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      A Pioneering Orchestra Boss Had ‘Unfinished Business,’ So She Returned

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      Deborah Borda led the New York Philharmonic in the 1990s, and was frustrated by its subpar hall. After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, she “finally saw a path forward,” she said.When the musicians of the New York Philharmonic gathered inside what was still very much a construction site in mid-August to hear for the first time how they would sound after the $550 million renovation of their home, David Geffen Hall, Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, handed out roses to the arriving players.“This is a historic moment,” Borda, who had barely slept the night before, told them from the conductor’s podium. “Welcome to your new home.”It was a homecoming that Borda, 73, has been working toward for decades.She first led the Philharmonic in the 1990s, and left partly out of frustration that there was no will to rebuild its perennially troubled home, known then as Avery Fisher Hall, which had long been plagued by complaints about its look and, especially, its sound. She spent 17 years at the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, ushering the orchestra into the acclaimed Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall and signing Gustavo Dudamel as music director. Then, just as she began to consider a new chapter, perhaps teaching, she was lured back to New York five years ago: a $100 million gift from the entertainment mogul David Geffen had revived plans to remake the hall, but momentum seemed to be stalling.“It was unfinished business,” she said. “I had been dreaming about this since the 1990s. And then I finally saw a path forward.”So there was a lot on the line that afternoon in August, when she listened intently as the orchestra tuned up and then, under the baton of its music director, Jaap van Zweden, played excerpts from Bruckner’s elegiac Seventh Symphony. She felt reassured.“It sounds terrific,” she told the small crowd in attendance, including leaders from Lincoln Center, board members, sound experts and construction workers.When Borda returned to New York in 2017, arts leaders had real concerns about the health of the Philharmonic, the oldest orchestra in the United States. It had top-flight musicians and a storied tradition — over the years it has been led by giants like Mahler, Toscanini and Bernstein — but it ran deficits every year, its audience was aging and it faced competition from the many international ensembles that tour New York. When she arrived, its endowment fund had less money than when she been in charge in the 1990s.It was the Geffen gift — secured in 2015 by Katherine G. Farley, the chairwoman of Lincoln Center, which owns the hall and is the Philharmonic’s landlord — that finally put a revamped hall within grasp. But there were still serious obstacles. Lincoln Center was going through a period of management churn as top executives came and went. The renovation plans under consideration were growing too expensive and hard to build, not to mention impractical (glass walls?) for an orchestra. Soon after Borda arrived, she and Lincoln Center officials announced they were going back to the drawing board.Undeterred, Borda kept working toward the ultimate goal. “She is a force of nature,” van Zweden said. “What she wants, she gets.”In 2019 Lincoln Center tapped Henry Timms, who formerly led the 92nd Street Y, as its president and chief executive. He returned stability to the organization, rethought the mission of the arts complex — which produces work on its own while serving as the landlord of independent constituent groups including the Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and New York City Ballet — and got the renovation project moving forward.The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.‘Unfinished Business’: After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, Deborah Borda returned to the New York Philharmonic, which she led in the 1990s, to help usher it into its new home.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Timeline: From a troubled opening in 1962 to a full gutting in 1976 to the latest renovations, here is a brief timeline of the long road to the new hall.He and Borda worked to turn the historically acrimonious relationship between Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic — which reached a low point in 2003, when the Philharmonic tried to leave and return to its old home, Carnegie Hall — into a collaborative one. That message was driven home by stickers and tote bags about the project that proclaimed, perhaps aspirationally, “Working in Concert.”Henry Timms brought stability back to Lincoln Center after a period of management tumult when he became its president and chief executive in 2019. That year he and Borda unveiled plans for the renovation of Geffen Hall, and surveyed the old hall. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesTimms recalled meeting Borda at her home for coffee shortly before he took office, when they vowed together to finally finish the Geffen project.“It was a priority that I think we both signed up for,” he said. “But what we needed to do was make our relationship a priority.”“She could have stopped before this job and gone down in history, but she chose not to,” he said. “She went the other way and chased this final triumph.”Borda said the hard work and support of Timms and Farley at Lincoln Center, as well as the co-chairmen of the Philharmonic’s board, Peter W. May and Oscar L. Tang, had been critical. “They had the heart and the hunger and the vision to do this,” she said.Borda, whose mother was a lobbyist and whose father immigrated from Colombia and worked as a salesman, grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens. She attended her first New York Philharmonic concert when she was 4, and from the balcony she watched Leonard Bernstein conduct. Her parents divorced when she was 6, and when she was 12, the family moved to Boston, where they lived with Borda’s stepfather, a psychiatrist, and she played in a youth orchestra. She initially envisioned a career as a performer, studying violin and attending the Royal College of Music in London for graduate studies, and working as a freelance musician in New York. But she was drawn to management early on.In 1979, when she was 30, she landed her first major job, as general manager and artistic administrator of the San Francisco Symphony. Her appointment caught attention: She was one of the first women to lead a major orchestra in the United States. But because of her gender and sexual orientation — she is gay — she sometimes faced obstacles in the male-dominated classical field. She recalled the surprise she felt losing out on a job managing the Pittsburgh Symphony in the 1980s after being told that its maestro, Lorin Maazel, would be uncomfortable working with her because she was a woman.“It didn’t even occur to me that my gender and sexual orientation might be an impediment,” she said. “I never even thought of it.”After stints at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, she came to New York in 1991 for her first round as the Philharmonic’s chief. She balanced the orchestra’s budget and led efforts to attract more young people to concerts with innovations like short evening “rush-hour” concerts. But her tenure was also marked by feuds, including acrimonious negotiations with the orchestra’s musicians over a labor contract, and persistent tensions with Kurt Masur, who was then its music director.Borda with the music director Kurt Masur during her last stint running the New York Philharmonic, in 1991. Jack Manning/The New York TimesShe first tried to remedy some of the hall’s stubborn acoustic problems in 1992, when Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic placed curved wooden reflectors around the stage — their shape inspired her to dub them “the bongos” — to help spread the sound. But the problems persisted.She left for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1999, in part, she said, because she did not believe cultural leaders in New York were committed to a full-scale renovation of the hall.“I didn’t think there was the heart or the vision to get it done at that time,” she said. “It was frustrating and that’s why I left.”She flourished in Los Angeles, leading the orchestra to new heights. She more than quintupled its endowment, earned the orchestra a reputation for creative programming, helped make Dudamel a superstar and started an ambitious youth orchestra program for the city’s underserved communities. Then, just when she was thinking about retiring from orchestra management to teach or start a think-tank, New York beckoned her back.She returned in 2017, energized by the opportunity to finally remake Geffen Hall. “It was sort of like a karmic circle,” she said. (She also wanted to be closer to her longtime partner, Coralie Toevs, who oversees development at the Metropolitan Opera; the two maintained a long-distance relationship when Borda was in Los Angeles.)Back in New York she worked to balance the budget, raising $50 million to help the orchestra stay solvent. She built up its endowment, which was valued at $195 million when she arrived, lower than it had been when she led the orchestra in the 1990s, and which is now valued at around $220 million. And she championed innovative programming: she commissioned works from 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which barred the states from denying women the right to vote, and one work, “Stride,” by Tania León, won the Pulitzer Prize.Then the pandemic hit. The orchestra canceled more than 100 concerts — losing more than $27 million in anticipated ticket revenue — and laid off 40 percent of its staff.“I genuinely thought we could go out of business,” she said.But Timms and Borda pressed ahead, seizing on the long pandemic shutdown period to accelerate the project, which was originally scheduled to take place over several seasons.Now Borda, having made good on her promise to usher another Philharmonic into another modern home, has announced plans to step down at the end of June, when she will hand the reins of the Philharmonic to Gary Ginstling, the executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra, in Washington. (She will stay on as a special adviser to assist with fund-raising and other matters.)But she still has work to do: planning enticing seasons to lure concertgoers to a new hall.“A hall can’t just be a monument to itself,” she said.And a critical decision looms: before she departs, Borda hopes to name a successor to van Zweden, the music director, who will leave his post in 2024. A 12-person committee of Philharmonic staff, musicians and board members is sifting through candidates. Among the likely contenders are Dudamel; Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, the former music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; Susanna Malkki, the music director of the Helsinki Philharmonic; and Santtu-Matias Rouvali, principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra. Borda said she was looking for a leader who “clicks with the orchestra” and “clicks with New York.”On a recent day, as she led a tour of the hall for the Philharmonic’s board, her cellphone often sounded, filling the hall with her ringtone: “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” from Handel’s “Solomon.”Standing before a new digital wall in the lobby, she smiled, saying she was moved that the Philharmonic would finally have a home to match its artistic caliber.“It energizes me completely,” she said. “It’s like a dream.” More

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      Is Little Amal Getting Lost in New York?

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      Parading down the middle of West 63rd Street last Saturday afternoon, we were following a giant puppet — a whole crowd of us, trekking along behind Little Amal.The 12-foot-tall Syrian refugee child, a creation of the renowned Handspring Puppet Company, was en route to Lincoln Center to greet more of her public, who would throng the wide plaza there to catch a glimpse of her with their own eyes, and capture proof of the encounter on their phones.Fueled by a savvy social media campaign — and surely also by recent headlines about migrants and asylum seekers being bused and flown north by Republican governors — Little Amal is the hottest celebrity in New York right now, drawing masses of admirers to her dozens of scheduled appearances.Since last year she has traveled across Europe, a sympathetic, high-profile emblem of the global migrant crisis. Her current 19-day tour of these five boroughs lasts only until Oct. 2, and as always with in-demand visitors, the time limit adds to her cachet.Making connections: Amal is in town through Oct. 2 and will be visiting all five boroughs over her 19-day stay in the city.For me, a puppetry fan with an interest in political theater, Little Amal — who is operated by one puppeteer strapped into stilts inside her torso and two others controlling her arms — should have been an almost automatic fascination. And yet she left me cold when I first went to scope her out, on Fifth Avenue in front of the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, on Sept. 15, the day after she arrived. Even when she bent down to cuddle Patience, one of the famous marble lions, I was unmoved.Amal is a 10-year-old, but with her gargantuan hands and forceful jaw, she reminded me of one of those paintings of a child before painters figured out that children weren’t merely miniature adults. Worse, the event felt like barely more than a photo op. I wondered if she is truly meant to be experienced in person — if, in fact, she counts as theater — or if the main purpose of this wordless puppet is to be an object, recorded in photos and videos in glamorous locations that people all over the world will recognize.Then, last weekend, my heart abruptly cracked wide open. On that tree-lined stretch of West 63rd Street, the brass band accompanying Amal broke into a festive rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and she began to dance as she walked along. It was a gentle, reveling bounce, and it made her utterly enchanting.In Central Park last weekend, spectators of all ages followed Amal.Later that day, her path cleared by a police escort, Amal led another procession up Central Park West. As her band played, we trooped along in the street — grown-ups, little kids riding on shoulders, the occasional dog. The mood was buoyant, happy, kind.There is something to be said for what is, in effect, a citywide party in honor of a refugee — even if she is merely a puppet, even if she is so well-connected that St. Ann’s Warehouse helped to bring her here. Symbolic behavior matters.Up ahead, Amal’s long brown hair swayed in the breeze, adorned with a bright red ribbon that was a beacon for those farther back. A thought crossed my mind that took me entirely by surprise. Although I was raised Roman Catholic, I’m not religious, and definitely not accustomed to bits of Bible verses floating through my consciousness.Still, there it was, inescapably, a line from Isaiah: “and a little child shall lead them.”Gulp.This, of course, is the point of Little Amal — to use the visceral power of puppetry, and of theater at its most disarming, to make us feel, and cajole us into considering what we owe to the most vulnerable among us. And ultimately, presumably, to act on that moral imperative.She was greeted at Lincoln Center on Sept. 17.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesBut it is so easy for any message to get lost on the grand stage set that is New York, and maybe even more so when collaborations with the city’s cultural institutions can come across as mutually promotional opportunities, bereft of substance. When Amal visited Lincoln Center, she seemed more like a dignitary granting an audience than a child ambassador for a cause. Her context had disappeared; without it she registered as a buzzy spectacle, one you want to be able to say you saw.Still, the visuals were terrific — musicians serenading her from the balcony of the Metropolitan Opera House — and people strained to get near her, to touch those enormous hands. It is astonishing when she gets really close, looming right above you. Looking up, all you see is her huge face, with those big, brown, blinking eyes. (Makes a great photo, actually.)I followed Amal late on Sunday morning to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where the vast front doorway posed no obstacle to her height, and where the lyrics of one hymn were particularly apt — not so much for her but for the rest of us: “Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto me.”Some people are seeking out Amal around town, while others, instantly smitten, seem to be ditching their plans to tag along.And I followed her early on Monday morning to Coney Island, Brooklyn, where she wandered the wooden boardwalk forlornly, peering through the gates of rides not open just then for customers. The carnival colors popped, the moody clouds cast a flattering light and when she looked over the side of a pier into the water, the sound was of crashing waves and clicking shutters.If it seemed contrived — which, to be fair, it was; this was theater — there was no feigning the interest in her as she strode along with a gathering entourage, while a persistent drone hovered unnervingly overhead. Some people had made the pilgrimage to see Amal; others, like a smitten woman in a one-piece swimsuit and pink bathing cap, seemed to have ditched their beach plans to tag along.Amal’s performance that night, with its narrative of a weary child’s peregrination through Dumbo to the glass-walled carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park, should have been delicate and gorgeous. But from the moment she set off from the walk’s starting point, a triangle in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, something was wrong.In Coney Island, on Sept. 19, Amal found the space she needed to stand out as she strode along with a gathering entourage. But later that night, in Dumbo, the crowd overwhelmed her event.It wasn’t only that the hundreds of us were too many for the narrow cobblestone streets; the spirit of the evening was off, too. In that most Instagrammable of the city’s neighborhoods, the focus of the crowd was palpably on getting the shot — and Amal, in that lighting, did look glorious. (She stopped, lingeringly, in precisely the ultra-photogenic spot that’s illustrated on the cover of the current issue of The New Yorker.)But this wasn’t the joyous welcome of an attentive audience; it felt like a flash mob that had gotten out of hand. And when we reached the carousel — an elevated and brilliantly illuminated space that should have made an ideal stage — it was so surrounded by people that the performance was impossible to see unless you were up front. Even being 12 feet tall couldn’t help Amal there.The creepiest thing about that evening’s walk, though, was the sense that allegiance had been replaced by pursuit. It had the feeling of a hunt, with the puppet refugee as quarry. People jostled for position, cut in front of one another, tried to anticipate where Amal was going and get there first.And so I wonder, a little worriedly, with Saturday’s walk across the Brooklyn Bridge coming right up: Are we ruining Little Amal for ourselves?There may be no solution to the problem of the sheer numbers she draws, especially when the vistas promise to be breathtaking. But one tenet of theater suggests a way to better experience her live.Be present.Shoot a few photos if you like, a snippet of video. But mostly, just put down your camera, put away your phone. Be there, in the moment, walking with her. And feel. More

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      New York Drill Rappers Say They Were Removed From Rolling Loud Festival

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      At least three local artists were cut from the traveling rap show, scheduled for this weekend in Queens, at the request of the New York Police Department, their representatives said.At least three rappers with ties to the booming New York drill scene — which has risen in popularity in recent years, even as law enforcement officials and politicians like Mayor Eric Adams have questioned its relationship to local gun violence — have been removed from the lineup of the traveling rap festival Rolling Loud, scheduled for this weekend at Citi Field in Queens, at the request of the New York Police Department, the artists’ representatives said.The rappers included Sha Ek, a 19-year-old from the Bronx; 22Gz, an influential figure in Brooklyn’s drill movement; and Ron Suno, a musician and comedian from the Bronx.Rolling Loud, which is scheduled to run from Friday to Sunday, and the New York Police Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the rappers’ removal this week. But the last-minute cancellations matched a similar scenario ahead of the festival’s New York stop in 2019, when five artists, including 22Gz and Pop Smoke, had their performances scrapped.The rappers had “been affiliated with recent acts of violence citywide,” according to a letter sent by an assistant chief at the Police Department to the festival organizers at the time. “The New York City Police Department believes if these individuals are allowed to perform, there will be a higher risk of violence.”Tariq Cherif, a founder of Rolling Loud, said then that the festival had no choice but to comply if it wished to return to New York. A representative for Sha Ek and 22Gz said this week that the artists were paid in full for their performances.But on Thursday, Stanley Davis, a manager for Sha Ek who is known as Noodles, said in a statement that his client had not been charged with any crime that could justify his ban. “The police try to associate what he’s doing with violence and negativity,” he wrote. “They don’t respect that he’s an artist and entertainer trying to better himself and feed his family at 19 years old.”Davis added, “Sha Ek has performed all over the Northeast this year. The crowds at his concerts are full of kids dancing and having fun. He’s excited to keep growing his touring business and proving the police wrong.”Diamond Brown, a manager for Ron Suno who goes by Bo, said via text message: “How can a person who has no criminal record and no gang ties — the kid never even made a diss record — be denied to perform in his hometown after all his hard work?”Suno had been involved in a fight at last year’s edition of Rolling Loud in New York, but he downplayed the incident in subsequent interviews and on social media. No charges were filed.A spokeswoman for 22Gz’s record label, Atlantic Records, confirmed his removal but declined to comment further. 22Gz is currently out on bond after being charged in June with attempted murder for his role in a Brooklyn club shooting that injured three people.Drill, which started as a neighborhood hip-hop sound in Chicago about a decade ago, has since traveled to London, New York, Stockholm and beyond, becoming a dominant mode for rap music. But the proudly hyperlocal artists, whose songs are often a reaction to and a documenting of gun violence, gang disputes and extreme poverty in their hometowns, have also faced heavy scrutiny from community leaders and law enforcement officials, who claim that the music incites more violence.In the United Kingdom, drill artists have said their lyrics and their very existence have been criminalized, resulting in constant scrutiny. Chief Keef, one of drill’s pioneers and a breakout star from Chicago, has also been prevented from performing in his native city, or even nearby, with police once shutting down a concert in Indiana in which Keef was appearing only via hologram from California.In New York, Mayor Adams has questioned whether social networks should ban drill music from its platforms. “Violent people who are using drill rapping to post who they killed, and then antagonize the people who they are going to kill is what the problem is,” he told reporters earlier this year.The mayor then met with a coalition of New York rappers to discuss drill and potential ways to reduce gun violence in the city. Two of the drill artists who sat down with Mayor Adams in February — Fivio Foreign and B-Lovee — are still scheduled to perform at Rolling Loud this weekend.Since its 2015 debut in Miami, Rolling Loud has grown into the defining and farthest-reaching music festival for rap, though it has also been connected to spates of arrests and occasional violence. Headliners this weekend in New York include Nicki Minaj, Future, ASAP Rocky and Playboi Carti. More

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      Little Amal Arrives in New York, With a Message of Hope and Humanity

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      The 12-foot-tall Syrian refugee puppet traveled from Turkey to Britain last year. Now, she will spend nearly three weeks in the five boroughs taking part in numerous events.As her head peeked out from above metal barriers, Little Amal widened her eyes as she took in the arrivals terminal at Kennedy International Airport on Wednesday. She looked left, then right, clutching her big green suitcase with its rainbow and sun stickers. She was, as newcomers to New York City so often are, a little nervous, and a little lost.But then, some music. As Little Amal lumbered through the terminal, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and its children’s chorus began to perform music of welcome: the final chorus from Philip Glass’s opera about Gandhi’s early life, “Satyagraha” — whose title translates loosely to “resistance.”Amal, a 10-year-old Syrian refugee puppet, appeared transfixed by the music — much like the many travelers strolling by with their suitcases appeared transfixed by the 12-foot-tall puppet suddenly towering before them. Still, she was trepidatious, a tad reluctant to approach the orchestra. At least, that is, until a chorus member — a girl wearing a sunflower yellow shirt — went up to her and took her by the hand.Amal and her puppeteers made their way through Terminal 4, and were welcomed by members of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and its children’s choir.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesAmal has traveled across Europe and met with Ukrainian refugees in Poland. Now she has made her way to the Big Apple with big plans. For the rest of this month, she will tour all five boroughs, visiting with children, artists, politicians and community leaders as she begins a search for her uncle, and, her creators hope, helps highlight the experience, hardship and beauty of millions of displaced refugees.Her extended walk through New York City will include more than 50 events of welcome like the one at the airport on Wednesday. She will pick flowers at a community garden in Queens, walk across the High Bridge in the Bronx, ride the Staten Island Ferry, dance in the streets of Washington Heights and find herself amid a Syrian wedding procession in Bay Ridge.“She will render visibility to something people don’t want to see,” said Amir Nizar Zuabi, the artistic director of the Walk Productions, which is presenting the public art involving Amal, along with St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.Amal has already traveled quite a distance — 5,000 miles from Turkey to Britain last year — in search of her mother. And on Wednesday, when she stepped into the arrivals terminal she was greeted by a top-flight welcome committee.Embarking on a U.S. walk: Amal will participate in over 50 events across the five boroughs through Oct. 2.Todd Heisler/The New York Times“Opera is about dreaming and it’s also about reflecting our world,” Nézet-Séguin told The New York Times before the welcome. “Especially in the past years and months, the Met has been showing how important it is to welcome everyone to our opera house and also to really, truly respond to our times and connect with everyone in the world.”“I know this is going to be a very moving event,” he added.For those unfamiliar with Little Amal’s story and her journey, here is a look at who Amal is, where she has been, where she is going — and why.The making of AmalAmal, whose name means “hope” in Arabic, is operated by up to four people, including one person on stilts. Designed by the Handspring Puppet Company based in South Africa, Amal is delicate — her arms and upper body are made of bamboo canes — and she sometimes requires maintenance.The puppet is the protagonist in what is ostensibly a traveling theater project meant to remind a news-fatigued public about the children fleeing violence and persecution. Syrian refugees garnered considerable attention in 2015 and 2016 as they fled the country. The Walk in Europe followed a route similar to the one taken by some Syrians who fled.As it happened, Amal began her European walk in the summer of 2021, shortly after the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, which spurred a fresh migration crisis in Europe. Over four months, Amal crossed the continent, stopping at refugee camps, town squares and the Royal Opera House in London. To date, she has been part of more than 190 events in more than 80 towns, cities and villages in 12 countries.Amal and her puppeteers in Calais, France, last October. It was one of many stops she made during a four-month, 5,000-mile journey from Turkey to Britain.Elliott Verdier for The New York Times“We were really taken by the amount of people who took to the streets to welcome her,” Zuabi said during a recent interview conducted via Zoom. “It became very clear that while the governments are talking on a certain level on this issue, the people of the cities are willing to engage.”Now Amal is continuing her journey in New York.“New York’s ethos — or at least the way it perceives itself — is this great human endeavor created by wave on wave of migration,” Zuabi said. “New Yorkers celebrate what they have achieved through this melting pot of migrations and how stories have amalgamated for growth and for culture. Taking Amal here was a way to investigate that and also investigate the United States in a very particular moment.“How do you want to welcome her?” he added. “I truly hope that in this very busy, very hectic city, people will take a moment and come and be empathetic and reach out to each other through this stranger.”As was the case in Europe, many of Little Amal’s stops are planned and include visits with artistic and institutional leaders; other encounters may be more spontaneous. And there are plans in the works, officials say, for a later trip across America.“It’s one big theater show happening for free on your streets,” Zuabi said. “You don’t need to travel far to a fancy theater and get dressed — you can walk down in your pajamas if you want.”July 2021: TurkeyIn Adana, Turkey, children flew flocks of homemade birds around Amal.Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York TimesAmal’s first stop was in Gaziantep, a city in southern Turkey just 40 miles from the Syrian border. It’s where many Syrian refugees have settled. At one point, she visited a park where Syrian children sang to her; another group gave her a handmade trunk, filled with gifts for her journey.August 2021: GreeceAmal met some resistance in Greece. She had planned to visit the Greek World Heritage site of Meteora, known for Orthodox monasteries perched upon towering rocks. But a local council banned her scheduled picnic on the grounds that a “Muslim doll from Syria” shouldn’t be performing in a space important to Greek Orthodox believers. (Amal’s religion has never been specified.)Later, in Larissa, in central Greece, people pelted Amal with eggs, fruit and even stones. Then in Athens, her planned events drew protests and counterprotests.September 2021: RomeDuring a visit to Vatican City to meet the pope, Amal embraced a bronze statue in St. Peter’s Square that depicts 140 migrants, including Jews fleeing the Nazis.Remo Casilli/ReutersUpon arriving in Rome, Amal went to the Vatican, strolled through St. Peter’s Square, hugged a bronze statue depicting 140 migrants and met Pope Francis, a vocal supporter of refugees. She proceeded to the Teatro India, one of Rome’s most well-known theaters, where paintings, collages and digital works by the Syrian artist Tammam Azzam flashed up on a wall behind her. The works were nightmarish visions of the war-torn home she’d left behind.October 2021: FranceAt a town square, with locals leaning out of apartment windows, Amal danced to the music performed by a group of refugee and migrant rappers. Then she headed for the beach, where she was joined by 30 other puppets her size. Joyce DiDonato, the American opera singer, offered a serenade.November 2021: EnglandTo close out her long journey, Amal went to Manchester, where thousands of fans waited for her at the Castlefield Bowl, many expecting her to be reunited with her mother. As she took her final steps, a flock of wooden puppet swallows surrounded her and then, in a burst of smoke, an image of a woman’s face appeared — her mother in spirit, if not person.“Daughter, you’ve got so far — so very far away from home — and it’s cold, so stay warm,” a gentle voice intoned in Arabic. “I’m proud of you.”May 2022: UkraineSince completing her 2021 journey, Amal has traveled to Lviv and to several cities in Poland to visit Ukrainian refugee children and families who were forced to flee after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.Sept. 14 and 21: QueensTodd Heisler/The New York TimesAfter her arrival at Kennedy Airport on Wednesday, Little Amal will set out for Jamaica, Queens, with her big suitcase. She may get some help navigating the city from her friends at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning. But how will she fare in Astoria when night falls?Little Amal will return to Queens on Sept. 21 to visit Corona and Jackson Heights.Sept. 15 to Oct. 1: ManhattanLittle Amal will not leave New York without seeing all of the sights. While in Manhattan, she has planned visits to Grand Central Terminal, the New York Public Library, Times Square, Lincoln Center and St. Patrick’s Cathedral.Later in her trip, she will go to City Hall, and visit Washington Heights, Harlem, Chinatown and several other neighborhoods.Sept. 19 to Oct. 2: BrooklynAs it turns out, Amal has some roots in Brooklyn: In 2018, St. Ann’s Warehouse presented an Off Broadway play, “The Jungle,” that introduced the character of Amal.The play will return to St. Ann’s early next year.“We left like we needed her here,” said Susan Feldman, the president and artistic director of St. Ann’s Warehouse, an organizer of Little Amal’s New York walk.“If you ask me what is the best thing to do, you want to walk with her,” Feldman said. “The best times are when people first see her.”During her time in the borough, Amal will make stops at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Green-Wood Cemetery and several Brooklyn neighborhoods. She will also make multiple visits to St. Ann’s Warehouse, including on her last day in the city, on Oct. 2.Sept. 25 and 26: The BronxAmal will visit Mott Haven in search of the waterfront. She is also interested in crossing the High Bridge but may need help from the community to overcome her fear of heights.Sept. 30: Staten IslandAmal will ride the Staten Island Ferry, and head to Snug Harbor, where she will be welcomed by a parade.Alex Marshall contributed reporting. More

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      New Yorker Festival, which runs Will Host Bono and Rep Jamie Raskin

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      The three day-festival beginning on Oct. 7 will also include conversations with stars like Ben Stiller, Chloe Bailey and Sandra Oh.The New Yorker Festival returns for its 23rd edition, featuring conversations with Bono, Quinta Brunson, Ben Stiller, Chloe Bailey, United States Representative Jamie Raskin and more, and will run from Oct. 7-9.Bono, the Irish rock star and more recently the motorbike-riding lion in “Sing 2,” will be in conversation with The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, about his new memoir and his decades as an activist and musician. The book, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,” will be released in November.“Like so many memoirs that I’ve read, the most intriguing part is how someone becomes himself or herself,” Remnick said in an interview.Quinta Brunson, who plays the chirpy yet clumsy elementary school teacher in “Abbott Elementary,” will speak with the magazine’s television critic, Doreen St. Félix. And Chloe Bailey (of the R&B sister duo Chloe x Halle) will perform live at the festival after a conversation.Remnick said that politically driven conversations can be had by artists, authors and actors, as well as lawmakers. Raskin, a Democrat of Maryland and a member of the Jan. 6 House select committee, along with three of the magazine’s writers, will join a live taping of The New Yorker’s “The Political Scene” podcast.The political conversation will continue with a talk about Asian American culture and representation, with the chef David Chang, the filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung, the writer Min Jin Lee and the actor Sandra Oh. And the climate activists Sara Blazevic and Molly Burhans, and the climate expert Leah Stokes, will delve into the future of the environment.“All of these people in cultural life are also in many ways connected to the political,” Remnick said.The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will return to the festival, where Hari Kunzru, Elif Batuman, Gary Shteyngart, Rachel Kushner and Ottessa Moshfegh will also appear.As for comedy, Molly Shannon and Vanessa Bayer, the actresses and comedians who star in the Showtime series “I Love That for You,” will chat with Susan Morrison, an editor at the magazine. And the comedians Hasan Minhaj, Phoebe Robinson, Billy Eichner and Jerrod Carmichael will also participate in festival conversations, along with the directors Stiller, the duo Daniels, Sharon Horgan and Maggie Gyllenhaal.Remnick said that with the return to theaters and the arrival of vaccine boosters, he feels confident sharing a room with readers, thinkers and performers, and the festival will hold select events virtually.“Part of cultural lifestyle was taken from us, and now it’s bounced back,” he said. More

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      Solange Enters New Territory: Ballet Composer

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      The multihyphenate pop star will compose her first ballet score for the Fall Fashion Gala at New York City Ballet in September.Solange, the pop star whose artistic tendrils have reached into the worlds of music, choreography, fashion, film, visual art and more, will soon add a new genre to her repertoire: ballet composer.New York City Ballet announced on Monday that Solange would write an original score for a work (as yet untitled) by Gianna Reisen that will premiere at the company’s annual Fall Fashion Gala, on Sept. 28. The score is composed for a chamber ensemble that will be made up of some of Solange’s musical collaborators and members of the City Ballet orchestra.This step into ballet is the latest in a series of adventurous turns by Solange, 36, who began her career young as a singer and dancer — including with her sister, Beyoncé, in Destiny’s Child. Solange’s work later blossomed into multihyphenate and more independent territory, with her music — starting with the 2012 album “True” and continuing with “A Seat at the Table” (2016) and “When I Get Home” (2019) — often doubling as a gathering place for genre-crossing, interdisciplinary artists. In her art and in the streets, she has also been an activist for Black Lives Matter and other causes.Solange has long had a theatrical edge that brought her into contact with Lincoln Center regulars and collaborators beyond the musical sphere. She has worked with the designer Carlos Soto, a regular partner of the auteurist director Robert Wilson, and organized programming — as well as brought her own performances — to spaces like the Guggenheim and Getty museums, as well as the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany.Her music for Reisen will be her debut in ballet, which was formative for her as a child in Houston. She saw Lauren Anderson, a pioneering Black principal dancer at Houston Ballet, and once told the writer Ayana Mathis, “My dream was to go to Juilliard.”The new dance is Reisen’s third for City Ballet, and will feature costumes by Alejandro Gómez Palomo of Palomo Spain. The Fall Fashion Gala, which pairs choreographers with designers, will also feature a premiere by Kyle Abraham, with costumes by Giles Deacon; and the first live performance of Justin Peck’s “Solo,” which premiered virtually in 2021 in a film directed by Sofia Coppola, and now features costume design by Raf Simons. Rounding out the gala evening is a George Balanchine masterpiece, “Symphony in C” from 1947. More

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      The Art of Disappearance

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.The problem — or at least a problem, I’ve been told — is that I am not very concerned about being missed upon any of my exits, not the ones that are voluntary nor the ones that swoop down without warning to cover me in a quilt of dark feathers. I think about this often, and if there is a remedy for it. I read the sometimes long, sprawling announcements people make when they leave or take breaks from social media platforms, or I watch someone announce that he or she is departing on the way out of a crowded party, and I sometimes find myself puzzled by the practice. I slip out of parties unannounced. I make up excuses for why I didn’t make the rounds, or say goodbye. I see the concerned texts, I tell myself I’ll reply later and sometimes I do. I am indifferent about being missed, which isn’t to say that I don’t believe that I have been missed, or will be missed again. It is very likely that there are people missing me right now, reading this admission and shaking their heads at what they’ve always known, even if I wasn’t bold enough to explicitly speak it out loud before walking out of a door that I’d never again be on the better side of.This feeling is acute during the long, endless-feeling Ohio winters, when leaving a physical space is scarcely an option. This is most challenging in late March, when temperatures can barely rise above the 30s and snow is still accumulating. During that season within a season, when hope tails off, spinning into the still-early darkness, I return to the music of the cult favorite singer-songwriter Connie Converse. When I am most seduced by the idea that sunlight might be a cure for an emotional descent I can no longer trace, I return to the same song: Converse’s “We Lived Alone.” Clocking in at just over a minute, it’s both an ode to contentment with loneliness and an expression of intense longing. When the song begins, Converse is reveling in her own isolation: “We lived alone/my house and I/we had the earth/we had the sky/I had a lamp against the dark/and I was happy as a lark.” She describes her beloved stove and window, and the chair wearing a “pretty potato sack,” and the roses blooming around her doorstep. And then, right before the listener is evicted from the tune, there is the Volta: “I had a job/my wants were few/they were until I wanted you/and when I set my eyes on you/nothing else would do.” I first heard the songs of Converse in 2009, five years after Gene Deitch, who initially recorded Converse’s music in his kitchen with a Crestwood 404 tape recorder in the 1950s, played a cluster of recordings on WNYC. The songs were compiled and then released as the 2009 album “How Sad, How Lovely.” The release ignited a fascination around Converse, whom most people had never heard of. There are few things that seduce like scarcity — the reality that you can briefly traverse a single small world built by someone who left, and then built nothing else for the public to find or access. These were the only songs Converse ever recorded: She disappeared from Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1974, and hasn’t been seen or heard from since.If Connie Converse were alive today, she would be 98. On the internet, she is mostly assumed dead. Written of and spoken of in the past tense. For some, it might be hard to separate the shock of how her story ended from the songs themselves, but there is an abundance of brilliance in the work. Converse mastered the art of sparseness, relying on her ability to create a tiny chamber in which all that could survive is a voice and the pin pricks of a guitar’s strings, moving along inch by inch. It is very possible that even if nothing about her disappearance were spectacular beyond the disappearance itself, even if she spent decades in the mountains or forest, or simply driving from place to place, the years might have accumulated, her body might have reached its limits. But I find myself uncomfortable with the assumption of finality.I realize that I am projecting. Converse was someone who, it seemed, made a path for her life, post-music, that was rooted in refusal. A refusal to be known, a refusal for access. Her musical legacy suggests that an exit — both the life it leaves behind, and the elsewhere that it hints at — can echo, be endless. An elsewhere can offer relief, or at least an idea of relief, whether that desire for an elsewhere leads one to consider death, or whether it leads one to simply exit her circumstances and seek new ones, seek a place where she is unreachable. I am drawn to Converse because she offers a model for these questions that I have weighed and carried in the past, questions that I will almost certainly be confronted with again. I live with multiple anxiety disorders and depression. I have, in the past, had to do hard math around the subject of staying: staying alive, staying present in the place that I am, the world I know best.I have found myself newly sensitive to the art of disappearance, and how it is not — or at least not always — aligned with death. Sometimes a desire to be gone is simply a desire to be gone. It may be foolish, but there’s something comforting about imagining Converse living, moving through the back end of her ninth decade, in defiance of the dissatisfying “here” that haunted her over 40 years ago.Connie Converse is a person with a life ripe for the writer’s gaze. There are incompletions, large holes that can be filled only through imagination, through wishing, through myriad projections, for better or worse. But there are, of course, some concrete facts.Converse was born Elizabeth Eaton Converse in Laconia, N.H., on Aug. 3, 1924. Her father was a minister, and her mother ran a strict Baptist household. She was the middle child, sandwiched between two brothers: Paul, nearly three years older, and Phillip, four years younger. Converse excelled academically and earned a scholarship to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. She was continuing a tradition — her mother and grandmother each graduated from Mount Holyoke — but dropped out abruptly after two years and moved to New York City. It was there, working at a printing house in the Flatiron district and living in Hell’s Kitchen and Greenwich Village, that she shed the name Elizabeth and began going by Connie. She started writing songs and playing them for friends. She also took up drinking and smoking, which reportedly enraged her religious parents. Still, Converse gave in to the joys of reinvention. Photo illustration by Itchi. Source photograph: Courtesy of the estate of Elizabeth Eaton Converse.When we speak of artists as being “ahead of their time,” we often mean that they were operating in a time, place or space that was not prepared for them, and wouldn’t be prepared for years or decades to come. A very specific ache in the Connie Converse story is that she was ahead of her time, but by only minutes. Or, she was ahead of her time but unrecognized as an innovator perhaps because of immutable factors: her gender, her personality. In New York, before the enormous success of singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan, Converse got in good with the right crowd, rolling with a crew of budding young folk musicians like Pete Seeger. In 1954, she played songs on the CBS “Morning Show.” In photos from this moment, she is sitting next to Walter Cronkite, who leans in while Converse answers a question, her arm slung over her guitar, a half-grin on her face. But then there was nothing. The TV appearance came and went with little interest from the public. The work to get her music in front of producers and managers yielded no results. She was considered too hard to sell, according to Deitch. She would mail her brother Phillip some of her recordings monthly. When her listener base didn’t expand as she’d hoped, she moved to Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1961, in part to be closer to Phillip. She worked as a secretary for two years before taking a job as the managing editor for The Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1963. She stopped writing songs altogether, seemingly content with her newfound life of relative certainty. By that time, the folk scene in New York had taken off, bursting with singer-songwriters who were aligned with the work Connie had already done.By the end of 1972, The Journal, which she had helmed for nearly a decade, left the University of Michigan, where it was housed, and was acquired by Yale. This was an inciting event for Converse, whose loved ones saw her growing increasingly depressed, bored and burned out on the routine of work, though it seemed to be the routine that sustained her. Friends pooled money to send her on a sabbatical to London, where she lived for around half a year, though it didn’t appear to have an impact on her demeanor upon her return. When she did return, her mother coaxed her into taking a trip to Alaska. Converse, who was by now drinking with noticeably more frequency, was not interested. But that trip, too, just furthered her dissatisfaction. In a quote attributed to Converse from 1974, she reportedly told her brother Phillip, “Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy; I just can’t find my place to plug into it.” Shortly after that, she placed her meager belongings into her Volkswagen Beetle, left behind a batch of goodbye letters and vanished, entirely. In the interview, Phillip says that he didn’t know where his sister was. That he wouldn’t know what to say to her even if he knew where to find her. In the 2014 documentary “We Lived Alone,” Phillip reads a letter his sister left behind. The language in the letter is much like the language in her songs, poetic and direct. Speaking of things as they are, not as she dreamed they could be: “I’ve watched the elegant, energetic people of Ann Arbor, those I know and those I don’t, going about their daily business on the streets and in the buildings, and I felt a detached admiration for their energy and elegance. If I ever was a member of this species perhaps it was a social accident that has now been canceled.” In another letter, she wrote: “Let me go, let me be if I can, let me not be if I can’t.”Beautiful and jarring and haunting as it may be, what has most remained for me, in the back of my mind at a low hum, is its opening: Let me go, let me be if I can, let me not be if I can’t. About a decade after her disappearance, Converse’s family hired a private investigator to find her, or to at least confirm whether she’d taken her own life. In the documentary, Phillip says that the investigator declined, telling the family that even if he did find Connie, it was her right to disappear. He couldn’t bring someone back who didn’t want to return to the place from which they fled.To drill down on the definition of “being alive,” I have always come to a core definition that I can understand and make peace with: being someone who participates in the ever-shifting world. But I have no control over the world, and I don’t mean only the world in the sense of a blue rock twirling along endless dark. I also mean the smaller worlds. The worlds of the country I live in, the worlds of my city, the worlds of my neighborhood. There are edges of these worlds simultaneously sharpening and softening, even now, and I do not know which edges they are, or when they’ll come for me or comfort me, depending on their intent. And so I decide that living, then, is also a contract. I’ll stay for as long as I can, and I hope it is a good, long time. I’ll stay as long as staying gives more than it takes. In the times I’ve not wanted to stay, I have been showered with familiar platitudes. I’ve been told I have “a lot of life left,” or I’ve been told to think about all the people who will miss me when I’ve gone. Once, a doctor who was tasked with keeping me alive for longer than I wanted to be at the time told me to envision my funeral. It didn’t work, because I’d buried enough people I’d loved by that point. I had begun to believe in the funeral — at least as it serves the still-living — as a portal. Something you enter with one understanding of grief, and exit with a newer, sharper understanding of grief. I began to believe the funeral as a simple moment of transience, not of any grand enough consequence to keep me grounded in an unsatisfying life. I have still not gotten good at explaining this to anyone who has always wanted to be alive, or at least people who have rarely questioned their commitment to living, but there is a border between wanting to be alive and wanting to stay here, wherever here is to you, or whatever it means. It’s a border that I have found to be flimsy, a thin sheet overrun with holes. But it is a border, nonetheless. Similar to the border between, say, sadness and suffering. All these feelings can intersect, of course. But I have found it slightly more confusing when they don’t. When I maybe want to be alive, but don’t want to be in the world as it is. When I haven’t wanted to be alive, but want to cling to the varied bits of brightness that tumble into my sadness, or my suffering, which isn’t the same as a temporary haze of sadness, or a rush of anxiety. I mean suffering that requires a constant measuring of the scales between staying and leaving. Suffering that requires a consideration of how long the scale can tilt toward leaving before it becomes the only viable option. There are a lot of things in any life that aren’t left up to the people doing the living. If there is anything for a suffering person (or any person) to self-determine, it should be how they live, or if they choose to live at all.There are few thoughtful bits of advice for those who drift between those borders, or those who have a foot on each side simultaneously. And so, in a bad week, I turn my phone off, and then on again. I play piano in a quiet room. I look at maps. I admit, of course, that there are many intersections of Converse’s story that allow for me to map myself onto both her apparent frustrations and dissatisfactions. This is, I’m sure, why I’m here again. Why I have been here before, picking apart her old tunes and searching tirelessly for more and hoping that she is somewhere, alive, and away from anywhere that reminds her of any ache she has carried. I feel some compulsion to defend against the dominant idea that is attached to her songs: that they are terribly, poignantly sad. I bristle at this, not only because I know sadness to be a shorthand description for deep, vibrantly aware feeling. What Converse seemed to aspire to was a removal from the world on her own terms. From what is known about the time leading up to her disappearance, Converse was seeking newness. Her close friends pooled money to send her on a six-month trip to England in 1973, and she returned home, her mood unchanged. Not long before her disappearance, her mother pushed her into the Alaska trip, which worsened her discomfort and depression. These are the gestures people make when they love us, when they see us suffering. The idea is about what can be done to fix a person gripped by a sometimes unexplainable condition. Someone who is folding further into herself, and becoming seemingly unreachable. There is something I understand about the letter Converse left behind. She wanted to be let go, perhaps not only for the sake of not feeling like a burden on loved ones, but also to figure out, on her own, if the world was worth living in.I am sure that no small part of me takes some offense to Converse being referred to in the past tense is because it rushes to a conclusion about her motivations and fate — neither of which we have access to — and assumes that what seemed to be her relentless dissatisfaction was a form of selfishness. In the words she left behind, it seems as if she was most eager to be gone, away from a world that dissatisfied her, that had failed her after a half century of living. But to live in a world that often can’t make sense of someone self-determining their own exits, death is the easiest presumption to make. Photo illustration by Itchi. Source photograph: Courtesy of the estate of Elizabeth Eaton Converse.What I hear fighting its way to the surface in Converse’s songs is a type of questioning discontent, opening up to a sky of insatiable desire. In her songs, her voice doesn’t sound weighed down by grief, or weariness. It doesn’t sound as if it is nested in some web of dilemmas from which it can’t untangle itself. It tends to leap at the end of each line she sings. It’s a playful voice, a curious and constantly seeking voice. It splashes in the gaps of silence left by the space in her sparse guitar playing. It is almost a child’s voice — which, yes, can sometimes be sad — but is often trying to make sense of the otherwise unexplainable world that is newly coming into focus. I hear longing, and something that seems like hope.What stands out most is a sort of eager dreaming. Exuberant wishes that aren’t as sad as they appear on the tracks themselves, but maybe became sad for her as the years accumulated and she continued to seek them. What Converse seemed to know in her songs was that there was somewhere better, or a little more satisfying. And then, when she was done recording, she spilled back into a world where all of that satisfaction became increasingly out of reach. I am aware, more often now than I used to be, that I am up against time, same as anyone else. I can work to be happy where I am, and I do. I can work for my satisfaction with what I have at my disposal, which, to be clear, is a life full of privileges and sometimes pleasures, even if it is difficult to make that clear to myself some days. But in my wishing, my satisfaction is endless. In my dreams, I want to live forever. To come back to earth, swept into the many jagged realities of the present, is small damage. It accumulates, though in my case, that accumulation is met with other moments that make survival worthwhile: A pink flower that didn’t grow in my front yard last year pokes out of a brown patch. My dog, somehow, still excited to see me when I walk through the door. It didn’t rain when I wanted to go shoot ball and I made a few shots in a row. But even those pleasures work against a clock. Everything is a balance. When I think back to “We Lived Alone” and what I love about that song, I am grateful for its celebration of building the world you want amid life’s wreckage. It’s a song about understanding that what some people might see merely as absence is not only that. Like most of Converse’s songs, it is an ode to the delights of small pleasures, the things worth staying for.It might be hard for some listeners to hear this aspect of her music. I find myself uncomfortable with how people — not just in the case of Connie Converse, but broadly — tend to flatten the idea of what sadness is, or looks like, without considering its varied face. The music of Connie Converse teems with longing, desire and relentless dreaming. We are to believe that the outcome of her life is sad; therefore, she and her music have retroactively been branded as sad. But Converse reminds us that sadness is a complex color, a result of other, primary colors intersecting over time. I’m thankful for Converse’s vanishing act, even if I’ll never know its destination. She wrote and sang of all the places she hoped to go, and I listen to her songs now and hope that she got to where she wanted, even if it wasn’t where the people who loved her wished that she would be. If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to Speaking of Suicide for a list of additional resources.Hanif Abdurraqib is a contributing writer for the magazine as well as a poet, an essayist and a cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. More

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      Dan Smith Might Teach You Guitar

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      Teaching is a calling for New York’s king of the marketing flier, whose students include the former governor David Paterson. But he won’t take just anyone.For three decades, Dan Smith has been making a solemn promise to New Yorkers. He has posted his flier — “Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar” — thousands of times in the city’s bodegas, coffee shops, pizza parlors, delis and laundromats. Parodied by Jon Stewart and the guitar god John Mayer, Mr. Smith has reached local legend status alongside the likes of Cellino & Barnes, Dr. Zizmor and Keano.There have been at least 60 versions of the sign, and most have included a photo of a seemingly ageless, sinewy and smiley Mr. Smith posing with his instrument. But spotting one in the urban wild may soon become a rarity, because New York’s go-to guitar teacher is doing less of his vintage style of promotion and embracing a more 2022 approach.Three months ago, Mr. Smith, 51, started a YouTube channel, where he has posted short instructional videos to help aspiring guitarists navigate “Should I Stay or Should I Go” (by the Clash), “I’ll Be Your Man” (the Black Keys) and more songs. Others have had success as YouTube guitar instructors: “Marty Music” has 3.3 million followers, and “Andy Guitar” has 2.2 million. Mr. Smith, a newcomer to the world of online tutorials, had 144 followers as of this week.While reporting this story, I took my old guitar from its case, where a family of cockroaches had taken up residence a few months before, and tried to play along with a couple of his videos, only to get frustrated. I quickly gave up, as I had many times before when trying to learn instruments.My can’t-do attitude makes me exactly the kind of person Dan Smith does not want to teach. In fact, when I asked him if he would give me lessons, he said no. In other words, Dan Smith will not teach me guitar. At one point, he even threatened to cancel an interview.After we had re-established the traditional journalist-subject relationship, I asked him why he had soured on me. “You didn’t really want to learn how to play guitar,” he said.Correct.“I understand why I’m perceived as just an amazing promoter,” he said. “Of course, that’s how people perceive me, because, in many ways, that’s all they’ve known of me so far.”To crack Dan Smith the man, I would need to look past Dan Smith the marketer.Mr. Smith, with his Gibson Hummingbird guitar, at his teaching studio in Manhattan.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesMr. Smith, who lives in Manhattan with his wife, Melissa, a photographer, charges $150 for a one-hour private session. He also offers group workshops and lessons in songwriting and solo performance. He said he has supported himself by teaching guitar since the mid-1990s.He started giving lessons at age 16 in his hometown, Newton, Mass. A few years later, after doing some experimental theater, busking outside Le Centre Pompidou in Paris and putting in some time at New York University, he decided to pursue a career in music and theater. He started teaching again to make money, and it soon became a calling.“I’m trying to help people connect to themselves,” he said.He has stipulations about whom he’ll teach and how, pedagogical rules he said he had come up with after thousands of lessons.Students must see him at least one hour a week, as a sign of their commitment. And they should not go to him with the idea that his lessons are all about learning to pick and strum or play solos like a guitar hero.“Music is a lot more than just putting your fingers on the strings,” he said. “It’s telling a story, it’s creating a mood, it’s evoking an emotion.”Mr. Smith does not teach his friends. “You need some distance,” he said. “You need some objectivity.”He does not take on students under 21. “Everybody pays as they go,” he said, “because I want everybody to think about it every time they have a guitar lesson: ‘I’m paying for this. What am I bringing to the table?’ The person who’s doing it needs to pay for it, because that’s what makes it real for them.”There are yet more stipulations: Mr. Smith does not offer gift certificates; he does not teach people who have signed up for lessons at someone else’s behest, like singers or actors whose managers want them to learn guitar; and he does not take notes for his students or permit them to take notes.“It doesn’t work,” he said. “I’ve tested everything that I know for a fact. That’s another thing that separates me from other teachers: I’ve done the research.”Mr. Smith plays his acoustic guitar in Central Park.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesFor those who meet the criteria, the experience can be transformative.“It’s not just about learning an instrument but expanding my feelings about myself, about what I’m about,” said David A. Paterson, the former governor of New York, who has been studying with Mr. Smith since 2020.Mr. Paterson, who takes a two-hour lesson each week, said that he and Mr. Smith frequently spend half a session just talking. “I think that’s his meditation technique,” he said. “That’s how he gets you in the mood to play.”Mr. Paterson, who is legally blind, added that he appreciated his teacher’s patience and an approach that goes beyond technique. “He’s a psychologist,” he said. “I’ve always been someone who thinks that, to make up the difference, that I have to hurry.”“When you do a song,” Mr. Paterson continued, “it’s almost like you’re shoveling snow: You just drive through. You have a lot of energy and you work hard, but it’s not an intellectual pursuit; it’s getting the feel of things. The great musicians call it ‘Make room for Jesus.’ In other words, you play — and then you just stop. That little space is as much a part as the music. I’m still struggling with just stopping.”Mr. Smith said that the time spent in conversation serves a purpose: “If a student arrives and they are tense or distracted — everybody needs time to, in my opinion, clear the runway for themselves before they can really make music.”In 2020, six months into his studies with Mr. Smith, Mr. Paterson and his teacher took the stage of Bar Nine in Manhattan, where they performed “Stand By Me” by Ben E. King and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” by Marvin Gaye.The “Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar” flier has had at least 60 incarnations over the last three decades.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesMr. Smith sometimes plays solo at Paddy Reilly’s Music Bar and other Manhattan clubs. His original songs include the city-centric “Sixth Avenue” and “New York Forever.” During our time together, he mentioned that he was about to perform in front of a large audience at an outdoor show in Battery Park. In the days leading up to the gig, he texted me to make sure I would be there. Mr. Smith’s wife echoed the gravity of the moment, telling me how excited they were for the occasion.It was billed as “a talent show” featuring the city’s “most notable and iconic characters.” The lineup was put together by Nicholas Heller, a filmmaker and social media personality known as New York Nico. It was timed to the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Mr. Heller’s documentary film short, “Out of Order.”“There’s a BuzzFeed list of people who are super-famous in New York, and Dan Smith is on it,” Mr. Heller said. “To me, he’s more important than a worldwide celebrity.”With his trusty Gibson Hummingbird guitar, Mr. Smith took the stage at dusk. He looked serious, earnest. It was clear that, unlike some others on the bill, he did not view his performance as a stunt, but as a chance to show New York what he is made of.He started playing “New York Forever,” which he had written in the early part of the pandemic as a tribute to the city’s resilience. In the middle of the song, another New York character appeared onstage, on stilts. It was the one-name street performer Bobby, who regularly walks the city towering over crowds.As Bobby loomed over the stage, Mr. Smith seemed unfazed. He has, after all, had decades of practice in teaching others about what it means to take your time and seize the moment. And when his song was over, the crowd cheered not for the man from the flier but for the performer who was trying to realize a New York dream like the rest of us. More