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    Joni Mitchell Performs Surprise Show at Newport Folk Festival

    The 78-year-old artist performed a full set, her first in about two decades, at the renowned festival in Rhode Island on Sunday.Joni Mitchell, the revered Canadian singer-songwriter and one of the defining musicians of the 1960s and ’70s, surprised an audience in Rhode Island on Sunday when she appeared at the Newport Folk Festival to perform her first full set in about two decades, guitar in hand.Mitchell, never one for the limelight, has remained largely out of the public eye since having a brain aneurysm in 2015. As she recovered, she made a few brief appearances: In December, she gave a rare public speech as she accepted a Kennedy Center Honor, and in April, made a televised appearance at the Grammys and was honored at a gala for MusiCares, a Grammy-affiliated charity.But on Sunday, Mitchell, 78, wearing a beret and sunglasses, performed some of her most iconic songs, including “Carey,” “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Both Sides Now.”At one point, Mitchell, an electric guitar slung over her shoulder, performed a several-minutes-long solo during “Just Like This Train,” as fans whooped and cheered.“After all she’s been through, she returned to the Newport Folk Fest stage after 53 years and I will never forget sitting next to her while she stopped this old world for a while,” the singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile, who sang backup for Mitchell during her festival appearance, said in a Tweet.Having “looked at life from so many sides,” Mitchell has come “out of the storm singing like a prophet,” she added.Although Mitchell has limited her appearances in recent years, she has not avoided the headlines.In January, Mitchell joined Neil Young in boycotting the streaming service Spotify, over its role in giving a platform to Covid-19 vaccine misinformation.“Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives,” Mitchell wrote of the company at the time. She added, “I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.”On Sunday, several musicians, including Carlile, flanked Mitchell onstage, and sang with her. “I will never be over this. I can’t even watch it without the tears coming back,” Carlile wrote later on Twitter. “Please forgive me.”As Mitchell and Carlile sang “A Case of You” from the influential “Blue” album, released more than 50 years ago, Mitchell sang:Oh, I could drink a case of you, darlingAnd I would still be on my feetOh, I would still be on my feet.The crowd roared. More

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    A Bold Concert of Songs and a Potent Play Leave Audiences Abuzz

    At the Williamstown Theater Festival, Daniel Fish’s “Most Happy in Concert” confounds and Anna Ouyang Moench’s “Man of God” raises its own question.WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Saturday matinee of “Most Happy in Concert” had just let out at the Williamstown Theater Festival, and grumbling disgruntlement hung in the air, along with surprised puzzlement.“Was there supposed to be a story involved in that?” a woman asked her companions, on a patio outside the ’62 Center for Theater & Dance at Williams College.No, ma’am, evidently there was not. Or if there was, it isn’t the story that Frank Loesser tells in his 1956 musical “The Most Happy Fella,” about the romance between the unhandsome middle-aged Tony and the waitress Rosabella. To be fair, no one promised that it would be. This is not the musical but rather a 70-minute program of songs (and song fragments) from the score. And it may leave you, as it’s left me, humming those tunes for days. This, though, is no friendly, pattering cabaret.Conceived and directed by Daniel Fish, this fast and busy show on the festival’s main stage (through July 31) is far more aggressively experimental than the sexy, bloody reboot of “Oklahoma!” that he put on Broadway with its book intact. That production was so conscious of the audience’s presence that intermission featured a communal meal of chili and cornbread. Granted, Fish wanted ultimately to implicate us in the American culture of gun violence that’s at the core of that show. But it mattered that we were there.“Most Happy in Concert,” whose fella-free cast of seven includes two terrific veterans of Fish’s “Oklahoma!,” Mary Testa and Mallory Portnoy, is a starkly different creature: aurally rich and gorgeous, visually austere and glamorous — and utterly aloof from its audience.It’s not just that one song bleeds into the next with no pause for breath, let alone applause. It’s that from the opening number, “Ooh! My Feet!,” which the actors perform in a remote corner way upstage, there is the strange, shrugging sense that this production needs nothing from us, and would hurtle right along even if no one were watching from the auditorium. Maybe that will change in future iterations, as Fish gets closer to solving the show’s mysteries. For now, it’s a real obstacle.From left: Maya Lagerstam, Erin Markey, April Matthis, Tina Fabrique and Testa in Fish’s minimally staged production. Emilio MadridThe trouble isn’t an absence of artistry, and it certainly isn’t the cast, which also includes Tina Fabrique, April Matthis, Erin Markey, Maya Lagerstam and Kiena Williams. Songs like “Somebody, Somewhere” and “Big D” are lovely, and Fabrique makes every second of “Young People” entirely her own. The sole case that this concert unambiguously makes is that someone needs to hand Fabrique a big, juicy role in a full-on musical as soon as humanly possible.But any larger point is lost. What does it mean to take the girl-watching harmonies of “Standing on the Corner” out of the mouths of men and put them into the mouths of these actors? Unclear. Given that no one is playing a character from the musical, what is the actors’ relationship to one another meant to be? Ditto. Fish has uprooted these songs from their original context without planting them in a solid new one. (Music arrangements are by Daniel Kluger and Nathan Koci, vocal arrangements by Koci and Fish, orchestrations by Kluger. The music director is Sean Peter Forte.)On a set by Amy Rubin whose main feature is a kinetic curtain of golden fringe that we see stagehands lower so it puddles on the floor and raise so it spins in the air, Fish seems more interested in exploring architectural space and the geometry of bodies within it than he is in communicating with audience members. Who, depending on where they’re sitting, can’t necessarily see the parts of the show happening in the wings.Is this chilly production — which boasts choreography by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the Urban Bush Women founder, but is hardly rife with dance — an album in three dimensions? Is it a music video? As striking as “Most Happy” is to look at (lighting is by Thomas Dunn, costumes are by Terese Wadden), it feels like something less alive than theater, and less shared.In a Q. and A. in the digital program, Fish says that the show — seen in an earlier version last year at Bard SummerScape, with many design elements not yet in place — is ideally “a proposition or a provocation to the audience that asks ‘What happens when this person sings this song in this space with these people?’”It’s an interesting question, but he doesn’t help us to hazard a guess. He is provoking his spectators, absolutely, but to what end?From left, Erin Rae Li, Ji-young Yoo, Shirley Chen and Emma Galbraith as high school students on a mission trip to Bangkok in “Man of God.”Stephanie BergerNext door on Williamstown’s smaller Nikos Stage, Anna Ouyang Moench’s “Man of God” (through Friday) builds and builds, bringing its audience along on an unsettling, darkly comic ride. Not that a plot summary suggests hilarity.A pastor (Albert Park) has taken four high school girls from his California church on a mission trip to Bangkok. He has also hidden a camera in their bathroom, the discovery of which, as the play begins, throws the teenagers into crisis — inciting some of them into thoughts of murdering this supposedly holy man who took such advantage of their trust.“If you read the Bible,” one says, “it’s full of examples. People get killed for a lot less.”At 15 and 16, the girls have little in common beyond their church. Jen (Emma Galbraith) is a brainy, ambitious feminist; Mimi (Erin Rae Li) is a knee-jerk rebel with a fondness for four-letter words. Samantha (Shirley Chen at the performance I saw) is naïve but more intelligent than the others give her credit for, while Kyung-Hwa (Helen J Shen, who took over the role on July 16, the day I saw the show) is deeply conservative, keen to give the pastor the benefit of the doubt.Directed by Maggie Burrows on a messily lived-in hotel room set by Se Hyun Oh, “Man of God” could use some tightening, in both text and performance. But it’s a play whose potency accumulates as it balances ordinary adolescent bickering with stomach-dropping realizations. We see the girls’ illusions crumble as they consider the common ground between lurid sexual exploitation and quieter, more insidious predation.It’s a smart and thoughtful play, with a wordless, minutes-long penultimate scene that’s a tour de force of tension: the girls packing their suitcases to go home, radiating fury and betrayal. And the revenge fantasies that lead up to it? They’re lots more fun than contemplated homicide ought to be.All of which sparks its own kind of post-show chatter — people heading to their cars, eagerly asking one another: “Would you have killed him?”Man of GodThrough July 22 on the Nikos Stage, Williamstown Theater Festival, Williamstown, Mass.; wtfestival.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.Most Happy in ConcertThrough July 31 on the Main Stage, Williamstown Theater Festival, Williamstown, Mass.; wtfestival.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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    Ukrainian D.J. Spins Rare Music in N.Y.C.

    Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times“Support Ukraine means listen to some Ukrainian songs, buy some Ukrainian brands, talk about Ukraine one minute a day, just in conversation.” Recently, Daria played her music at Le Bain, a club in The Standard, High Line hotel. More

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    ‘The Day the Music Died’ Review: ‘American Pie,’ the Life of a Hit

    Don McLean tries to clear up some misapprehensions about the eight-an-a-half-minute song that took on a life of its own, in this documentary.Even those who don’t like Don McLean’s song “American Pie” have to admit that it’s a distinctive pop culture achievement. A nearly eight-and-a-half minute allegory that goes from mournful to infectious to mournful again, the monster 1971 radio hit is seemingly known to all generations and still sung at bar-closing times the world over.That last fact is according to this reverent documentary about the song. Directed by Mark Moormann, the movie travels all over America to bring home the idea that “American Pie” says something profound about the country. It interweaves McLean’s biography with an account of the last days of the ’50s rockers Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, creating a compelling narrative about the effect the plane crash that took their lives in 1959 had not just on young McLean, but American music itself. The movie then alternates with a history of McLean’s professional career (including his mentoring by the folk legend Pete Seeger) and scenes in which stars including Garth Brooks rhapsodize about the song.Back in the day, kids analyzing the lyrics surmised that the bits about “the devil” expressed McLean’s moral and aesthetic disapproval of Mick Jagger. But to many of the interviewees here, including Brooks (who brought McLean onstage to sing it with him at his giant Central Park concert in 1997) and the Cuban-born musical artist Rudy Pérez, the song is “about freedom.”The movie really comes alive when it is recreating the recording session for the song, showing how the ace studio keyboardist Paul Griffin transformed the tune with his energetic gospel-style piano.McLean, who has frequently been portrayed as a prickly figure, and worse, puts on his most ingratiating mien here. And why not. Few musicians are given such generous opportunities to be docent to their legacies.The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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    Kodak Black Is Arrested on Drug Charges in Florida

    The authorities said they found dozens of oxycodone tablets and $75,000 in cash while searching the rapper’s car after he was pulled over in Fort Lauderdale on Friday.The rapper Kodak Black was arrested on Friday in South Florida on felony drug charges, the authorities said. It was the latest in a long string of legal woes for Black, 25, who was serving prison time on weapons charges when President Donald J. Trump commuted his sentence on his last day in office last year.At about 4:30 p.m., Florida Highway Patrol troopers saw Black driving a purple Dodge Durango in Fort Lauderdale with tinted windows that appeared darker than allowed under state law.The troopers confirmed that the car’s registration was expired. After pulling Black over, they observed “a strong odor of marijuana” coming from inside the car, the Highway Patrol said in a statement. The troopers searched the car and found a clear bag containing 31 oxycodone tablets and nearly $75,000 in cash, the Highway Patrol said.Black, whose legal name is Bill Kapri, was arrested and taken to the Broward County jail in Fort Lauderdale. He was released on Saturday on a $75,000 bond, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office said.Black was charged with one count of trafficking oxycodone and one count of possession of a controlled substance, according to the Broward County Clerk’s Office. He pleaded not guilty and requested a jury trial, court documents show.Bradford Cohen, Black’s lawyer, said on Twitter that there were “always additional facts and circumstances that give rise to a defense, especially in this case.” Cohen did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Black’s lawyers filed a motion on Sunday to “inspect, weigh and independently test” the tablets that the authorities have identified as oxycodone pills.Black, who is from Pompano Beach, Fla., topped the Billboard album charts in December 2018 with his album “Dying to Live.” But his career suffered as he has faced various drug, weapons, sexual assault and robbery charges over the years. Early Monday morning, he posted his mug shot on Instagram with the caption, “Not Again.”In 2019, Black pleaded guilty to federal weapons charges, admitting that he lied on background check forms while buying firearms earlier that year. Prosecutors said two of the guns were later found at crime scenes.Black had served about half of a 46-month prison term when Trump commuted his sentence in the final hours of his presidency.Shortly after his release, Black put out a song called “Last Day In,” expressing his hopes for the future: “This my first day out the joint, so that’s my last day in.” More

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    The Middle Eastern Party Scene Thriving in Brooklyn

    Several New York City parties offer spaces where anyone and everyone can let loose, come together and find comfort in Middle Eastern and North African music.Just before midnight on a Friday in June, a short line formed outside Elsewhere, a music venue and nightclub in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Saphe Shamoun, one of the D.J.s performing that night, gingerly approached two women in the queue.“Are you here for Laylit?” he asked. They nodded, and Mr. Shamoun directed them toward another entrance — and a much longer line — further up the block.Laylit, or “the night of” in Arabic, is a party based in New York and Montreal that spotlights music from the Middle East and North Africa and its diaspora.It has had a residency at Elsewhere since October, but this night was special: The event had become so popular that for the first time, it was being held not in the venue’s smaller rooms but in its cavernous hall, where over 800 people would soon dance under a shimmering disco ball and hypnotic light show.On the bill: a performance by Anya Kneez, a Lebanese drag queen, and D.J. sets highlighting Arabic pop, hip-hop, folk and electronic music.A decade ago, it was practically unheard-of for a major New York club to regularly host a Middle Eastern-themed party. But now, Laylit is part of a thriving scene in Brooklyn that puts Middle Eastern and North African music front and center.The events vary in style, but they all celebrate cultures that the promoters say have been overlooked in the West. And they offer many New Yorkers a sense of comfort in a teeming city that can nonetheless feel isolating, especially after more than two years of a pandemic.“It’s so, so beautiful to see the community coming together,” said Felukah, a hip-hop artist who moved to New York from Egypt in 2018 and is a regular at Laylit and other parties like it. “The sounds remind me of home.”For some partygoers, nostalgia is the main attraction. Yet each event also looks toward the future, be it through challenging stereotypical notions of Middle Eastern culture or by championing inclusivity and progressive ideals.Laylit, for one, has created a shared space for Arabs who hold those values, said Mr. Shamoun, a Syrian D.J. and Ph.D. candidate who founded the party in 2018 with Wake Island, a Montreal-based music duo made up of Philippe Manasseh and Nadim Maghzal.Ironically, it wasn’t until the two left their native Lebanon that they embraced its sounds.“It wasn’t cool when I was growing up to play Arabic music,” Mr. Maghzal said.“It was actually uncool,” Mr. Manasseh added.And after emigrating to Montreal in the early 2000s, they actively separated themselves from their culture, fearing discrimination and feeling a sense of duty to assimilate, Mr. Manasseh said.But now, they use Laylit as an outlet to rediscover their roots. In September, they’ll be celebrating the party’s fourth anniversary with another show at Elsewhere, and a tour across Montreal, Detroit and Washington, D.C.Ana Masreya, an Egyptian drag queen, getting ready before a drag show at Littlefield, in Brooklyn.Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesDisco Tehran, a dance party and performance project that channels the international music culture of 1970s Iran, was also born out of the immigrant experience. The organizers, Arya Ghavamian and Mani Nilchiani, said it took years to get it off the ground.Nearly a decade ago, Mr. Ghavamian, an Iranian filmmaker who had moved to the United States a few years earlier, approached an organization about throwing a party to celebrate Nowruz, a holiday that marks the beginning of the Persian New Year and is observed in several countries across Central and West Asia. “It was a ‘no,’” Mr. Ghavamian said.A few years later, he began hosting get-togethers in his apartment where he would cook Persian cuisine and invite musicians to play. By early 2018, his apartment could no longer accommodate the crowds, so he and Mr. Nilchiani hosted their first public Disco Tehran event: the long-shelved Nowruz celebration.The party has since expanded and evolved, and it now includes a film project and community outreach efforts. It celebrated its fourth anniversary last month at the Sultan Room, a nightclub and eatery in Bushwick, with an eclectic playlist and performances by Alsarah and the Nubatones, an East African retro pop band, and Epilogio, a Puerto Rican indie-funk band.Disco Tehran, Mr. Ghavamian said, “is about a collection of different cultures who may not have anything to do with each other on a given day, but they come together.”And the project is on its third European tour, which gives the organizers the sense that they “have a place wherever we are in the world,” Mr. Ghavamian said. Its next New York event is Aug. 13, at the Knockdown Center in Queens.Yalla! Party Project also grew out of intimate apartment gatherings, hosting its first public event in the spring of 2018. (“Yalla” translates to “let’s go” or “come on” in Arabic.) Its founder yearned for a queer party that featured Southwest Asian and North African music.Over the years, Yalla! has expanded into an arts collective and community-building exercise. It is starting a professional directory to help people find jobs and it runs a market that supports small businesses run by women, people of color and queer people.Its parties reflect New York’s cultural diversity. At a May show at the Sultan Room, an Eritrean henna artist drew intricate patterns on a man’s palm while partygoers danced to R&B and Lebanese pop. Yalla! also ramped up programming during Pride month, with four events spread across venues in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx.Hanan Selim, center, dances with her husband and friends during a Haza party in Bushwick, Brooklyn.Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesOnce word of Yalla! got around, similar events followed. It was at an early Yalla! show where Mr. Maghzal, of Laylit, first spun Arabic music. A year later, a drag queen named Ana Masreya — her name means “I’m an Egyptian woman” in Arabic — organized a Middle Eastern and North African cabaret called Nefertitties, a play on the name of the ancient Egyptian queen.Ana celebrated her show’s third anniversary in May with an event at Littlefield, in Gowanus, and visited Washington, D.C., for a cabaret in late June. For her grand entrance at the anniversary show, she was carried in on a makeshift sedan chair, shrouded by a gold mesh sheet, which she later removed to reveal a gold crown modeled after that of Nefertiti.Onstage, Ana spoke about her experience being a publicly known L.G.B.T.Q. person from the Middle East, a region where homosexuality is largely taboo and can, in some nations, lead to persecution. “It’s mad scary sometimes,” Ana said.The night featured drag performances by Rifi Royalty, who is Egyptian American, and Meh Mooni, who is Iranian American; a set by Felukah; and a belly-dancing contest set to an Egyptian song that is a staple at Arab parties: “Shik Shak Shok.”The following week, the song would be played again at the Sultan Room’s rooftop during Haza, a dance party and radio show that began in 2019 and spotlights artists from the Middle East and African diasporas and beyond.One of its founders, an Egyptian American D.J. and creative writing consultant who performs under the name Myyuh, grew up in a predominantly white town in Connecticut, where she said she was largely detached from Egyptian culture. She felt embarrassed when her mother would blast Arabic music at home, she said.But at Haza, she turned to it for comfort — and blasted it on a pulsating dance floor while fellow Arabs ululated in celebration under the Bushwick sky. (Haza will return to the Sultan Room for its next show on July 29.)“We’re creating a totally different experience with these songs,” Myyuh said.Her co-founder, an Egyptian D.J. and audio engineer who performs under the name Carmen Sandiego, likened the experience to a hug.“It’s everything that you know and love,” she said. “And it’s not just you, but the person next to you is singing the same thing because they understand why this is so meaningful.”For Mr. Shamoun, of Laylit, that experience is particularly important for those who have fled the Middle East amid war, uprisings and refugee crises.“We’ve been robbed of a present and a future in the Arab world,” he said.When he’s behind the decks at his shows, he often spots recent immigrants and hopes the songs he plays transport them back home, if only for a few minutes.As the events continue to generate buzz, few of the promoters appear to be in competition — in fact, most of them collaborate with each other.Ana Masreya performed at a Laylit party earlier this month, drawing cheers from the crowd, while Myyuh was in the D.J. lineup.Mr. Manasseh believes the scene grew out of what he calls an “affirm yourself on the dance floor” movement that took hold after the aughts and grew stronger when Donald J. Trump became president.Rock was suddenly out, dance and electronic music were in, and more people of color and L.G.B.T.Q. people were creating spaces where they felt seen and heard.Even though Laylit is seemingly rooted in faraway cultures, Mr. Manasseh credits its existence to a single city.“All this was inspired and enabled by New York,” he said. More

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    After 350 Years of Tradition, a Boys’ Choir Now Admits Girls

    The Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge, is the latest English choir to start including female singers, a move some fear will reduce opportunities for boys.CAMBRIDGE, England — At 8 a.m. one recent Thursday, the boys of the Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge, stifled yawns as they began their first rehearsal of the day with some vocal exercises. Soon, the room was filled with a host of “Ooo” and “Zah” sounds.Once the choir was warmed up, Andrew Nethsingha, its music director, called upon boy after boy to sing a couple of lines of a psalm solo.Then, the director did something none of his predecessors had, in the choir’s entire 350-year history: He called upon a girl to sing. Amelia Crichton-Stuart, 10, quickly pushed her glasses up her nose and sang, high and pure, two lines about how God’s “right hand is full of righteousness.”“Very good,” Nethsingha said, with a smile. After one of the other choristers pointed out that Crichton-Stuart had sung one word incorrectly, not lengthening it as in the notation, Nethsingha said he preferred what she had sung. “We’re going to change the choir to do your version!” he told Crichton-Stuart, who beamed with joy.For centuries, British choral music has been a largely male space, with the country’s cathedrals and chapels filled with the angelic voices of boy choristers, who perform daily services with male singers supplying the bass parts.The choir arrives at St John’s College Chapel for an evensong service earlier this month. Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesAmelia Crichton-Stuart said the boys had been “really welcoming.”Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesFor centuries, British choral music has been a largely male space.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesThe Rev. Dr. Mark Oakley gives the new choristers their white surplices, as they end their probationary period and join the choir.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesThe choirs have become an iconic part of British musical life, with the boys usually living and studying for free at schools linked to the choirs (the children of the St. John’s choir attend a school founded in the 17th century for the education of the choristers).In the 1990s, a host of cathedrals in Britain set up separate girls’ choirs to perform services, too, but the recent move by the Choir of St. John’s — generally considered one of England’s best — to mix genders has been greeted by choral insiders as groundbreaking. Some have celebrated it as a long overdue step toward equality, and others have agonized that it may herald the demise of boys-only choirs.Shortly after Nethsingha announced the change last October, three other choirs said they would be mixing girls and boys too, including St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle (a place of such tradition it has hosted numerous royal weddings, including Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s in 2018).Nethsingha said in an interview that he knew the move was bold, but he also felt “rather late to the party,” since a couple of less prominent choirs, including the Choir of St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh, mixed their choristers in the 1970s. Nethsingha received some complaints about the decision, he added, mostly on the college’s Facebook page.Other choirs who have decided to mix boys and girls said they had similarly received a few negative reactions. Charles Harrison, the choir master at Chichester Cathedral, said he was sent “half a dozen” letters of complaint, including one from a regular donor who announced they were withdrawing their support.The choir’s new members have also begun boarding at the choir’s associated school, just like the boys.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesBut Nethsingha said he didn’t regret the move. In April, he admitted Crichton-Stuart, alongside Martha Gritten, 9, and Ingrid B., also 9 (Ingrid’s parents did not want her surname included in this article for reasons of privacy). The girls began boarding at the choir’s associated school just like the boys. In the same month, Nina Vinther, 24, joined the choir’s adult ranks.Britain is not the only country whose choral world is agonizing over whether to include girls. In 2019, a German court blocked a 9-year-old girl’s attempt to join one of Berlin’s oldest choirs on the grounds that artistic freedom was more important than equal treatment — despite studies having shown that differences between young girls’ and boys’ voices are slight, and even professional singers can’t always tell the difference.Opponents of mixing choirs insist there are many good reasons to exclude girls. Alan Thurlow, a retired choral director and a vice president of the Traditional Cathedral Choir Association, which offers grants to men’s and boys’ choirs, said in a telephone interview that he worried if choirs admitted girls, it would mean fewer boys would be able, or want, to join.“You’re not making the choir bigger, you’re reducing the opportunity for boys,” he said, adding that boys can only sing high vocal parts for a few years before their voices change. A drop in the number of boys trained would also mean fewer bass and tenor singers for adult choirs, he added.Nethsingha said his choir was increasing the number of choristers from 20 to 25 to avoid reducing opportunities for boys. He hoped separate girls’ and boys’ choirs would continue to exist, he added. “I don’t want to be remembered in 100 years time as the chief destroyer of boys’ choirs,” he said, with a nervous laugh.During evensong, the choir stood in the chapel’s stalls, their voices soaring and echoing around the vast space.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesAt least one part of the choral world isn’t deliberating the implications of mixing: the children doing the singing. Last year, when Nethsingha told his boys that girls would be joining them, he said he braced himself for a “barrage of complaints.” Instead, the boys asked just four practical questions — including one about whether they had sufficient toilets for new joiners — then “went bouncing off to their lessons,” Nethsingha said.“They didn’t have any of the baggage that adults have,” he added.In an interview after the recent rehearsal, the girls seemed equally undaunted by joining a famed choir, with daily performances, international tours and recordings. Asked if they felt like pioneers, Gritten said, “Sort of, but sort of not!” She then looked at her fellow choristers and giggled.Crichton-Stuart said the boys had been “really welcoming,” and they played together in their dormitories. The best part of choir life so far, Gritten said, had been Ascension Day — commemorating Jesus’s rise to heaven — where the entire choir climbed up to the top of the college’s chapel, via a spiral staircase, and sung from its roof.Many major choirs here have made it clear they will not be mixing choirs on a daily basis. In May, St. Paul’s Cathedral in London announced that it would introduce a separate girls choir from 2025. Andrew Carwood, its music director, said in a telephone interview that the cathedral needed to raise 7.5 million pounds, nearly $9 million, to pay for choristers’ school fees and make changes to buildings to accommodate 30 new female singers. Boys and girls would likely sing together for major services, he added.The choir’s music director, Andrew Nethsingha, right, said he felt “rather late to the party,” just this year opening the choir to girls.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesAt St. John’s, the girls were already fully involved in all services. About eight hours after their morning rehearsal, 18 of the choir’s child members and 13 adult choral scholars walked into the college’s grand chapel, to sing that day’s traditional evensong service. Stood in the stalls, their voices soared and echoed around the vast space.At one point, the choir walked to the front of the chapel and performed an experimental piece involving an electronic backing of whale sounds, the girls’ red outfits standing out among the boys’ white robes. But many of the 60 worshipers in the chapel had their eyes closed, so absorbed in the music bouncing around them, they weren’t looking at who was making it. More

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    Maude Latour, a Columbia Student, Makes Existential Pop

    The 22-year-old singer-songwriter just graduated with a degree in philosophy.Name: Maude LatourAge: 22Hometown: New York CityNow lives: In a four-bedroom apartment near Columbia University, with the same four roommates she has lived with since freshman year.Claim to fame: Ms. Latour is a singer-songwriter whose plush indie pop grapples with impermanence. She writes about composing a letter to her future self, cleaning a bedroom that always gets messy and, on her recent single “Trees,” mourning the loss of her grandmother, whom she searches for in the space between branches. Ms. Latour filmed the song’s music video during her final semester as an undergraduate at Columbia this spring, between classes on Virginia Woolf and the history of philosophy. “I’m majoring in, ultimately as a philosophy major, life being fleeting,” Ms. Latour said.Big break: A self-described choir kid, Ms. Latour began songwriting at 15 and uploading her music to Spotify at 17. In March 2020, during the early pandemic lockdown, Ms. Latour posted a video of herself singing “One More Weekend,” an upbeat rendering of an early college heartbreak, to TikTok, where it has been viewed more than 455,000 times. (It has more than 28 million streams on Spotify.) In 2021, during her junior year, Ms. Latour was applying to summer jobs when record labels approached her. She signed with Warner Music and released an EP, “Strangers Forever,” last October.Latest project: Ms. Latour went on a North American tour this spring, squeezing in six shows during spring break and the rest on weekends. Ms. Latour said she cried onstage at Bowery Ballroom in Lower Manhattan, while dedicating her song “Lola” to friends in the audience who are survivors of sexual assault. (“Keep my girls protected/ I’m turned on when I’m respected,” she sings.) “Diderot says you can’t have authentic emotions onstage,” said Ms. Latour, referencing the French philosopher’s “Paradox of the Actor.” “I was like, ‘What?’ All I do is go onstage and feel and bleed out my emotions in front of people.”“The way I feel at the old age of 22 is so much more complicated than when I was 19,” Ms. Latour said.Braylen Dion for The New York TimesNext thing: Later this month, Ms. Latour will play Lollapalooza, her first festival, on the same day as Metallica. “I’m on the same stage as them, so their drum kit and stuff is going to be behind me,” she said. Ms. Latour is also working on an EP she described as a queer coming-of-age set in the “enchanted forest” that is New York City. “The way I feel at the old age of 22 is so much more complicated than when I was 19,” she said. “I’m trying to grow up with my music.”Borrowed threads: Ms. Latour’s iridescent, Y2K-era stage outfits are a joint effort between herself and her four roommates. The magenta corduroys, rhinestone belt and rust-orange Nike jacket she wore on tour were sourced from her roommates’ closets. Wearing her friends’ clothes helps ease Ms. Latour’s nerves. “I feel hugged by their presence,” she said. More