician Brian Eno heard Laraaji in Washington Square Park, where he often performed, “sitting on the ground with his little autoharp and two little speakers,” Eno recalled in a video chat from England.Eno left Laraaji a note inviting him to record. “People are very nonchalant about something they see every day,” he said. But he saw something special in the man busking in orange robes. “I thought, ‘There’s probably nobody in this crowd who is going to think there should be an album of this guy except me, because I’m a foreigner and I’m a stranger and it looks exotic and interesting to me.’”The album Eno produced, “Ambient 3: Day of Radiance,” was Laraaji’s first international release, in 1980. It is now considered a milestone of ambient and new-age music. Eno said his own role in the music was minimal. “I had a little bit of influence on some of those pieces, in that I added something to the processing of the sound,” he said. “But the music was all his.”Another early Laraaji fan was Vernon Reid, the guitarist who formed the socially conscious hard-rock band Living Colour. He bought the “Celestial Vibrations” album on the street from Laraaji after hearing him play in Park Slope, and they went on to become friends.“Laraaji was really a complete outsider,” Reid recalled in a video interview. “He played this mesmerizing music and he didn’t have a chip on his shoulder. He’s extraordinarily consistent in all the years I’ve known him. He showed me that there was a way to be in the world with music that wasn’t predicated on rage and wasn’t predicated on material things.”“When Brian Eno encountered him, he wasn’t looking for Brian Eno,” Reid added. “He wasn’t the one trying to impress Brian Eno. There was no construct. He’s a person who was following this impulse. He just is what he is.”But that identity has evolved. Edward Larry Gordon was born in 1943 in Philadelphia and grew up in New Jersey, attending a Baptist church. (The name Laraaji has echoes of “Larry G.”) “Bethlehem” — the first track of his debut album — was titled to commemorate the experience of being baptized when he was 12. “It was semi-traumatic and transformational. It was a very, very deep moment,” Laraaji said. “You’re in the water, so the best friend to you at that point is your next breath. I wanted to emulate that experience in life — to treat others to a nonverbal baptism experience by sound.”“My music turns into a wafting sound or a wall of sound,” Laraaji said. “The idea is to move faster than the mind can track. And so the mind gives up and goes to a relaxed place and gives up its thinking function for awhile.”Balarama Heller for The New York TimesHe played violin as a child and majored in piano and composition at Howard University, but also explored acting and stand-up comedy. After college he moved to New York City, where he appeared in Greenwich Village clubs as a comedian and hosted shows at the Apollo Theater. He also had a role in the groundbreaking 1969 film “Putney Swope.”“The idea of invoking laughter has always been second nature to me,” he said. “But at some point when I began exploring consciousness, cause and effect, I realized that the material I was using for comedy wasn’t the most mindfully healthy thing for me to be sharing with audiences or to be conditioning myself with. So around 1970, I faded out of comedy.”He grew increasingly interested in meditation and in exploring the healing properties of sound. Then and now, he said, his music grows out of “improvisation, experimenting with electric zither and exotic open tunings, and performing from contemplative, meditative states.”Through the decades, his music has embraced advancing technology: guitar pedals, synthesizers, apps, all in the service of “adventurous sound painting,” he said.“The texture of the music is like embracing a warm, immersive, friendly, welcoming, inviting soul with a warm, fuzzy hug. Or like a nice, soothing, safe place to be vulnerable. And I think of music as inspiring movement, inspiring a body movement, inspiring a positive movement of thought and social behavior.”Laraaji has also returned to invoking laughter, but without telling jokes. Along with his concert schedule, he presents “laughter meditation” workshops, an idea he was introduced to at an ashram in New York. “The idea was to get people relaxed, chanting into their bodies and then get them to laugh for 15 minutes lying down,” he said. “The workshop evolved into a play-shop, where I direct people how to laugh using the voice, into the body, into the head, to massage the head, the thyroid, the thymus in the chest, the heart, the abdominal organs, and then releasing air from the alveoli in the lungs. So it becomes a total inner workout.”The recordings that have resurfaced on “Segue to Infinity” can be simultaneously enveloping and propulsive. Some are simply named after the instruments they use: “Koto” (Japanese zither) and “Kalimba” (African thumb piano). And some derive their soothing tone, paradoxically, from nonstop motion: “Kalimba 2” is a 23-minute tour de force of sheer concentration and stamina.“His innovation was to bring a rhythmic intensity at the same time as creating this shimmering kind of cloud,” Reid said. “There’s a kind of dance that’s inherent in what he does, and at the same time, the celestial vibration.”Laraaji enjoys the paradox of hyperactivity bringing relaxation. “My music turns into a wafting sound or a wall of sound,” he said. “I think of dance movement or Brownian motion. The idea is to move faster than the mind can track. And so the mind gives up and goes to a relaxed place and gives up its thinking function for awhile.”Hearing his old recordings may change the course of Laraaji’s performances. “People come to the concerts expecting a variety of Laraaji-isms, and I tend to go to a medley of things in my live performances,” he said. “I haven’t done really a thing in a long form for 15 minutes’ duration for a live performance, which is now something I will get back to. I respect long form. As James Brown said, ‘Stay on the scene.’”Note: The photographer used a lens filter to create a starburst effect on these images. More

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      ‘Mixtape Trilogy’ Review: Powerful Music, but a Less Powerful Film

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      A scholar, an architect and an Indigo Girls superfan talk about the musical artists that inspire them in Kathleen Ermitage’s documentary.Early in the documentary “Mixtape Trilogy: Stories of the Power of Music,” directed by Kathleen Ermitage, the composer and pianist Vijay Iyer, striving to describe the power of music, says, “I don’t want to say ‘magical,’ but I do.” This film, relatively modest in scale but broad in ambition, offers three stories of music makers and devotees.It’s a mixed bag, alternating conventional homily with genuine, substantial analysis. Dylan Yellowlees’s adventures as an Indigo Girls superfan, which inspired not only her own coming out as gay, but led her to embrace activism, working for the National Center for Transgender Equality, are uplifting. Nevertheless, the section in which Amy Ray and Emily Sailers, of Indigo Girls, break down both the musical and verbal development of “Go,” Yellowlees’s favorite song of theirs, is meatier.Next, the essayist and academic Garnette Cadogan and Iyer compare notes on their experience of racism. Iyer’s musings on the condition of being an American of South Asian descent working in the Black art form of jazz develop into a fascinating mini-disquisition on Iyer’s fascination with Detroit-based techno. It’s a music he feels is explicitly shaped for dancing in the face of oppression.In these sequences, artist and admirer interact on camera; that’s not the case with the architect Michael Ford and the rapper Talib Kweli. But their discrete ideas about music building community are compassionate and, in Ford’s case, unique. His architectural designs are directly inspired by hip-hop lyrics, and he founded a children’s camp based on his ideas.The music from the artists featured here is fine indeed, but the actual movie’s underscore, credited to an entity called “Scorebuzz,” is unmitigated treacle. As De Niro’s Jake LaMotta said in “Raging Bull,” “it defeats its own purpose.”Mixtape Trilogy: Stories of the Power of MusicNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      Jason Moran Pays Tribute to an Early Jazz Ancestor

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      The album “From the Dancehall to the Battlefield” puts the music of James Reese Europe through a contemporary prism.In the 1910s alone, the composer, pianist and bandleader James Reese Europe seemed to do enough living for multiple lifetimes.He started that decade at the Clef Club in Harlem, an organization that fielded its own group and worked to improve labor conditions for Black musicians throughout New York. Not long after, Europe brought his 125-member Clef Club Orchestra — and the syncopated styles of Black American composers — to Carnegie Hall. In 1914, Europe provided new music for the star dancing couple Vernon and Irene Castle while also taking his group into the studio to record for the Victor Recording Company.During World War I, he was Lieutenant Europe: Along with other members of the all-Black 369th Infantry, he pushed to be allowed to fight while also leading a regimental band — known as the Harlem Hellfighters — that amazed audiences abroad. After a triumphant return to New York, in early 1919, his war-drilled ensemble recorded material for the Pathe label, including a vivacious take on Carl Bethel and Sandy Coffin’s “That Moaning Trombone.” Later that year, one of Europe’s band members stabbed him with a knife during an intermission. (He thought Europe had disrespected him.) The bandleader died later that night.All this took place long before Louis Armstrong’s first recordings with King Oliver, which helped to codify and claim the “jazz age” for the Roaring Twenties. But a new, Europe-focused recording by the pianist and composer Jason Moran — titled “From the Dancehall to the Battlefield” — rewinds jazz’s history a bit and brings Europe’s sound into a relationship with successive waves of jazz and contemporary music.“They talk about ‘jazz is dead,’ like it’s not everywhere or there’s something wrong with it,” Moran said in a recent interview. “But if you’re listening, the music is everywhere.”Moran cited a riff — synthetically rendered yet clearly big band-derived — that powers the Harry Styles song “Music for a Sushi Restaurant.” “That swing is still associated as the rhythm of this country,” Moran added. And for him, that tradition is greatly indebted to James Reese Europe’s bands in the 1910s.“What isn’t mentioned enough about Europe’s band is, they are incredible technicians,” Moran said. “When I show this music to people and say, ‘Can we get it like they do on the record?,’ inevitably they are like, ‘No, we can’t.’”Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York Times“It’s hitting the stage, and hitting the mass of our people in New York City. But it’s also tied up in the vaudeville era, you know — and blackface. It’s emerging right at that time, and it’s scary,” Moran said. “So, I think he’s having that push-pull with it. And I think he reaches the other side of the conversation by claiming: ‘This is a Black music that we have to cherish. And we should be looking at our own kind of ensembles to manage that.’”On the new recording, Moran’s band channels some of that original Europe energy, and deploys herculean efforts during Moran’s own arrangement of “That Moaning Trombone.” That track, in its hard-charging refinement — and finely judged inflections of tempo and dynamics — proves a worthy modern testament to Europe’s handling of large ensembles.

      From the Dancehall to the Battlefield by Jason Moran“What isn’t mentioned enough about Europe’s band is, they are incredible technicians,” Moran said. “When I show this music to people and say, ‘Can we get it like they do on the record?,’ inevitably they are like, ‘No, we can’t.’” (Moran allows that his take on “Trombone” is his attempt to reach that summit: “Kudos to the horns for really working together on that.”)Elsewhere, Moran deviates strategically from recorded history. During Europe’s “Ballin’ the Jack,” Moran fuses the song with motifs from the post-bop pianist Geri Allen’s “Feed the Fire,” before executing an elegant pivot back to “Jack.”

      From the Dancehall to the Battlefield by Jason MoranThat mash-up format reflects Europe’s own taste in medleys, as well as the real-time remixing that Moran has long executed with his trio, the Bandwagon. (“Thank god for the Bronx, and figuring out that two turntables can work this way,” he said, when asked whether “Ballin’ the Jack / Feed the Fire” was indebted to turntablism.)Elsewhere, Moran embellishes the up-tempo tune “Castle House Rag,” filling it with nervy rhythmic repetitions — and pianistic lines that are, by turns, soulful and avant-garde in nature (and sometimes both at once). “It’s very Threadgill, the way it opens up,” he said, referring to the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and performer Henry Threadgill, who is also a Europe aficionado. (The tuba player Jose Davila, a regular in Threadgill’s bands, lends a sense of drive to Moran’s new album.)Other modern sounds show up for cameos on the recording: The breathing meditation “Zena’s Circle” comes from the composer and conceptualist Pauline Oliveros. Moran once invited her to lead a Deep Listening session during his first season of programming at the Park Avenue Armory. “Selfishly, I wanted to give it to the Bandwagon,” he said. “But I also wanted people to experience it.”Jazz isn’t dead, Moran said. Rather, “if you’re listening, the music is everywhere.”Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York Times“Zena’s Circle” leads directly into “For James” — a collaged, multitake document of a Moran original. It is initially interpreted by his own group, as well as a German crowd singing it back to the players; then, in the final moments, Moran’s tribute is heard — in a majestic, impromptu take — as it was performed by members of Stephany Neal’s The 369th Experience. (That organization encourages bands at historically Black colleges and universities, or H.B.C.U.’s, to gather and study Europe’s music.)“They not only scaled it up,” Moran said, “but they made it better.”If the range of references on this album seems vast, that’s also a testament to Europe’s capaciousness, and his influence on Moran. Since departing from the Blue Note label to produce his own recordings on the Bandcamp platform, Moran has become a master of the unexpected feint. The sounds of “From the Dancehall to the Battlefield” consistently surprise and delight; backward-masked percussion on a performance of “St. Louis Blues” might send you reeling back in more ways than one. The studio effect suggesting time travel — heard prominently in the cymbals — feels like something out of a 1970s Funkadelic stew; the W.C. Handy tune is, itself, of even deeper vintage. (Connecting all this is playing that feels utterly contemporary.)But Moran is being more than simply clever; he is an artist with an eye for connections among the past, present and future. On “All of No Man’s Land Is Ours,” Moran bends the end of one motif so that it ends in a less celebratory fashion than it does on Europe’s recording. (Moran’s version sounds like a phrase out of Thelonious Monk.)“I imagine that when they talk about ‘No Man’s Land,’ it’s with mystery,” Moran said, thinking about Europe and his players. “What do enslaved people think about what ‘no man’s land’ means? I want to go forward and backward on the idea. Where do we feel our boundaries are?” More

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      Kim Petras, A Transgender Woman, Wins Grammy for Best Pop Duo Performance

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      Accepting an award with Sam Smith for “Unholy,” the German pop singer Kim Petras announced that she was the first transgender woman to win a Grammy in the best pop duo and group performance category.“Unholy,” featured on Smith’s album “Gloria,” became the British musician’s first No. 1 hit in the United States and captured listeners with “a campy, devilish romp,” as the New York Times critic Lindsay Zoladz put it. Smith stood back and let Petras do the talking, as she thanked Madonna for her fight for L.G.B.T.Q. rights, “the incredible transgender legends before me” and her mother.“My mother — I grew up next to a highway in nowhere, Germany, and my mother believed me that I was a girl, and I wouldn’t be here without her and her support,” Petras said.Petras also thanked Sophie, a transgender Scottish producer who died in 2021 at age 34. Sophie received a Grammy nomination in 2018 for “Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides” in the best dance electronic/album category.“Sophie, especially, my friend who passed away two years ago, who told me this would happen and always believed in me,” Petras said. “Thank you so much for your inspiration, Sophie. I adore you and your inspiration will forever be in my music.”Other nominees included “Don’t Shut Me Down,” by Abba; “Bam Bam,” by Camila Cabello featuring Ed Sheeran; “My Universe,” by Coldplay and BTS; and “I Like You (A Happier Song)” by Post Malone and Doja Cat. More

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      ‘Baraye,’ the Anthem of Iran’s Protest Movement, Is Honored With a Grammy

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      He was a relatively unknown young pop singer who had been eliminated in the final round of Iran’s version of “American Idol.” Then he wrote a protest song. On Sunday, he won a Grammy Award.Shervin Hajipour, 25, won in a new special merit category recognizing a song for social change for his hit “Baraye.” The song has become the anthem of protests that have swept through Iran in recent months, evoking grief, anger, hope and a yearning for change.The first lady of the United States, Jill Biden, introduced the award. “A song can unite, inspire and ultimately change the world,” she said. “Baraye,” she added, was “a powerful and poetic call for freedom and women’s rights” that continues to resonate across the world.And as Hajipour’s image and song played on two screens, she reiterated the bedrock slogan of Iran’s uprising: “For Women, Life, Freedom.”“Congratulations Shervin, and thank you for your song,” she said. Hajipour lives in Iran and did not respond to a request for comment. “We won,” he posted on Instagram after the award was given. A video circulated on social media that seemed to capture the moment when Mr. Hajipour, surrounded by friends and watching the ceremony on television, heard his name announced as the winner. He appeared stunned as friends screamed, cheered and hugged him. “My God, my God, I can’t believe it,” said one of his friends, according to the video.He was arrested by the intelligence ministry shortly after his song went viral in September, generating some 40 million views — close to 87 million people live in Iran — in 48 hours. He is currently out on bail and awaiting trial, and has made only one short video message since his release.“I wrote this song in solidarity with the people who are critical of the situation like many of our artists who reacted,” said Hajipour in the video message, from early October.In late September, protests erupted across Iran as tens of thousands of people, led by women and girls, demanded liberation from the Islamic Republic’s theocracy. The protests were set off by the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old who had been in the custody of the morality police on the allegation of violating hijab rules.Iranians tweeted their reasons for protesting using the hashtag #baraye (or “#for”). Hajipour wove those tweets into lyrics, naming his song after the hashtag. He composed and recorded the song from his bedroom in his parents’ house in the coastal city of Babolsar.As Iranians shared the reasons they were protesting via tweets, Hajipour wove some of them into his verses:“For embarrassment due to being penniless; For yearning for an ordinary life; For the child laborer and his dreams; For this dictatorial economy; For this polluted air; For this forced paradise; For jailed intellectuals; For all the empty slogans”For the past five months, everywhere Iranians congregated inside and outside the country, be it protests, funerals, celebrations, hikes, concerts, malls, cafes, university campuses, high schools or traffic jams, they blasted the song and sang the lyrics in unison:“For the feeling of peace; For the sunrise after long dark nights; For the stress and insomnia pills; For man, motherland, prosperity; For the girl who wished she was born a boy; For woman, life, freedom…For Freedom.”The Grammy will raise the song’s profile even more.“‘Baraye’ winning a Grammy sends the message to Iranians that the world has heard them and is acknowledging their freedom struggle,” said Nahid Siamdoust, the author of “Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran.” “It is awarding their protest anthem with the highest musical honor.”Siamdoust, who is also an assistant professor of media and Middle East studies at the University of Texas at Austin, said that while music has played an important political role in Iran since the constitutional revolution a century ago, no song compared to “Baraye” in terms of reach and impact. “Music can travel and traverse homes and communities and spread sentiment in a way that few other means can achieve,” she said.In a 2019 documentary short about his musical journey that recently aired on BBC Persian, Mr. Hajipour said that he began training as a classical violinist at the age of 8, started composing music at 12. He also said he has a college degree in economics but works as a professional musician, composing music for clients and recording his own songs.He said that his passion was creating music that broke form and that he drew inspiration from the pain and suffering he experienced and witnessed.“My biggest pain and my biggest problems have turned into my best work. And they will do so in the future as well,” he said in the documentary in what turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.While Hajipour was in detention, “Baraye” disappeared from his Instagram page. Iranians mobilized, posting and reposting the song. “For Shervin” trended on Twitter with demands of his release.“Shervin is an extremely talented, innocent and shy young man,” said a prominent Iranian singer, Mohammad Esfahani, who had met him when he was a contestant on the television show.The Recording Academy said it was “deeply moved” by the overwhelming number of submissions for “Baraye,” which received over 95,000 of the 115,000 submissions for the new category. The award was proposed by academy members and determined by the Grammys’ blue ribbon committee, a panel of music experts, and ratified by the Recording Academy’s board of trustees.“Baraye” became the vehicle through which people around the world displayed their solidarity to Iranians. Scores of musicians have covered the song, including Coldplay and Jon Batiste. The German electronic artist Jan Blomqvist remixed it as a dance tune. The designer Jean Paul Gaultier used it as a soundtrack as models walked the runway last month at his show during Paris fashion week, and Malala Yousafzai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, played it in the background in a message to the girls and women of Iran.The lyrics have been translated and performed in various genres: jazz and opera in English, metal in Germany, choir by French school children and pop in Swedish among others. It has also inspired a number of dance performances, including in Israel. Some artists around the world have covered it verbatim in Persian, including one in Ukraine who said she sang it to highlight the plight of the Iranian people.Hajipour’s Grammy win stirred pride among many Iranians online after the award was announced.“God, I am crying from joy,” a Twitter user named Melody posted about Hajipour’s victory.“A song about the most basic rights of a human, the most simple wishes of an Iranian,” an Iranian journalist, Farzad Nikghadam, tweeted. “A nation crying for gender equality and freedom.”In the documentary, Hajipour spoke about the importance of music. “The biggest miracle in my life has been music,” he said. “I would like to be successful and to be able to make a living with music that comes from my heart.” More