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      Jesse McReynolds, Lead Singer in Long-Running Bluegrass Duo, Dies at 93

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      He also played mandolin in the act, Jim & Jesse, performing with his brother for 55 years.Jesse McReynolds, for 55 years the lead singer and mandolin player with Jim & Jesse, the first-generation bluegrass duo he established with his older brother, Jim McReynolds, died on Friday at his home in Gallatin, Tenn. He was 93. His death was confirmed by his wife, Joy McReynolds, on her Facebook page.Bluegrass’s longest running brother act, Jim & Jesse developed a smooth blend of harmony singing that contrasted with the more piercing, down-home vocal arrangements of Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers. Mr. McReynolds sang the melody line in a crystalline baritone, while his brother, who died of thyroid cancer in 2002, added honeyed tenor harmonies on top.The McReynolds’s instrumental approach likewise was more polished than that of their peers, creating a bridge between the barnyard twang of early sibling duos like the Delmore Brothers and the more streamlined sounds of mid-20th century country music.Typically backed by banjo, fiddle and bass, the duo’s music — built around Mr. McReynolds’s plaintive mandolin playing and his brother’s metronome-like rhythm guitar — was not without its experimental side. Most notable was Mr. McReynolds’s widely imitated cross-picking technique, which employed a flat pick to approximate the three-finger banjo roll of the bluegrass pioneer Earl Scruggs.“I was sort of listening to what he was doing,” Mr. McReynolds said, discussing the origins of his Scruggs-style picking, an approach that influenced mandolin virtuosos like David Grisman and Sam Bush, in a 2019 interview for the website candlewater.com.“I didn’t know how he was doing it. I knew he was using a three-finger roll on it,” he added, but “I was trying to do it with a straight pick so I could play my other style, too.”That other style, which also qualified as an innovation in bluegrass, involved a split-string technique in which Mr. McReynolds used his pinkie to hold down one string of his mandolin’s four pairs of strings while letting its counterpart reverberate, or ring open, to achieve a droning effect. Requiring great precision, this sleight-of-hand produced two distinct notes from a pair of strings which, on the mandolin, were usually played in unison.The duo’s 1963 recording of the instrumental “Stoney Creek” is often cited as the quintessential vehicle for Mr. McReynolds’s prowess as a mandolinist. His Scruggs-inspired “mandolin roll,” though, already could be heard a decade earlier on gospel recordings like “I’ll Fly Away” and “On the Jericho Road.”The McReynolds brothers sometimes incorporated electric and steel guitar into their performances in lieu of bluegrass’s customary banjo and fiddle. In 1969, Mr. McReynolds contributed mandolin to a track on “The Soft Parade,” an album released by the countercultural Los Angeles rock band the Doors.Repertoire was yet another area in which Jim & Jesse were in the bluegrass vanguard. Nowhere was this more evident than with the 1965 release of “Berry Pickin’ in the Country,” a collection of bluegrass covers of Chuck Berry songs, including a chuffing take of “Memphis.” The album proved to be one of the most popular of the brothers’ career.Jesse McReynolds, center, in Nashville in 2014. He continued to perform after his brother Jim died in 2002. Erika Goldring/Getty ImagesTheir untrammeled musical instincts notwithstanding, Jim & Jesse were among the most commercially successful bluegrass acts of the ’60s and ’70s. They placed 10 singles on the country chart, notably “Cotton Mill Man” (1964), a worker’s plaint, and “Diesel on My Tail” (1967), a truck-driving song featuring steel guitar that reached No. 18.Jesse Lester McReynolds was born on July 9, 1929, in Carfax, Va., in the mountains of southern Appalachia. His father, Claude Matthew McReynolds, was a coal miner and amateur banjo player; his mother, Savannah Prudence (Robinette) McReynolds, played guitar, banjo and harmonica and taught her sons to sing gospel harmonies. Mr. McReynolds’s grandfather, the fiddler Charles McReynolds, recorded as one-half of the Bull Mountain Moonshiners at 1927’s Bristol Sessions, the so-called big bang of country music that produced landmark recordings by the likes of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family.Although raised in a musical family, young Jesse did not take up the mandolin in earnest until he turned 14 and was recovering from an automobile accident that left him with two broken legs. Four years later, he and his brother started a banjo-less string band that played country music throughout southwestern Virginia. It was not until 1952, when they began working with the producer Ken Nelson at Capitol Records, that they first described the music they were making as bluegrass.“We were hesitating over whether we’d even feature the five-string banjo,” Mr. McReynolds said in an interview for the liner notes to “Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys: In the Tradition,” a 1987 album released by Rounder Records. “But it turned out that Ken Nelson was expecting us to record as a bluegrass band, so that’s what we did.”Mr. Nelson also encouraged the brothers to change the name of their ensemble from the Virginia Trio, under which they made their first recordings in 1951, to Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys. In 1960, after more than a decade of performing on many of the radio barn dances of the era, they began hosting their own syndicated television program, sponsored by the Martha White flour company.The duo was a popular draw on the early ’60s folk circuit, appearing, among other places, at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. A year later they became members of the cast of the Grand Old Opry, having gained a reputation, like Bill Monroe before them, for attracting elite talent to their band like the fiddle players Tommy Jackson and Vassar Clements.The ensuing decades found the brothers returning to a more traditional approach to bluegrass while consolidating their reputation as one of the premier ensembles in the history of the idiom. Mr. McReynolds served as the affable frontman of the group, his brother as manager of their business affairs.In the late ’80s, Mr. McReynolds toured and recorded with the Masters, a bluegrass supergroup that included the fiddler Kenny Baker, the dobroist Josh Graves and the banjo player and guitarist Eddie Adcock.In 1993, Jim & Jesse were inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Hall of Fame. Four years later they received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.Mr. McReynolds remained active after his brother’s death. Among other projects, he released a 2010 collection of songs written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead, a band upon which Jim & Jesse were a formative influence.Besides his wife of 27 years, Mr. McReynolds is survived by a daughter, Gwen; two sons, Michael and Randy; eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.Much has been made of Mr. McReynolds’s debt to the ebullient banjo phrasing of Earl Scruggs. While certainly the case, Mr. McReynolds also improvised on his forebear’s technique by reversing the order of the notes he played in his variant of the Scruggs banjo roll to create a more melancholy tonal effect.“Ultimately, I ended up playing the opposite of what he did,” Mr. McReynolds explained, talking about the differences between his technique and that of Mr. Scruggs in a 2017 interview with Bluegrass Today. “My rolls went backwards, while Earl’s rolls went forward.” More

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      John Williams on ‘Indiana Jones’ and His Favorite Scores

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      In a long career making music for the movies, the composer has made an indelible contribution to cinema. Williams shares his thoughts on some landmark works.When the New York Philharmonic honored the work of the film composer John Williams this past spring, the director Steven Spielberg introduced a clip of the opening scenes of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” — without the music. The effect, he noted apologetically, was like something out of the French new wave.The clip was played again, this time with the orchestra joining in. Like magic, the adventuresome spirit of the movie was restored.On June 30, the rugged archaeologist at the heart of that film (played by Harrison Ford) will return for the fifth entry in the franchise, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” He’ll be accompanied, as ever, by Williams’s indispensable music.The composer, who turned 91 this year, had said it would be his final film score. Speaking during a video call more recently, he walked back his retirement plans. “If they do an ‘Indiana Jones 6,’ I’m on board.”Ahead of the new film’s opening, Williams shared his thoughts — with contributions from others closely connected to this work — on milestone moments in an extraordinary career.1966‘How to Steal a Million’Williams made some of his earliest contributions to movie music playing piano for the scores of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “West Side Story,” among others. (That’s also him playing the chugging piano riff on the “Peter Gunn” theme for television.)Under the name Johnny Williams, he gradually transitioned, as he put it, “from the piano bench to the writing desk,” composing several light, jazzy scores for comedies. “How to Steal a Million,” an art-heist caper starring Audrey Hepburn, was an early high point. “It was the first film I ever did for a major, super-talent director, in William Wyler,” Williams said.With moments of comedy and tongue-in-cheek suspense, that score was an early clue of “just how versatile John Williams could be,” said Mike Matessino, a producer of numerous Williams soundtracks.Many years later — long after his name had become synonymous with the sound of the cinematic blockbuster — Williams would channel his earlier, funnier work into the jazz-inflected score of “Catch Me if You Can.” That mode “had been residing there in the intervening decades, waiting to come howling to the surface,” Williams said. “It was the easiest thing in the world for me to do, and I was giggling while I was doing it.”1972‘Images’1973‘The Long Goodbye’Working with the director Robert Altman produced a couple of the strangest entries in Williams’s filmography. The soundtrack to “The Long Goodbye,” Altman’s woozy neo-noir starring Elliott Gould as a laconic Philip Marlowe, consists of several cheeky variations on the title tune, including a bluesy nightclub number, a mariachi and a tango.For the psychological horror “Images,” Altman gave Williams the kind of freedom he famously gave his actors. “‘Do whatever you want. Do something you haven’t done before,’” Williams remembers Altman saying.The result was an eerie, fractured score that reflects the deteriorating mental state of the protagonist. The music was a collaboration with the Japanese percussionist Stomu Yamashta, who performed on sculptures by the artists François and Bernard Baschet. Williams said that had he devoted his career to composing for the concert hall rather than the cineplex, his work would have sounded most like his “Images” score.When Spielberg was looking for menacing music to accompany scenes of dread in “Jaws,” he tried sounds from “Images.” But Williams believed the movie needed something more primal, less psychological, and eventually built a theme around two brutish bass notes.1977‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’How to sum up the Williams-Spielberg collaboration? Beginning with “The Sugarland Express” and concluding (for now, at least) with “The Fabelmans,” the partnership has spanned 29 films.Spielberg has described Williams’s score for “Schindler’s List” as “one of the most stunningly evocative gifts that John has ever given us.” It says something about the range of their collaboration that “Jurassic Park” came out the same year, featuring another towering Williams score — infused with an almost religious awe for the prehistoric creatures of the film.In an interview, Emilio Audissino, the author of “The Film Music of John Williams,” made the case that “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was the movie on which “the two fully realized the mutual advantage and compatibility of their partnership.” One moment in that film captures some of Spielberg and Williams’s alchemy: the musical dialogue between the humans and the otherworldly visitors, itself an artistic collaboration of sorts.Williams remembers spending hours with Spielberg, listening to countless musical phrases. “We were waiting for that eureka moment.”Many years later, Williams figured out why the phrase they ultimately chose (re, mi, do, do, so) feels so perfect. The “re, mi, do” feels musically resolved, he explained, after which “do, so” — the alien response — feels like an appropriately startling interjection. “I realized that 20 years after the fact.”1978‘Superman’Remember when superheroes had memorable themes?The score for “Superman” demonstrated one of Williams’s own musical superpowers: making the unbelievable feel thoroughly believable. His indomitable sounds are essential to audiences’ accepting — and being stirred by — the sight of a man in flight.The director Richard Donner had a theory that the three-note motif in the main theme — the one that makes you want to punch the air in triumph — is a musical evocation of “SU-per-MAN!”Is there anything to that?“There’s everything to that,” Williams told me.1999‘Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace’Williams remembers feeling “a little bit insecure” on the first day of recording “Star Wars” in 1977. But Lionel Newman, the studio musical supervisor, “who was sitting there next to me, said, ‘This is really going to work very well — you’ll see.’”The music for the central “Star Wars” saga was consistently extraordinary even when the films themselves failed to strike a chord. This is true of “The Phantom Menace,” which, despite its 51 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, features some of the composer’s most exciting work. Today, the Carl Orff-inspired symphonic banger “Duel of the Fates” is the most streamed piece of “Star Wars” music on Spotify.“It was pretty indescribable,” Maxine Kwok, a London Symphony Orchestra first violinist, said of the recording session. “I remember getting chills the first time the ostinato started.” Kwok joined the institution partly because she associated it with the music of “Star Wars” — the soundtrack to her childhood. “I grew up with those heroic trumpets and soaring strings. It had a profound effect on me.”Scoring “The Rise of Skywalker” in 2019, after more than 40 years with “Star Wars,” Williams said he didn’t want it to be over. “My feeling was, ‘This is fun. Let’s go back and do nine more.’”2023‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’The “Indiana Jones” movies feature a number of Williams’s most recognizable character themes. They also feature swaths of swashbuckling music precisely calibrated to the action onscreen.“I don’t see John as simply a genius of themes and tunes, which he is of course,” the director James Mangold said. “Rather, it’s John’s moment-to-moment scene work that astounds me. Film scoring is really a kind of duet between the director and the composer. It’s John’s sensitivity to this partnership that most defines his work for me.”On the appeal of scoring a fifth “Indiana Jones” movie, Williams said, “I just thought, if Harrison Ford can do it, I can do it.” The movie features a new theme for the character of Helena, played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. “I had a wonderful time writing a theme for her,” Williams said.“When John first played that theme for me, with the orchestra, I was wowed, of course,” Mangold said, “completely knocked over by the music. But I was also a bit nervous that it was just too much — too damned lush. Too romantic. John just smiled, gently, and let me babble, because I think he knew it was going to work beautifully.” More

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      in Theater

      Sheldon Harnick, Musical Theater’s Great Marriage Broker

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      In lyrics of rare humor, elegance and compassion, the man who put words to “Fiddler on the Roof” and “She Loves Me” explored the complex emotional architecture of love.The twilight golden years of the Golden Age of musical theater, which archaeologists date from about 1959 to 1981, produced three great lyricists. One, of course, was Stephen Sondheim, setting words to his own music with a neurotic complexity that defined that time and ours. Another was Fred Ebb, the longtime songwriting partner of John Kander, who if poppier in outlook was a genius at prosody, shooting off syllables (“one day it’s kicks, then it’s kicks in the shins”) that never failed to bruise.Sheldon Harnick, who died on Friday at 99, was the third, though only one of his musicals, “Fiddler on the Roof,” written with the composer Jerry Bock, was widely known outside the world of theater lovers. But within that world, his subtle craft and character insight were universally acknowledged. Sondheim called his lyrics “impeccable.”As models of humor, elegance and compassion, they could stand to be more widely studied and imitated. That they aren’t is partly the result of the strange bifurcation of Harnick’s career into Bock and post-Bock eras. Though Harnick kept writing well for four decades after the team broke up at the height of its powers in 1970, he never again met with the kind of success that greeted the earlier work. And Bock fell almost completely silent.What a loss! And yet what a success it had been. By the time of the split, Harnick had written the lyrics not just for the worldwide hit “Fiddler” (1964) but also for two smaller yet equally admired scores: “Fiorello!” (1959) and “She Loves Me” (1963). Another handful of his shows with Bock (“The Apple Tree,” “The Rothschilds,” “Tenderloin”) are just as pleasurable, if less profound.I use the word “profound” to describe those shows, and Harnick’s best lyrics, not because they offer earth-shattering insights but because they are perfect expressions of ordinary ones. A jaunty waltz like “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” from “Fiddler,” could not, after all, be more conventional in its framing: Two poor young sisters dream of being fixed up with perfect husbands.But notice how the agenda-like structuring of their wish list, along with the click-lock rhymes, captures in a few lines what “perfect” means to several people involved:For Papa, make him a scholarFor Mama, make him rich as a king.For me, well, I wouldn’t hollerIf he were as handsome as anything.By song’s end, though, alerted to the dangers of overreaching, the girls have turned the image inside out:Maybe I’ve learned:Playing with matchesA girl can get burned.What neither the sisters nor the audience yet know, but Harnick suggests, is how broadly the idea applies. While initiating the marriage plot so central to “Fiddler,” the lyric also introduces a warning about a world soon to go up in flames.Once heard, Harnick’s lyrics seem like the last word on their subjects. In part that’s because of their concision — he typically writes short lines and never too many — and in part because they build an almost impenetrably tight argument through structure and sound. The important words all land on the right beat; the grammar is never distorted to squeeze over a melody. With so little space, every syllable does at least double duty.Double duty is a nice way of looking as well at his main theme, marriage. (Harnick was briefly married to Elaine May; he wed Margery Gray, who survives him, in 1965.) Like most musicals, his and Bock’s keep circling the subject, but with a slyer view of the rage and redemption that go into it.That combo is brilliantly expressed in “Fiorello!” — the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical about Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York City from 1934 through 1945. In “The Very Next Man,” the mayor’s long-suffering secretary, Marie, after years of frustrated love, vows to marry whoever shows up.Again, an ordinary setup, yet Harnick captures Marie’s compulsive preoccupation in a neat chain of repeated words, a few perfect rhymes (some of them hidden) and a heartbeat of recurring long o’s:I’m through with mopingMoping from all this pointless hopingHoping he’ll notice me and open his heartTime now to break away and make a new start.That stanza is actually a rewrite; apparently, in 1959, the original version (“And if he likes me/Who cares how frequently he strikes me?”) was considered acceptable and got a big laugh.There’s some justice in the rewrite being better crafted than the original; Harnick’s dramatic sweet spot was letting characters tie themselves in knots to convince themselves of ideas they know are not right. Also a Harnick sweet spot: forcefully untying the knots later. So even though Marie insists at the end of “The Very Next Man” that she’s finished with romance forever —New York papers, take note!Here’s a statement that you can quote:Waiting for ships that never come inA girl is likely to miss the boat.— she of course does marry La Guardia in the end.Harnick’s gift for expressing simply the complexity of emotional architecture finds perhaps its greatest expression in “She Loves Me,” a show essentially built on romantic delusion. In the song “I Don’t Know His Name,” Amalia concludes that her anonymous pen pal — even though he is, in fact, a co-worker she hates — must be an extremely kind and cultured man:When I undertook this correspondence,Little did I know I’d grow so fond;Little did I know our views would so correspond.But as that tight and high-minded stanza gives way to florid fantasizing —He writes his deepest thoughts to meOn Swift, Vermeer and Debussy.De Maupassant, Dumas, Dukas, Dufy, Dufay, Defoe.— we understand she is not yet ready to find love where it really exists. That will come later.In Sondheim’s lyrics, the double bind of attachment is often a source of agitation; in Ebb’s it is often a pummeling. But in Harnick’s word-world, attachment is a pleasant and relatively livable condition, once you get past the drama.Near the end of “Fiddler,” when in the song “Do You Love Me?” Tevye asks his wife that question, she replies, barely singing the words, “Do I what?” It’s a laugh line, defanging or absorbing what might otherwise seem sentimental. By the end of the gentle, forgiving and ruminative number, so typical of Harnick’s gentle, forgiving and ruminative art, you come willingly to the couple’s conclusion, sentimental or not:It doesn’t change a thingBut even soAfter twenty-five yearsIt’s nice to know. More

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      Sheldon Harnick, ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ Lyricist, Dies at 99

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      His collaborations with the composer Jerry Bock also included “Fiorello!” — which, like “Fiddler,” was a Tony winner — and “She Loves Me.”Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist who teamed up with the composer Jerry Bock to write some of Broadway’s most memorable musicals, including the Tony Award winners “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Fiorello!,” died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 99. His death was announced by a spokesman, Sean Katz.Mr. Harnick’s lyrics could be broadly funny, slyly satirical, lushly romantic or poignantly moving. He gave voice to a broad range of characters, including starry-eyed young lovers, corrupt politicians, a quarreling Adam and Eve and, in “Fiddler on the Roof,” struggling Jews in early-20th-century Russia.When three unmarried sisters in “Fiddler” confront the village matchmaker, two of them hopeful and the third cynical, they all end up having second thoughts:Matchmaker, matchmaker, plan me no plansI’m in no rush, maybe I’ve learnedPlaying with matches a girl can get burned.So bring me no ring, groom me no groom,Find me no find, catch me no catch.Unless he’s a matchless match!When the leading man in “She Loves Me” is about to meet the woman with whom he’s been trading love letters for months, he practically sings himself into a nervous breakdown:I haven’t slept a wink, I only thinkOf our approaching tête-à-tête,Tonight at eight.I feel a combination of depression and elation;What a state!To waitTill eight.Maria Karnilova and Zero Mostel in the original Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” for which Mr. Harnick and Jerry Bock wrote the score. The show, which opened in 1964, ran for more than 3,200 performances and became the longest-running musical in Broadway history.Bettmann/Getty ImagesMr. Harnick met Mr. Bock in the late 1950s, and the two quickly realized they could work together despite their different temperaments. “I tend to approach things skeptically and pessimistically,” Mr. Harnick told The New York Times in 1990. “Jerry Bock is a bubbling, ebullient personality.”The team would break up after a dozen years over a dispute involving their musical “The Rothschilds.” But the combination worked extremely well while it lasted.The late 1950s was a challenging time for newcomers to the musical stage. The decade’s hit Broadway musicals had included “Guys and Dolls,” “The King and I,” “Wonderful Town,” “My Fair Lady” and “Candide.” “In those days,” Mr. Harnick recalled in a 2004 interview, “lyricists were consciously trying to be more sophisticated and literate. Now we’re in the Andrew Lloyd Webber vein, trying to hit bigger, broader audiences.”Mr. Harnick and Mr. Bock got off to a weak start in 1958 with “The Body Beautiful,” set in the world of prizefighting; it closed after a brief run. But they bounced back decisively the next year with “Fiorello!,” a breezy portrait of one of New York City’s most colorful politicians.“Fiorello!,” which had a book by George Abbott and Jerome Weidman and was directed by Mr. Abbott, starred Tom Bosley as Fiorello H. La Guardia, the reformer who was mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945. Its score evoked a time when political corruption was rife.The song “Little Tin Box,” for example, suggests how a crooked party boss (Howard Da Silva) might have responded when a judge asked him how he has managed to buy a yacht, given his modest salary. The boss replies:I am positive Your Honor must be joking.Any working man can do what I have done.For a month or two I simply gave up smokingAnd I put my extra pennies one by oneInto a little tin boxA little tin boxThat a little tin key unlocks.There is nothing unorthodoxAbout a little tin box.“Fiorello!” ran for nearly 800 performances and won three Tony Awards, including the prize for best musical, which it shared with “The Sound of Music.” It was also one of the few musicals to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama.Jerry Bock, left, with Mr. Harnick in 1970. Their collaboration produced some of Broadway’s most memorable musicals.Barton Silverman/The New York TimesBut the Bock-Harnick team’s biggest success — and one of Broadway’s — was yet to come: “Fiddler on the Roof,” which opened in 1964 and ran for more than 3,200 performances. It became the longest-running musical in Broadway history, a record that stood for a decade.Directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, with a book by Joseph Stein based on the stories of Sholem Aleichem, “Fiddler on the Roof” told the story of a Jewish community facing expulsion from a village in the czarist Russian empire, with a focus on Tevye (Zero Mostel), the village milkman, and his family.In addition to “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” the score included a number of songs that would soon be regarded as classics, including “Tradition,” “Sunrise, Sunset” and Tevye’s humorously wistful lament “If I Were a Rich Man” (“There would be one long staircase just going up/ And one even longer coming down/ And one more leading nowhere, just for show”).“Fiddler on the Roof” was more than a hit show; it was a phenomenon. It won nine Tony Awards, including one for its score. It was made into a hit movie in 1971, has been performed all over the world, and has had five Broadway revivals, most recently in 2015. (A Yiddish-language production was an Off Broadway hit in 2019 and played a return engagement in late 2022.)Mr. Harnick, left, and Hal Prince, the producer of “Fiddler on the Roof,” in 2015.Damon Winter/The New York TimesAmong the Bock-Harnick team’s other noteworthy efforts was “She Loves Me” (1963), based on the same Hungarian play that was the basis for the movies “The Shop Around the Corner,” “In the Good Old Summertime” and “You’ve Got Mail.” The story of two workers at a perfume shop in Budapest (Barbara Cook and Daniel Massey) who finally realize that they have been trading romantic letters and that they are meant for each other, “She Loves Me” had no showstopping songs and was not initially a big success, closing after 301 performances. But it has grown in popularity after a series of revivals — although Broadway productions in 1993 and 2016 were equally brief.Their other shows included “The Apple Tree” (1966), three musical playlets (including one about Adam and Eve) directed by Mike Nichols, and “The Rothschilds” (1970), based on Frederic Morton’s biography of the Jewish family that rose from the ghetto to become a financial powerhouse.It was a dispute over who would direct “The Rothschilds” that ended the Bock-Harnick partnership. The show’s original director, Derek Goldby, was replaced by Michael Kidd at the urging of Mr. Harnick and others who wanted someone with more musical-theater experience. Mr. Bock was irate.“Jerry felt that Derek had gotten a raw deal,” Mr. Harnick recalled in 1990. “For a while, the feelings between us were very bad.” He added that “things changed for the better” when “Fiorello!” was revived in 1985 at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut and he and Mr. Bock met there to work on it. (It was revived again off Broadway in 2016.)Nonetheless, they never wrote another show together. Mr. Bock died at 81 in 2010.From left, Mr. Prince, Mr. Bock, Mr. Harnick, Fred Ebb and John Kander in 2004, when the Bock-Harnick and Kander-Ebb songwriting teams announced that they were giving their archives to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.Yoni Brook/The New York TimesSheldon Mayer Harnick was born on April 30, 1924, in Chicago to Harry and Esther Harnick. His father was a dentist, his mother a homemaker. He took violin lessons as a child, attended music school as a teenager and earned money playing in amateur theatricals. After serving in the Army, he enrolled at the Northwestern University School of Music. He graduated in 1949.He began writing songs while in Carl Schurz High School in Chicago and became seriously interested in songwriting as a career after hearing a recording of Burton Lane and E.Y. Harburg’s hit 1947 musical, “Finian’s Rainbow.” At the urging of the actress Charlotte Rae, a fellow Northwestern student, he moved to New York in 1950.Mr. Harnick’s first song in a Broadway show was “The Boston Beguine,” which he wrote — music as well as lyrics — for the revue “Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1952.” He wrote numbers for several other revues, including “Two’s Company” (1952), before teaming with Mr. Bock. (One of his compositions from those years, the darkly satirical and deceptively cheerful “The Merry Minuet,” was popularized by the folk music group the Kingston Trio.)Mr. Harnick’s first marriage, to Mary Boatner, was annulled. His second, to the comedian, writer and director Elaine May, ended in divorce. In 1965, he married Margery Gray, an actress whom he had met when she auditioned for his show “Tenderloin.” (She later became a photographer and an artist.) She survives him, as do a daughter, Beth Dorn; a son, Matthew Harnick; and four grandchildren.After his split with Mr. Bock, Mr. Harnick went on to collaborate with other composers. He worked with Mary Rodgers on a 1973 version of “Pinocchio” performed by the Bil Baird marionettes, and with her father, Richard Rodgers, on “Rex,” a musical about King Henry VIII of England that had a brief Broadway run in 1976, with Nicol Williamson in the title role. He also worked with Michel Legrand on two shows: an English-language stage version of the movie musical “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” produced off Broadway in 1979, and a new adaptation of “A Christmas Carol,” staged in Stamford, Conn., in 1982. And he collaborated with Joe Raposo on “A Wonderful Life,” based on the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which has had a number of regional productions since 1986.Mr. Harnick in 2015. His lyrics could be broadly funny, slyly satirical, lushly romantic or poignantly moving. Chad Batka for The New York TimesMr. Harnick also became an accomplished opera translator, providing English librettos for classical works like Lehar’s “The Merry Widow,” Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale” and Bizet’s “Carmen.”He wrote some original opera librettos as well, including “Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines” (1975), with music by Jack Beeson, and “The Phantom Tollbooth” (1995), a collaboration with Norton Juster, the author of the children’s book on which it was based, and the composer Arnold Black. “Lady Bird: First Lady of the Land,” an opera about Lady Bird Johnson, for which he wrote the libretto and Henry Mollicone wrote the music, had its premiere in Texas in 2016 and has been performed in New York and elsewhere.In late 2015, shortly before the latest Broadway revival of “Fiddler on the Roof” opened, Mr. Harnick was in the studio making a demonstration record of songs from “Dragons,” an adaptation of a Russian play for which he wrote the book, music and lyrics, and which he had been working on for many years. In an interview with The Times, he said that he had no thoughts of retirement, and that he continued to attend every show on Broadway, as he had for many years. He added that he was working on a new show of his own.“I hope I live long enough to complete it,” he said. “I won’t tell you what idea I have, because you’ll steal it.”Robert Berkvist, a former New York Times arts editor, died in January. Peter Keepnews contributed reporting. More

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      Sonic Sphere, a Concert Hall That Hangs Like a Disco Ball

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      The lights inside the cavernous McCourt space at the Shed had been dimmed, and a mystical soundtrack was playing. “Your journey begins in five minutes,” a recorded voice announced to the roughly 200 people gathered there on a recent evening.A curtain opened, revealing a 50-ton spherical, suspended concert hall that glowed red and orange.There were whispers among audience members that the hall, called the Sonic Sphere, resembled a spaceship, Epcot, a disco ball or the Death Star. Some people, snapping photos, joked that it might take flight during the nearly 70-minute program, a listening session of Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians.” Others were expecting a more spiritual experience.“I want to lose myself in the sound,” Stephen Ross, an architect, said as he made his way up a flight of stairs to the main entrance. “I want to be transported.”The Sonic Sphere, a realization of a modernist dream by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, aims for a new kind of listening experience: surrounding the audience with 124 meticulously arranged speakers and an array of lights that change color with the music.The 66-foot-diameter Sonic Sphere suspended and under construction at the Shed.George Etheredge for The New York TimesThe Sonic Sphere was overseen by a team that includes Ed Cooke, Merijn Royaards, Nicholas Christie, Chester Chipperfield and Jessica Lair.George Etheredge for The New York TimesThe infrastructure includes 1,178 steel struts, 3,500 yards of cloth and 12 structural cables supporting the sphere from the roof.George Etheredge for The New York TimesThis summer, the Sonic Sphere will host listening sessions of music remixed for its spatial sound design, including the xx’s debut album, from 2009. The lineup also includes playlists by the D.J.s Yaeji and Carl Craig, and live performances by the pianist Igor Levit, who will play Morton Feldman’s “Palais de Mari” with a visual accompaniment by Rirkrit Tiravanija.The Shed’s iteration of the Sonic Sphere — overseen by a team that includes Ed Cooke, Merijn Royaards, Nicholas Christie, Chester Chipperfield and Jessica Lair — is the 11th and the largest, with a diameter of about 66 feet and a capacity of roughly 250 people, who sit or lie in netted areas.“It’s about a change in consciousness that leaves a memory,” Cooke said of the project. “Can people have an experience where they touch some new territory of consciousness, not in a way that is like an altered state, but one that actually leaves a trace?”George Etheredge for The New York TimesStockhausen conceived of a spherical concert hall known as the Kugelauditorium, a form of which was erected at the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka, Japan. There, Germany’s pavilion presented works written for the dome, including music by Stockhausen himself. Crowds of music fans visited, but the idea never caught on.Since 2021, Cooke and his team have revived the concept, building Sonic Spheres in France, the United Kingdom, Mexico and the United States, including at Burning Man. Each time, the hall has grown bigger; the first one, at the Féy commune in northeastern France, was 10 feet in diameter and cost about $1,000.Events at the Sonic Sphere include listening parties of albums remixed for its 124 meticulously arranged speakers, as well as live performances by the pianist Igor Levit.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesThe version in New York has 1,178 steel struts, 3,500 yards of cloth and 12 structural cables supporting the sphere from the roof. The hall’s opening was pushed back a week because of delays receiving supplies, including trusses and floor plates. The result is the first Sonic Sphere to be suspended in air, at a cost of more than $2 million, with much of the financing from technology investors and entrepreneurs.Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director, who in his early career worked with Stockhausen, said that the Sonic Sphere’s aim was to bring the focus back to sound.Christopher Lee for The New York Times“These days, we talk about going to see a concert, which is kind of nuts,” he said. “We’re so dominated by the visual. Here we’re bringing music back to the center of the experience, and that’s really beautiful and important.”At the “Music for 18 Musicians” listening session last week, audience members had a range of opinions about the hall.Ryan Mannion, a software engineer in New York, said he was able to lose himself in the music: “I found myself just sort of sitting back and closing my eyes and enjoying it.” Some, though found the experience too noisy, and too long. “There were a few moments when it was sublime,” said Sarah Watson, an executive coach, “but not all the time.”The Sonic Sphere’s main entrance is reached by a staircase of about 50 steps.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesOne audience member, Ryan Mannion, said, “I found myself just sort of sitting back and closing my eyes and enjoying it.”Christopher Lee for The New York TimesWatson’s 9-year-old daughter, Matilda Morton, said that she enjoyed the session but found some parts excessive. “It felt like we were secret agents in an alien mother ship,” she said. “It was pretty overwhelming with the red lights and the loud, vibrating noises.”The Shed’s Sonic Sphere will close on July 30, but is expected to return next year. Before then, it will move to another location, possibly on the West Coast or in Europe.Cooke said that he hoped the agility and accessibility of the spheres, which can be built and taken down relatively quickly, would allow them to become more common.“People are more and more desperate to come together and experience rich, transformational things,” Cooke said. “We want to give them something magical.” More

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      Share Your Favorite Hip-Hop Lyrics

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      As The New York Times prepares to pay tribute to the genre on its 50th anniversary, we want to hear about the lines that have stuck in your heads and shaped your musical lives.It’s hard to pinpoint the exact birth date of a musical revolution. But if you ask most experts when hip-hop burst onto the scene, they’ll tell you it all started with a block party in the Bronx on Aug. 11, 1973.Since that auspicious day, hip-hop has spread from Sedgwick Avenue to every corner of the globe, becoming a multibillion-dollar industry and a cultural touchstone for generations of music lovers.As The New York Times prepares to commemorate hip-hop’s 50th anniversary, we want to hear from you. Please share with us:Lyrics that are at least a couple of lines longLess popular lyrics that mean something to youThe artist’s name for each lyricTell Us About Your Favorite Lyrics More

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      Pink Floyd, ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and Me

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      Last October, when Roger Waters brought his “This Is Not a Drill” tour through Austin, Texas, he also took the time to record a nearly three-hour appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. These are typically rambling affairs, guided by the host’s idiosyncratic curiosities, and about halfway through, following a riff by Waters about nuclear […] More

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      Dolby Atmos Wants You to Listen Up. (And Down. And Sideways.)

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      True believers in the immersive audio format say it could restore a musical appreciation lost to a generation that has come up during the streaming era.After more than 30 years as a producer and engineer, Brad Wood wasn’t sure if he still had a future in music.Wood, a classically trained saxophonist, had gotten his start in Chicago’s early ’90s music scene, helming breakthrough albums for Liz Phair and Veruca Salt, and platinum records for Smashing Pumpkins and Placebo. In 2000, he moved to Southern California, where he thrived for a time — and then merely survived, as the downloading era sank recording budgets just as the brand of guitar rock he specialized in lost cultural relevancy.While many of his colleagues gave up, Wood kept going, working harder while earning less. “I probably got to the point where I was making the same rate as when I started,” he said.Then, in 2021, an emergent technology ushered Wood — and thousands of recording professionals like him — into an unexpected boom time.Over the past two years, Wood has been busy mixing old and new records in Dolby Atmos, an audio format that lets engineers create a listening experience more immersive than traditional stereo by placing sounds around and above the listener. Working for a variety of labels, Wood has done Atmos mixes for the Supremes, the Pogues, Jennifer Lopez, Modest Mouse, Gwen Stefani and Soul Asylum — some 300-plus tracks in total, the equivalent of two dozen albums.“The whole thing has been pretty unexpected and thrilling,” he said.For Dolby, the audio company that developed Atmos, and Apple Music — which has invested heavily in it — the technology could lead to the most dramatic shift in audio in 65 years.“The recording industry went from mono to stereo decades ago, and it didn’t move from there,” John Couling, senior vice president of Dolby Laboratories, said in a phone interview.There have been efforts to convince the public to adopt new advanced technologies in the years since, ‌including Quadraphonic sound in the ’70s ‌and 5.1 surround sound in the ’90s, but with little success. “We’ve changed formats, we’ve changed delivery methods, we’ve changed all sorts of things,” Couling said, “but it was still fundamentally the same sound. Atmos is a completely new experience.”Oliver Schusser, a vice president at Apple Music, said that his company, which has incentivized record labels to deliver catalog material in Atmos, sees it as way to bring sonic value back to music — something that’s been lost among a whole generation that has come up during the streaming era.“There was no appreciation of the art and work of sound engineers and mixing and mastering,” Schusser said over a video call this spring. “That really pained us. We wanted to fix that.”Today, all three major record labels and hundreds of independents are delivering tracks in Atmos. Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal and Qobuz are the among the 15 streaming services bringing Atmos to 160 countries and over 500 million listeners.“But mention the word ‘Atmos’ to anyone in the general public and they don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” said the veteran engineer and producer Bob Clearmountain. One of the most respected and influential figures in the recording world, Clearmountain was initially dubious of Atmos’s staying power, but he has come to believe in its future.“Music has become background noise for most people. It’s something in your headphones while you’re out doing other stuff,” he said during a call last month. “When I was a teenager, I used to listen to an album three, four times through just sitting in front of my speakers, entranced.” That way of listening has disappeared, he said, but he’s hopeful that Atmos can bring it back, “if we’re able to get people to understand what it is and hear it the right way.”From the outside, it appears Atmos is entering a critical period that could determine whether it will kick off a sonic revolution or become just another tech lost to time.“The goal is to feel like you’re sitting amongst these musicians as they’re performing,” the producer Brad Wood said.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesDOLBY ATMOS, INTRODUCED in 2012, was initially developed for movie theaters and the home theater market. Because it offers a wider palette than stereo, and differs from traditional 5.1 and 7.1 channel setups, Atmos allows engineers — typically mixing across a dozen or more speakers — to put sound sources in front, to the side, behind and even above the listener.“When you take sounds and you separate them from each other,” Couling said, “you will be able to hear those sounds independently much more clearly than if they are on top of each other. By creating space, we also create depth and clarity — and we found that’s what content creators really wanted.”For artists like Chic’s founder, Nile Rodgers, immersive audio is the closest thing to the musician’s experience. “When I’m making a record, I’m sitting in a room with the band,” Rodgers said during a video chat, “we’re playing and jamming and what happens is the sound is bathing us. That’s what music sounds like to me.”Listening to Dolby Atmos mixes in a professional recording studio can be a powerful experience. “It’s remarkably seductive,” said Clearmountain, who’s done Atmos projects for Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones and others. “I’ve played Atmos tracks for so many people who say, ‘I can never listen to stereo again.’ People have been in tears, moved by what they were hearing. It has an incredible effect.”Opinions among recording professionals on any subject are rarely uniform, and there are some who have reservations about Atmos.Susan Rogers, a longtime engineer for Prince, left the music industry in the late ’90s to become a cognitive neuroscientist. Last fall, Dolby invited her to the company headquarters in San Francisco to listen to a new Atmos mix of Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” a track she originally worked on.“As both an engineer and as a psychoacoustician, I have mixed feelings about whether it’s an improvement,” Rogers said in a phone interview.She noted that there are evolutionary and biological reasons that sound sources coming from behind and above listeners can be unsettling or anxiety inducing. She also observed that music is a potent form of communication in large part because the consummatory phase happens entirely in the listener’s head. Having clearer and more sound sources can actually make it harder to know what to pay attention to.“That was what I noticed listening to ‘When Doves Cry’ in Atmos,” Rogers said. “It sounded amazing, but it was more difficult to assemble it into a unified whole in that private place I listen to music. I found it distracting.” Her “knee-jerk reaction was ‘do not want,’” she said. “But over time I may learn to like it.”APPLE MUSIC IS betting heavily that the public will, by and large, come to love Atmos. Although other companies, including Amazon, had flirted with the technology, in 2021 Apple decided to commit itself fully to Atmos, putting its own proprietary and branding spin on the tech, dubbing it “spatial” audio.Strategically, Atmos offers Apple Music a way to further distinguish itself from streaming competitors like Spotify — which has historically ignored high resolution or advanced audio options — and siphon market share from the industry’s dominant music service, YouTube.“We wanted something where people would notice a difference immediately,” said Schusser, the Apple Music executive. “Maybe not 100 percent would love Atmos or spatial audio right away, but everyone would know this sounds different, and the hope is the majority would come to appreciate the upgrade.”Initially, Apple’s biggest challenge was that there was very little Atmos content available. In 2017, R.E.M.’s “Automatic for the People” became the first album mixed for Atmos, and over the next few years, several notable Atmos releases — from Elton John, Queen and the Beatles — showcased the format’s possibilities.To achieve its broader aims, Apple needed to make Atmos content both viable and plentiful. It began by partnering with Dolby to encourage recording studios to upgrade to the format. There are now some 800 officially recognized Dolby Atmos studios in over 40 countries, a 350 percent increase in just two years. (Dolby estimates there are two or three times that number of other studios capable of delivering music in Atmos.)Apple Music also drew up wish lists of artists, albums and tracks and presented them to record labels, along with funding and deadlines, to help quickly expand the library of titles available in Atmos. Over the past few years, this effort to refit 50 years of pop music has heralded a rush of work for engineers and mixers, who’ve suddenly found themselves doing volume business in the format.Wood, initially dismissive of learning to work in Atmos, said he changed his mind once he realized the inevitability of its rise. “It was clear that records I’d made were going to get mixed in Atmos,” he said, “and if I didn’t learn how to do it, somebody else would, and I’d be ceding that control.” Wood’s first Atmos mix was for Liz Phair’s “Soberish,” an album he’d originally produced. “And, also, I realized there would be a good payday in learning,” he added.While contemporary pop and hip-hop artists were quick to adopt the format for new releases, convincing veteran rock acts to enter the Atmos fray proved more of a challenge. “The first six months, those artists had a lot of questions,” Schusser said.Some groups, like the Doors, embraced the format, overhauling their entire catalog in Atmos all at once; others, like Fleetwood Mac, have proceeded more cautiously, doing one album at a time. More and more though, top legacy artists have been putting out Atmos mixes with increasing regularity, with recent releases including landmark albums like Pink Floyd’s‌ ‌“The Dark Side of the Moon‌‌” and ‌the Beach Boys’‌ ‌“Pet Sounds.”Given the sheer volume of Atmos catalog work and the still evolving understanding of the format, not all mixes are created equal.“The labels seem to be farming this stuff out and it isn’t always being done with the original artist or production team involved,” Clearmountain said. “I know that’s not always possible. But sometimes what comes back are just bad mixes — or strange mixes, anyway.”Wood — who has done mixes in consultation with the original artists as well as on his own — agrees. “In general, you have to try to put the tracks into a speaker array so it doesn’t sound too jarring or gimmicky,” he said. “The goal is to feel like you’re sitting amongst these musicians as they’re performing. Like all mixing, it’s subjective, and how you approach it really depends on the music itself.”For some artists, transforming old recordings into Atmos has been challenging. Chic recently had its first three albums mixed in the format. “The process took months and months to get right,” Rodgers said. “The team that was working on it, we gave them notes, we went into different rooms, did rough mixes to show them what we were talking about.”For others, the overhaul has been relatively painless and even eye-opening. This past spring, Alicia Keys had eight of her albums mixed for Atmos. In a video interview promoting her catalog overhaul, Keys said that engineers working on her albums “completely reimagined every note, every sound, every instrument, every voice. It sounds like you’ve never heard it before. I mean, I never even heard it like this before. It really is a new experience.”Strategically, Atmos offers Apple Music a way to further distinguish itself from streaming competitors like Spotify,Chad HagenONE OF THE reasons other highly touted surround sound technologies like 5.1 and 7.1 failed to catch on is because they required a specific speaker configuration. Dolby Atmos, however, is scalable and can adapt to a variety of setups.Given its success in the headphones market, Apple has emphasized playback on its AirPods and Beats Fit Pro devices, which all offer a version of the Atmos experience with dynamic head tracking (where the sound shifts along with a user’s movement) in the $200 to $500 range. A number of other manufacturers, including Audeze, RIG, Corsair and LG, also offer Atmos headphones and earbuds.The options for affordable home music systems, ones purpose-built for Atmos audio, have been limited. Amazon and Apple have long offered their own Atmos-enabled smart speakers, but neither really conveyed the full range of sound possible.In March, Sonos introduced a first of its kind sub-$500 speaker, the Era 300, which more successfully packages the Atmos experience into a single compact unit, equipped with a half-dozen drivers that direct sound left, right, forward and upward.The Grammy-winning mixing and mastering engineer Emily Lazar, who helped test and fine tune the Era 300, hopes it will be the start of tech companies bringing more viable Atmos options to market.“No one who’s listened to Atmos in a properly tuned, beautiful-sounding studio can deny what it offers,” she said. “How now can we deliver that in a smaller package so everybody can afford it and have that same kind of experience is going to be key moving forward.”If Atmos does ever achieve critical mass, it might come through automobiles. Most cars come equipped standard with a dozen-plus speakers, making them a natural environment for immersive audio. So far, a handful of major automakers including Mercedes-Benz and Volvo have introduced plans to put Atmos in their vehicles. It’s a market Dolby and Apple both say they are determined to expand further.“But those kind of tech changes don’t happen in a year or two — and that’s really what it’s been so far,” Schusser said. “There’s obviously more work to be done. But we’re all optimistic we’ll get there with Atmos.”In the meantime, recording pros like Wood will keep working and mixing, hoping the Atmos bump will last a little while longer.“I don’t know that I could have written a better chapter for this phase of my career,” he said. “If you told me three years ago, I was going to get paid my day rate to listen and work on some of the greatest recordings in history, I would’ve said, ‘Sign me up — that sounds amazing.’” More