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      A Harvard Professor Prepares to Teach a New Subject: Taylor Swift

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      Swift-inspired classes are sweeping colleges across the country.The syllabus is much like what one might expect from an undergraduate English course, with texts by William Wordsworth, Willa Cather and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But there is one name on the list that might surprise budding scholars.Taylor Swift.In the spring semester, Stephanie Burt, an English professor at Harvard University, will teach a new class, “Taylor Swift and Her World.” Nearly 300 students have enrolled.The class is part of a wave at academic institutions around the country, including New York University and the University of Texas at Austin. Stanford has invoked the Swift song “All Too Well (Ten Minute Version)” with a course planned for next year titled “All Too Well (Ten Week Version),” and Arizona State University offered a psychology class on Ms. Swift’s work.Next year, the University of California, Berkeley plans to offer “Artistry and Entrepreneurship: Taylor’s Version,” and the University of Florida will school undergraduates in Ms. Swift’s storytelling. The Florida course’s description begins with the words “ … Ready for it?” — an allusion to the song from the album “Reputation.”In a conversation with The New York Times, Professor Burt, 52, discussed her love of Ms. Swift’s music and what exactly her students will be studying. This interview has been edited and condensed.Let’s start with the big question. Are you a Swiftie?Ten or 12 years ago, I noticed that of all of the songs that one would hear in, you know, drugstores and airports and bus stations and public places, there was one that was better than all the other songs. I wanted to know who wrote it. It was just a more compelling song lyrically and musically, just a perfect piece of construction. It was “You Belong With Me.”“Fearless” got you!It turned out she had a lot of other great songs. The thing that made me really think about her as an artist whose process and career I wanted to learn more about and thought about a lot was when I saw “Miss Americana,” the documentary.What about it?It really does such a great job of showing both how much support she’s had — she’s someone who’s come from a good deal of privilege and had parents who really wanted to help her realize her dreams, which, you know, honestly, I have, too — but also how she worked to become herself, and how she has become someone who makes her own decisions in a way that brings people along with her and doesn’t alienate people. I realize that she could probably take fewer private jet flights.The Harvard campus.David Degner for The New York TimesMs. Swift during an August concert in Inglewood, Calif.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDo you have a favorite era?It bounces between “Red” and “Folklore”-slash-“Evermore.”Let’s talk a little bit about the coursework. What is on the syllabus?Each week pairs some body of her work with some body of work by other people. We are reading two different Willa Cather novels. We’re reading a novel by James Weldon Johnson about a performing artist who’s got a very different relationship to his own career in his hands. We are reading a contemporary novel by Zan Romanoff about One Direction fandom.We’re going to read some Wordsworth, Wordsworth being a Lake District poet. She sings about the poets of the Lake District in England. Wordsworth also writes about some of the same feelings that Taylor sings about: disappointment in retrospect, and looking back and realizing that you’re not the child you were, even though you might want to be.What songs are going to be paired with those texts?We are reading Coleridge’s “Work Without Hope.” “Work Without Hope,” of course, being Coleridge’s version of “You’re on Your Own, Kid.”Of course. How about homework?The written work will include a couple of conventionally argued academic essays, where the student needs to make a well-supported argument with clearly framed evidence in easy-to-follow prose. One of them has to be on a Taylor topic. One of them has to be about something else that we read for the course. So you can’t write about nothing but Taylor Swift and get a good grade.Is there a final?The third of the three papers is the final assignment. I have such mixed feelings about final exams because they stress people out. They’re a pain to give and they’re no fun. On the other hand, Harvard students are also often taking other classes that absolutely demand a lot of time from them, especially if they’re, for example, future doctors. Or they have other commitments that eat up a lot of the time. If you don’t do something to make sure they feel like they have to do the reading, they will sometimes, regretfully, blow off reading.Any chance of a guest lecture by (the honorary) Dr. Swift?I have tweeted at her, and I would welcome her presence if she would like to pop in, but she is quite busy.A Harvard class about Taylor Swift feels ripe for detractors. What would you say to people who might criticize such a subject as unserious or not worthy of rigorous study?This is a course that includes plenty of traditionally admired dead people who’ve been taught in English departments for a long time, who I not only admire but am teaching in this course. Taylor’s work is the spine. If you don’t appreciate this body of songwriting and of performance, that’s not my problem. But they should remember literally everything that takes up a lot of time in a modern English department was at one point a low-prestige popular art form that you wouldn’t bother to study, like Shakespeare’s sonnets and, in particular, the rise of the novel. Can I quote Wordsworth?Please.Others shall love what we have loved and we will teach them how. If you’re going to teach people to love something that they see as obscure or distant or difficult or unfamiliar, your best shot at doing that honestly and effectively is to connect it to something that people already like. More

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      ‘Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project’ Review: An Afrofuturist Space Odyssey

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      The experimental documentary is punctuated by Giovanni’s poetry, read both by her and the actress Taraji P. Henson. But the film offers only what the poet is willing to give.Nikki Giovanni wants to die in zero gravity.“We don’t have any poets in space,” she says in a speech featured in “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” a documentary about the elusive artist, directed by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson.Giovanni would like to travel to the space station to record what she sees, adding that, when it’s time for her to go, she can simply be released into the ether. This desire — part jest, part genuine — drives the biographical project, in which the directors try to capture Giovanni’s legacy and her Afrofuturist vision for Black women.“Going to Mars” combines archival footage of Giovanni and moments in Black history, images of space and present-day interviews and speeches to paint an expansive picture of the poet’s evolution from young firebrand to elder. Giovanni posits that viewers should turn to Black women to learn about surviving in space because of our ability to survive all the hardships thrown at us on Earth. Throughout, the scenes are punctuated by her poetry, read by both Giovanni herself and the actress Taraji P. Henson.The documentary offers only what the poet is willing to give. And Giovanni is a challenging subject: She has firm boundaries, and there are questions she refuses to answer. “You want me to go to someplace that I’m not going to go, because it will make me unhappy,” she says in response to a question about her childhood. “I refuse to be unhappy about something I can do nothing about.”Yet other times Giovanni’s work speaks for itself. She won’t discuss how she felt after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, for instance, but what follows is a powerful rendering of her poem “Reflections on April 4, 1968,” in which she expresses anger over the injustice. Here, and in general, viewers must fill in their own blanks.Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni ProjectNot rated. Running time: 1 hours 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Jamila Woods Puts Herself at the Center of “Water Made Us”

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      “Water Made Us,” a new album due Oct. 13, achieves the musician’s greatest synthesis yet between her voices as a poet and as a songwriter.For many artists, the weeks leading up to a new album are a hectic flurry of promotional obligations, relentless tour rehearsals and omnipresent anxiety. But two months before the Oct. 13 release of Jamila Woods’s “Water Made Us,” the Chicago-based writer and musician was far from the music industry’s antic churn: at a six-week writing residency at a remote castle in Umbria, Italy.“I’m just grateful for the time to chill,” Woods, 34, said, video chatting from her sparse room in the 15th-century fortress. Half of her chin-length hair was twisted up in pigtailed buns, and seven of her 10 fingers were adorned with chunky, artful rings.Woods’s music has always been imbued with a literary sensibility — “I’m such a poet in the way that I do everything,” she said, defining poetry as “a way of being and looking at the world” — but on “Water Made Us,” she achieves her greatest synthesis yet between her voices as a poet and as a songwriter. The opening track “Bugs” moves fluidly between laid-back, neo-soul melodicism and precision-cut spoken-word (“Someone will jump fully clothed in the moat you dug outside,” she declares. “It’s not that deep”), while the strikingly compassionate “I Miss All My Exes” is essentially taboo-shattering free-verse set to a serene composition that features her frequent collaborator, the trumpeter Nico Segal.“She has an amazing sense of language and a way with words,” said the musician and producer Chris McClenney, who co-executive produced “Water Made Us” with Woods. “Every lyric on the album has so much weight.”And nearly every one of those lyrics is focused on Woods herself, which is a departure for an artist who has so far made her name as a skillful observer of character, history and social issues. Most people first heard Woods’s voice — warm, heartfelt and sincere — when she was featured on gospel-tinged tracks by Chance the Rapper (“Blessings”) and Segal (“Sunday Candy”). Her 2016 solo debut, “Heavn,” was a confident assertion of Black womanhood in a time of political unrest (“Yeah she scares the government,” she sang on the trenchant “Blk Girl Soldier,” “déjà vu of Tubman”), while her 2019 breakout “Legacy! Legacy!” was an ambitious ode to artists of color who came before her. Each song took the name of a different pioneer: “Zora,” “Miles,” “Octavia.”That’s not to say there wasn’t any Jamila in them. “With ‘Legacy!,’ there’s a lot of songs where I was actually writing a lot about myself, but I’m like, ‘I’ll call it ‘Sonia!’” she said and laughed. “Water Made Us,” which she considers her most personal and vulnerable album to date, found her “shedding” armor. She decided, she said, to “write with myself as the source material. I don’t need to put that layer on top of it anymore.”“Water Made Us” is all about Woods’s own search for love. She said she and McClenney sequenced its 17 tracks so it would feel “like the cycle of a relationship.” The first few songs have the fluttery apprehension of a new connection. Then comes conflict, in the form of the soulful, keyboard-driven ballad “Wreckage Room” and the heartbroken but hopeful “Thermostat.” The final stretch contains a few of what Woods calls “mantra songs,” for their expressions of accumulated wisdom.A conversation with Woods is full of such mantras. She has collected the insight of her poetry mentors and writerly inspirations and pocketed them like talismans, ready to be quoted at the opportune moment. One advised her, “Your relationship to your art is the most precious thing, so you have to be protective of it and gentle with it.” Another, listening to some of her early music, offered an observation that rings especially true to “Water Made Us”: “He said, ‘You have so many specific loves,’” she recalled. “I was like, ‘That feels so accurate. I think the way that each person loves and is able to love is so specific, and the attachment styles or lessons we carry into what it means to love someone are so personal.”Most songs about love fall at two poles: “I love you” and “I hate you.” The refreshing thing about “Water Made Us” is how many variations along the spectrum between them Woods captures — how many specific loves these songs have. “It’s not butterflies and fireworks,” she sings on the gorgeous leadoff single “Tiny Garden,” finding an apt lyrical image of the everyday work that goes into a relationship in the steady care of a green space: “Said it’s gonna be a tiny garden, but I feed it every day.”She knew water would have to play a part in the album’s cover, and via YouTube she discovered the work of Birdee, an underwater portrait photographer. While finishing the album, they set up a shoot, “and then somewhere along the way I realized I can’t really swim,” Woods said with a laugh. An artist less committed to growth would have returned to the drawing board. Instead, she committed to a week and a half of intensive swim classes in Chicago, passing the requirement to enter the deepwater course shortly before the photo shoot.The experience provided another apt metaphor for the creative process. Woods recalled Birdee explaining in an interview she’d watched how shooting underwater is unpredictable and challenging. “You can’t control anything, so you have to go into it with an attitude of surrender,” she said. “And that’s how making this whole album has felt.” More

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      Mahogany L. Browne’s Love Letter to Hip-Hop

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      It was a clear black night, a clear white moon. Warren G, “Regulate” (1994)Originally appearing on the soundtrack of the Tupac Shakur film “Above the Rim,” this song is built around a sample of Michael McDonald’s “I Keep Forgettin’ (Every Time You’re Near).” I’m looking like a star when you see me make a wish. […] More

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      Germany Celebrates Wolf Biermann, a Singer Who United East and West

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      A show at the German Historical Museum honors Wolf Biermann, whose music and moral stance endeared him to audiences across the once divided country.If passers-by on a busy bridge in central Berlin on a recent summer afternoon recognized East Germany’s most famous songwriter, poet and dissident, they did not show it.Posing for this article’s photographs in front of a huge wrought iron eagle that featured on one of his best known record sleeves, Wolf Biermann, 86, smiled and tried joking with the afternoon crowd. But the office workers and tourists ignored him and continued their journeys across the river.Nearly five decades after Biermann was thrown out of East Germany for criticizing its totalitarian Communist government, the German Historical Museum is honoring him with a major exhibition. Biermann may not be recognized on the street, but the show, which opens Friday and runs through Jan. 14, 2024, proves he is far from forgotten: He is the first living person in recent memory to be the subject of such an exhibition at Germany’s national history museum.In a life that crisscrossed the East-West border that once divided Germany, Biermann’s music and principled moral stance made him a rare figure who transcended that barrier. Now, his tale is a perfect one for the united Germany to celebrate.“His story is both East German and West German history,” said Monika Boll, the exhibition’s curator. “You can’t get more German than that.”Biermann was born under Nazism, in 1936, and raised in West Germany. As a teenager, he defected to the East and made a career as a singer of witty, folk-inspired songs — until an anti-authoritarian streak in his music began to trouble the Communist authorities. For a decade from the mid-60s, Biermann’s songs, many of which he recorded in his East Berlin apartment, were smuggled to the West and released by record labels there, then smuggled back behind the iron curtain.After a 1976 concert in Cologne, West Germany, in which he criticized the government of East Germany, Biermann was barred from re-entering that country, where he had made his home.Barbara Klemm/Frankfurter Allgemeine ZeitungYet Biermann wanted to stay in the German Democratic Republic, or G.D.R. Although he was the subject of a yearslong state surveillance operation, he was never imprisoned, unlike many other critics of the government. The authorities worried about a backlash from West Germany, where the press was taking special note of Biermann’s career.In a speech at the exhibition opening on Wednesday, Claudia Roth, Germany’s culture minister, compared Biermann to a “raised middle finger” aimed at the “pride of the G.D.R. leadership.” The opening’s guests included many former East German dissidents, and Angela Merkel, Germany’s former chancellor.In an interview, Biermann said that his life story was instructive for anyone who wants to understand Germany’s complicated postwar past. “I’m the ideal counterpoint,” Bierman said, to what was typical in those decades. “To recognize what was normal, you need to look at the exception,” he added.Right from his childhood, he did the opposite of everyone around him, he added. His family was staunchly communist, he recalled, and his father was Jewish. Naturally, he said, they detested the Nazis — unlike most German families at the time.Even the British fire bombing of his hometown, Hamburg, which he only survived by diving into a canal with his mother, did not stop Biermann rooting for the Allies. In a song, he later wrote:And because I was born under the yellow starIn GermanyThat is why we took the English bombsLike gifts from heaven.His father, Dagobert Biermann, a labor organizer, was murdered in Auschwitz by the Nazis when Biermann was 6.In 1953, swimming against the historical tide, the 16-year-old Biermann moved, alone, from West Germany to the East, just as thousands were fleeing in the other direction in search of a better life. But as a convinced Communist, Biermann thought it was the G.D.R., not the capitalist West, that offered a more just and moral vision.Right from his childhood, Biermann said, he did the opposite of everyone around him.Gordon Welters for The New York TimesA talent for music was recognized during his tenure as a production assistant at Berthold Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble theater, where he had been hired by Brecht’s widow. Supported by politically connected sponsors, Biermann had gained minor notice as a singer-songwriter by 1960. If his lyrics offended some, he got away with it because of his communist bone fides, including the fact that his father was killed by fascists.But soon his lyrics and texts became too critical of the government and, in 1965, the authorities — which had tight control over cultural life — de facto banned Biermann from performing, recording or publishing in East Germany.During the 11 years in which he was also not allowed to leave the country, Biermann’s apartment became his stage and recording studio, and he was under constant watch. Over the decades, the East German state security services, known as the Stasi, watched and bugged his home, followed his car, listened to his phone calls and tried to recruit his friends and lovers.“You could say he was in the champion league — such a level of surveillance was atypical,” said Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, a historian who has studied Biermann’s Stasi file.Biermann responded ironically with “The Ballad of the Stasi,” in which he commiserates with the poor “Stasi dogs” monitoring him, who would probably end up singing his songs in bed.East German fans who were caught with Biermann’s music on bootleg cassette tapes or handbills of his verse could be arrested and locked away for years. But his apartment, which was close to the main border crossing point into West Berlin, still became a gathering place for dissident artists and thinkers. American stars, like Joan Baez and Allen Ginsburg, also visited him there.A turning point in Biermann’s career came in 1976, with a three-and-half-hour concert he gave to a sold-out hall in Cologne, on a rare visit to West Germany. He came out swinging against the “old comrades” who ran East Germany, and painted a bleak picture of life behind the wall. Three days later, while watching the news on television, he learned that he had been permanently barred from re-entry to East Germany.Demonstrators in Leipzig, East Germany, in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall Fell. The placard, in German, reads, “We want our old singer Biermann back!”Archiv Wolf Biermann; Staatsbibliothek–PK/Abteilung Handschriften und historische Drucke Biermann said he was crestfallen to be shut out of the country he held so dear, despite all its shortcomings. While hundreds of people were risking their lives crossing illegally to the West, Biermann’s heart pined for the East. “With me, everything was always the other way around — that’s almost the fundamental law,” he said.Biermann’s expulsion led to protests by East Germany’s most famous artists, writers and actors, and the government reacted with further repressions on artistic expression that remained in place until the fall of the Berlin Wall, 13 years later.After Germany’s 1990 reunification — in which he played an important role — Biermann remained active, though less in the spotlight. He continued to be a respected figure on the German left, even as he voiced unpopular opinions among his comrades: He supported the American-led war in Iraq, and criticized the peace movement that grew against it.Standing in front of the bridge’s wrought iron eagle in Berlin, Biermann recalled writing one of his most popular songs, “The Ballad of the Prussian Icarus,” after he and Ginsburg crossed the bridge in 1976 and took pictures in front of the bird. They made a bet over which of them would bring the iron creature into verse, Biermann recalled.That song, which became one of his best known, is typical Biermann, a lyrical critique of the East German state that notes:The barbed wire slowly grows deepInto the skin, the chest and boneInto the brain’s gray cellsAs tourist boats passed under its perch on the bridge, the same eagle looked out on a very different world. If Biermann now has an official place in German history, it’s because of the part he played in shaping it.Wolf Biermann: A Poet and Songwriter From GermanyThrough Jan. 14, 2024, at the German Historical Museum, in Berlin; dhm.de. More

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      Aja Monet’s Debut Album Blends Jazz and Poetry From a Place of Love

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      On her debut album, “When the Poems Do What They Do,” the writer and community organizer offers up a fluid mix of jazz and poetry that evokes the spirit of 1990s spoken-word scenes.A crowd that included musicians and actors filled the Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue earlier this spring to hear the poet and community organizer Aja Monet speak about the subtleties of Black love, joy and uncertainty.But for Monet, there was only one celebrity in the room: Bonnie Phillips, her former college adviser, who sat rapt in the front row.“I remember her suggesting what schools to go to and it wasn’t Harvard, you know what I mean?” Monet said in a recent video interview from her home in California. Recalling her high school years in New York, Monet said she asked a lot of questions in class but didn’t have the best grades: “I think I was way more just opinionated and outspoken.”She remains both on her debut album, “When the Poems Do What They Do,” a fluid mix of jazz and poetry out Friday that evokes the spirit of 1990s spoken-word scenes. Featuring a who’s who of instrumentalists she’s known over the years — Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah on trumpet, Samora Pinderhughes on piano, Elena Pinderhughes on flute, Weedie Braimah on djembe and Marcus Gilmore on drums — the LP is a nuanced exploration of Blackness.“Joy is a song anywhere,” Monet declares on “Black Joy,” a sprightly, soulful track. “Joy is a six-block wheelie through traffic, with no handlebars, in the rain.”The poet Saul Williams, who has known Monet since she was 14, praised his longtime collaborator in an email. “Aja stands out because she stood up for poetry, for magic in language, for spell-casting and patriarchy-bashing,” he wrote. “She’s still standing.”Chatting from Los Angeles, where Monet, 35, has lived for almost three years, she roamed from room to room, showing off a few album covers (at least, the ones that could be seen through the still water and dhow ship that served as her artificial backdrop). “That’s my Zanzibar life,” she said, smiling. “It was a beautiful experience. It was the first trip I ever did fully by myself, not knowing anyone anywhere.”Monet grew up in East New York in Brooklyn and started writing poetry when she was 8 because she was “fascinated by typewriters and people who would sit at typewriters,” she said. “The first thing I ever asked my mother for Christmas was a typewriter,” she added, recalling an early interest in “stories and storytelling, and the ways that people tell stories.”An English teacher at Baruch College Campus High School in Manhattan was an early inspiration. “She would read and recite one foot from one desk to the next, and give us encouragement to really see what was happening in the language and what was going on in the stories,” Monet said.At home, she listened to a different kind of poetry: the R&B singers Sade, Whitney Houston and Mary J. Blige, and the rapper Tupac Shakur. She knew they were each saying something profound, even if she couldn’t fully process what it was yet. When she won the school talent show with a poem, “I just remember all my teachers in tears in the front.”Monet didn’t find much community for burgeoning poets like herself, though, so she created her own club: SABA, or Students Acknowledging Black Achievements, a space where others at her high school “with the weird obsession of poetry and art” could convene. After a classmate encouraged her to check out Urban Word NYC, a program that teaches creative writing to minority students, she attended her first poetry slam there and was hooked.“To this day it’s probably one of the most pivotal memories in my life,” Monet said. “Because it was the beginning of me being introduced to a whole world, legacy and tradition that I now found myself called to. It deeply felt like a home that I had been waiting to return to.”“Ultimately, everything I do is rooted in a deep place of love, an overwhelming obsession with love.”Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThe poet Mahogany L. Browne remembered a 15-year-old Monet at Urban Word. “From that moment, I could see the power of her purpose,” Browne said in a telephone interview. She invited Monet to a poetry workshop at a group home for pregnant teens in Manhattan’s Inwood neighborhood, which opened the young writer’s eyes to what poetry and community activism could accomplish. Later, as a freshman at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., Monet organized a poetry potluck to aid those affected by Hurricane Katrina.“I just remember feeling so powerless, away from the community of poets that I knew understood what that meant and what it felt like,” Monet recalled of her response to the storm. “It was just jarring to see Black people being killed literally by neglect of this country.”Those themes and concerns stayed with her, and inform “When the Poems Do What They Do.” The album blends poetry Monet has written over the years with vigorous live instrumentation. “The Devil You Know” pairs dark, psychedelic jazz with searing observations about America, and “Yemaya” centers upbeat, polyrhythmic percussion with words about the cleansing power of water.Monet uses a similar approach on an earlier stand-alone track titled “Give My Regards to Brooklyn.” Throughout the sprawling nine-minute cut about coming up in the borough, a mix of collaborators discuss their impressions of Monet. “Ever since I’ve known Aja,” a male voice says, “she’s been just this bold force reflecting back beauty in the world.”Monet is quick to pay homage to voices that came before her: Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka and the Last Poets, among many others. “She’s speaking with the guidance of her elders,” Browne said. “She’s never separating herself from the legacy of the work.”Making art as part of an ecosystem of music, writing and grass-roots activism remains central to Monet’s project. “I know that I’m a part of a collective of many people who are working every day in their own way to create a world that is more equitable and just for all,” she said. “So, ultimately, everything I do is rooted in a deep place of love, an overwhelming obsession with love.” More

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      High Schoolers Get In on Tyshawn Sorey’s Latest Music

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      Pleasant spring weather warmed the grounds of Girard College here on a recent afternoon. But even as classes were letting out for the weekend, some high school students at this boarding school had a few hours of work ahead of them.Inside the gymnasium of the school, which is devoted to children from single- and zero-parent homes who come from underserved communities, five teenagers began to gather around the bleachers.Nearby, in the middle of the basketball court, the contemporary classical group Yarn/Wire commenced a soundcheck while, off to the side, the director Brooke O’Harra consulted with a theater-tech team that was supervising audio amplification and video projections. But she quickly broke away to welcome the students as they entered. A few minutes later the composer Tyshawn Sorey conferred with the instrumentalists.Brooke O’Harra, with the microphone, speaking with student performers in the show, which will be performed inside a gym at Girard College.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesThey had all gathered for one of the final rehearsals of their years-in-development, multimedia adaptation of Ross Gay’s book-length poem “Be Holding,” which premieres on Wednesday at the gym — featuring movement, music and work behind the scenes by the school’s students.Gay’s text is nominally about a balletic, baseline scoop shot from the 1980 N.B.A. finals, as improvised and executed by Philadelphia 76ers star Julius Erving (known as Dr. J); but it is also about the legacy of Black genius off the court, and about notions of community, or its faltering absence, in the United States.Adeshina Tejan, 16, a Girard sophomore who contributes movement to the production, praised Gay’s poetry, saying he particularly relished “the way he’s able to jump from topic to topic. But you still feel the sense that he’s still talking about ‘the shot,’ even when he’s talking about different situations.”Sae Hashimoto, one of the Yarn/Wire percussionists.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesThe 18-year-old senior Jaelyn Handy, who contributes movement as well as chiming tubular bell playing alongside members of Yarn/Wire, cited a passage having little to do with basketball as one of her favorites. “The part in the poem where he’s describing a picture — and it’s a picture of a girl, and the girl is falling with her godmother,” she said. “That hits home because of the detail that’s given. And the background information of photographing Black pain: That was deep!”After the show’s performances this week, it could run elsewhere, including New York. If that happens, Gay might also participate in the recitation of his poem. In Philadelphia, the production will engage the talents of the local poets Yolanda Wisher and David A. Gaines, as primary speakers and movement artists.As the afternoon rehearsal gave way to a run-through around 8 p.m., Wisher and Gaines handed off selections of the text to perform as spoken-word solos; at other junctures, they echoed each other, or enunciated identical phrases in phasing patterns. At moments, the student collaborators mimed basketball scoop shots as an ensemble of dancers; at others, they contributed cascading individual vocalizations that echoed the lines being read by the adult performers.The poet Yolanda Wisher, who with another poet, David A. Gaines, is reciting “Be Holding” in the show.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesDuring a dinner break, Wisher — a longtime friend of Gay’s — said that the poem’s imagery of Dr. J’s athletic feat works well as a visual element in the production, but that the show doesn’t rely solely on that imagistic coup for its drama.“There’s something about that poem on the page that is still superpowerful when you read from start to finish,” Wisher said. “He’s switching times: You’re going from the Middle Passage to a Dr. J clip. How to communicate that sonically, rather than cinematically, I think, is what’s happening here.”While finishing up a burger, she added: “A lot of times we’re working against the music, rather than trying to be floating on top of it — which, sometimes, is a lot of what poets and spoken-word artists do.”Gaines, center, with students in a rehearsal for “Be Holding.”Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesIn the piece, Yarn/Wire’s two pianists and two percussionists interpret what Sorey calls a “living score”: stretches of written-out material that can be juggled or adapted at will. After Friday’s rehearsal, Russell Greenberg from the group wrote in an email: “In ‘new music’ we are used to fully notated scores or instructions (this being related to CONTROL). But I’ve come to think about the music in this piece as an ‘energy map’: of different builds; densities; ebb and flow; tonal/chromatic; metal/wood; extended/traditional, etc. They all work together to push and pull against the text.”Sorey’s music here revels in a dreamy consonance during Gay’s first extended description of Dr. J’s drive to the basket. But as the poem explores tangential ideas and metaphoric asides, Sorey’s score trends chromatic — while making use of Yarn/Wire’s facility with the experimental techniques that Greenberg mentioned in his email. Later, there is a return to the opening’s beatific energy while the text of “Be Holding” lands on its expanded conception of communal joy.Gay’s poem is about a storied basketball play, the legacy of Black genius and notions of community.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesIn a phone interview, Sorey congratulated Yarn/Wire for its ability to break down his personal language of conducted improvisations, known as Autoschediasms, and to apply it to this new “quote-unquote score,” to the point where he doesn’t even need to conduct the music.He said that the involvement of Girard students “makes the poem even more powerful, when they do the movements and when they get involved in some of the conversational parts of the poem.“It amplifies the positive spirit that it has; it gives it a different character,” Sorey added. “I think if it was just the poetry and the music, it might not affect me in the same way.”O’Harra said that her vision for Gay’s poem “starts out really kind of simple: We’re in a gym, there’s a person speaking,” then marshals an unusual blend of elements. (Itohan Edoloyi designed the lighting. Matthew Deinhart and the artist known as Catching on Thieves co-designed the video; Eugene Lew is the sound designer.)“You think almost mathematically” about all those layers, O’Harra said. “And then something nails you, and you wanna cry. Or you feel really moved. That’s what I love.” More

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      Pete Brown, Who Put Words to ‘Sunshine of Your Love,’ Dies at 82

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      A British Beat poet, he wrote lyrics for the band Cream and, after it broke up, continued to collaborate with Jack Bruce, the group’s lead singer and bassist.Pete Brown, a British Beat poet who wrote the lyrics to songs by the rock supergroup Cream, including the hits “White Room,” “I Feel Free” and “Sunshine of Your Love,” and who after the band’s breakup collaborated for nearly five decades with Jack Bruce, its lead vocalist and bassist, died on Friday at his home in Hastings, on the southeast coast of England. He was 82.His manager, Peter Conway, said the cause was cancer.Mr. Brown entered Cream’s circle at the request of Ginger Baker, the band’s drummer. They knew each other because Mr. Brown performed his poetry backed by jazz musicians and Mr. Baker had gotten his start in jazz combos; Mr. Baker asked Mr. Brown for help on the lyrics to the group’s debut single, “Wrapping Paper,” which preceded the release of “Fresh Cream,” its first album, in 1966.Mr. Brown quickly discovered a career-long writing partner in Mr. Bruce, whose fluid and propulsive playing provided counterpoint to Mr. Baker’s explosive drumming and the guitar pyrotechnics of Cream’s third member, Eric Clapton.In a short documentary about the making of “White Room” seen on Dutch television in 2018, Mr. Brown recalled, “It became evident that Jack and I had a chemistry, and when we wrote ‘I Feel Free,’ which was a big hit, so everyone went, ‘OK, that’s a team, let it roll.’”Mr. Brown did not provide the lyrics to all of Cream’s songs, but he was the group’s primarily lyricist. On its second album, “Disraeli Gears” (1967), he wrote the words to “Sunshine of Your Love,” a collaboration with Mr. Bruce and Mr. Clapton, as well as “Dance the Night Away” and two other songs.“White Room,” one of four songs he wrote with Mr. Bruce on the band’s third album, “Wheels of Fire” (1968), rose to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1968. It was the second-highest ranking a Cream single achieved; “Sunshine” had peaked at No. 5 earlier that year.“White Room” began as a poem Mr. Brown wrote, inspired by his stay some years earlier in an actual white room, in an apartment.“I had been semi-destitute, a semi-bum, living on people’s floors, and eventually I began to earn some money from songwriting, and the white room was the first place I moved into,” he told the culture website Please Kill Me in 2022. In the Dutch documentary he added that he had stopped drinking and taking drugs in the room and decided to be a “songwriter rather than an itinerant poet.”“White Room,” begins with these lines:In the white room with black curtains near the stationBlack roof country, no gold pavements, tired starlingsSilver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyesDawn light smiles on you leaving, my contentmentI’ll wait in this place where the sun never shinesWait in this place where the shadows run from themselvesMr. Brown in concert in 1970 in Copenhagen. He found his voice as a singer in the decade after Cream broke up, performing with a number of bands.Jorgen Angel/Redferns, Getty ImagesPeter Ronald Brown was born on Dec. 25, 1940, in Surrey, England, with World War II underway. His parents had moved there after fleeing London during the Blitz. His father, Nathan Brown, whose birth name was Nathan Leibowitz, and his mother, Kitty Cohen, sold shoes.Peter started writing poems as a teenager, fired up by the works of Dylan Thomas, Federico García Lorca and Gerard Manley Hopkins. But he detoured, at least temporarily, to journalism, which he studied for nine months in 1958 at the Polytechnic-Regent Street (now the University of Westminster) in London.He returned to verse and published his first poem in 1961 in Evergreen Review, the boundary-breaking literary magazine based in the United States that filled its pages with work by luminaries like Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller and William Burroughs.In one early poem, “Few,” composed under the fear of nuclear war, Mr. Brown wrote:Alone and half drunk hopefulI staggered into the bogsat Green Park stationand found 30 written on the wall.Appalled I lurched outInto the windy blaring Piccadilly nightthinking surely,Surely, there must be more of us than that.Over the next few years, he was a working poet. He was part of the First Real Poetry Band, which included the guitarist John McLaughlin, and he had a jazz poetry residency at the Marquee Club in London.In 1965, he and more than a dozen other poets from around the world, including Mr. Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Michael Horovitz and Andrei Voznesensky, read their work at the International Poetry Incarnation, which filled Royal Albert Hall in London. On its website, the venue recalled the event as one “where beatniks met the emerging hippie culture.”The call for help from Mr. Baker jump-started a long songwriting career, first with Cream and then, when Cream split up after two years, with Mr. Bruce on his solo work. He wrote the lyrics to songs on nearly all of Mr. Bruce’s albums, from “Songs for a Tailor” (1969) to “Silver Rails” (2014). One of their collaborations, “Theme for an Imaginary Western,” became a staple in the repertoire of the band Mountain.“I was in awe of Jack,” Mr. Brown told The Guardian in an interview last month. But, he said, “Sometimes we had to have a rest from each other — two very big personalities in the same room sometimes wasn’t good, plus his addictions got in the way.”Mr. Brown, right, with Jack Bruce in 2005. The two began collaborating on songs when Mr. Bruce was the bassist and lead vocalist in Cream, and they continued writing together for nearly five decades.Brian Rasic/Getty ImagesMr. Brown found his own voice, as a singer, in the decade after Cream broke up. He performed with the bands Pete Brown & His Battered Ornaments, Piblokoto!, Back to the Front, Flying Tigers and Bond & Brown, which he formed with the British rock and blues musician Graham Bond. He also began a long songwriting collaboration in the early 1980s with the keyboardist Phil Ryan, a former member of Piblokto!, that produced several albums through 2013.He also helped write most of the songs on “Novum” (2017), Procol Harum’s last studio album. (He replaced Keith Reid, Procol Harum’s longtime lyricist, who died this year.)Mr. Brown’s autobiography, “White Rooms & Imaginary Westerns: On the Road With Ginsberg, Writing for Clapton and Cream — An Anarchic Odyssey” (2010), is being adapted as a documentary by the director Mark Aj Waters but has not yet been finished. Mr. Brown had recently been working on an album, “Shadow Club”; one of his collaborators was Mr. Bruce’s son Malcolm, an electric bassist like his father. (Jack Bruce died in 2014.)“We’ve naturally gravitated to each other,” Mr. Brown told The Guardian, adding that he was planning to write songs with Malcolm Bruce for his next album “as long as I can stay alive for a reasonable amount of time.”Mr. Brown is survived by his wife, Sheridan MacDonald; his daughter, Jessica Walker; his son, Tad MacDonald; and a grandson.Even after he began singing, Mr. Brown said, his admiration for Mr. Bruce initially led him to avoid singing the Cream songs he had helped write.“You know, ‘I’m not good enough,’” he told Dutch television. “Then I suddenly thought, ‘OK, I wrote those songs as well,’ and I thought, ‘It’s kind of about time I started singing some of these songs.’” More