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      The ‘Twin Peaks’ Theme Isn’t Just a Song. It’s a Portal.

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      Angelo Badalamenti, who died at age 85, left behind the bum-bommm that feels like home.Suffering from a case of middle age, I recently decided to learn the piano as an adult. The lesson I played on Monday was the theme from “Twin Peaks” — well, the idiot-proof, one-hand version that my iPad teaching app prepared for me, built around that low, hypnotic pattern. Bum bommm. Bum BOMMM.Later that day, in the sort of coincidence that seems to happen only in dreams and in small, spirit-afflicted logging towns in Washington, came news that the song’s composer, Angelo Badalamenti, had died at age 85.Badalamenti was a classically trained composer with a long résumé, including the scores for David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive.” But his memory is secured by those mesmeric notes, which opened the red curtains on Lynch and Mark Frost’s eerie mystery, and which stand above and apart from most music written for television like an ancient evergreen in an old-growth forest.In a recent list of the 100 greatest TV themes ever, Rolling Stone ranked “Twin Peaks” at 35. It would be unfair to use Badalamenti’s passing to dunk on that choice. (Counterpoint: Come on.) But whether or not it is the best theme of all time, it may be the most otherworldly, the most unlike anything that came before it.TV themes before 1990, when “Twin Peaks” premiered, tended to be come-ons or introductions. They whipped up a sense of excitement and adventure, like the theme from “Mission Impossible.” Or they outlined characters and told a story, like Waylon Jennings’s “Good Ol’ Boys” from “The Dukes of Hazzard.”Badalamenti’s theme is not a synopsis. It is not a fanfare. It is a passageway, a portal. It is slow, spare and meditative, even by the relatively languid TV pacing of three decades ago. It tells you to reset your pulse, abandon your expectations and step for an hour into a dark wood where the owls are not what they seem.Angelo Badalamenti was a classically trained composer with multiple film scores to his name. His memory is secured by the opening notes of the “Twin Peaks” theme.Nancy Wegard for The New York TimesThat opening motif seems to be plucked on the strings of an instrument that no human ever played, because in a way it is. According to Badalamenti, it began as a sample on a synthesizer, pitched lower and doubled with another guitar sound. “There’s no synth that has that sound, and it’s much too low to be an electric guitar, and it’s not a bass,” Badalamenti told Vulture in 2016. “We kept that quiet because we didn’t want anyone else to use it.”The resulting sound is simultaneously twangy and chthonic. It seems to vibrate from the earth, from your bones, from inside a tree trunk. It is, like the series, both filled with ghostly dread and saturated with romantic emotion.The theme couples that figure with a wash of dreamy synthesizers. Their interplay sets up contrasts that Lynch and Frost built into their supernatural murder mystery. It’s spooky but also naïve. It’s retro, with echoes of a rockabilly riff, and space-age. (The synthesizers, the critic John Rockwell wrote in The Times in 1990, “invest everything with an electronic glow, as if the music were radioactive.”)The music for “Twin Peaks” had to make realistic and surrealistic sense. It needed to work in a cherry-pie all-American diner and in the anteroom of the underworld. Badalamenti met the challenge in his playful and minimal score for the rest of the series, from the wistful “Laura Palmer’s Theme” to the seductive “Audrey’s Dance” to the jazzy, twitchy “Dance of the Dream Man.”The score played with Americana and pop history, but despite coming out at the dawn of the age of TV irony — “Seinfeld” had premiered a year before — it never winked. Like “Twin Peaks” itself, it meant what it said, even if you could spend your life grasping after that meaning.When Lynch and Frost brought “Twin Peaks” back for a revival in 2017, it was in many ways a different series with a different sound: even more gorgeously and truculently experimental, with an audio palette that leaned heavily on Lynch’s eerie, mechanical sound textures.But as the opening sequence began, there it was again: Bum bommm. Bum BOMMM. TV series are rituals, and those opening notes feel quasi religious, like an “om,” the one true bass line thrumming under eternity.Those notes live somewhere deep in my brain; I could feel that as I clumsily plunked them out on my piano. This is the power of a great theme: However disorienting things might get, on the screen or in life, you can always return to that musical mantra. Angelo Badalamenti is gone now. But his song remains, pulling me ever deeper into the woods. More

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      Angelo Badalamenti, Composer for ‘Twin Peaks,’ Is Dead at 85

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      The filmmaker David Lynch turned to his haunting work again and again, for “Blue Velvet,” “Mulholland Drive” and other neo-noir films.Angelo Badalamenti, an internationally sought-after composer who wrote the hypnotic theme to “Twin Peaks,” David Lynch’s 1990s television drama series, and the music for five Lynch films, including “Blue Velvet” (1986), died on Sunday at his home in Lincoln Park, N.J. He was 85.His niece Frances Badalamenti confirmed the death. She said she did not know the cause.Mr. Badalamenti was at the piano behind Isabella Rossellini when she sang “Blue Velvet” at the Slow Club in Lumberton, N.C., a flower-filled, picket-fence kind of town with a very dark side. Aside from the title song, a Bobby Vinton hit from 1963, he had composed much of the film’s music.He also wrote the music for Mr. Lynch’s 2001 neo-noir mystery “Mulholland Drive” and had a small role in the film as one of two mobster brothers who spits out his espresso in a conference-room scene.His best-known work was the “Twin Peaks” theme, recognizable from its first three ominous, otherworldly notes. He won the 1990 Grammy for best instrumental pop performance for the number, which was, according to the Allmusic website, “dark, cloying and obsessive — and one of the best scores ever written for television.”In 2015, a Billboard writer described the theme as “gorgeous and gentle one second, eerie and unsettling the next.” It was, according to Rolling Stone, the “most influential soundtrack in TV history.”Mr. Badalamenti didn’t really disagree.“Music and composing — I almost feel a little guilty about it — come so easily for me,” he told the north New Jersey newspaper The Record in 2004. “It’s like the well doesn’t seem to run dry.”Angelo Daniel Badalamenti was born on March 22, 1937, in Brooklyn. A second-generation Italian-American, he was the second of four children of John Badalamenti, a fish market owner, and Leonora (Ferrari) Badalamenti, a seamstress.Growing up in the Bensonhurst section, he started piano lessons at 8 but quit because he preferred playing stickball outdoors with his friends. He took it up again at his older brother’s insistence and came to appreciate the piano when girls admired his playing. He was soon accompanying vocalists and other acts at Catskills resorts during summers off from high school and college.Mr. Badalamenti attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., and earned a master’s degree at the Manhattan School of Music in 1960.His first job was teaching the seventh grade in a public school, but when he wrote a musical Christmas program for his students, members of the Board of Education saw the production and told the local public TV station Channel 13 about it. The station videotaped and broadcast the show, and the Monday after Christmas, Mr. Badalamenti got a call from a Manhattan music publisher with a job offer.Nina Simone recorded some of his first songs, including “I Hold No Grudge,” in 1965. Nancy Wilson sang “Face It, Girl, It’s Over” (1968).Mr. Badalamenti got started in films by writing music for “Gordon’s War,” a 1973 blaxploitation film. Ossie Davis, the director, wanted an all-black crew, all “brothers,” he said. Mr. Badalamenti pointed to Sicily on a world map. “You do seven strokes from Sicily, and you’re in Africa,” he said he told Mr. Davis. “I may not be your brother, but I’m certainly your cousin!”Mr. Badalamenti was at the piano when Isabella Rossellini sang “Blue Velvet” in the 1986 David Lynch movie of the same title. De Laurentis Group/Courtesy Everett CollectionHe and Mr. Lynch met when Mr. Badalamenti was called in as a vocal coach for Ms. Rossellini on the set of “Blue Velvet.”Jamie Stewart, whose band Xiu Xiu did an album of “Twin Peaks” music, saw Mr. Badalamenti’s Lynchian work in a historical midcentury context: a postwar world where everything appeared to be sunshine and pastels but where the evil unleashed by World War II still lurked.“It’s very romantic but can be terrifying,” Mr. Stewart said of the music, speaking to The Guardian in 2017. “It has a violence and a sincere sentimentality — sadness but not despair.”Mr. Lynch, who described Mr. Badalamenti’s work as having “a deep and powerful beauty,” said that he and the composer would be entirely in sync in expressing Mr. Lynch’s vision for a film. “I sit next to him and I talk to him, and he plays what I say,” he said in an interview with the American Film Institute.As Mr. Badalamenti explained on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” that’s how he wrote “Laura Palmer’s Theme” for “Twin Peaks.” Sitting beside him at his Fender Rhodes keyboard, Mr. Lynch began talking.“It’s the dead of night,” Mr. Badalamenti said. “We’re in a dark wood. There’s a full moon out. There are sycamore trees that are gently swaying in the wind. There’s an owl.”The words became notes that evoked the story of a murdered homecoming queen in the Pacific Northwest.They collaborated again and again, on the films “Wild at Heart” (1990), “Lost Highway” (1997) and “The Straight Story” (1999), in addition to “Mulholland Drive.” There were five iterations of “Twin Peaks,” including the film “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” (1992) and an 18-episode sequel series (2017).In between, Mr. Badalamenti wrote for a wide variety of movies, among them “Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” (1987), “The Comfort of Strangers” (1990), “Naked in New York” (1993), “The City of Lost Children” (1995), “A Very Long Engagement” (2004) and “The Wicker Man” (2006).He used what he called his “classical chops” to score “Stalingrad” (2013), a wartime love story set against that pivotal 1942 battle. It was an enormous box office success in Russia, where it was produced.One of his longest-running projects was the music for the PBS program “Inside the Actors Studio,” which was on the air from 1994 through 2019, hosted by James Lipton.Writer’s block was rarely a problem for Mr. Badalamenti, but composing a torch-lighting theme for the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona had him stumped. The notes finally came to him in the shower, he recalled, and he hurried downstairs to his piano. “I wrote it in half an hour,” he said.He received the Henry Mancini Award from Ascap, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, and a Lifetime Achievement honor from the World Soundtrack Awards.Mr. Badalamenti is survived by his wife, Lonny; his daughter, Danielle; and four grandchildren. His son, André, died in 2012.His niece Frances interviewed him for a magazine, The Believer, in 2019. He remembered being drawn to film noir in his youth, telling her, “The haunting sounds have been there, the off-center instrumentals, ever since I was a child.”Alex Traub More

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      An Opera Company’s Precarious Future Has Some Worried About a Ripple Effect

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      For a month now, politicians, newspapers and classical music stars have been arguing over the future of English National Opera. A funding cut could have repercussions far beyond Britain.LONDON — When Leigh Melrose, a rising British opera star, looked at his calendar recently, much of the next three years were blocked out for one company: English National Opera. He was signed up to sing multiple roles there, starting with the lustful dwarf Alberich in the company’s new “Ring” cycle, a coproduction with the Metropolitan Opera that was meant to head to New York.Melrose said that he’d had his wig fitting for that role, and that rehearsals for “The Rheingold,” the first installment in Wagner’s four-part epic, were scheduled to begin Dec. 28.But now, he said, all those plans seemed uncertain. Last month, Arts Council England, a body that distributes government arts funding here, announced it was shutting off a grant to English National Opera worth 12.4 million pounds a year, or about $15 million. The Arts Council instead gave the company a one-off grant to help it develop “a new business model,” including a potential move to Manchester, 178 miles north of its current home at the London Coliseum.On the same day, the Arts Council also slashed funding to other major opera companies including the Royal Opera House, by 10 percent, and Glyndebourne Productions, by over 30 percent.Melrose said those cuts came as a “total shock,” adding that the long-term future of the “Ring” in both London and New York did not look good. If the E.N.O., as English National Opera is known, had to move away from London, “How can it keep on doing the rest?” Melrose asked. “How can it carry on doing anything?”For the past month, the fate of the E.N.O. has made headlines here. Musicians, critics and politicians have been arguing over whether the decision to cut the company’s funding is a sensible response to a declining interest in opera, or an act of cultural vandalism. Concerns have spread beyond Britain, with companies in Europe and the United States warning that the global opera ecosystem may suffer, too.Protesters outside the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, a government ministry, in London, on Nov. 22.Tolga Akmen/EPA, via ShutterstockDozens of senior opera figures — including Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, and Yuval Sharon, the artistic director of Detroit Opera — signed a recent letter to The Times of London, warning of a wider impact. “Everyone across the world has long looked to the United Kingdom as a center of artistic excellence,” the letter said. “We fear that this decision signals to the world that they — and we — must now look elsewhere.”Gelb said by phone that he had already pushed the Met’s run of the “Ring” cycle back a year, to the 2027/28 season, “for casting reasons.” But, he added, “if the E.N.O. doesn’t exist, we obviously can’t collaborate with it.”Christopher Koelsch, the chief executive of Los Angeles Opera, said that the E.N.O. had “historically been a crucible for creativity and experimentation,” noting that numerous stars including the conductor Edward Gardner, the composer Nico Muhly and the director Barrie Kosky had done early or important work at the company.Los Angeles Opera had been planning a new coproduction with the E.N.O. for its 2024/25 season, Koelsch said, though he declined to give further details and said he had not been in contact with the company since the funding cut was announced. “I think they’ve got other things to focus on,” he said.Newspaper coverage of opera in Britain is usually restricted to the arts pages, but the ferocity of debate here in recent weeks has propelled it to the front pages, and made it a major topic on social media.The company has been urging opera fans to pressure the government and the Arts Council to overturn the funding decision. More than 74,000 people have signed an online petition started by the singer Bryn Terfel.Performances at the London Coliseum have a relaxed atmosphere.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesGenerous policies that give free or discounted tickets to people under 35 have helped English National Opera draw in a younger crowd than the Royal Opera House.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesIn the last season, each ticket the company sold was propped up with about $168 of state funding.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesJohn Berry, who was the E.N.O.’s artistic director from 2005 to 2015, said that the company had coped with funding cuts before: In 2014, it lost a third of its government grant after failing to meet box office targets. But it would be “impossible,” he said, for the company to deal with a total loss of subsidy unless “a guardian angel” appeared. That was unlikely, given Britain lacked a culture of philanthropy, he added.Britain’s major opera companies have a unique funding model that is halfway between American companies’ reliance on philanthropy and European houses’ dependence on state funding. The E.N.O.’s Arts Council grant currently represents over a third of its income. In contrast, the Los Angeles Opera gets about 5 percent of its income from public grants; the Met, about 0.5 percent.English National Opera traces its history back to 1931, when Lilian Baylis, a theater owner, established the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company to bring the art form to popular audiences. That founding aim is still central to the company, which stages all its work in English. Those performances, at the London Coliseum, have a more relaxed atmosphere than the ones at the nearby Royal Opera House, with audience members often wearing jeans rather than tuxedos, and generous policies to give free or discounted tickets to people under 35.It made its global reputation in the 1980s when it became the first British opera company to tour the United States and debuted a host of major productions including Nicholas Hytner’s much-praised 1985 staging of Handel’s “Xerxes.” Under Berry’s leadership, the company also started to act as a test bed for productions heading to the Met, with productions of Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha,” Nico Muhly’s “Two Boys” and Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” among others, premiering in London before being tweaked and sent to New York.A scene from “Porgy and Bess,” which premiered at English National Opera in 2018. The production came to the Metropolitan Opera, in New York, in 2019.Tristram KentonDespite those triumphs, John Allison, the editor of Opera magazine, said in an interview that the company had recently been lurching from crisis to crisis with a string of high-profile resignations, financial difficulties and a declining number of works presented.Fewer performances meant that the Arts Council was subsidizing each E.N.O. ticket sold to a greater extent, and the company was often criticized for providing poor value for public money.A spokeswoman for the company said in an email that 90,000 people went to the company’s 63 performances last season, a figure that means each ticket was propped up with £137, or about $168, of state funding. The spokeswoman added that attendance was lower than usual that season, because of the pandemic, and that the opera reached many more people through other means, including television broadcasts seen by 2.2 million viewers.The Arts Council has defended its decision. Claire Mera-Nelson, the agency’s director of music, said in a blog post that she had seen “almost no growth in demand” for large-scale opera over the past five years, and had decided to prioritize funding for the art form “at different scales, reimagined in new ways” such as staging productions in parking lots, or pubs. Darren Henley, the Arts Council’s chief executive, wrote in The Guardian that “new ideas may seem heretic to traditionalists,” but that opera needed to reinvent itself to “remain exciting and meaningful to future generations.”On Thursday, Henley told British politicians he was having discussions with the E.N.O. over how it could keep showing work in London, as well as elsewhere in England, but added, “We can’t fund them in London.” (The Arts Council declined an interview request for this article.)While English National Opera’s future is hanging on officials’ whims, its audience seems hopeful that it will remain in London, somehow. At the Coliseum last week, before a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Yeomen of the Guard,” the atmosphere was relaxed and informal. Audience members in winter coats and bobble hats arrived on foot, rather than in sleek cars, and headed into the theater, where a merchandise stall was selling T-shirts with the slogans “Choose Opera” and “#loveENO.”Nick McConagh, 72, said he had been coming to the E.N.O. since the 1970s because its tickets were affordable. “It disproves the belief that opera is for the rich,” he said.Nearby, Hatti Simpson, 30, with pink hair and tattoos, said she fell in love with opera after taking advantage of the company’s cheap ticketing for young people. Cutting the E.N.O.’s funding and forcing it to move out of London would be “an absolute travesty,” she said.Two hours later, when the lights went down at the end of the show, the audience of nearly 2,000 applauded and cheered. After the cast had taken several bows, Neal Davies, a Welsh baritone, stepped forward and quietened the crowd for one final number. “I’m here to sing the praises of English National Op-er-a, who strive to make the medium both radical and pop-ul-ar,” he sang, to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General,”If the company did not exist “your life would be a dull-er one,” he added. That prospect, Davies bellowed, “was almost as unthinkable as Gilbert without Sul-liv-an.”The audience cheered loudly. But it was unclear if anyone outside the building was listening. More

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      Joyce Bryant, Sensual Singer Who Changed Course, Dies at 95

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      In the 1940s and ’50s she was a glamorous Black star when there were few. Then she became a missionary.Joyce Bryant, a sultry singer of the 1940s and ’50s who broke racial barriers in nightclubs and raised the hackles of radio censors before setting aside her show business career in favor of missionary work, then reinventing herself as a classical and opera singer, died on Nov. 20 in Los Angeles, at the home of her niece and longtime caregiver, Robyn LaBeaud. She was 95.Ms. LaBeaud said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.Ms. Bryant was a teenager when she first attracted attention on the West Coast with her striking voice and equally striking looks. She started out with the Lorenzo Flennoy Trio — “Can’t just can’t get rid of those chills up and down my spine whenever Joyce Bryant with the Flennoy Trio sings ‘So Long,’” J.T. Gipson wrote in The California Eagle in 1946.Soon she was appearing regularly at clubs, first in San Francisco and Los Angeles and then beyond. And she was developing a signature sexiness, wearing striking gowns that accented her hourglass figure.“Many of Joyce’s gowns are created so form-fitting that the singer cannot sit down in them,” The Pittsburgh Courier wrote in 1954. “Joyce has had to develop a glide to move about.”And there was her hair — silver, thanks to the application of radiator paint. Sometimes she went with an all-silver look: hair, gown, nails. It was a gimmick, she told The Montreal Star in 1967, that had been born of a desire to set herself apart from Lena Horne and Josephine Baker, two top Black stars of the day, at a benefit concert.“After them, who was going to listen to me?” she said. “I knew I had to do something different.”The “something different” garnered a long standing ovation, she told The Star. and “I don’t think the audience even heard me sing that night.”In her nightclub appearances, Ms. Bryant developed a signature sexiness, wearing striking gowns that accented her hourglass figure.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesHer look was only one factor in her fame. The other was her delivery, which on certain songs was boldly sensual. Her first record, released on the London label in 1949, was a song called “Drunk With Love” that she imbued with so much sexiness that some radio stations wouldn’t play it. (One in Los Angeles would play it only at night, news accounts at the time said.)A second release, her version of the Cole Porter song “Love for Sale,” encountered similar resistance.“Joyce Bryant’s waffles, ‘Drunk With Love’ and ‘Love for Sale,’ are darn good, but you’ll have to take our word,” Walter Winchell, the influential columnist and a Bryant fan, told his readers in June 1953. “Both ditties are banned from networks.”Her nightclub performances sizzled as well. When singing one number, she would pick out a patron, sit on his lap and give him a bite on the neck or ear or cheek.“Not a hard bite,” she said in a 2001 video interview with Jim Byers, who is making a documentary about her, “but a little nip.”In 1952 she was booked into the new Algiers Hotel in Miami Beach, one of the first Black performers to headline in that town. She was advised to tone down her act for the largely white audience, she said, but didn’t.Her first show shocked the crowd. For her second, she said, she noted a different seating pattern — the men in the audience somehow were all front and center.“There were all the rednecks and everybody sitting on the aisles,” she said, “hoping to be the one that was going to be bitten.”But she hadn’t escaped the racism of the day. When she was booked into the Algiers, she said, “It brought about a lot of stuff; it brought about burning crosses and threats.”Mr. Byers, who has studied Ms. Bryant’s life for decades, said that she engendered strong reactions because she was a dark-skinned Black woman (in contrast to lighter-complexioned Black stars of the day like Dorothy Dandridge) who was openly sensual. Her banned records, he said, had suggestive lyrics but not dirty ones.“Really,” he said, “the crux of it was that she was an African American woman singing these sensual love songs.”But in 1955, with her career going well, Mr. Bryant quit show business for a time. She told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1965 that after her voice gave out during an engagement at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, she overheard a conversation between a doctor and her manager. The doctor advised vocal rest; the manager instead urged him to give her cocaine to get through her shows.“I said to myself, if a human being can be exploited this way,” she said, “if somebody who is supposed to be guiding your career can be so selfish and greedy, even willing to risk you becoming hooked on narcotics for the sake of the almighty dollar, then I’d better get out.”She had been raised a Seventh-day Adventist and grew increasingly ambivalent about her singing career and her sexy onstage persona the more famous she became.“I felt for three years that I was living a lie,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1956.Ms. Bryant in 1977. She took a break from her singing career in the 1950s, doing missionary work and then becoming a teacher.Chester Higgins/The New York TimesShe entered Oakwood College (now Oakwood University) in Huntsville, Ala., a historically Black institution run by the church. She did missionary work and then became a teacher in Washington. There she was encouraged to try opera, and in 1965 she was back on a New York stage, singing the role of Bess in a New York City Opera staging of “Porgy and Bess.”Harold C. Schonberg wrote in The New York Times that her voice was not quite strong enough for the part, but that he was mesmerized by her acting, calling her “beautiful, lithe, intense.”“When she made her entrance,” he wrote, “wives in the audience clutched their husbands’ arms. A black panther was on the loose.”She played Bess in various houses across the country for several years. Then, in the 1970s, she reinvented herself again, performing a more modest pop-and-standards cabaret act in places like Cleo’s and the Rainbow Grill in Manhattan.“Song by song,” John S. Wilson of The Times wrote in reviewing her at the Cotton Club in New York in 1978, “Miss Bryant’s performance is a masterful display of concept, structure, and a delivery that bristles with vitality.”Mr. Byers said that in the early 1990s Ms. Bryant, who was living in New York at the time, was walking near Lincoln Center on a sidewalk that was being repaired. She took a fall and was injured, breaking a knee and chipping some teeth.“That’s when she basically disappeared,” he said, moving back to California and fading into relative obscurity.Ms. Bryant performing at the Rainbow Grill in Manhattan in 1977.Chester Higgins/The New York TimesEmily Ione Bryant was born on Oct. 14, 1927, in Oakland, Calif. Her father, Whitfield, was a chef for the Southern Pacific Railroad, and her mother, Dorothy (Withers) Bryant, was a homemaker.Ms. LaBeaud, her niece, said that Ms. Bryant’s grandmother used to remark that her granddaughter’s singing around the house brought joy; “joy” became “Joyce,” which Ms. Bryant began calling herself.Ms. Bryant’s career got started when she and some friends were visiting Los Angeles and went to a nightclub where the entertainer was leading an audience singalong.“All of a sudden she realizes that no one else is singing but her,” Mr. Byers said. Her arresting voice got her paired with the Flennoy Trio and, Mr. Byers said, also got her a film role as a nightclub singer in the 1946 George Raft movie “Mr. Ace.” But, Mr. Byers said, she was shown only in fleeting glimpses, and subsequent scenes in other movies were cut entirely, which he attributed to Hollywood’s racial constraints at the time.She appeared regularly at nightspots like the Club Alabam in Los Angeles, then received a career boost when Pearl Bailey, appearing at the West Hollywood club Ciro’s, became ill and she was brought in to complete the engagement. That got her a booking at Bill Miller’s Riviera in Fort Lee, N.J., just outside New York, in the summer of 1951, where Mr. Winchell saw her and became a fan.“Almost every day I got a mention in his column,” she told The New York Times in 1977. “That did it for me.”Ms. Bryant is survived by a brother, Randolph.Mr. Byers said that Ms. Bryant remained relatively unknown because she did not fit show business molds — first as a glamorous Black nightclub singer when that was not common, then as someone who turned her back on fame.“What has always fascinated me about Joyce’s career,” he said, “is what it says about the machinery of popular culture.” More

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      How to Mint a Holiday Hit

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      Grabbing a piece of the lucrative holiday market requires planning, luck and the occasional battle with a seasoned superstar like Mariah Carey.Last December, while the popular a cappella group Pentatonix was on tour with its fifth holiday album, the ensemble’s five members gathered backstage around a whiteboard to brainstorm ideas for 2022.High on the list: a sixth Christmas album.“Holidays Around the World,” Pentatonix’s latest, joins a holiday release wave that gets more crowded every year. Alicia Keys, Sam Smith, Lizzo, the Backstreet Boys and the duos of Dolly Parton-Jimmy Fallon and David Foster-Katharine McPhee are all out with new seasonal albums or singles, vying for radio time and the most coveted real estate of all: plum placement on the streaming services’ big playlists.Holiday music has long been a big business; back in 2018, Billboard estimated it at $177 million in the United States alone, and since then the overall recorded music business has grown by well over 50 percent.But streaming has supercharged it. Listeners now have easy access to decades’ worth of material, leaving contemporary artists to compete against not just each other but also all the hits of the past, by Nat King Cole, Elvis Presley or Mariah Carey. This week, streaming helped send Carey’s 28-year-old “All I Want for Christmas Is You” to No. 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, beaten only by Taylor Swift’s latest.A vast audience awaits the victors: In the week leading up to Christmas last year, holiday songs accounted for 10 percent of all music streams in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. And on Christmas Eve, Amazon Music received 35 million voice requests around the world for holiday songs through devices like the company’s Alexa-enabled smart speakers.The a cappella group Pentatonix has made holiday music a core part of its identity and business.Jason Szenes/EPA, via ShutterstockSome of the standard strategies of pop streaming can help get an edge, music executives and marketers say. Front-load a song’s hook to deter skips. Tee up plenty of “features” — track-by-track collaborators, the more famous the better — to invite fan cults.Pentatonix’s new album, for example, includes Meghan Trainor, the classical pianist Lang Lang and Lea Salonga, who has been the singing voice for Disney princesses, alongside guests less known by mainstream American audiences, like the eclectic Los Angeles group La Santa Cecilia and the Indian vocalist Shreya Ghoshal. The group said it created a detailed spreadsheet to track all the cultures, songs and artists it wanted to include.Media tie-ins also help. Last week, Disney Plus released “Pentatonix: Around the World for the Holidays,” a special in which the group pokes gentle fun at its specialty. In the show, the members find themselves stumped in a recording studio, having already done every Christmas song in the book. So, while locked in a magical break room with candy cane décor (hey, it’s Disney), they sift through fan mail from around the planet and arrive at their concept: a multicultural holiday album with far-flung collaborators.“There’s a sense of spirituality in Christmas music,” Mitch Grassi, one of the Pentatonix singers, said in a recent interview. “It creates an atmosphere of togetherness and community, acceptance and warmth.”Yet holiday music can also be the most unforgivingly conformist side of the industry, in which old songs and styles dominate the market and anything new or unorthodox risks being buried under decades of tinsel.In an interview, Foster, the golden-touch pop producer who has worked on hit Christmas albums by Celine Dion, Michael Bublé and Josh Groban, relayed what he has learned as the three rules of the game.No. 1: The public prefers the old classics, and isn’t too interested in new songs.No. 2: Singers shouldn’t wander too far from the melody.No. 3: “You can’t be too corny at Christmas. You totally get a free pass.”Foster stressed the importance of the first rule, noting that violating it could sink any holiday album. “In general, people want to hear the old songs,” he said. “They don’t want to hear a songwriter like me write a song about sitting by the fireplace, Santa’s coming down the chimney, there’s snow outside.…” He trailed off.“Christmas Songs,” Foster’s seven-track mini-album with McPhee, his wife, is an illustration of this approach, featuring swinging pop-jazz takes on “Jingle Bell Rock,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and others (though it does have one original, “My Grown-Up Christmas List”).To capture attention on streaming playlists, record labels start their work early. Lyn Koppe, the executive vice president of global catalog at Sony Music, said the company begins marketing songs in the summer, seeding search engines and prepping their own playlists. During the holiday season, Sony — whose thick portfolio of evergreens includes Presley’s “Blue Christmas,” Gene Autry’s “Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane)” and Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” — runs a global data dashboard tracking songs’ performance.David Foster, left, and Katharine McPhee released a mini album called “Christmas Songs.”Paul Archuleta/Getty Images“It’s not like we just wake up and go, ‘Oh, it’s Christmas,’” Koppe said. “We’ve been thinking for many, many months.”For current artists, the biggest challenge is turning a new song into a classic. In the old days, that meant having a catchy music video, pushing the song at radio and hoping that it stuck. Now the process can still take years, but it involves TikTok virality, perhaps a movie usage and, most important of all, user attention on streaming playlists, which can translate into return appearances year after year.“Getting on key algorithmic stations is really everything,” said Andrew Woloz of the music company Concord, who pointed to the version of “Carol of the Bells” by the crossover violinist Lindsey Stirling, which was released five years ago but has stuck around on TikTok, giving it an edge on current playlists.Relatively few new songs from the streaming era have become anything like classics. One of them is Ariana Grande’s “Santa Tell Me,” from 2014, which Karen Pettyjohn, the principal music programmer for Amazon Music, added to its giant Holiday Favorites station last year — which sprinkles some new tracks in with the old chestnuts — and saw it “cut through” very well.“Ariana’s fans are aging with her,” Pettyjohn said. “It becomes a classic to them.”Grande’s song gets a small boost on TikTok, where it has been used in 371,000 videos — peanuts compared to Carey’s smash, which has been used on TikTok 12 million times and racked up more than 1.2 billion streams on Spotify alone.The enduring popularity of Carey’s song is one of the great phenomena of the contemporary music business. In 2019, after a yearslong push by Carey and her label that involved a children’s book, a new music video and numerous live Christmas shows, “All I Want” finally made it to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, 25 years after its initial release. (It topped that chart again in 2020 and 2021, and has a good shot of doing so again this year.)But Carey’s dominance in another arena became the subject of a legal fight this year, after she attempted to trademark the term “Queen of Christmas,” not only for music but also for fragrances, clothing, dog collars, hot chocolate and dozens of other products.Her only challenger was Elizabeth Chan, who a decade ago gave up a marketing job at Condé Nast to devote herself to writing holiday music, and who has called herself — and titled one of her albums — the Queen of Christmas.In a recent interview at her small home office in Lower Manhattan, which she keeps decorated for Christmas year-round, Chan said the trademark was a threat to her livelihood. While strictly D.I.Y., Chan has built a full-time business making holiday music, releasing 12 albums to date, including her latest, “12 Months of Christmas.” She would no longer be able to use the term “Queen of Christmas” if Carey’s application was approved.The costs of litigating a trademark can be huge, but Chan’s attorney, Louis W. Tompros, said his firm, WilmerHale, took the case pro bono because they viewed Carey’s application as an example of “classic trademark bullying.” Carey never responded to Chan’s opposition, and on Nov. 15, the Trademark Office’s trial and appeal board issued a judgment by default, denying Carey the trademark. Chan, and anyone else, is free to call themselves Queen of Christmas.Chris Chambers, a representative of Carey, said in a statement that the “world at large” began calling her “Queen of Christmas,” and added, “Ms. Carey wishes everyone a Merry Christmas and says anyone who wants to call themselves a queen can freely do so, anything else is petty and unfestive.” (Had her application been successful, other performers, like Chan, would not have been able to.)Chan said she had no choice but to fight the trademark, but still framed the result as suited to the holiday.“Everyone in this business wants to tell you what’s not possible because they don’t know what’s possible,” she said.“Not only do I want to leave a great Christmas song behind, I want to leave that lesson behind,” Chan added. “That’s Christmas too — the season of perpetual hope.” More

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      Bob McGrath, Longtime ‘Sesame Street’ Star, Dies at 90

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      He was an original cast member who, for nearly half a century, played a sweater-clad and easygoing music teacher who dispensed advice.Bob McGrath, who played the sweater-clad neighborhood music teacher and general advice-giver on “Sesame Street” for almost half a century, died at his home in New Jersey on Sunday morning. He was 90.Mr. McGrath’s daughter Cathlin McGrath confirmed his death by email on Sunday. She said Mr. McGrath died from complications after a stroke. She said that the night before Mr. McGrath passed, his family had decorated his room for Christmas, and sung and danced around him. “We just knew that he wanted to go the way he lived.”Mr. McGrath wasn’t particularly interested when an old Phi Gamma Delta fraternity brother stopped him one night to tell him about his new project, a children’s show on public television. But then he had never heard of Jim Henson, the puppeteer, and he had never seen a Muppet. After his first meeting and a look at some of the animation, he knew this show would be different.“Sesame Street” had its premiere in November 1969, with Mr. McGrath and other cast members gathered around an urban brownstone stoop, in front of the building’s dark green doors, beside its omnipresent collection of metal garbage cans. His character, conveniently and coincidentally named Bob, was reliably smiling, easygoing and polite, whether he was singing about “People in Your Neighborhood” (the butcher, the baker, the lifeguard), discussing everyday concerns with young humans and Muppets, or taking a day trip to Grouchytown with Oscar the Grouch.Viewers were outraged when Mr. McGrath and two other longtime cast members — Emilio Delgado, who played Luis, and Roscoe Orman, who played Gordon — were fired in 2016. When HBO took over the broadcasting rights to “Sesame Street,” their contracts were not renewed.But Mr. McGrath took the news graciously, expressing gratitude for 47 years of “working with phenomenal people” and for a whole career beyond “Sesame Street” of doing family concerts with major symphony orchestras.“I’m really very happy to stay home with my wife and children a little bit more,” he said at Florida Supercon, an annual comic book and pop culture convention, later in 2016. “I’d be so greedy if I wanted five minutes more.”Robert Emmett McGrath was born on June 13, 1932, in Ottawa, Ill., about 80 miles southwest of Chicago. He was the youngest of five children of Edmund Thomas McGrath, a farmer, and Flora Agnes (Halligan) McGrath.Robert’s mother, who sang and played the piano, recognized his talent by the time he was 5. He was soon entering and winning competitions in Chicago and appearing on radio. He did musical plays and studied privately but, as a practical matter, intended to study engineering.But he was invited to attend a music camp outside Chicago the summer after his high school graduation. Teachers there encouraged him to change his plans, and he “did an about-face,” he remembered in a 2004 video interview for the Television Academy Foundation.He majored in voice at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1954. He spent the next two years in the Army, mostly in Stuttgart, Germany, where he worked with the Seventh Army Symphony. Then he went to New York, where he received a master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music.He took a job with St. David’s, a private boys’ school in Manhattan. Freelance singing assignments, obtained through a vocal contractor, paid the bills until 1961, when “Sing Along With Mitch” came along. He was one of 25 male singers who appeared every week on that show, on NBC, performing traditional favorites like “Home on the Range,” “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.”As St. Patrick’s Day approached, the program’s host and producer, Mitch Miller, asked Mr. McGrath if he knew the song “Mother Machree.” He was so impressed with Mr. McGrath’s rendition and his light lyric tenor — he had been singing the sentimental Irish American number since he was a little boy — that he doubled his salary and made him the show’s featured male soloist.After “Sing Along With Mitch” ended in 1964, the cast played Las Vegas and did a 30-stop tour in Japan. That led to an unusual chapter in Mr. McGrath’s career: teenage idol.Schoolgirls chanted his name at concerts and organized fan clubs. Their demand brought him back to Japan nine times over the next three years, and he recorded nine albums there, singing in both English and Japanese. His repertoire included Japanese folk ballads on which he was accompanied by a shakuhachi, or bamboo flute. Back home, he amused American television viewers by singing “Danny Boy” in Japanese.When “Sesame Street” began, it led to a very different collection of albums for Mr. McGrath, with names like “Sing Along With Bob” and “Songs and Games for Toddlers.”He also learned American Sign Language, which he used regularly on camera with Linda Bove, a cast member who was born deaf.Asked about important memories of his years on the series, Mr. McGrath often named the 1983 episode devoted to children’s, adults’ and Muppets’ reactions to the death of Will Lee, who had played Mr. Hooper on the show for 13 years. Another favorite was the holiday special “Christmas Eve on Sesame Street” (1978), particularly the Bert and Ernie segment inspired by the O. Henry story “The Gift of the Magi.”In 1958, Mr. McGrath married Ann Logan Sperry, a preschool teacher whom he met on his first day in New York City. They had five children. He is survived by Ms. McGrath, who is 89, and their five children, Liam McGrath, Robert McGrath, Alison McGrath Osder, Lily McGrath and Cathlin McGrath, as well as eight grandchildren. He is also survived by an elder sister, Eileen Strobel.“It’s a very different kind of fame,” Mr. McGrath reflected in the Television Academy interview about his association with “Sesame Street.”He recalled a little boy in a store who came up to him and took his hand. At first he thought he had been mistaken for the child’s father. When he realized that the boy seemed to think they knew each other, Mr. McGrath asked, “Do you know my name?” “Bob.” “Do you know where I live?” “Sesame Street.” “Do you know any of my other friends on Sesame Street?”“Yep,” the boy answered and promptly gave an example: “Oh, the number 7.”Livia Albeck-Ripka More

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      A Drummer Showing the Way to ‘the Freest Musical Universe’

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      BUENOS AIRES — The crowd at a recent concert exploded into rapturous cries as the group’s frontman walked onto the stage and began setting a drum beat, launching his band on an improvised journey across musical genres that culminated an hour later in a standing ovation.Over a 30-year career, Miguel Tomasín has released more than 100 albums, helped turn his Argentine band into one of South America’s most influential underground acts, and helped hundreds of people with disabilities express their voices through music.Mr. Tomasín has achieved this in part because of a distinctive artistic vision that comes, his family, fellow musicians and friends said, from having been born with Down syndrome. His story, they say, shows how art can help someone overcome social barriers, and what can happen with an effort to elevate a person’s talents, rather than focusing on their limitations.“We make music so that people enjoy it,” Mr. Tomasín said in an interview at his home in the windswept Argentine city of Rio Gallegos, near the country’s southern tip. Music is “the best, magical,” he added.Though his prolific output has not achieved commercial success, it has had a significant impact on how people with disabilities are perceived in Argentina and beyond.At a recent sold-out Reynols concert in Buenos Aires, Miguel Tomasín sang and played all the instruments on the stage in front of 600 fans.Video by Centro Cultural KirchnerIt has also inspired members of his band, Reynols, to establish long-running music workshops for people with disabilities. And other musicians they have worked with have started more bands whose members include those with developmental disabilities.“Thanks to Miguel, many people who had never interacted with a person with Down syndrome were able to become aware of their world through music,” said Patricio Conlazo, an occasional Reynols member who, after playing with Mr. Tomasín, started music projects for people with disabilities in southern Argentina.Reynols’s unconventional approach to music has also inspired established musicians.“I was reminded by him that you can play music as you like,” said Mitsuru Tabata, a veteran Japanese experimental musician who has recorded with Reynols.But the band’s freewheeling sound has its detractors, too.A prominent British music journalist, Ben Watson, called their music “annoying racket,” in his 2010 book “Honesty Is Explosive!” where he suggested that Mr. Tomasín’s presence in the band was a publicity stunt.The members of Reynols, from left; Alan Courtis, Patricio Conlazo, Mr. Tomasín and Roberto Conlazo in their dressing room before a concert in Buenos Aires.Mr. Tomasín playing the drums during the concert in Buenos Aires.In its first years, the band struggled to find venues and labels interested in their improvisational sound. A turning point came nearly a quarter century ago, in 1998, when they unexpectedly became a house band on an Argentine public television program, which exposed them to a new audience.The job made Mr. Tomasín the first Argentine with Down syndrome to be employed by a national broadcaster.“It was revolutionary, because people with these conditions were largely hidden from public view,” said Claudio Canali, who helped produce the program.A New York Times reporter and a photographer spent a week in Argentina to interview Mr. Tomasín and document his life, both in Buenos Aires and Rio Gallegos. Mr. Tomasín speaks in short phrases that are largely understandable to a Spanish speaker, but sometimes require an accompanying relative to put them in context.Mr. Tomasín is 58, though, like many other artists he lowers his age, insisting he is 54.He was born in Buenos Aires, the second of three children of middle-class parents. His father was a Navy captain, his mother a fine arts graduate who stayed home to raise the children.In the 1960s, most Argentine families sent children with Down syndrome to special boarding schools, which in practice were little more than asylums, according to his younger sister, Jorgelina Tomasín.After visiting several of them, his parents decided to raise Mr. Tomasín at home, where he was treated no differently than his siblings.Mr. Tomasín posing with a fan after the show in Buenos Aires.Mr. Tomasín improvising on the piano while wearing his favorite Reynols T-shirt.He started showing interest in sounds as a toddler, banging on kitchen pots and playing with a family piano, prompting his grandparents to buy him a toy drum kit.Later, after coming home from school, Mr. Tomasín would go straight to his room and play all three cassettes that he owned from beginning to end, making the crooners Julio Iglesias and Palito Ortega an inescapable house presence for years, Ms. Tomasín said.By the early 1990s, the close-knit household began to separate, as his siblings grew up and left home, leaving Mr. Tomasín, by then a young adult, feeling isolated.To fill the void, his parents decided to send him to a music school, but struggled to find one that would accept him.One day, in 1993, they tried an unassuming place they came across while shopping in their Buenos Aires neighborhood, the School for the Comprehensive Formation of Musicians, which was run by young avant-garde rockers who taught classes to subsidize their rehearsal space.“‘Hi, I’m Miguel, a great famous drummer,’” Roberto Conlazo, who ran the school with his brother Patricio, recalled Mr. Tomasín saying at their introduction, despite his having never, up to that point, touched a professional drum kit.Mr. Tomasín checking his drums.From left, Patricio Conlazo Mr. Tomasín and Roberto Conlazo during a rehearsal.The school became an unexpected artistic home for Mr. Tomasín. In a country that remains deeply divided by the legacy of a military dictatorship and a Marxist insurgency, it was rare for a military family to even associate with bohemian artists, let alone entrust a child with them.But Mr. Tomasín’s family and the artists ended up becoming lifelong friends, an early example of how his lack of social prejudices has influenced others to reconsider long-held assumptions. His spontaneity and lack of insecurities made Mr. Tomasín a natural improviser, and an ideal fit for the school’s goal to create music without preconceived ideas.“We were looking for the freest musical universe possible,” said Alan Courtis, who taught at the school. “Miguel became the alarm that woke up the dormant side of our brains.”Roberto Conlazo and Mr. Courtis had already been playing in a group that eventually would become Reynols, a name loosely inspired by Burt Reynolds.After giving Mr. Tomasín some drumming lessons, they decided to bring him into the band. Their collaboration, however, got off to an uncertain start.Mr. Tomasín in the dining room at his brother’s home in Rio Gallegos, Argentina.Mr. Tomasín with his brother, Juan Mario Tomasín, and a neighborhood dog on the banks of the Rio Gallegos River.During one of their first shows, in 1994, a crowd of high school students broke into a mosh pit, which Mr. Courtis and Roberto Conlazo stoked by spraying deodorant into the audience’s faces, pulling out guitar strings with pincers and emitting bloodcurdling noise from primitive loudspeakers.When Mr. Tomasín’s father, Jorge Tomasín, approached the band after the show, they were resigned to never seeing Miguel again, sure his father would disapprove.“‘Lads, I didn’t understand a lot of what you played,” Roberto Conlazo recalled the father saying, “‘but I saw Miguel very happy. So go right ahead.’”Those words were a green light for the ensuing three decades of creativity that has produced around 120 albums, American and European tours, and collaborations with some of the world’s most respected experimental musicians. Reynols splits proceeds from shows and music sales equally, making Mr. Tomasín one of the few professional musicians with Down syndrome in the world.The band first came to broad national attention with the afternoon TV gig. A popular host, Dr. Mario Socolinsky, had interviewed Reynols on his daytime program, “Good Afternoon Health,” in which he gave health tips. Impressed with Mr. Tomasín’s integration into the band, he invited them to be the show’s house musicians, giving Reynols an unlikely job of playing to a mainstream audience five times a week for a year.Reynols’s next break came in 2001, when Mr. Courtis and Roberto Conlazo went on the band’s first U.S. tour. Although Mr. Tomasín decided not to join them, the tour introduced his work to the global underground music network that has supported the band’s subsequent career.Mr. Tomasín playing guitar during a concert.Juan Mario Tomasín, left, Miguel’s brother, and his bandmate Patricio Conlazo after a rehearsal.In the following years, the band’s focus on improvisation drove its extraordinary output of albums. Because each jam session with Mr. Tomasín could result in a different sound, the band has released dozens of them as albums on small record labels in runs of a few hundred copies.After seeing Mr. Tomasín’s performance on TV, families across Argentina started contacting the band, asking them to teach music to their children with disabilities. That led Mr. Courtis and Roberto and Patricio Conlazo to create a collective, called Sol Mayor, which brought together people with various physical and developmental disabilities to play music.Their approach, they believe, puts a spotlight on the beauty of music that does not follow Western norms, like playing in an octave scale.Inspired by work with Reynols, other musicians have started bands for people with disabilities in Norway and France.“We make music so that people enjoy it,” Mr. Tomasín said. Music is “the best, magical,” he added.Mr. Tomasín in his bedroom at his brother’s family home in Rio Gallegos.Mr. Tomasín’s family say they were able to give him the support to develop his creativity thanks in part to their relatively well-off economic position, acknowledging the social inequalities that prevent many people with disabilities from reaching their potential.At a recent sold-out Reynols concert in Buenos Aires, Mr. Tomasín sang and played all the instruments on the stage in front of 600 fans, posing for selfies with admirers after the show.Earlier this year, Mr. Tomasín moved from Buenos Aires to Rio Gallegos to live with his brother Juan Mario, a former Army officer who now teaches English. In the afternoons, Mr. Tomasín dances to Argentine folk music, cooks and gardens at a local center for people with disabilities, often wearing his favorite Reynols T-shirt.Mr. Tomasín’s bandmates say one of his greatest gifts is helping people become better versions of themselves without even being aware of his influence.“He teaches without teaching, by simply enjoying his life,” Roberto Conlazo said.Mr. Tomasín’s big plan for the near future is to stage a concert in his new town, bringing his bandmates from Buenos Aires, 1,600 miles away, and inviting his new friends.“Let them come to my school,” he said, “so we can all play together.”Mr. Tomasín participating in a folk dance class at the René Vargas Day Center in Rio Gallegos.Hisako Ueno More