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      in Television

      For Times Reporters Appearing on TV, Extra Prep Time Helps

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      Appearing on TV news shows lets Times reporters take their work to a wider audience. But the opportunities must be handled with care.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.“What do you think?”The host looks to you. Hundreds of thousands — even millions — of television viewers await your answer. What do you say?Annie Karni, a White House correspondent for The New York Times who is a regular guest on MSNBC, said she has been asked some version of that question often during her TV news show appearances over the past few years.“You’re there to talk about your reporting, even if the host is pushing you to offer an opinion,” she said.Ms. Karni is one of approximately 20 Times reporters who make regular appearances on television networks like CNN, CBS and MSNBC. Although most appearances are unpaid unless a journalist has signed a contract with a network, Ms. Karni and others see substantial pluses in the appearances.“Sources in Washington watch, and maybe someone starts to recognize you more and is more likely to return your call on your next story,” she said.“It’s also another way to bring the work of The Times to people watching a program who might otherwise not have seen it,” said Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent for The Times and a CNN contributor.Reporters are generally asked to appear on a show a few hours in advance, Ms. Karni said. They are given topics of discussion, along with any relevant articles to read, though producers do not supply precise questions.Before an appearance, Ms. Karni said she sometimes makes extra calls to her sources to get additional context.Katie Benner, who covers the Justice Department for The Times and recently signed on as a contributor at MSNBC, said she makes an extra effort to consider how to contextualize any topic she discusses for an audience that may be unfamiliar with it.“If there’s a major shooting and the Justice Department has deemed it a possible hate crime, the public should probably know what constitutes a hate crime,” she said. “Are they on the rise? Are we seeing a trend? If someone else addresses that, great. If not, I want to make sure it’s said.”Ms. Karni said the best way for reporters to learn how to present their work for a television audience is simply to do it repeatedly, but first-time guests aren’t completely on their own. The Times’s communications department offers media training for its reporters, which can include mock interviews. One thing that Ms. Karni said surprised her when she began appearing on TV was the streamlining and repetition necessary when summarizing reporting.“You want to come up with one or two things you want the audience to know and really emphasize those,” she said. “Even if it’s not the exact answer to the question you’re asked, it’s better than trying to think on your feet.”Even though a reporter may be on camera for only five minutes, the time required for TV appearances is hardly brief, Ms. Karni said. In addition to getting to and from the studio (during normal times, that is), reporters must catch up on all the news of the day, not just their specific stories. That can be the most difficult part, Ms. Karni said: the ability to pivot and to be prepared to speak on any pressing topic after a 15-minute cram session on the car ride over.But journalists have been appearing remotely since March 2020, which enables them to commit more like 10 minutes of their time rather than two hours. And reporters can make late-night appearances on shows like “Nightline” without worrying about catching a late car ride home.“It’s been a totally new world since the pandemic,” Ms. Karni said. “I bought a ring light for my bedroom, do my own makeup, and the whole thing is much quicker.”Ms. Benner agreed but said she missed one big perk: the hair and makeup team.“I normally don’t really wear any makeup, but they make you look amazing,” she said. “They’re also the funniest people and always make me laugh.”Mr. Kanno-Youngs, however, has become a little self-conscious about dialing in from his apartment. His dog stares at him from the couch, just waiting to bark; people tramp by in the hallway outside his door; and he ends up eyeing artwork in his background, wondering if it’s slanted.“That makes me nervous,” he said. “It’s like: ‘Geez, is this painting crooked in my background? Is Room Rater going to completely expose me because I didn’t wipe the kitchen counter?’”Aesthetics aside, Ms. Benner pointed out one critical rule to her appearances. “If, because of your schedule, you have to choose between reporting and being on TV, you should always choose reporting,” she said.But while Times journalists can spend months — or even years — reporting a single story, an appearance on a news show is, by comparison, over in a heartbeat.“There’s always a moment right after the host finishes and they go to the next guest,” Ms. Karni said. “You’re like, ‘Oh, wait, I have one more thing I want to say — come back!’” More

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      in Music

      How a Times Team Captured the Sound of a Harlem Gospel Choir

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      What does a socially distant gospel choir sound like? Here’s how Times journalists and technologists put users inside the sanctuary of a church in Harlem.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.In March 2020, one of the earliest coronavirus superspreader events in the United States occurred when a church choir in Washington State met for a rehearsal. Of the 61 singers who attended, 53 developed symptoms of Covid-19. Soon after, congregations around the country held what would be their last in-house services of the year.Tariro Mzezewa, a New York Times reporter, talked to churches recently to learn how they had adapted. “My favorite part of going to church as a kid was the music and the sense of community,” she said. “I wanted to know how the pandemic changed that.”Some churches had a soloist sing from home during live-streamed services. Others created small pods of a few singers that performed from an empty sanctuary. Some had choir members spread out in the pews or the balcony.Churches are built for their acoustics, so when Tariro told our Narrative Projects team about these socially distant choirs, we wondered: What does that sound like? Three months later, we’ve created a special feature to give you a feel for that sensory experience.As a visual editor at the Times, I work on innovative journalism, joining with colleagues to leverage new technologies like augmented reality, photogrammetry, 3-D modelingand visualization and volumetric video (moving 3-D images of real people, like a hologram). One of the best parts of my job is the thrill I get from trying new things.For the past year, we have been experimenting with a technology called environmental photogrammetry, with which we can build photorealistic 3-D models of a room or a neighborhood.We wanted to transport our readers into a church to hear the new sound of these choirs. With the help of Bethel Gospel Assembly in Harlem, we built a 3-D model of its sanctuary and embedded 3-D audio in it, something we’ve never done before for the Times website.Times journalists and technologists spent two days at the church in April. They used lasers and sensors to measure the size of the room and the distance between all the objects in it. They also took more than 7,000 photographs, many of them using a drone inside the sanctuary (with the church’s blessing) to capture images of the upper reaches of the balcony and ceiling. That data was combined using photogrammetry software to produce the 3-D model in this interactive article.With 31 microphones, two mixing boards and a sea of cables, our team recorded a live rehearsal with a small group of singers, a band and Bethel’s leader, Bishop Carlton T. Brown. Using binaural audio, which replicates the acoustics of the human ear, we created a 3-D audio experience meant to mimic what it sounds like in that room.“You really get a sense of the energy and how important the live part of making music is,” said Jon Cohrs, a technical producer on The Times’s research and development team and an audio engineer. In the two days he spent at Bethel, Jon witnessed the camaraderie and connection among choir members. “It’s really special, and you can see how impactful it is for everybody involved.”The music you hear in the opening of the interactive feature is captured from two microphones in the back of the church, as if you were sitting in the pews hearing the voices reverberate through the cavernous space. You can move through the space in the 3-D experience, and the sound changes as you get closer to the stage and fly over the instruments.Working on this project over the past few months, I’ve spent many minutes a day listening to the ethereal music we recorded, often with my eyes closed, my mind floating somewhere between my home office in Brooklyn and that sanctuary in Harlem.Our reporting affirmed why so many churches went to great lengths to bring music to their communities during times of hardship. Again and again, pastors, congregants and choir members told us that church without music was never an option. Music is healing, they said, and it brings people together in a shared spiritual and cultural experience, even when we have to be physically apart.As part of her research, Tariro attended an Easter Sunday service at Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem, which is now allowing a small number of parishioners to attend in person. “There was a real sense of people sighing in relief, like, ‘We made it,’” she said. “A year ago they didn’t know if they’d make it.” More

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      in Music

      Dominic Fike Video Shows Paul McCartney and New York Times

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      Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.At a New York Times printing plant in College Point, Queens, the soundtrack is usually the rapid thwap, thwap, thwap of blank paper turning into the next edition. But one night in February, thanks to a famous Beatle and the singer Dominic Fike, things got a little more musical.“Have you,” Mr. Fike sings in a music video shot at the plant, “read the paper?” The song is a cover of Paul McCartney’s “The Kiss of Venus,” and Mr. Fike is shown at the plant taking in the 14 miles of conveyor belts ferrying copies of The Times all around him.With the presses rolling and assembled copies sailing overhead, he glances at the dizzying activity and sings, in verses he added to the track, about people’s differences on issues and the media. “What’s your take on it?” he asks.The 78-year-old former Beatle himself makes a cameo at the end of the video, seated on a bench outside London. He whistles the tune as the camera zooms in on the copy of The New York Times International issue he is perusing. Mr. McCartney slowly lowers the paper to reveal wide eyes and a shock of gray hair. Then he raises his eyebrows and grins.“Paul whistled that perfectly the first time,” Jack Begert, who directed the video, said. “He’s elite.”Mr. Begert added that the image of Mr. McCartney enthusiastically poring over a copy of the paper underscores that he, ultimately, is the source of the music. “Even though Dom reimagined that song, at the end of the day, it’s a Paul McCartney song,” Mr. Begert said.Last year, Mr. McCartney wrote and recorded “The Kiss of Venus,” a smooth acoustic ballad, for his recent solo album “McCartney III.” Mr. Fike’s reimagined version — an R&B pop earworm — is part of the album “McCartney III Imagined,” out Friday, which features A-listers covering “McCartney III” tracks.So how did The New York Times score a starring role in Mr. Fike’s video?Mr. Begert said that he considered “The Kiss of Venus” a reflection of the stop-and-go energy of modern life — and that when the time came to conceptualize a video, his first thought was New York. “It’s still and beautiful, but also crazy,” he said.The video’s creative director, Reed Bennett, suggested the Times printing plant. “I was like, ‘That’s perfect,’” Mr. Begert said. “I wanted to link back to the theme of one person feeling small but also like they have a really important place in the universe.”The cavernous, 550,000-square-foot plant — about the size of 11 and a half football fields — prints copies of The Times each night, along with copies of Newsday and USA Today.At College Point in Queens, the presses are several stories tall. Clayborne BujorianThe presses are generally quiet during the day, but at night, the seven cerulean blue behemoths — each several stories tall — roar to life. “It gets your adrenaline pumping,” Nick D’Andrea, the vice president of production at the College Point plant, said. “You get that excitement as they start up to get the paper out.”The late edition of the paper goes to press at about 10:15 p.m., so a video crew of eight showed up a little before then on a Friday night in February to scout potential shots, Mr. Begert said. After that, the pressure was on: They had a few hours — max — until the presses shut down for the night.“We just knew we had to move as quickly as possible to get all the different shots we wanted,” Sam Canter, the executive producer of the video, said.Once they began shooting, Mr. Fike marveled at the organized chaos happening around him.“I don’t know what I expected, but it was surreal,” he said in an interview. “It felt like the North Pole, like Santa’s elf factory on the evening of Christmas.”Although Dominic Fike isn’t a frequent consumer of the news, he was struck by the machinery required to print it. Clayborne BujorianThis isn’t the plant’s first on-screen appearance. It got around two minutes of time in a scene in “The Bourne Legacy” — which took three days to shoot — and has been featured in episodes of “30 Rock,” “Elementary” and a couple of commercials.Mr. D’Andrea, who has worked at Times production facilities for 46 years, said visitors were often taken aback by the plant’s team of laser-driven robots, which glide around replacing rolls of paper on the presses.“People are always like, ‘I didn’t know you could do that,’” he said.But Mr. Fike had the opposite reaction. “I was surprised by all the original machinery and how old it was,” he said. “Everything that ever happened was printed there, recorded and written down.” Maybe not quite everything, but still plenty of history. Mr. Fike said he was particularly taken with a page (printed at a different plant) showing the 1969 moon landing.Although Mr. Fike is not an avid news consumer, the experience of seeing the presses and sensing some of the history there might have had an influence on him. “I’m not a news guy. But I love the NYT and I’m going to start reading the news,” the 25-year-old singer said. “That’s what people do when they get older.”Well, perhaps, but reading the news can help keep you young, too. Just ask a 78-year-old whistler. More

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      in Movies

      40 Acres and a Movie

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      Disney owns a piece of every living person’s childhood. Now it owns Marvel Studios, too. The co-hosts Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris look at depictions of racist tropes and stereotypes in Disney’s ever-expanding catalog. The company has made recent attempts to atone for its past. But can it move forward without repeating the same mistakes?On Today’s EpisodeThe Marvel Cinematic UniverseLetitia Wright as Shuri in “Black Panther” (2018).Disney/Marvel Studios, via Associated PressTeyonah Parris portrayed Monica Rambeau in the 2021 Disney+ series “WandaVision.”Marvel Studios/Disney PlusEarlier this year — during “season three of the pandemic” — Jenna binged the M.C.U., the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While she appreciated the moral messaging of the movies, which are centered on a fight against evil forces, she was appalled by the lack of nonwhite characters. “You mean to tell me they’ve been making these movies for over a decade — 12 years — and you have still not managed to decenter the whiteness of this universe?” she exclaimed.Jenna and Wesley talked about these offerings from the Marvel universe: “Avengers: Endgame” (2019), “WandaVision” (2021) and “The Eternals” (2021).The Disney of Your Childhood and NowWesley and Jenna discussed how rewatching classic Disney movies with adult eyes has been unsettling, from the colonial undertones in “The Little Mermaid” (1989) to the Orientalist tropes peddled in “Lady and the Tramp” (1955).Disney, however, has tried to atone for its history. On the Disney+ streaming service, some older movies, such as “Dumbo” (1941) and “The Aristocats” (1970), contain warning labels about “negative depictions” and “mistreatment of people or cultures.” And one musical, “Song of the South” (1946), does not appear on the platform at all.Still, the labeling effort isn’t comprehensive and seems to address only movies with instances of blatant racism, Jenna noted. “It’s worth interrogating how all of these movies reinforce the ideas that are so harmful in the formation of this country,” she added.In recent years, Disney has started to make movies that feature more diverse casts and story lines, such as “Coco” (2017), “Moana” (2016) and “Soul” (2020). They’ve also remade classics, including the live-action “Mulan” (2020) and a super-realistic version of “The Lion King” (2019).“Moana” (2016) is about a Polynesian girl who embarks on a journey to save her island from destruction.DisneyBlack FuturesJenna mentioned the essay, “Fandom, Racism, and the Myth of Diversity in the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” which unpacks how Black and Asian stereotypes are employed in Marvel comics.She also pointed to Alisha Wormsley’s art project “There are Black People in the Future,” which began as “a response to the absence of nonwhite faces in science-fiction films and TV.”Alisha’s project gets at the importance of thriving representation in popular culture. “What is on our screens matters so much,” Jenna said, and “has a huge impact on how we see ourselves.” She added: “We have to be able to imagine ourselves whole, happy and healthy in the future for that to be possible today.”Hosted by: Jenna Wortham and Wesley MorrisProduced by: Elyssa DudleyEdited by: Sara Sarasohn and Sasha WeissEngineered by: Corey SchreppelExecutive Producer, Shows: Wendy DorrExecutive Editor, Newsroom Audio: Lisa TobinAssistant Managing Editor: Sam DolnickSpecial thanks: Nora Keller, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani and Desiree IbekweWesley Morris is a critic at large. He was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his criticism while at The Boston Globe. He has also worked at Grantland, The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Examiner. @wesley_morrisJenna Wortham is a staff writer for The Times Magazine and co-editor of the book “Black Futures” with Kimberly Drew. @jennydeluxe More

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      in Theater

      A Theater Photographer Senses a Broadway Bloom

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      For Sara Krulwich, who has shot productions for The New York Times for more than two decades, a series of recent assignments hinted at an industry revival.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.On the first evening in April, Sara Krulwich, a New York Times photographer, visited the Kraine Theater in the East Village, where Mike Daisey, an actor and monologuist, was rehearsing a show for which the seating capacity would be limited to 22. The restriction, Mr. Daisey said, reminded him of his earliest days as a performer, when he was thrilled if even a handful of people were in the audience.For about 20 minutes, Ms. Krulwich photographed Mr. Daisey, adjusting her shutter, she later said, to ensure that “the theater lights and my camera were going to talk to each other in a kindly way.”The next day, Ms. Krulwich photographed part of a performance at the Daryl Roth Theater at Union Square. And on Saturday, she shot a 36-minute performance at the historic St. James Theater in Midtown. Those assignments added up to her busiest stretch of theater work in more than a year.Theatrical productions, dormant since last spring, are resuming in New York City, the first tentative steps toward what actors, directors and others hope will be a strong comeback by the fall. And many in the theater world may see Ms. Krulwich’s presence as a reassuring sign.For more than two decades, she has been a Broadway and Off Broadway fixture, photographing about 100 shows a year, a body of work that led to her receiving a Tony Honor in 2018.After a yearlong absence, Ms. Krulwich began photographing performances and rehearsals, feeling her way back into familiar tasks and reflecting on early traces of a theatrical revival, which, she said, mirrored the stirrings of spring.“The blooms are beginning,” she said by phone. “Even if we’re not seeing the full flowering just yet.”Ms. Krulwich joined The Times as a staff photographer in 1979, working for the Metro, National and Sports desks before becoming the paper’s first culture photographer in 1994.At that time, she said, it was common for news organizations to run theater photographs handed out by producers that tended to present reality in the light most favorable to them. Ms. Krulwich, however, wanted to cover theater with the same journalistic approach that the paper employed while reporting on other events.Ms. Krulwich said that her approach was direct, telling producers that theater was looked upon as news inside The Times and should be documented that way. Eventually, she obtained access to almost every production in the city.Over the years, Ms. Krulwich has captured moments that have become a part of theater lore. She photographed developmental work on the Broadway production of Tony Kushner’s masterwork, “Angels in America.” In 1996, she took what is believed to be the last picture of Jonathan Larson, the writer and composer of “Rent,” hours before his death the night before the show’s first Off Broadway preview.Her Tony, in 2018, made her the first journalist recognized for excellence in the theater, an honor given to people, organizations and institutions that have contributed to the industry but are not eligible to win in other Tony categories.Returning to work inside venues she’s accustomed to, Ms. Krulwich said she took delight in seeing people she has known for many years and looked forward to a time when everyone connected to productions will, once again, be able to make a living.“It’s a small group of people,” she said. “Almost an extended family.”The day after photographing Mr. Daisey, Ms. Krulwich wore an N-95 mask and climbed a ladder at the Daryl Roth while shooting about 20 minutes of a performance of “Blindness,” an audio adaptation of the dystopian novel of the same name by the Portuguese writer José Saramago.And then, the following day, at the St. James, she photographed the dancer Savion Glover and the actor Nathan Lane at the 36-minute event they performed in front of a masked audience of 150.It was, noted Michael Paulson, a Times theater reporter, the first time in 387 days that there was activity inside a Broadway house.Ms. Krulwich said the performance was not the same as one that would have taken place before the coronavirus pandemic, but she added that she felt at home back inside the St. James and appreciated the hints of what is to come.“I must say, it felt familiar to me,” she said. “It’s just a little bit. It’s a tiptoe. It’s the doors opening a crack.” More

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      in Theater

      Lessons From Oz: How Australian Theater Gives Broadway Hope

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLessons From Oz: How Australian Theater Gives Broadway HopeCheck in with “Frozen,” “Come From Away,” “Moulin Rouge!” and “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” in Offstage, our digital series about theater during the pandemic.“Frozen” fans entering the Capitol Theater in Sydney. Credit…Matthew Abbott for The New York TimesMarch 8, 2021Updated 4:29 p.m. ETTheater is up and running … in Australia.“Frozen” is onstage in Sydney, and “Come From Away” and “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” are running in Melbourne. And there’s more to come: “Hamilton” opens later this month in Sydney, and “Moulin Rouge! The Musical” is gearing up for an August bow in Melbourne.How are they managing to perform when most of the theater world is dark? And what, if anything, do the Australian productions portend for a resumption of theater in New York, London, and everywhere else?That’s the subject of the next episode of Offstage, a New York Times digital series about theater during the pandemic. It airs at 7 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, April 29 (that’s 9 a.m. on Friday, April 30 in Sydney), and is free to Times subscribers.We’ll be talking with actors about what it’s like to perform at this time, and with producers about challenges faced and lessons learned. Plus, the casts of “Frozen” and “Come From Away” will sing.We’d love for you to join us. You can RSVP here.And if you missed the earlier episodes of Offstage, or just want to see them again, they’re all archived here.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Music

      Peter G. Davis, Music Critic of Wide Knowledge and Wit, Dies at 84

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPeter G. Davis, Music Critic of Wide Knowledge and Wit, Dies at 84He wrote with passion and bite about classical music, and especially opera, over a 50-year career at The Times and New York magazine.Peter G. Davis in 1990 on a visit to Sissinghurst Castle Garden in England. As a student years earlier he toured  Europe’s summer music festivals.Credit…Scott ParrisFeb. 19, 2021, 2:43 p.m. ETPeter G. Davis, who for over 30 years held sway as one of America’s leading classical music critics with crisp, witty prose and an encyclopedic memory of countless performances and performers, died on Feb. 13. He was 84.His death was confirmed by his husband, Scott Parris.First as a critic at The New York Times and later at New York magazine, Mr. Davis wrote precise, sharply opinionated reviews of all forms of classical music, though his great love was opera and the voice, an attachment he developed in his early teens.He presided over the field during boon years in New York in the 1960s and ’70s, when performances were plentiful and tickets relatively cheap, and when the ups and downs of a performer’s career provided fodder for cocktail parties and after-concert dinners, not to mention the notebooks of writers like Mr. Davis, who often delivered five or more reviews a week.He wrote those reviews with a knowing, deadpan, at times world-weary tone. During a 1976 concert by the Russian violinist Vladimir Spivakov, an activist protesting the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union threw a paint bomb at the stage, splattering Mr. Spivakov and his accompanist. Mr. Davis wrote, “Terrorists must be extremely insensitive to music, for tossing paint at a violinist playing Bach’s ‘Chaconne’ is simply poor timing.”He maintained faith in the traditions of classical music not for the sake of perpetuating the past but for their intrinsic power, and he looked askance at those who tried to update them just to be trendy.In a 1977 review of the Bronx Opera’s staging of “Fra Diavolo,” by the 19th-century French composer Daniel Francois Auber, he decried what he saw as a “refusal to believe in the piece by treating it as an embarrassment, a work that needs a maximum of directorial gimmicks if the audience is to remain interested.”He could be equally dismissive of new music and composers who he thought were overhyped. The minimalist composer Philip Glass and Beverly Sills (early on “a dependable, hard-working but not especially remarkable soprano” who became a star, he felt, only after her talents had peaked) were regular targets.In a review of a performance of Mr. Glass’s work at Carnegie Hall in 2002, he wrote, “It was pretty much business as usual: the same simple-minded syncopations and jigging ostinatos, the same inane little tunes on their way to nowhere, the same clumsily managed orchestral climaxes.”Which is not to say that Mr. Davis was a reactionary — he championed young composers and upstart regional opera companies. His great strength as a critic was his pragmatism, his commitment to assess the performance in front of him on its own terms while casting a skeptical eye at gimmickry.“He was a connoisseur of vocal music of unimpeachable authority,” said Justin Davidson, a former classical music critic at Newsday who now writes about classical music and architecture for New York magazine. “He had a sense that the things he cared about mattered, that they were not niche, not just entertainment, but that they cut to the heart of what American culture was.”Peter Graffam Davis was born on March 3, 1936, in Concord, Mass., outside Boston, and grew up in nearby Lincoln. His father, E. Russell Davis, was a vice president at the Bank of Boston. His mother, Susan (Graffam) Davis, was a homemaker.Mr. Parris, whom he married in 2009, is his only immediate survivor.Mr. Davis fell in love with opera as a teenager, building a record collection at home and attending performances in Boston. During the months before his junior year at Harvard, he took a tour of Europe’s summer music festivals — Strauss in Munich, Mozart in Salzburg, Wagner in Bayreuth.He encountered European opera at a hinge point. It was still defined by longstanding traditions and had yet to fully emerge from the destruction of World War II, but poking out of the wreckage was a new generation of performers: the French soprano Régine Crespin, the Austrian soprano Leonie Rysanek, the Italian tenors Franco Corelli and Giuseppe di Stefano. Mr. Davis got to see them up close.Mr. Davis’s 1997 book is exhaustive, exhilarating and often withering history of opera in America.He graduated from Harvard in 1958 with a bachelor’s degree in music. After spending a year at a conservatory in Stuttgart, Germany, he moved to New York to complete a master’s degree in composition at Columbia University.Mr. Davis wrote a number of musical works of his own in the early 1960s, including an opera, “Zoe,” and a pair of Gilbert and Sullivan-esque operettas. But he decided that his future lay not in writing music but in writing about it. He became the classical music editor for both High Fidelity and Musical America magazines, as well as the New York music correspondent for The Times of London.He began writing freelance articles for The New York Times in 1967, and in 1974 was hired as the Sunday music editor, a job that allowed him to supplement his near-daily output of reviews — whether of recordings, concerts or innumerable debut recitals — with articles he commissioned from other writers. “He had a superb memory,” said Alex Ross, the classical music critic for The New Yorker. “Anything you threw at him, he was able to speak about precisely and intelligently.”Mr. Davis moved to New York magazine in 1981. There he could pick and choose his reviews as well as occasionally stand back to survey the classical music landscape.Increasingly, he didn’t like what he saw.As early as 1980, Mr. Davis was lamenting the future of opera singing, blaming an emphasis on “pleasing appearance and facile adaptability” over talent and hard work and a star system that pushed promising but immature vocalists past their physical limits.The diminished position of classical music in American culture that he documented did not spare critics, and in 2007 New York magazine let him go. He went back to freelancing for The Times and wrote regularly for Opera News and Musical America.For all his thousands of reviews, Mr. Davis seemed most proud of his book “The American Opera Singer” (1997), an exhaustive, exhilarating and often withering history in which he praised the versatility of contemporary American performers while taking many of them to task for being superficial workhorses.“I can’t think of a music critic who cares more deeply about the state of opera in America,” the critic Terry Teachout wrote in his review of the book for The Times. “Anyone who wants to know what is wrong with American singing will find the answers here.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More