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      Franz Streitwieser, Trumpet Maestro With a Trove of Brass, Dies at 82

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      He accumulated more than 1,000 items with provenances spanning centuries, all housed for a time in a converted barn in rural Pennsylvania.Franz Streitwieser, a German-born trumpeter who amassed a collection of brass instruments that encompassed centuries of music history and drew musicians from around the world to its home in a converted barn in Pennsylvania, died on Nov. 8 in a hospice in Sebring, Fla. He was 82.The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, his son Bernhard said.While a performer by profession — on one of the most extroverted of orchestral instruments, no less — Mr. Streitwieser had the soul of an archivist.He took a 19th-century yellow-and-white barn in bucolic Pennsylvania and converted it into a museum to house one of the world’s largest collections of brass instruments and to serve as well as a concert space. The Streitwieser Foundation Trumpet Museum, in Pottstown, opened in 1980 and was home to approximately 1,000 items until 1995, when it found a new home in Europe.Mr. Streitwieser (pronounced STRITE-vee-zer) sought to elevate the trumpet’s status.“When somebody finds an old violin in the attic, they think it’s a Stradivarius and it’s valuable,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1983. “But when somebody finds an old brass instrument in the attic, they just throw it out. We want to change that.”In addition to its standard brass fare, including valved trumpets, French horns and trombones, the museum showcased a variety of curiosities: over-the-shoulder trumpets used in the Civil War, replicas of Bronze Age Viking trumpets, horns carved from elephant tusks. Visitors would have encountered a life-size cardboard cutout of the composer John Philip Sousa and a 12-foot-long horn carved from pine wood, made for Swiss shepherds.Mr. Streitwieser situated the museum in Pottstown because he and his wife, Katherine, had moved there to be closer to her relatives. She was a descendant of the DuPont family, of chemical company renown, which helped support the museum.The museum stood on a 17-acre plot called Fairway Farm (it also had a bed-and-breakfast), and it drew brass devotees from far and wide. The music historian Herbert Heyde, who later curated the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s instrument collection, spent six months cataloging the Pottstown museum’s contents in the 1990s.But Pottstown, which is about 40 miles from Philadelphia and closer in culture to the state’s rural center, lacked strong funding for arts programs, and attendance at the museum lagged. After Ms. Streitwieser’s death in 1993, Mr. Streitwieser could not afford to keep the museum going and was forced to find a new home for his trove. Local universities expressed interest, but none had the space.It was Austria to the rescue. Kremsegg Castle, near Linz, was establishing a government-funded musical instrument museum, and officials there knew of Mr. Streitwieser as a prominent collector. They offered to take in his holdings — and him as well, as a consultant. The collection was packed up and sent off in 1995.Franz Xaver Streitwieser was born on Sept. 16, 1939, in Laufen, Germany, a Bavarian town just across the border from Austria. He was one of five children of Simon and Cecilia (Auer) Streitwieser, who were farmers.As a boy, Franz visited a music store with his mother one day and felt drawn to a gleaming brass trumpet. But it was prohibitively expensive, so the shopkeeper pointed him to a tarnished, less costly trumpet toward the back of the store. He bought it, and after a teacher of his gave him a can of polish, it gleamed. It was the first of many instruments in his life.Franz soon joined the town band and went on to Mozarteum University Salzburg in Austria, graduating in 1961 with a degree in trumpet performance.While at the university he met Katherine Schutt, an oboe and piano student from Wilmington, Del. Their courtship played out during the filming of “The Sound of Music” in and around Salzburg, and the couple became extras in several scenes.Mr. Streitwieser and Ms. Schutt married in 1963. They lived mainly in Freiburg, Germany, where Mr. Streitwieser was principal trumpet of the Freiburg Philharmonic from 1965 to 1972. Traveling to the United States regularly, he spent a year in New York City studying at Juilliard. The couple had five children, one of whom, Heinrich, died in infancy.Mr. Streitwieser began collecting brass instruments early on in Freiburg — his son Bernhard said the family home sometimes resembled a trumpet repair shop.In 1977, Mr. Streitwieser worked with the German instrument maker Hans Gillhaus in designing a modern version of the corno da caccia, a circular horn popular in the 18th century; they called it a clarinhorn.The family moved to Pottstown in 1978. Mr. Streitwieser played in local orchestras and in 1980 received a master’s degree in music from the University of South Dakota. With Ralph T. Dudgeon, he wrote “The Flügelhorn” (2004), a history of that member of the trumpet family.After the death of his first wife, Mr. Streitwieser married Katharine Bright in 1994 and soon moved with her to Austria in the company of his brass collection. The couple spent half the year in an apartment in the 13th-century Kremsegg Castle, at home among their horns. The rest of the time they lived in Florida, moving for good to Lake Wales, in the central part of the state, in 2004. Mr. Streitwieser founded a brass quintet and continued to perform in local festivals.The Streitwieser collection remained at Kremsegg until the musical instrument museum closed in 2018. Much of its contents were moved to Linz Castle and Museum or other museums in Upper Austria.In addition to his son Bernhard, Mr. Streitwieser is survived by his wife; his sons Erik and Charles; his daughter, Christiane Bunn; his stepdaughter, Henrietta Trachsel; a sister, Anna Breitkreutz Neumann; and 13 grandchildren.Dr. Dudgeon, who also played music with Mr. Streitwieser and help catalog the brass collection, said he first heard of him in the 1970s. He had come to pick up a purchase from a Massachusetts music store and found that the shop had very few brass instruments left.He knew he had to meet Mr. Streitwieser, he said, when the shopkeeper told him that “a Bavarian fellow came in and bought them all.” More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Organ

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      Listen to the biggest, loudest, most extravagant (yet incredibly subtle) instrument of them all.In the past we’ve chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms, choral music, percussion, symphonies, Stravinsky, trumpet, Maria Callas and Bach.Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the grandeur and colors of the organ — a full orchestra in a single instrument. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆James McVinnie, organistIf I had a time machine, I would go back to 1740 to hear Johann Sebastian Bach play the organ in Leipzig, Germany. Bach is the ultimate composer for this extraordinary, timeless instrument. Much of his organ music is intense, revealing its multilayered, life-affirming majesty slowly, through repeated listening. The opening to his 29th cantata, however, leaps and bounds with immediate joy. There is something visceral about hearing this music played live, on a great organ, in a vast cathedral space: The building shakes, the air shimmers and the music is as much felt as heard.Bach’s “Wir danken dir, Gott”Robert Quinney (Hyperion)◆ ◆ ◆Joy-Leilani Garbutt, organist and Boulanger Initiative co-founderThis piece stops me in my tracks every time I hear it, conjuring the phrases “tour de force” and “pièce de résistance.” In an incredible display of badassery, Demessieux unleashes the full spectrum of the organ’s capabilities, with all its sounds, timbres, colors and contrasts. Too often people associate this instrument with dirges or spooky music; this piece is energetic and exuberant.The middle section is like a slow jazz waltz sound bath, filled with luscious chords and featuring an inverted texture that places the solo in the pedals and the bass line on the keyboards. As a performer, it’s always a great adventure to tackle music written by a virtuoso composer to showcase her own instrument. Demessieux knows exactly what the organ can do, and she uses all of it.Jeanne Demessieux’s “Te Deum”Hampus Lindwall (Ligia)◆ ◆ ◆Zachary Woolfe, Times classical music editorIt hardly gets grander than Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony, which he titled “with organ.” And yet, with the right musicians, this gigantic Romantic wedding cake of a piece is shining elegance, not overkill. After its first C-major blast in the finale, the organ is woven into the orchestra so lovingly that it never seems to be used for mere effect; the instrument is treated like a jewel, to be placed in one of the repertory’s most sumptuous, stirring settings. A delightful bonus in this finely detailed recording: a father-and-son pair of eminences as organist and conductor.Saint-Saëns’s Third SymphonyDaniel Roth; Les Siècles; François-Xavier Roth, conductor (Harmonia Mundi)◆ ◆ ◆Sarah Kirkland Snider, composerOne remarkable thing about the organ is its ability to generate acoustic sounds that seem electronic. The Scottish composer Claire M. Singer explores this to rapturous effect in “The Molendinar,” a slowly morphing, 25-minute journey that intricately builds beautiful, bending overtones over a simple ground bass through her manipulation of the organ’s mechanical stop action. The Molendinar is a hidden watercourse above which the city of Glasgow was founded in the sixth century, but the music’s grand, glacial build, and ghostly evanescence, remind me of the Breton legend of Ys, its mythological cathedral rising and then sinking back into the ocean.Claire M. Singer’s “The Molendinar”Claire M. Singer◆ ◆ ◆Cameron Carpenter, organistIf I’m introducing someone, I can only submit my most recent recording, since it is played on an instrument I designed whose very point is to demonstrate the possibilities of the modern organ. The transition of the instrument to the digital realm gives us a glimpse of the part of it that transcends moving parts. In pairing Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations with Howard Hanson‘s 1930 Symphony No. 2, “Romantic,” I wanted to contrast two masterpieces from outside the organ repertoire. I didn’t intrude on any organ works in which others are better versed, and the instrument’s clarity and color helps us to understand these well-loved pieces anew.Howard Hanson’s “Romantic” SymphonyCameron Carpenter (Decca Gold)◆ ◆ ◆David Allen, Times writerAlthough César Franck wrote relatively few works for the organ, he was still arguably the greatest composer for the instrument since Bach, and it was in Bach’s shadow that he composed three chorales in 1890, the year he died. What Franck called a chorale, though, bears little resemblance to Bach’s settings of hymn tunes; the three are vast, 15-minute ruminations on belief, none more spiritual than the second, a passacaglia that hypnotically winds its way to what the ear thinks is going to be an imposing declaration of faith, before it falls away to a quieter, more personal hope.Franck’s Chorale No. 2 in B minorJeanne Demessieux (Eloquence)◆ ◆ ◆Paul Jacobs, organistBeethoven considered organists “the greatest of all virtuosi.” But if making music with all four limbs isn’t hard enough, Lou Harrison also expects the soloist in his Concerto for Organ and Percussion to play clamorous clusters of keys with felt padded slabs — to match a full battery of percussion that includes Chinese crash cymbals, oxygen tank bells and gongs galore. While I’ve always prized the organ’s uncanny ability to arouse our numinous instincts, sometimes we just want to let our hair down. The irrepressible joy of the final movement will wake the dead and make them dance.Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Organ with Percussion OrchestraPaul Jacobs; San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor (SFS Media)◆ ◆ ◆Anthony Tommasini, Times chief classical music criticThe young Aaron Copland wrote his Symphony for Organ and Orchestra at the behest of his teacher, Nadia Boulanger, who played the solo part at the premiere, in 1925. Copland’s friend and colleague Virgil Thomson later described the symphony as “the voice of America in our generation.” He was right. While looking back at the European symphonic heritage, Copland’s ambitious piece is fresh, direct, unsentimental and sassy in a way that seems somehow American, especially the feisty, unabashedly dissonant finale. And I love the ruminative opening Andante, which glows and sighs in this live recording.Copland’s Organ SymphonyPaul Jacobs; San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor (SFS Media)◆ ◆ ◆Javier C. Hernández, Times classical music and dance reporterHandel is best known for his operas and oratorios. But his organ concertos contain some of his most lively and playful music. A gifted virtuoso on the instrument, he performed several of these pieces as entertainment for audiences between acts of his oratorios. The Organ Concerto in F, which premiered in 1739, goes by the nickname “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale” for its chirpy motifs. Marie-Claire Alain plays with precision and zeal, gliding through the many improvisatory sections.Handel’s Organ Concerto No. 13Marie-Claire Alain; Orchestra de Chambre Jean-François Paillard (Erato)◆ ◆ ◆Nico Muhly, composerThe organ in church can be like a piece of beautiful architecture, or a wonderful sermon: It is sometimes taken for granted. And there is a subtle art to playing with a choir; the organist must wrestle with the acoustics of the space to make sure everything aligns, as the player is oftentimes quite far from the singers, and the pipes can be practically miles away.One beautiful challenge is the “Jubilate” from Herbert Howells’s morning service for the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, and the extraordinary and specific acoustics of the chapel there. Even when the organ is under the choir, Howells is masterly at doubling the voices and weaving in and out of them, foretelling little themes or echoing them after. The acoustics of the space turn the simple counterpoint into something intentionally blurry but somehow precise, like a house at night lit from within but seen from outside, with shapes flickering in and out of view.The beginning of the piece starts with the organ in its simplest incarnation, just holding an E-flat minor chord. In the last phrase, on the text “world without end, amen,” the choir sings in unison, and the organ, here the primary voice, unspools a long melody, crabwise but ultimately pointing downward toward a resolution in E-flat major.Herbert Howells’s “Jubilate”Peter Barley; King’s College Choir; Stephen Cleobury, conductor (Argo)◆ ◆ ◆Joshua Barone, Times editorYou can’t help but appreciate the too-muchness of the organ. Its extremity goes both ways: It can whisper, or shake the ground you stand on with the awe-inspiring sound of a full-voiced choir. Both ends of the spectrum coexist in Samuel Barber’s 1960 “Toccata Festiva.” About two-thirds into the piece, after an opening of Romantic excess and concerto-like flair, comes a cadenza that rises from foreboding depths to episodes that are by turns agile, luminous and borderline outrageous — but arriving at a mysterious peace. When the orchestra returns in a crowded dash to the ending, all of its might is necessary to meet the grandeur of what may be our most extravagant instrument.Barber’s “Toccata Festiva”Paul Jacobs; Lucerne Symphony Orchestra; James Gaffigan, conductor (Harmonia Mundi)◆ ◆ ◆Anna Lapwood, organistIt’s hard not to be impressed by the sheer power a pipe organ can produce, but it is also an instrument with an amazing capacity for beauty and sensitivity, characteristics that are often overlooked when talking about it. We hear this more subtle side in Robilliard’s transcription of Fauré’s “Sicilienne,” performed here by Thomas Ospital in the Church of St. Eustache in Paris. It’s in this kind of music that the building becomes integral to the success of a performance; as we hear the individual flute stops dancing around the space, the acoustic bloom becomes an architectural sustaining pedal.Fauré’s “Sicilienne”Thomas Ospital◆ ◆ ◆Seth Colter Walls, Times writerWhen the Los Angeles Philharmonic wanted to commission organ music from Terry Riley, they let him hang out all night playing on Hurricane Mama, the potent pipe instrument inside Walt Disney Concert Hall. Some of the material Riley improvised there made its way into his 2013 concerto “At the Royal Majestic.” One of his grandest late-career works, it’s punchy, mystical and gorgeous. (It’s also a reminder that his artistic development did not stop with the early Minimalist touchstone “In C.”)The close of the first movement — called “Negro Hall,” after a drawing by the fin-de-siècle Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli — occasionally seesaws between sugar-sweet orchestral motifs and gloomier exhalations from the organ. Riley presents such contrasts not with postmodern irony, but with tangible, genuine delight. Even after a climactic turn toward frenzied rhythmic patterns, his joyous sensibility is always perceptible, and the final chords are exhilarating.Terry Riley’s “At the Royal Majestic”Todd Wilson; Nashville Symphony; Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor (Naxos)◆ ◆ ◆Olivier Latry, an organist at Notre-DameApril 15, 2019: The whole world was horrified to discover the images of Notre-Dame on fire. A few weeks earlier, I was in the cathedral recording this “Little” Fugue in G minor for an album called “Bach to the Future.”“Little” — but it is nevertheless great Bach! In a few minutes, the cantor of Leipzig tells us such a story. I love the fragility that shines throughout this work, a fragility that brings us back to our human condition in front of current events: the fire of Notre-Dame, the health situation, climate change. May this music make us aware of our determining role in humanity.Bach’s Fugue in G minor, BWV 578Olivier Latry (La Prima Volta)◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      How Hans Zimmer Conjured the Otherworldly Sounds of ‘Dune’

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      The composer worked with a far-flung “band” of collaborators who sung, scraped metal, invented instruments and more for the score.When the composer Hans Zimmer was approached to score “Dune,” the new movie adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic sci-fi novel, he knew one thing absolutely: It would not sound like “Star Wars.” Musically, those films drew on influences that ranged from Holst and Stravinsky to classic movie scores of the ’30s and ’40s. Even the rollicking tune performed by the bug-eyed creatures in the Cantina was inspired by Benny Goodman.For “Dune,” by contrast, Zimmer wanted to conjure sounds that nobody had ever heard before.“I felt like there was a freedom to get away from a Western orchestra,” he said recently, speaking in the Warner Bros. offices overlooking Hudson Yards in New York. “I can spend days making up sounds.”The resulting soundtrack might be one of Zimmer’s most unorthodox and most provocative. Along with synthesizers, you can hear scraping metal, Indian bamboo flutes, Irish whistles, a juddering drum phrase that Zimmer calls an “anti-groove,” seismic rumbles of distorted guitar, a war horn that is actually a cello and singing that defies Western musical notation — just to name a few of its disparate elements.The score combines the gigantic, chest-thumping sound of Zimmer’s best known work of the last decade with the spirit of radical sonic experimentation. The weirdness is entirely befitting the saga of a futuristic, intergalactic civilization whose denizens are stalked by giant sandworms and revere a hallucinogenic substance called spice.Timothée Chalamet stars in the latest film version of ‘Dune,’ directed by Denis Villeneuve.Warner Bros.No hallucinogens were imbibed as part of the composing process though: “Weirdly, I’m the only rock ’n’ roller who never did any drugs,” said Zimmer, who has a wide, boyish grin that belies his 64 years, particularly when discussing his more outrageous musical endeavors.Some time after his stint with the band the Buggles, the German-born, California-based composer made his name with scores for “Rain Man,” “The Lion King” and “The Thin Red Line.” More recently he scored the latest Bond outing, “No Time to Die.” But to many he is perhaps best known for his work on Christopher Nolan movies, including “Interstellar,” “Inception” and his Batman series.In fact, Zimmer turned down an offer to work on Nolan’s last film, “Tenet,” to focus his energies on “Dune.” In a way, the composer said, he has been working on this soundtrack ever since he first read the novel as a teenager. “I’ve been thinking about ‘Dune’ for nearly 50 years. So I took it very seriously.” He avoided seeing the 1984 movie adaptation, directed by David Lynch — featuring music by Toto — to preserve the vision of the movie in his head.As part of his creative process, Zimmer spent a week in Utah tuning in to the sound of the desert. “I wanted to hear the wind howling,” he said.Zimmer’s score is so prominent in “Dune” that at times the movie feels like an otherworldly equivalent of a “Planet Earth”-style nature spectacular. “‘Dune’ is by far my most musical film,” said the director Denis Villeneuve, who also hired Zimmer for “Blade Runner 2049.” “The score is almost ubiquitous, participating directly in the narrative of the film. It’s spiritual.”In fact, Zimmer wrote more music than could fit in the film. In addition to the original soundtrack, there’s “The Dune Sketchbook (Music From the Soundtrack),” comprising extended sonic explorations, and “The Art and Soul of Dune,” a companion soundtrack to the book of the same title that goes behind the scenes of the film. (There’s still more written for the hoped-for sequel.)It’s Zimmer’s name in the credits and on the soundtrack releases, but he prefers to think of himself as a member of an unusual band that includes a select group of composer-collaborators: “If someone has a great idea, I’m the first one to say, yes. Let’s go on that adventure.”The composer David Fleming, who gets an “additional music” credit for his contributions to the score, explained, “We create and collaborate on ideas, experimenting as long as the filmmakers will allow us to before we finally start applying those ideas to picture.” He described “band meetings” as an open forum, adding, “More than anyone else, you can count on Hans to push a bold idea one step further than you think it could possibly go, and then push some more.”Guthrie Govan, a slide guitarist whom Zimmer discovered on YouTube, described the process: “He’ll outline the desired end result rather than prescribing a specific means of getting there. For one cue, he just said, ‘This needs to sound like sand.’”To create the unorthodox score, Zimmer gave his collaborators cues like “This needs to sound like sand.”Warner Bros.Entirely new instruments ended up being created from scratch. (With pandemic-era travel restrictions in place, many of these elements were recorded separately in different parts of the world.) Winds player Pedro Eustache built a 21-foot horn and a “contrabass duduk,” a supersized version of the ancient Armenian woodwind instrument. Chas Smith, working in isolation in his barn in rural California, struck, scraped and scratched various metallic instruments of his own invention, including one made from springs and saw blades, and another made of Inconel 718, a superalloy used in cryogenic storage tanks and SpaceX engines. In the film, Smith’s complex, resonant tonal textures accompany visuals of desert sands and windblown spice.One of the major and more surprising musical moments in “Dune” occurs during a ceremonious arrival on the desert planet Arrakis. The scene is announced with the portentous drone of bagpipes, an aural assault generated by a battalion of 30 highland pipers playing in a converted church in Scotland. Ear protection had to be worn: the volume reached 130 decibels, the equivalent of an air-raid siren..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}That unholy din in particular permeated Zimmer’s home during his late-night work sessions. “My daughter told me the other day she has bagpipe PTSD.”But perhaps the most mystical presence in the score is a choir of female voices, singing, whispering and chanting in an invented language. “The true driving force of this novel is always the female characters,” Zimmer said. “It’s really the women that craft the destiny of everybody.”One arresting voice comes through like a war cry, all ancient, melismatic syllables in unsettled rhythms. These vocals were recorded in a closet in Brooklyn, the makeshift studio of the music therapist and singer Loire Cotler. In that space, sitting on the floor, with clothes dangling above her head and her laptop perched on a cardboard box, Cotler sang for hours a day, emerging when it was dark. “It became a sacred musical laboratory,” Cotler told me.Stylistically, Cotler drew on everything from Jewish niggun (wordless song) to South Indian vocal percussion, Celtic lament to Tuvan overtone singing. Even the sound of John Coltrane’s saxophone was an influence, she said. “When you start to hybridize these far-flung influences and techniques, interesting sounds start to happen,” she said. “It’s a vocal technique called ‘Hans Zimmer.’”Villeneuve has made headlines for insisting that “Dune” is the kind of multisensory experience that demands to be seen on a big screen in a cinema. In the same way, Zimmer’s score is one that demands to be experienced via a good cinema sound system.“I write in surround sound — but it’s not just about the big sound and big screen,” Zimmer said. “It’s about sharing something together. Shared dreaming.” More

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      A Celebrated Virtuoso on an Instrument She Wasn’t Meant to Play

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      The hallowed tradition of kora playing in Sona Jobarteh’s family passed down the male line. One of her teachers dismissed it as “an ethnic thing.” But it has brought her international acclaim.MANCHESTER, England — The ethereal sound of the kora, a centuries-old West African instrument, reverberated as Sona Jobarteh, a virtuoso from one of Gambia’s most celebrated musical families, plucked its strings with her forefingers and thumbs.Under purple stage lights at the Manchester International Festival in July — her first performance since the pandemic began — Ms. Jobarteh added her velvet voice to the crisp sound of the kora, a 21-string instrument that combines the qualities of a lute and a harp. She sings in Mandinka, a language spoken by one of Gambia’s many ethnic groups, and the words descended like rainfall on the audience in northern England.Like her father and relatives stretching back generations, Ms. Jobarteh is a griot — a musician or poet whose tradition is preserved through the family bloodline. And in West Africa the griot fills a far broader role: not just as a kora master, but also as a historian, genealogist, mediator, teacher and guardian of cultural history.“The griot is someone who is a pillar of society, who people go to for guidance, for advice, for wisdom,” said Ms. Jobarteh, who is 37.Until Ms. Jobarteh, kora masters had one other notable characteristic: They were always male. By tradition, the playing of the kora is passed from father to son, but for many years Ms. Jobarteh was her father’s only child. “Whatever I do, it’s always in the awkward box,” she said, laughing.She initially shunned the label of first female kora master, preferring to be appreciated for her abilities rather than her gender. “I hated it with a passion,” she said. “I felt like no one would listen to what I was playing, that all they would do is observe what I am.”But she has come to embrace that status, in part because her achievements have inspired young female students. “It’s much bigger than just being about me,” she said. “It’s about instilling that seed of inspiration in girls.”The kora was also what brought her parents together.The kora, a 21-string instrument, combines the qualities of a lute and a harp.Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesIn 1982, a year before Ms. Jobarteh was born, her mother, Galina Chester, who is English and who had never left Britain, flew to Senegal. She was traveling with Ms. Jobarteh’s half brother, Tunde Jegede, a British-Nigerian who is now a multi-instrumentalist and composer, to connect him with his African heritage.Toting a piece of paper scrawled with the name of a kora master, Ms. Chester drove across the desert to Gambia, where there was no airport at the time, to the house of Amadu Bansang Jobarteh, whose influence was so broad that he served as an adviser to Gambia’s first president.There, she met the kora master’s son and primary student, Sanjally — who would go on to become Ms. Jobarteh’s father. “That’s how she met my father, and how my story began,” Ms. Jobarteh said.Ms. Jobarteh’s childhood straddled two worlds: Britain, where she was born, and Kembujeh, her grandfather’s village in Gambia, where, enveloped by the warmth of her extended family, she found her “cultural grounding.”Griot women are typically taught to sing, but her grandmother Kumunaa encouraged her to sit with her grandfather and listen to the kora.A few years ago, Ms. Jobarteh’s mother shared letters with her daughter in which Kumunaa had predicted that the girl would become a griot and pleaded that her lineage be nurtured.“I just wish she was alive for me to ask her what was in her mind,” Ms. Jobarteh said. “She knew I was a girl. She knew it was not acceptable.”Ms. Jobarteh’s first kora teacher was Mr. Jegede, her half brother, whom she began playing the instrument with at age 3. (Although Mr. Jegede is a virtuoso in his own right, he is not a griot, coming from outside the Jobarteh bloodline.)She later became determined to carve out a path in classical music. At 14, she took composition lessons at the Purcell School for Young Musicians, outside London. Yet her initial instrument remained in her periphery: The school library displayed a kora that Tunde had donated as a student there. Drawn to it, she tuned and played it, and the school eventually gave it to her.A year later, she enrolled in the Royal College of Music, where she learned the cello, harpsichord and piano. But her personal musical legacy wasn’t welcome. One instructor dismissed the kora as an “ethnic thing,” she said, and another said of the instrument, “If you want to succeed, this is not a part of it.”Three years into her education there, Ms. Jobarteh deliberately failed her annual assessment in piano and cello. “I was shaking,” she said. “It felt so wrong, but I just knew, ‘I can’t do this to myself anymore.’”The college declined to comment for this article.Ms. Jobarteh instead asked her father to officially teach her to play the kora, and went on to train with him for several years. He told her, “I have a duty to give you what is mine,” she recalled.Ms. Jobarteh’s 14-year-old son, Sidiki Jobarteh-Codjoe, playing onstage with his mother in Manchester.Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesSome families say the instrument dates to the establishment of the griot tradition in the 13th-century Mandinka empire. The first written account of the kora, by the Scottish explorer Mungo Park, appeared in 1797, according to Lucy Durán, a professor of music at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Its popular origin story, Ms. Jobarteh said, is that it was stolen from a jinn, a supernatural being mentioned in Islam.The Mandinkas and griots attracted widespread interest after the writer Alex Haley traced his ancestry to a Gambian village in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Roots.” But their ancient melodies had made their way across the Atlantic centuries earlier, aboard ships carrying enslaved Africans, and morphed into the early American blues.The kora, with its improvised, oral tradition, can take decades to master. “You learn with your ears, not with your hands,” Ms. Jobarteh said.For years, she was reluctant to perform in Gambia, where a professional female kora virtuoso had never been seen onstage. But her stage debut with her family, in 2011, was met with adulation.The release of her debut album that year was also a leap of faith, as Ms. Jobarteh sang in Mandinka rather than in English, which could garner more commercial success. “I thought, ‘This is it. I’ve just put my life down the plug hole,’” she recalled.The album propelled Ms. Jobarteh’s music around the world, from the United States to New Zealand. And that brought her something far more meaningful than royalties.Ms. Jobarteh performing in Manchester.Adama Jalloh for The New York Times“It makes Africans feel something, to see that someone is being respected to sing in their own language, dress in their own clothes, play their own music,” she said. “That is a message not just for Gambians — it’s for the whole African continent.”Although preserving her heritage is Ms. Jobarteh’s passion, she says her real purpose is educational reform in Gambia — a broader mission that aligns with her role of griot.In 2015, she opened The Gambia Academy in Kartong, a coastal town, in part to prevent a brain-drain of young people seeking better prospects abroad. “I don’t want the next generation to have to do that,” she said, “where you have to have the privilege of having European connections or titles to be able to succeed in your own society.”With a curriculum that centers on West African traditions, the school now has 32 students, including her 14-year-old son, Sidiki, and 9-year-old daughter, Saadio. That has helped her pass down her family tradition, too, and onstage in Manchester Sidiki played the xylophone-like balafon and Saadio percussion.They are learning the griot repertoire — not from their father, but from their mother, a guardian of seven centuries of tradition. More

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      It’s Never Too Late to Play the Cello

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      “It’s Never Too Late” is a new series that tells the stories of people who decide to pursue their dreams on their own terms.In 1940, at age 12, Vera Jiji found her first passion: the cello. She learned to love playing the orchestra instrument at the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan. “I didn’t pick the cello. They assigned it to me because I had a good ear and long fingers,” said the Bronx native, now 93. “I loved it. It’s a beautiful instrument that can sound like a human voice. It looked like a female body, with hips, breasts and a waist. Holding it and playing it was a very intimate experience.”As an adult, though, she stopped playing the instrument. She became a professor and a fixture at Brooklyn College teaching English classes. She married twice and had four children. Her beloved cello, her mother’s high school graduation present, sat tucked away in the back of her clothing closet. It remained untouched, almost forgotten, for about 40 years. She picked up her cello again only after retiring at 62.“I revived the passion I always felt when I started playing again,” she said. Since then, it has been like a second life.Today Dr. Jiji, who lives with her 93-year-old husband in an Upper East Side townhouse, can be found playing most Fridays with other amateurs and friends in two musical groups, a trio and a string quartet, at the 92nd Street Y. She’s also a part of the Y’s annual musical performance. In 2007 she self-published her first book, “Cello Playing for Music Lovers,” which is sold on Amazon in more than 20 countries. (The following interview has been edited and condensed.)What made you return to music after all these years?Brooklyn College gave me companions and socialization with other teachers and students. I felt important socially. When I retired, I lost that. I felt empty and needed to replace that loss and community. I wanted to meet people in the neighborhood.How did you feel about retiring?I thought my life was over; it wasn’t. I had to find a different road. I thought about the road I took when I was younger, and the one I didn’t take because I was a wife and a mother of four and had a career. I thought about the road I didn’t travel — one filled with music — and realized I should take that road now. I couldn’t take both at the same time. The one I took became my life. I went back to the fork and took the other road to see where it would take me.How did you know where to start?I’m a half a block away from the 92nd Street Y. I walked in and asked about classes; they had a creative music class for people over 60 and told me to just show up. I thought I would have to take a test, but I didn’t. I was at the piano, seated next to an instructor who said, “Let’s see how you play,” when someone walked in carrying a cello. I couldn’t believe it. I asked if I could play it and I fell in love with the instrument instantly.What did that feel like?Like coming home. It all came flooding back, and it was wonderful. I felt like I was reconnecting with a best friend. I needed the opportunity to play music and have these other musicians in my life. This was a return to a prized passion.What have you gained by returning to this passion?Music is a perfect language; it’s like a conversation between people who never misunderstand each other and never get bored. When you play music with people, it’s a kind of friendship. Music is a world of pleasure. It has given me a way to communicate without using words. It gave me a next step in life.What made you write your book, “Cello Playing for Music Lovers”?I looked for other books I could turn to, and didn’t find anything helpful. So I decided to write one. As an English professor, I knew how to do this. I’m good at articulating ideas, being able to put things down in a way people can follow, and I’m disciplined enough to sit down everyday and write. I made it a practice to stop at a specific point where I knew what I wanted to say going forward. I never stopped when I was at a loss. That way I could continue the next day knowing I had direction and wouldn’t get overwhelmed. And I wanted to help others.What did it feel like for Dr. Jiji to return to the cello? “Like coming home,” she said. “It all came flooding back, and it was wonderful.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesHow do you feel about this stage in your life?I’m 93. People view age incorrectly: Getting older doesn’t mean you can’t have something, you can. And getting older isn’t getting worse. I’m about enjoying the moment. You have to get up each morning and do something you love. That’s how you move forward.What is your best advice for people looking to make a change?Do not be afraid to go back to something you loved. People say no to things too quickly. We aren’t always our best friends. Your passion or skills are still there. You will remember more than you think. All the information about music I thought I’d lost was in a part of my brain that wasn’t talking to me until I tapped back into it.What have you learned during this new act in your life?Even though I was aging I learned I could still re-enter this wonderful world of creating music. And the community I lost I found again. Music gave me a new group of people. It gave me support. It gave me a new home.In this second act, what are you most proud of accomplishing?Writing and publishing “Cello Playing for Music Lovers.” I lived, I died; what did I give the world? This book, which will outlast me. When I’m gone, this will still be here, helping people learn the cello.What lesson can people learn from your experience?Don’t say no to yourself.We’re looking for people who decide that it’s never too late to switch gears, change their life and pursue dreams. Should we talk to you or someone you know? Share your story here. More

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      Peter Zinovieff, Composer and Synthesizer Innovator, Dies at 88

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      His powerful, affordable instruments made memorable sounds for Pink Floyd, Kraftwerk, David Bowie, King Crimson and many others.Peter Zinovieff, a composer and inventor whose pioneering synthesizers shaped albums by Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Roxy Music and Kraftwerk, died on June 23 in Cambridge, England. He was 88.His death was announced on Twitter by his daughter Sofka Zinovieff, who said he had been hospitalized after a fall.Mr. Zinovieff oversaw the design of the first commercially produced British synthesizers. In 1969, his company, EMS (Electronic Music Studios), introduced the VCS3 (for “voltage controlled studio”), one of the earliest and most affordable portable synthesizers. Instruments from EMS soon became a staple of 1970s progressive-rock, particularly from Britain and Germany. The company’s slogan was “Think of a sound — now make it.”Peter Zinovieff was born on Jan. 26, 1933, in London, the son of émigré Russian aristocrats: a princess, Sofka Dolgorouky, and Leo Zinovieff. His parents divorced in 1937.Peter’s grandmother started teaching him piano when he was in primary school. He attended Oxford University, where he played in experimental music groups while earning a Ph.D. in geology. He also dabbled in electronics.“I had this facility of putting pieces of wire together to make something that either received or made sounds,” he told Red Bull Music Academy in 2015.He married Victoria Heber-Percy, then 17, who came from a wealthy family. She and her parents were unhappy with the extensive travel that a geologist’s career required. After Mr. Zinovieff worked briefly for the Air Ministry in London as a mathematician, he turned to making electronic music full time, supported by his wife.He bought tape recorders and microphones and found high-quality oscillators, filters and signal analyzers at military-surplus stores. Daphne Oram, the electronic-music composer who was a co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, taught him techniques of making music by splicing together bits of sound recorded on magnetic tape in the era of musique concrète.But Mr. Zinovieff decided that cutting tape was tedious. He built a primitive sequencer — a device to trigger a set of notes repeatedly — from telephone-switching hardware, and he began working on electronic sequencers with the electrical engineers Mark Dowson and Dave Cockerell. They realized that early digital computers, which were already used to control factory processes, might also control sound processing.Mr. Zinovieff’s wife sold her pearl and turquoise wedding tiara for 4,000 British pounds — now about $96,000 — to finance Mr. Zinovieff’s purchase of a PDP-8 computer designed by the Digital Equipment Corporation. Living in Putney, a district of London, Mr. Zinovieff installed it in his garden shed, and he often cited it as the world’s first home computer. He added a second PDP-8; the two units, which he named Sofka and Leo, could control hundreds of oscillators and other sound modules.The shed was now an electronic-music studio. Mr. Cockerell was an essential partner; he was able to build the devices that Mr. Zinovieff envisioned. Mr. Cockerell “would be able to interpret it into a concrete electronic idea and make the bloody thing — and it worked,” Mr. Zinovieff said in the 2006 documentary “What the Future Sounded Like.”In 1966, Mr. Zinovieff formed the short-lived Unit Delta Plus with Delia Derbyshire (who created the electronic arrangement of Ron Grainer’s theme for the BBC science fiction institution “Doctor Who”) and Brian Hodgson to make electronic ad jingles and other projects.The programmer Peter Grogono, working with Mr. Cockerell and Mr. Zinovieff, devised software to perform digital audio analysis and manipulation, presaging modern sampling. It used numbers to control sounds in ways that anticipated the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) standard that was introduced in 1983.On Jan. 15, 1968, Mr. Zinovieff brought his computer to Queen Elizabeth Hall in London for Britain’s first public concert of all-electronic music. His “Partita for Unattended Computer” received some skeptical reviews: The Financial Times recognized a technical achievement but called it “the dreariest kind of neo-Webern, drawn out to inordinate length.”Mr. Zinovieff at the Electronic Music Studios in London in 1968. The following year, the company introduced one of the earliest and most affordable portable synthesizers.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesMr. Zinovieff lent a computer to the 1968 exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Visitors could whistle a tune and the computer would analyze and repeat it, then improvise variations.Continually upgrading the Putney studio was expensive. Mr. Zinovieff offered to donate the studio’s advanced technology to the British government, but he was ignored. To sustain the project, he and Mr. Cockerell decided to spin off a business.So in 1969, Mr. Zinovieff, Mr. Cockerell and Tristram Cary, an electronic composer with his own studio, formed EMS. They built a rudimentary synthesizer the size of a shoe box for the Australian composer Don Banks that they later referred to as the VCS1.In November, they unveiled the more elaborate VCS3, also known as the Putney. It used specifications from Mr. Zinovieff, a case and controls designed by Mr. Cary and circuitry designed by Mr. Cockerell (who drew on Robert Moog’s filter design research). It was priced at 330 pounds, about $7,700 now.Yet the VCS3 was smaller and cheaper than other early synthesizers; the Minimoog didn’t arrive until 1970 and was more expensive. The original VCS3 had no keyboard and was best suited to generating abstract sounds, but EMS soon made a touch-sensitive keyboard module available. The VCS3 also had an input so it could process external sounds.Musicians embraced the VCS3 along with other EMS instruments.EMS synthesizers are prominent in songs like Pink Floyd’s “On the Run,” Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain” and Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn,” and the Who used a VCS3 to process the sound of an electric organ on “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” King Crimson, Todd Rundgren, Led Zeppelin, Tangerine Dream, Aphex Twin and others also used EMS synthesizers.“I hated anything to do with the commercial side,” Mr. Zinovieff told Sound on Sound magazine in 2016. He was more interested in contemporary classical uses of electronic sound. In the 1970s, he composed extensively, but much of his own music vanished because he would tape over ideas that he expected to improve.He also collaborated with contemporary composers, including Harrison Birtwistle and Hans Werner Henze. “I didn’t want to have a commercial studio,” he said in 2010. “I wanted an experimental studio, where good composers could work and not pay.” Mr. Zinovieff and Mr. Birtwistle climbed to the top of Big Ben to record the clock mechanisms and gong sounds they incorporated in a quadraphonic 1971 piece, “Chronometer.”Like other groundbreaking synthesizer companies, EMS had financial troubles. It filed for bankruptcy in 1979 after branching into additional products, including a video synthesizer, a guitar synthesizer and a vocoder.Mr. Zinovieff handed over his full studio — including advanced prototypes of an interactive video terminal and a 10-octave pressure-sensitive keyboard — to the National Theater, in London, which belatedly found that it couldn’t raise funds to maintain it. The equipment was dismantled and stored for years in a basement, and it was eventually ruined in a flood.Mr. Zinovieff largely stopped composing for decades. During that time he taught acoustics at the University of Cambridge.But he wasn’t entirely forgotten. He worked for years on the intricate libretto for Mr. Birtwistle’s 1986 opera “The Mask of Orpheus,” which included a language Mr. Zinovieff constructed using the syllables in “Orpheus” and “Eurydice.”In 2010, Mr. Zinovieff was commissioned to write music for a sculpture in Istanbul with 40 channels of sound. “Electronic Calendar: The EMS Tapes,” a collection of Mr. Zinovieff’s work and collaborations from 1965 to 1979 at Electronic Music Studios, was released in 2015.Mr. Zinovieff in 2015, the year “Electronic Calendar: The EMS Tapes,” a collection of his work and collaborations from 1965 to 1979, was released.Graeme Robertson/eyevine, via ReduxMr. Zinovieff learned new software, on computers that were exponentially more powerful than his 1970s equipment, and returned to composing throughout the 2010s, including pieces for cello and computer, for violin and computer and for computer and the spoken word. In 2020, during the pandemic, he collaborated with a granddaughter, Anna Papadimitriou, the singer in the band Hawxx, on a death-haunted piece called “Red Painted Ambulance.”Mr. Zinovieff’s first three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his fourth wife, Jenny Jardine, and by six children — Sofka, Leo, Kolinka, Freya, Kitty and Eliena — and nine grandchildren.A former employee, Robin Wood, revived EMS in 1997, reproducing the vintage equipment designs. An iPad app emulating the VCS3 was released in 2014.Even in the 21st century, Mr. Zinovieff sought better music technology. In 2016, he told Sound on Sound that he felt limited by unresponsive interfaces — keyboards, touchpads, linear computer displays — and by playback through stationary, directional loudspeakers. He longed, he said, for “three-dimensional sound in the air around us.” More

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      Musical Chairs? Why Swapping Seats Could Reduce Orchestra Aerosols.

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      Moving super-spreading instruments, like the trumpet, closer to air vents could limit the aerosol buildup on stage, according to a new study.If musical instruments were people, trumpets would be super spreaders. When a trumpeter blows into the mouthpiece, tiny respiratory droplets, known as aerosols, travel out of the musician’s mouth, whiz through the brass tubing and spray into the air.During a deadly pandemic, when a musician might unwittingly be exhaling an infectious virus, that poses a potential problem for orchestras. And the trumpet is not the only musical health hazard.“Wind instruments are like machines to aerosolize respiratory droplets,” said Tony Saad, a chemical engineer and expert in computational fluid dynamics at the University of Utah.A simple but radical change — rearranging the musicians — could significantly reduce the aerosol buildup on stage, Dr. Saad and his colleagues reported in a new study, which was published in Science Advances on Wednesday.The work began last summer, when the Utah Symphony began to wonder whether, and how, they could return to performing safely.“They were looking for people that could provide insight into mitigation strategies that people would have some faith in,” said James Sutherland, a chemical engineer at the University of Utah and a co-author of the study.Comparison of aerosol concentrations, both instantaneous and averaged, for the baseline scenario and for the proposed mitigation strategy.Hedworth et alThe researchers created a detailed computer model of the symphony’s concert hall, noting the location of every air vent and the rate of air flow through the HVAC system.Then they mapped the typical position of each musician. The Utah Symphony, like most modern orchestras, positioned its musicians in a standard pattern, with the string instruments at the front of the stage, followed by several rows of woodwinds and brass instruments — the flutes and oboes, then the bassoons and clarinets, and then the trumpets and French horns. The trombones and the percussion section were positioned at the very back of the stage.To model the spread of aerosols during a concert, they incorporated recent research led by Jiarong Hong, a mechanical engineer at the University of Minnesota. Working with the Minnesota Orchestra, Dr. Hong and his colleagues had measured the concentration and size of aerosol particles emitted by a variety of different wind instruments. (Among their findings: The trumpet, bass trombone and oboe posed the highest risk.)With these parameters in place, Dr. Saad and Dr. Sutherland used what are known as computational fluid dynamics simulations to model how the air, and aerosols, would flow through the Utah concert hall when all the musicians were playing.The simulation revealed complex patterns of airflow. In general, the air flowed down from the air supply vents in the ceiling to the air return vents in the floor at the back of the stage. But two distinct vortices, at the front and the back of the stage, also formed, they found. “You see these large regions that are recirculating like a big tornado,” Dr. Saad said.Aerosols can get caught in these vortices, swirling around and around the stage and building up over time.The trumpets, which emitted large, concentrated aerosol clouds, posed a particular problem. As the instruments’ aerosol plumes traveled toward the air vents at the back of the stage, they passed directly through the percussionists’ breathing zone.“We saw this and said, ‘OK, this is a big problem, we’ve got to solve this,’” Dr. Sutherland said. “And given the insight we had into how the flow was moving, we said, ‘Well, let’s move some of these instruments around.’”They knew the idea might be controversial; orchestras have generally been arranged the same way for decades, for reasons that include both acoustics and tradition. “We asked them when we started the project, ‘What constraints do we have to work with? Can we move people?’” Dr. Sutherland said. “And they said, ‘You do whatever you think you can to mitigate risk.’”A visualization of the proposed seating arrangement for the orchestra. Colors indicate the speed at which the respiratory aerosols are being emitted at (red is high, blue is low) and size indicates the amount of aerosols emitted per second.Hedworth et alThey moved the trumpets to the very back of the stage, right next to the air-return vents. Then they shifted the other wind instruments from the middle of the stage, moving them either closer to the back air vents or to the stage doors, which they suggested opening.These moves, the team hoped, would allow the aerosols to flow directly out of the concert hall, without passing through the breathing zones of other musicians or getting caught in an onstage vortex. “You want the smoker to sit close to the window,” Dr. Saad said. “That’s exactly what we did here.”Finally, they moved the instruments that do not generate aerosols at all — the piano and the percussion section — to the center of the stage. Together, these tweaks reduced the average aerosol concentration in the musicians’ breathing zones a hundredfold, the researchers calculated.Although the precise air flow patterns will be different in every venue, the general principles should hold everywhere, the team said. Orchestras can reduce the risk of aerosol spread by positioning the highest risk instruments near open doors and air return vents. (Orchestras that cannot do their own computer modeling could put a fog machine onstage and track how the fog flows, the researchers suggested.)Dr. Hong, who was not involved in the Utah study, praised the modeling work. “Simulating the flow inside an orchestra hall is not easy,” he said. “They did beautiful work in terms of characterizing flow.”But he questioned whether moving musicians was really a practical solution. “We work with musicians closely, and they don’t like to be rearranged,” he said. (He did note, however, that “for a student band, I think it’s perfectly fine.”)Instead, he proposed a different, albeit equally unconventional, solution: Masks, for the instruments. In a recent study, he found that covering the bell of a trumpet with a single layer of acoustic fabric could reduce particle emissions by about 60 percent without compromising sound quality.The Utah Symphony, for its part, proved open to rethinking the seating. And when it took the stage last fall, it did so with the stage doors open and the wind instruments at the rear.“That was a huge challenge for the musicians,” said Steven Brosvik, the president and chief executive of the Utah Symphony and Utah Opera. “But they all dove into it, and said, ‘Let’s go, let’s give it a try.’”It took a few weeks for the musicians to get comfortable with the new arrangement, and they plan to return to their traditional seating configuration this fall, Mr. Brosvik said. But the simulations gave the musicians peace of mind and allowed them to get back onstage, he said: “For us, it was life changing.”The researchers were pleased with how willing the musicians were to embrace an unusual solution, although their findings may have hit some instrumentalists harder than others. As Dr. Sutherland said, “We had to apologize to the trumpets in advance.” More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Percussion

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      Listen to the varied, explosive, resonant sounds of instruments struck, shaken, pounded, scratched.In the past, we’ve chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms and choral music.Now we want to convince those curious friends to love percussion — the resonant sound of instruments struck, shaken, pounded. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Andy Akiho, composer and steel pan virtuosoIt’s an exciting era for percussion innovation and inspiration. Particularly new works with flexible instrumentation, because they really showcase an ensemble’s choices and personality. Sandbox Percussion’s multiple versions of Jason Treuting’s “extremes” are an awesome example of how a great composition can renew itself with each interpretation. It’s interesting to learn how the piece works and what inspired the material — rhythms drawn from the letters of six American cities — but most important, I just love listening to and watching it be performed, and I want to share that experience with you.Jason Treuting’s “extremes”Sandbox Percussion (Jonny Allen, Victor Caccese, Ian Rosenbaum, Terry Sweeney)◆ ◆ ◆Valerie Naranjo, musician and ‘Saturday Night Live’ band member“Gmeng Se Naah Eee” (“What Shall We Do?”) is a concerto movement for gyil (pronounced “jeel”) and orchestra. The gyil is a pentatonic African marimba that utilizes only four notes per octave in any particular work. Its composer poses the question — When trouble strikes, what shall we do? — then answers it: We will press forward with wisdom and determination, until we move from dismay to delight. I find it amazing that the 12 notes the gyil uses in this work can tell the story of wisdom conquering all with such exuberance — lifting my mood and making me dance.Ba-ere Yotere’s “Gmeng Se Naah Eee”Orchestrated by Andrew Beall; performed by Valerie Naranjo◆ ◆ ◆Evelyn Glennie, musicianPercussion is primal, sophisticated, raw, refined, playful, complex; it evokes a web of emotions and ignites vibrations that transform the body into a huge ear. “Thunder Caves” is relentless drumming that unleashes the human hand and technology together. The voice is primal, too, and what I drum I think about through the guttural grunts of my voice. Pronged sticks, drum sticks, flix sticks, skin on skin — all contribute to the sound colors on these conventional instruments. The incessant pounding of the kick bass drum gives this piece unrelenting momentum.“Thunder Caves”Improvised and performed by Evelyn Glennie (RCA)◆ ◆ ◆Antonio Sánchez, drummer and ‘Birdman’ composerThe drums are the engine of pretty much any band, but some engines work in a unique way. The first time I heard this live recording of Duke Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be” with the Keith Jarrett Trio — Jarrett on piano, Jack DeJohnette on drums and Gary Peacock on bass — back in college, I was astounded by how fluid the drums made the music sound. DeJohnette is one of the most original voices to ever play the instrument. Even though the swing factor is undeniably strong in his performance, the unconventional fills and accents keep a very well-known tune, with a very simple form, exciting and unpredictable. You can hear the crowd going crazy behind some of those trademark DeJohnette fills. Pure bliss.“Things Ain’t What They Used to Be”(ECM)◆ ◆ ◆Stewart Copeland, composer and former Police drummerMost concert works for percussion are as much fun as a concussion. But sometimes folks like Steve Reich and John Adams find real beauty in hitting things. In this piece Tan Dun takes it further, bravely writing for waterphones and other wildly rebellious instruments. He builds a rich orchestral envelope to suggest pitches and rhythms for the unpitched, wafting water sounds. Listening on your slick system, or over your headphones in a darkened room, it is guaranteed to inspire a wild adventure movie of your own design. For background while doing stuff, it will inspire lateral thinking and novel solutions. Probably not great for group bonding, marching or sex — and definitely don’t drive on this stuff!Tan Dun’s Concerto for Water PercussionNew York Philharmonic; Kurt Masur, conductor◆ ◆ ◆Sarah Hennies, composer and percussionistThe composer and performer Michael Ranta, born in 1942, is a crucial figure in percussion music, though he is almost totally unknown today, even to musicians. He was extremely prolific in the 1970s as an interpreter of avant-garde composition, as an improviser and as a composer of highly individualistic solo works, which he still produces today. He has spent significant time in Asia, especially China and Japan, and “Yuen Shan,” for live percussion and prerecorded sounds, is based on ancient spiritual principles and was composed over a period of almost 40 years. Ranta’s stalwart commitment to being a percussionist who is also a creative artist has been a source of great inspiration for my own work.Michael Ranta’s “Yin-Chu”From “Yuen Shan”◆ ◆ ◆David Allen, Times writerCarl Nielsen’s irrepressible Fourth Symphony was written in 1916, in the middle of World War I, and it’s a dogfight between light and dark. Where does the percussion fit in? As the orchestra tries to soar into glory in the finale, two timpanists duke it out, stationed at opposite sides of the stage — and, as Nielsen wrote, “maintaining a certain threatening character,” their dueling dissonances and the brutality of their attack almost pulling the music back into martial disaster. But not quite; life triumphs. It’s one of the most remarkable uses of the percussion in the symphonic repertoire, and stunning to witness live.Nielsen’s Fourth SymphonyBerlin Philharmonic; Herbert von Karajan, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Cynthia Yeh, Chicago Symphony principal percussionistThe most obvious traits of percussion in the orchestral realm are sheer power, intensity and terror — both overt, in-your-face terror and a subtler undercurrent of fear. Percussion is often used to create a color, a shimmer, a sparkle or crashing waves. The sounds we can make are limitless because our instruments actually are limitless; percussion is defined as anything one shakes, scrapes or strikes, and this is why I chose Christopher Cerrone’s “Memory Palace.” Almost all the instruments in this piece are D.I.Y.: planks of wood, pieces of pipe, bowls and bottles. It showcases the versatility of percussion — the range of instruments, the creation of rhythm, melody, harmony, character and mood.Christopher Cerrone’s “Memory Palace”Ian David Rosenbaum, percussion (National Sawdust Tracks)◆ ◆ ◆Glenn Kotche, composer and Wilco drummerDynamic and energetic, “Drums of Winter” is at the heart of John Luther Adams’s fascinating early multimedia work “Earth and the Great Weather: A Sonic Geography of the Arctic.” Even without pitched percussion, it contains all of the most exciting elements of percussion music. The tumultuous power and subtle peace of the natural world are expertly encompassed. The piece moves quickly and covers a lot of ground, with the sonic peaks and valleys of rhythmic consonance and dissonance showcasing the tonal potential of the drum quartet. The last 30 seconds are an exhilarating finale bound to open doors and ears to more.John Luther Adams’s “Drums of Winter”Amy Knoles, Robert Black, Robin Lorentz and John Luther Adams, percussion (New World Records)◆ ◆ ◆Anthony Tommasini, Times chief classical music criticThough the piano is a percussion instrument, we agreed we’d look beyond its traditional repertoire for this feature. But John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano are works that truly create a percussion ensemble of exhilarating variety. In these 20 pieces, Cage continued his experiments with prepared pianos — regular pianos with screws, bolts, slabs of rubber, pieces of plastic and other items inserted, according to Cage’s precise specifications, between its strings. By striking the keys, a player produces an array of thuds, chime-like tones, near-pitchless plunks, delicate harplike sounds and more. In the paired Sonatas XIV and XV, “Gemini,” the music sounds like a vaguely Asian dance, with rippling riffs in the bass register, melodic bits in peeling high tones, alluring thumps and intricate rhythmic figures.John Cage’s “Gemini”David Greilsammer, piano (Sony Classical)◆ ◆ ◆Seth Colter Walls, Times classical writerWhen it comes to Duke Ellington’s music from the early 1940s, discussion tends to center on the contributions made by the bassist Jimmy Blanton and the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster — and the skill of the percussionist Sonny Greer is often overlooked. Yet Ellington himself described Greer, his longtime drummer, as the “world’s best percussionist reactor.” “When he heard a ping,” Ellington added in his memoir, “he responded with the most apropos pong.” You can hear that responsiveness throughout the classic “Cotton Tail,” as Greer drives the ensemble sections, adds excitement to an already stirring Webster solo and pongs nimbly underneath Ellington’s piano.Duke Ellington’s “Cotton Tail”(Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Tyshawn Sorey, composer and instrumentalistComposed in 1978 for an eight-member percussion ensemble, Roscoe Mitchell’s “The Maze” is a seminal example of his dialogic/Afrologic relationship to composition. Its unusually notated score favors an egalitarian aesthetic, in which each of the performers has opportunities not only to interpret complex, traditionally notated passages, but also to explore different sonic areas in their individualized assemblages, which feature traditional Western percussion instruments, self-invented equipment and a multitude of found objects. “The Maze” encourages the performers to collaboratively interact with all the traditionally and graphically notated materials in a manner that problematizes separatist notions of “improvisation” and “composition,” cultivating a sonic universe in which such a binary never existed in the first place.Roscoe Mitchell’s “The Maze”(Nessa)◆ ◆ ◆Steven Schick, musicianDuring my first visit to New York City on a crystalline autumn day in 1977, I walked the length of Manhattan to stand outside of the building where Edgard Varèse had lived in SoHo. Along the way, I heard the metal-on-metal cacophony of construction, wailing sirens and snippets of the city’s joyous mix of world music. I realized then that “Ionisation,” composed of those very sounds, was not barren modernism but Varèse’s love letter to his adopted home. Listening 44 years later, the noises of “Ionisation” are still bracing, the rhythms still joyous, and I am buoyed again by this fierce anthem to the present.Varèse’s “Ionisation”Ensemble Intercontemporain; Susanna Malkki, conductor◆ ◆ ◆Jason Treuting, composer and So Percussion memberI first listened to “Genderan” in 1997. It is in the gamelan gong kebyar style and showcases so many of the transfixing qualities of Balinese music — qualities that led me to study with I Nyoman Suadin at the Eastman School of Music, and then to travel to Bali to learn more with him and other musicians. “Genderan” begins with a unison introduction, then hits with intricate hocketing over the gong cycle, showing off bright melodies that wind over the beat in endlessly compelling ways. This music utterly changed my life and my understanding of percussion and its capacities. I hope you love it, too.“Genderan”From “Music for the Gods”; recorded in Ubud, Bali, 1941◆ ◆ ◆Joshua Barone, Times editorIn its rhythms and lyrical gestures, this piece seems to contain elements of Steve Reich and John Adams — maybe even Leonard Bernstein. Yet it predates them all: Colin McPhee wrote “Tabuh-Tabuhan” in 1936, influenced by his years spent studying gamelan music in Bali. He transplanted his research onto the Western classical orchestra, featuring Balinese gongs but also creating what he called a “nuclear gamelan” of two pianos and percussion instruments, and approximating the sounds of hand-beaten drums in the strings. The resulting works helped to pave a new path, later trod by Benjamin Britten and broadened by Lou Harrison, for Western percussion in the 20th century.Colin McPhee’s “Tabuh-Tabuhan”BBC Symphony Orchestra; Leonard Slatkin, conductor (Chandos)◆ ◆ ◆Zachary Woolfe, Times classical music editorIn the prelude to Janacek’s opera “Kat’a Kabanova,” the percussion is as articulate as any singer could be in previewing the drama to come: the timpani, first shadowy, then brutal, beating like a heartbeat, like fate; and the insistent sleigh bells that will later carry away a husband, leaving his wife to temptation, adultery and suicide. Percussion functions under, over and through the orchestra — adding punctuation, italics, boldface.Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova”Vienna Philharmonic; Charles Mackerras, conductor (Decca)◆ ◆ ◆Kate Gentile, drummer and composerThe brilliant, multitudinous improvisation in this excerpt typifies the “ancient to the future” ethos of this revolutionary group. The Art Ensemble of Chicago’s extensive percussion setup is played freely and fully by all four band members on this 1969 recording, made before Famoudou Don Moye joined. Lester Bowie is listed as playing bass drum; Roscoe Mitchell, cymbals, gongs, conga drums, logs, bells, siren, whistles, steel drum, etc.; Joseph Jarman, marimba, vibes, conga drums, bells, whistles, gongs, siren, guitar, etc.; and Malachi Favors, log drum, cythar, percussions, etc. — all that in addition to their primary instruments.“Reese and the Smooth Ones”Art Ensemble of Chicago — A.A.C.M.◆ ◆ ◆Elayne Jones, former San Francisco Opera timpanistThe timpani can be such a loud instrument, and people tend to watch you when you’re playing it. But it really captures the audience when it’s so soft; it kind of gets you. Just before the end of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, it’s only the solo piano and the quiet timpani. Something so big and so heavy, but it comes out so delicate. You capture everyone’s imagination.Beethoven’s Fifth Piano ConcertoAndras Schiff, piano; Staatskapelle Dresden; Bernard Haitink, conductor (Teldec)◆ ◆ ◆ More