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    The Piano Trio: (Still) a Powerful Force in Jazz

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    New releases from Tyshawn Sorey, Kim Cass, Bill Charlap, Tarbaby, Matthew Shipp, Kris Davis and others are showcasing how a classic format can still feel fresh.Two of the most engrossing jazz tracks in recent months, the Tyshawn Sorey Trio’s “Your Good Lies” and Kim Cass’s “Slag,” share a classic trio instrumentation and the presence of Sorey behind the kit.Sorey’s “Your Good Lies,” a cover of a track by the pop-soul group Vividry that features the pianist Aaron Diehl and the bassist Harish Raghavan, is a vortex of downtempo groove, sprawling across 26 zoned-in minutes. “Slag,” in which Sorey performs alongside the bassist-bandleader Cass and the pianist Matt Mitchell, is a meticulous yet marvelously frantic scramble that exhausts itself just shy of the three-minute mark.Taken together, these ultimately very different pieces — drawn from Sorey and Cass’s new albums, “The Susceptible Now” and “Levs” — point to a major theme in jazz in 2024: Piano trios are everywhere, and their potential still feels limitless.The piano-bass-drums combo has been a staple since the late ’50s and early ’60s, when trios led by Ahmad Jamal and Bill Evans modeled the crisp elegance and conversational charge that the format could offer. In subsequent years, as new approaches have come and gone, the music has always made room for great piano trios: Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio, Brad Mehldau’s three-piece, Jason Moran’s Bandwagon, the Bad Plus.This year’s crop is striking for its robust growth: Many major pianists are involved — Vijay Iyer, Bill Charlap, Kris Davis, Matthew Shipp, Ethan Iverson, Nduduzo Makhathini and Mitchell, at the helm of his own group — plus notable up-and-comers such as Marta Sanchez and Luther S. Allison, and other instrumentalists and composers like Sorey, Cass and John Zorn, and the collective group Tarbaby. And it’s notable for the sheer variety of work these artists have produced. Orthodox approaches to the idiom are easy to find, but so are a wealth of other tacks, ranging from the earthy to the outré.New releases from (clockwise from top left) Matthew Shipp, Kim Cass, Sorey and Kris Davis are part of the year’s surge in trio albums.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tyshawn Sorey Wins Pulitzer for Composing an ‘Anti-Concerto’

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      The composer and instrumentalist was honored for “Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith),” an unconventional concerto written for saxophone and orchestra.Concertos are typically works meant to showcase dazzling virtuosity. But when the composer and instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey set out to write one for saxophone and orchestra several years ago, he quickly dispensed with convention.Describing the work as an “anti-concerto,” Sorey set out to provide a “respite from the chaos and intrusiveness of modern life.” In the score, he instructed the soloist and orchestra to play very softly and at an unhurried tempo of thirty-six quarter notes per minute.“I’m not interested in having a typical experience,” Sorey, 43, said in an interview. “I just wanted to create a work that kind of gets us to let the music wash over us, and lets us take our time in listening to it.”On Monday, the work, called “Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith),” which was commissioned by the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music. It was a high honor for an artist who has spent his career defying labels, blurring the boundaries between jazz and classical music.Sorey wrote the roughly 20-minute work to pay tribute to Smith, the celebrated American trumpeter and composer, whom he met two decades ago and calls a mentor.“Every moment I spend with him is a learning experience,” he said, “and it’s always been something that I value and cherish.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nicki Minaj and Drake Reunite, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Tems, Idles, Adrianne Lenker and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Nicki Minaj featuring Drake, ‘Needle’Thirteen years ago, on her debut studio album “Pink Friday,” Nicki Minaj recruited her Young Money labelmate and fellow rising star Drake for the galvanizing hit “Moment 4 Life.” They join forces once again on “Needle,” a noticeably more laid-back and atmospheric track from Minaj’s long-teased “Pink Friday 2,” which demonstrates how both of these rappers — and the sound of rap music itself — have changed in the intervening years. Drake calls back to the island cadences of his “Views” era, lilting a somewhat strained metaphor: “You’re like a needle, life’s a haystack.” Minaj raps as if on cruise control, characteristically dexterous (“Poppin’ out like a cork/duckin’ ’em like Björk”) if zoologically confused; Nicki, it was a swan dress! LINDSAY ZOLADZTems, ‘Not an Angel’Afrobeats turns inward in the Nigerian songwriter Tems’s “Not an Angel” — an emphatic good-riddance song with lines like, “I was alone when I was with you,” “All you did was give me nothing” and “Right now it’s going nowhere but the graveyard.” Programmed percussion and a moody guitar lick carry her rising resentment and self-realization: “I’m not an angel — I’m just a girl that knows the truth,” she sings, moving into sync with the beat as she pulls away from her ex. JON PARELESWishy, ‘Spinning’Can a band be classified as shoegaze if its head is in the clouds? Such is the delightful paradox posed by Wishy, a promising new group from Indiana releasing its debut EP “Paradise” next Friday. Echoing the spirit of millennial dream-pop acts like the Pains of Being Pure at Heart and A Sunny Day in Glasgow, Wishy’s latest single “Spinning” layers textured guitar, a driving breakbeat and Nina Pitchkites’s airy vocals to create a sumptuous sound. “Spinning around on the kitchen floor,” she sings. “I don’t know what I’m dancing for.” Prepare to do the same. ZOLADZIdles, ‘Grace’The British band Idles generally play sinewy, irascible post-punk songs, but every so often the singer Joe Talbot confesses to vulnerability, as he does in “Grace.” It’s a secular prayer: “No God, no king/I said love is the thing,” Talbot sings. He both longs for and offers refuge and compassion; behind him, the band gnashes and clatters and eventually erupts, but his determined humility lingers. PARELESElephant Gym featuring Yile Lin, ‘Happy Prince’Elephant Gym, a bass-guitar-drums trio from Taiwan, plays a nimble, jazzy kind of math-rock, paced by the hopscotching bass lines of KT Chang and the guitar counterpoint of her brother Tell Chang. “Happy Prince” is loosely based on a children’s story by Oscar Wilde. With bright-eyed guest vocals by Yile Lin, from the band Freckles, “Happy Prince” breezes along, shifting meters and taking chromatic turns; every so often, it explodes. PARELESNnamdi, ‘Going Crazy’A snippet of children singing “We’re all going crazy” led the Chicago pop experimentalist Nnamdi to come up with “Going Crazy.” It appears at assorted speeds, over assorted chords and drum-machine beats, as he croons in falsetto about how “I been up working harder every night” and “I just want to have a little fun” — a workaholic’s jovial complaints. PARELESUsher and H.E.R., ‘Risk It All’It hardly gets more old-school than “Risk It All,” a duet from Usher and H.E.R. — from the soundtrack to “The Color Purple” — that’s happy to risk vocal close-ups: call-and-response, tag-teaming, overlapping, sharing. Little more than piano chords accompany the duo, who sound like they were singing to each other in real time throughout the song, though they couldn’t resist overdubbing some extra harmony vocals. Even so, there’s an unadorned, intimate physicality to the romantic sentiments. PARELESAdrianne Lenker, ‘Ruined’This sparse, movingly fragile song from the Big Thief frontwoman Adrianne Lenker is a dispatch from the most devastating kind of obsession: “Can’t get enough of you,” Lenker sings in a warbled falsetto. “You come around, I’m ruined.” Accompanied by just a haunting piano and eerie, echoing effects, Lenker’s plain-spoken vulnerability becomes, by the end of the song, a kind of strength. ZOLADZEliza McLamb, ‘16’Eliza McLamb, a songwriter who’s also a podcaster, revisits a period of severe teenage trauma — her mother’s mental illness, her own self-destructive compulsions — in “16”; it’s from her album due in January, “Going Through It.” Deep, sustained synthesizer tones accompany her breathy voice, offering the stability — or numbness — she longs for. PARELESKaren Vogt, ‘We Coalesce’Layers of wordless, echoey vocal loops, with hints of modal melody, are the makings of “We Coalesce,” one of the eerie, undulating pieces Karen Vogt recorded while mourning her cat. PARELESVijay Iyer Trio, ‘Prelude: Orison’If Vijay Iyer’s music was big for you this year, it was probably thanks to “Love in Exile,” the much-beloved album he released with Arooj Aftab and Shahzad Ismaily. Though cool-blooded and almost ambient, that LP was swept by an undercurrent of disquiet — a feeling the pianist embraces even further in his other working trio, with the bassist Linda Oh and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey. Their 2021 debut, “Uneasy,” was an itchy and stimulating affair inspired, as Iyer said ahead of its release, by the awareness “that this thing Americans love to call freedom is not what it appears to be.” Well, wait. Is there some paradox lurking here? How is instrumental music that sounds so elevated and indirect supposed to upend our most basic assumptions? To which another question might provide the response: Processing the news these days, have you felt angry, frustrated or helpless? If that resonates, this trio’s music would like to help you make some sense of that sensation — and maybe even sidestep it, pushing toward some kind of confrontation. (“Uneasy” includes “Combat Breathing,” a rhythmic call-to-action inspired by Black Lives Matter organizers.) The new, tempo-slurring “Prelude: Orison,” is languid, diaphanous, harmonically canted. Whenever it briefly resolves, it starts the cycle over again. It’s as if this band wants to both seduce you and discomfit you, stripping you of everything but the ability to think and see for yourself. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO 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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      Claire Chase Uses Her New Platform to Showcase a Hero

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      When the composer and performer Pauline Oliveros died in 2016, at 84, her reputation in music was secure.Her early electronic and tape-music pieces from the 1960s and ’70s are widely seen as key contributions to post-World War II American experimentalism. Oliveros’s solo shows, on a tricked-out digital accordion, were destination concerts at New York spaces like the Stone well into the 2010s. And the influence of her writing on the topic of “deep listening” had taken root in the academy.Yet at the time of her death, Oliveros had never received a formal showcase of her work at Carnegie Hall. So when the flutist Claire Chase began planning the first shows of her residency there, in her role as this season’s Debs Creative Chair, a corrective move seemed both obvious and overdue.On Saturday, Chase will present a program called “Pauline Oliveros at 90,” followed by two “Day of Listening” events the next morning and afternoon. “I really wanted,” Chase said, “to give the megaphone to the woman who made possible the lives in music that we have.”Oliveros with her digital accordion at Issue Project Room in 2013.Richard Termine for The New York TimesShe was talking about the wide network of players who have drawn inspiration from Oliveros’s example — but also the specific nucleus of artists she described as the composer’s “musical offspring.” They will share the stage at the Saturday concert, a program of two Oliveros text scores: “The Witness” and “The Tuning Meditation.”At a rehearsal of “The Witness” on Wednesday, Chase and her cohort created spellbinding effects while navigating the three “strategies” that Oliveros’s score outlines. In the first section, performers are asked to play only what comes from their own imaginations, without respect to what else is heard in the room; Chase described it as “the opposite of a feel-good meditation.”In the second strategy, they are instructed to interact as spontaneously as possible with one another. Then the highly idealistic third strategy asks musicians to perform “inside of the time, exactly with the time, or outside the time” of a partner’s playing. Chase said that when she once asked Oliveros what that meant, she was told that it was merely an invitation to be telepathic. “She was dead serious,” Chase recalled, “with a smile on her face.”On Sunday, audience members will be able to join the conceptual jamboree using their voices, slide whistles and the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument technology that Oliveros pioneered with an eye to helping children with a limited range of movement produce music.The artist Ione — Oliveros’s widow and longtime collaborator — said that while the technology was designed for children with “the least availability of movement,” it is also “wonderful for anybody.” That crossover application is, to Ione, part of Oliveros’s legacy: “Bringing people together for sound and music and play and fun. Pauline was as playful and fun as she was serious.”In interviews, four musicians featured in this weekend’s concerts offered their memories of Oliveros and her music. Here are edited excerpts from the conversations.Musicians who were in Oliveros’s orbit gathered this week to rehearse for Chase’s concert on Saturday.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesClaire Chase, flutistI did meet Pauline when I was a toddler. I have these beautiful memories of her playing her accordion — often barefoot — at concerts at the University of California, San Diego, where my parents would drag me because they couldn’t find child care. She was freer and more unfettered in her skin than anyone I’d ever met.It wasn’t until the late 1990s when I reconnected with her, when she was a visiting artist at Oberlin, where I was an undergrad. We were all on a treadmill toward what we thought would be careers in symphony orchestras. She asked — I have to do it in her Texan drawl — “Can you hear beyond the edges of your own imagination?” It wasn’t just like the ceiling opened up for me. It was like the walls dissolved completely. I found myself totally exhilarated and terrified, and suddenly wondering what else I wasn’t learning in conservatory.Susie Ibarra, composer and percussionistThere’s quite an array of Pauline’s music, between the stuff that she did later, for large ensembles, and earlier recordings that were solo. And then her text scores. There are many points of entry. I just love them all for different reasons.I’m very sentimental about coming to celebrate her at Carnegie Hall, as the first time I played there, it was to play her piece “All Fours for the Drum Bum.” It’s a practice in non-repetitive rhythm and texture. She was always somebody who was a great inspiration, and a mentor who offered such support. We did go into the studio and record duets, but we never released it. I was busy, sure, but she was extraordinarily busy toward the end. I think it’s probably at the right moment to release now.I was so fortunate to play a lot with Pauline as an improviser — and we had a quintet called New Circle Five, which recorded one album, “Dreaming Wide Awake.” She was so playful. Especially when she had her digital accordion; you never knew which “instrument” was going to come out. It was a constant surprise.Alex Peh, pianistMy entrance into contemporary music was a really social one. I’m a professor of piano. But I’m dear friends with Phyllis Chen — and when we did her residency at SUNY New Paltz, Pauline came down. We got the students all jazzed up on her “Sonic Meditations.” That’s when I started doing a lot of contemporary music.I played with Claire on Susie’s album “Talking Gong.” We did the online release, then we had some extra time. We were at a barn upstate, and Claire was just like, “Let’s jam.” So we read “The Witness,” and it all started there. After that, we started improvising in the woods, at the Mill Brook Preserve. We did it in caves, just looking for inspirations. This was in the pandemic; we were all sort of frayed and flustered. And now it’s spun into this.Since that time, I’ve explored piano styles throughout the world. I’ve been doing a lot of work with piano traditions in Myanmar. I’m doing a lot of work with Persian piano. Playing “The Witness” catalyzed this. Before that, I was just playing standard repertoire. I met Pauline, and it kind of unlocked curiosity. She gives permission to explore.Tyshawn Sorey, composer and percussionistMy piece “Bertha’s Lair” was commissioned by Claire for her Density 2036 project. And the day we were scheduled to rehearse that piece — and the day it was completed — I went over to the studio where we were going to rehearse it. Within five minutes of arriving there, we found out the news that Pauline had passed. So we hugged for long time; we didn’t even play. We just talked about Pauline the entire evening.It came out in the interpretation of the music, when we finally rehearsed the piece and played it dozens of times. It was different every time. Yet the spirit of Pauline would always remain over us, the way we both continued to take chances.In terms of Pauline’s sprit: It’s about this openness and trust. This way of becoming through making music and being present at all times. No matter what a particular score of hers would say, it certainly demands a different kind of consciousness on the part of the performer to be able to execute. It would put the performer in a place where they’ve probably never been before. More

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      Review: In ‘Monochromatic Light,’ Artists Saturate and Vacate Space

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      Tyshawn Sorey’s music, initially written with Mark Rothko’s abstractions in mind, comes to the Park Avenue Armory with art by Julie Mehretu.If you write a musical composition in homage to Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” and if you premiere it in the actual Rothko Chapel in Houston, you’d seem to be anchoring its meaning and context in rather firm ground. But the American composer and percussionist Tyshawn Sorey is a more restive and conjectural artist than that; and his “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” which commemorated the 50th anniversary of the chapel earlier this year, has come to New York rewritten, reorganized and reinvigorated.This latest, and now staged, version of “Monochromatic Light” premiered at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday, and it retains the spare and ritualistic tenor of Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” with long rests between its inquiring viola phrases and soft rumbles of the timpani. Here in New York, though, Sorey’s music is heard in the company not of Rothko but of another American painter: the contemporary artist Julie Mehretu, whose dense and digitally conversant abstractions flow and swarm where Rothko’s brooded. The production, by the avant-garde journeyman Peter Sellars, has been souped up for the Armory’s cavernous drill hall and augmented with young dancers. The running time has ballooned, too, from under an hour to a good 90 minutes.In scaling up, Sorey may have sacrificed the ecclesiastical concentration that both he and Feldman before him had found in Houston. The night has its longueurs. But this rethought and more antagonistic “Monochromatic Light” strikes a new richness in New York, and it affirms how abstraction can give form to suffering and freedom in ways more straightforward expression so often cannot.At the Armory, “Monochromatic Light” is staged in the round. Sorey, at center, conducts an ensemble of just three musicians, playing viola, keyboards and percussion: nearly the same instrumentation as Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel.” Singers from the Choir of Trinity Wall Street sit at a distance, and behind the audience is an octagonal gangway, with one massive reproduction of a Mehretu painting hanging above each side. Three of the eight abstractions were seen in her 2020 exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery; one appeared this year at David Zwirner in a group show devoted to Toni Morrison; and four are new, incorporating dense layers of halftone dots, sprayed clouds of bright yellow or green and seething black squiggles.The staging echoes Philip Johnson’s octagonal nave of the Houston chapel, but from the opening moments of gently struck tubular bells, it’s clear that Rothko’s dark reticence is being left behind. For Mehretu’s works here are not paintings but blowups on translucent screens, lit from front and back by colored spots. (The lighting designer, James F. Ingalls, a longtime Sellars collaborator, synchronizes the color adjustments across all eight paintings so that, at a given moment in the score, their backgrounds will all glow purple or aquamarine and their tremulous blacks will emerge or recede.)Deidra “Dayntee” Braz, one of the eight dancers who performed in the Brooklyn-born style known as flex.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesUp on the gangway are eight dancers, one per painting, who bend and writhe throughout in a Brooklyn-born style of dancing known as flex. The performers are athletic, the men among them perform shirtless, but choreographed by Reggie Gray (also known as Regg Roc) they appear vulnerable, fragile, under threat; they contort their arms as if they’re fractured or disjointed and draw in their stomachs as if taking a punch.The score is rangy and spatial, the tempo largo to larghissimo. (There’s no beat as such; Sorey marked time with strokes of his baton lasting a second or longer.) Its opening minutes are especially minimal. Against a long and attenuated trill of the viola, Mehretu’s backgrounds become a lurid green or mysterious blue and the black lines of the paintings start to look more querulous. The dancers moonwalk and roll their necks; their motions are smooth and spasmodic by turns, and several of them present bulging eyes and pained expressions that recall the existential intensity of butoh.The dancers’ broken movements, and Mehretu’s colliding layers and shaking lines, bring out an anxiety in Sorey’s score that probably did not come through in front of Rothko’s hushed paintings in Houston. There’s an angst and frailty in the scattered notes Kim Kashkashian brings from her viola, while the percussionist Steven Schick bows between the bars of a marimba to produce a spooky, theremin-like keening. The silky ah-ah-ah choral lines, a Feldman quotation that I imagine worked better amid the Rothkos, feel out of place against Mehretu’s unsettled paintings, though there is sharper accompaniment from Davóne Tines, the solo bass-baritone, walking through the audience and later circumnavigating the gangway. As he wrenches forth fragments from the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” the words octaves apart and isolated by long silences, the evening takes on the tone of a funeral march.The solo bass-baritone Davóne Tines singing in front of an enlarged reproduction of a painting by Julie Mehretu, with the flex dancer Jeremy “Opt” Perez lying on the gangway below.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesSorey’s interpolation of a spiritual into “Monochromatic Light,” as well as the dancers’ channeling of Jamaican vernacular movements and the violent news imagery that Mehretu abstracts into her churning backgrounds, all imbue this threnody with the particularities of Black grief. But it resists resolution throughout. This is a work of Blackness (or blackness) in abstraction — one that defies the supposed blankness of nonobjective painting or art music on the one hand, and current market demands for social advocacy on the other. Blackness in abstraction, as the curator Adrienne Edwards has written, is a more capacious and immanent model of artistic creation than many of our institutions can handle. It requires a dual engagement with form and identity, which, in Edwards’s words, “shifts analysis away from the Black artist as subject and instead emphasizes blackness as material, method and mode.” It can draw as much from Rothko, whose murals in Houston are black with purplish-blue undertones, as from Du Bois or Eastman or O’Grady. It pushes past biography or storytelling, and enters the realms of the psychic, the global, the cosmic.What I most admired about Mehretu’s midcareer retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art last year was how she used magnitude to defy the diminishment and simplifications that even our “diversified” cultural institutions still assign to artists outside the dominant representation. Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light,” for all its spareness, does the same. Where Mehretu saturates space, Sorey vacates it, yet both painter and composer offer vital examples of how to create at full scale when the times impel others to reduce their ambition. This is how you speak to some and to all at once; this is how you mourn and stay free.Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)Through Oct. 8 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More

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      A Work of Mourning Comes to New York, With No Rothkos in Sight

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      Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” written for the Rothko Chapel in Houston, becomes longer and grander for the Park Avenue Armory.Few pieces of music are as tied to the place where they premiered as Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife).”Commissioned to honor the 50th anniversary of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Sorey’s work was first heard in February in that intimate room, surrounded by Mark Rothko’s brooding late canvases. But the site specificity goes deeper: “Monochromatic Light” closely echoes the instrumentation and the mournful, glacial style of Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” written for the space soon after it opened in the early 1970s.Sorey’s work wouldn’t seem fit for any other setting. But along with the chapel and the Houston arts organization DaCamera, the Park Avenue Armory commissioned the work, and from Tuesday through Oct. 8, “Monochromatic Light” will be presented there — with no Rothkos in sight.“We decided we wouldn’t try to recreate the experience of the Rothko Chapel,” Sorey said in an interview. “You can’t do that anywhere. You can’t redo that situation.”The Armory’s vast drill hall dwarfs the chapel, where “Monochromatic Light” was given a straightforward, concert-style presentation. The New York production, staged by the veteran director Peter Sellars, has grown to match.An octagonal playing space, nodding to the shape of the chapel in Houston, has been constructed within the drill hall. The audience — about 600, versus 150 at the premiere — is seated in the round and surrounded by eight paintings by another abstractionist, Julie Mehretu, blown up to billboard-size dimensions. A dancer is stationed in front of each painting, sinuously twisting and bending in the Brooklyn-born street dance style called flex.An octagonal performance space that nods to the Rothko Chapel in Houston has been constructed inside the Armory’s drill hall.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesSorey has added to the piece itself, bringing its length to almost 90 minutes, from 50 minutes in Houston, particularly broadening the music for the pianist Sarah Rothenberg. She also plays celesta (the only keyboard instrument in the Feldman) and is joined in the center of the space by the violist Kim Kashkashian, the percussionist Steven Schick, and Sorey, as conductor.Sorey said he knew earlier this year that “Monochromatic Light” hadn’t yet reached its final form, but simply didn’t have enough time before the premiere to write more. And the rehearsal process in New York, particularly the addition of the dancers, had inspired him.“At the Houston performances, while I was very satisfied, I felt I needed more of this experience,” he said. “In terms of having more material and developing off what we did at the chapel, now I’m at a place where it’s like, we’ve left the chapel. I’m dealing with everything the chapel stood for, but also things we’re dealing with now.”His additions had arrived in the musicians’ email inboxes just a few hours before a rehearsal on Sept. 14, on an upper floor of the Armory. The stress level in the room was high. But the meditative music, with its spacious if unsettling quiet, gradually brought down the blood pressure.With mock-ups of the Mehretu paintings on the walls, a few dancers stood in for what would eventually be the full complement of eight, while four singers — one for each voice part — represented the choir of Trinity Wall Street. The choreographer, Reggie Gray, a flex innovator also known as Regg Roc, sat to the side watching, and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines slowly walked around the space, intoning the score’s vocalizations, which can evoke fragments of the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.”Tyshawn Sorey, center right, conducting his work, which he has expanded to 90 minutes for the Armory production.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesSellars occasionally called out cues to the dancers, representing shifts in mood that would be reflected in the staging by dramatic changes in the lighting on the paintings. “The heart of the world opens,” he cried at one point; at another, “walking on the razor-blade bridge on the day of judgment.”Gray, in a joint interview with Sorey, Sellars and Mehretu, said of the dancers’ movements: “It’ll be different every single night. It’s how do the emotions go through their bodies at that time.”When he was discussing the formation of a creative team with the Armory, Sorey said, he wanted to reunite with Sellars, after working with him on several iterations of “Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine,” an evening-length recomposition of Josephine Baker songs, starting in 2016. Sellars, in turn, suggested Mehretu (with whom he had staged Kaija Saariaho’s opera “Only the Sound Remains” in 2016) and Gray (with whom he created “Flexn” at the Armory in 2015).At first, Mehretu didn’t know how closely to hew to the works in the Houston chapel. “I thought a lot about making black paintings,” she said. What she ended up producing was far more active and jittery than the Rothkos, with the swooping calligraphic gestures and kaleidoscopic, colorful flecks she is known for.“I contacted Peter as I was working and said, ‘These are not monochromatic,’” Mehretu recalled with a laugh.Among the performers are members of the choir of Trinity Wall Street, left, rehearsing here with the production’s director, Peter Sellars.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesBut, Sellars said, “a lot of the staging is monochromatic light. Seeing these paintings under these single lighting temperatures or colors, they get new identities under monochromatic light.”The underpaintings — invisible in the final works — are blurred images, mostly taken from the news, including coverage of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol and the 2017 far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va. Those ghosts of history and trauma, personal and societal, are a veiled presence, like “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” in Sorey’s score.“It’s constantly playing back as the piece is going, but you only hear it now and again,” Sorey said. “You have this musical information that is in a lot of ways inspired by that spiritual, but you only really hear it from time to time. It’s there, and it’s not there.”In Sellars’s telling, the past is invoked in this way in “Monochromatic Light” in order to heal and press toward the future. “Coming out of the two years we’re coming out of, it’s important to move forward,” he said, “The past is ongoing, but we have to move this whole thing forward.”Unlike in Houston, where audience members faced in the same direction toward the performers, the Armory’s in-the-round presentation also has political reverberations. “It’s about a society looking at itself,” Sellars said. “There is no way out; we’re all in this together. None of us is experiencing the exact same thing, but we’re with each other.”Sorey’s music, he added, “is experiential. It’s lived in; it’s an experience.”The question is how audiences will respond to an experience so long, spare, rigorous and ritualistic. “It is about endurance,” Sellars said. “How long a minute can be. Not ‘Oh, let’s change the subject.’ We’re going to stay here until we really find something. It’s a space of concentrated investing.”And the music gives the sense that it could keep on quietly expanding forever. Sorey, however, said that he thought it had reached its final form: “This feels like what it is.”Then, with a grin, he added: “I’ve got another hour to add. Easily, right?” More

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      The 1975’s Chamber-Pop Confessions, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear new tracks from Alvvays, Tyshawn Sorey, Killer Mike and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.The 1975, ‘Part of the Band’Matty Healy, the proudly enigmatic singer-songwriter of the 1975, leads his group into chamber-pop with “Part of the Band,” the first song from an album due in October, “Being Funny in a Foreign Language.” He sings about “cringes and heroin binges,” about a “vaccinista tote-bag chic barista” and about literary-minded gay liaisons — “I was Rimbaud and he was Paul Verlaine.” He also queries, “Am I ironically woke?” The production wanders from chugging string ensemble to fingerpicked folk-rock to saxophone choir, with all of them mingling near the end. It’s pandemic confusion, self-questioning and ennui, with melodies to spare. JON PARELESAlvvays, ‘Pharmacist’A plain-spoken, everyday admission — “I know you’re back, I saw your sister at the pharmacy” — kick-starts the latest single from the Canadian dream-pop band Alvvays; as soon as the vocalist Molly Rankin sings that line, the song suddenly transforms into a fantasia of melancholic melody and squalling guitars. Hints of My Bloody Valentine and Japanese Breakfast hang in the hazy atmosphere, but Rankin’s bittersweet delivery gives “Pharmacist,” the opening track from the upcoming album “Blue Rev,” a distinct emotional undertow, like a stirring dream that ends a little too soon. LINDSAY ZOLADZJulien Baker, ‘Guthrie’“Guthrie” is a quietly harrowing postscript to Julien Baker’s 2021 album “Little Oblivions” from a collection, “B-Sides,” being released later this month. Like “Little Oblivions,” the song confronts what it’s like to be an addict: “Whatever I get, I always need a little more,” she sings. But while Baker overdubbed herself into a rock band on “Little Oblivions,” in “Guthrie” she’s solo, picking a soothing waltz on her guitar as she tears into her own failings. The song is a crisis of conscience and of faith, with a voice humbled by self-knowledge. “Wanted so bad to be good,” she offers, “but there’s no such thing.” PARELESKing Princess, ‘Change the Locks’“A year without no separation just might have broke us, baby,” King Princess sings in “Change the Locks,” a song about how pandemic proximity — and friction — could destroy a relationship. It’s three-chord folk-rock that explodes into hard rock when King Princess (the Brooklyn songwriter Mikaela Strauss) realizes how bad things have gotten. She wants to hold on; she knows she can’t. PARELESFlo, ‘Immature’English R&B lags American innovations by years or sometimes decades. The vocal trio Flo is catching up with what American acts like Destiny’s Child accomplished in the 1990s: calling out male assumptions while mastering recording techniques and harnessing voices, instruments and machines to sharpen their message of self-determination. The way Flo juggles individual voices and two or three-part harmonies, flirtation and fury, harks back to Destiny’s Child, but unerringly: “Why you gotta be so immature,” they sing, adding “Tell me how can I relate/If you don’t communicate?” Even before a crying-baby sample slips into the mix, it’s easy to know who’s in the wrong. PARELESGhetto Kumbé, ‘Pila Pila (Trooko Remix)’Ghetto Kumbé is a group from Bogotá that fortifies Afro-Colombian drumming and socially conscious lyrics with electronics; it released a potent self-titled debut album in 2020 and has opened for Radiohead. The group handed over tracks from its album to various producers for “Ghetto Kumbé Clubbing Remixes,” an album due in November. “Pila Pila,” a brawny tribute to the power of drums, got reworked by the Grammy-winning Honduran producer Trooko (who worked on “Residente” and “The Hamilton Mixtape”). He revved it up even further, switching the meter from 6/4 to 4/4, moving its incantatory lead vocal to the start of the song and bringing in a hopping salsa bass line, electronic hoots, jazzy piano and twitchy drum machines, constantly hurtling ahead. PARELESKiller Mike featuring Young Thug, ‘Run’A verse from a still-jailed Young Thug only adds to the urgency of “Run,” Killer Mike’s first new track as a solo artist since his vital 2012 album “R.A.P. Music.” Across four fruitful albums with Run the Jewels, it’s become commonplace to hear Mike rapping over El-P’s kinetic, collagelike beats, but it’s refreshing here to hear him link up once again with the veteran No I.D., whose understated production allows Killer Mike to tap into a smoother flow. “The race to freedom ain’t won,” he raps on the chorus, providing some welcome counterprogramming to your standard Independence Day jingoism. ZOLADZDomi & JD Beck (featuring Anderson .Paak), ‘Take a Chance’Jazz might be one of the only spaces left where the term “internet star” still means anything. Domi & JD Beck are Exhibit A, a duo of virtuosic post-jazz Zoomers who seem to have leaped out of a cartoon, and whose wow factor is suited to the small screen: A blond keyboardist rips solos while a diminutive drummer taps out hyper-contained, hyperactive beats. References to jazz history are funneled into the aesthetics of a sped-up TV jingle. Domi and Beck have found a champion in Anderson .Paak, and their debut album, “Not Tight,” is being jointly released by his new label and Blue Note Records. Redolent of lounge, ’70s fusion, trip-hop and breakbeat, this LP offers the nonstop dopamine drip of a doom-scroll, and it’s heavy on star features: Thundercat, Snoop Dogg and Mac DeMarco all pull up. “Take a Chance” is their moment with Paak, and if his earnest, rapped pledges of devotion don’t exactly square with the song’s feel-good vibes and the geometrically sound pop hook that Domi and Beck sing, you’re hard-pressed to hold it against them. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOTyshawn Sorey Trio, ‘Enchantment’A multi-instrumentalist, composer, University of Pennsylvania professor and MacArthur “genius” grantee, Tyshawn Sorey is likely to be found writing suite-length experimental works, or serving as composer in residence with an opera company, or conjuring up new systems for group improvisation. It’s been a long time since anyone really thought of him as “just” a jazz drummer. So, for Sorey, recording an album of standards with a piano trio qualifies as a curve ball. Of course, he has a big fondness for throwing curves. Sorey recently joined up with the pianist Aaron Diehl, one of jazz’s standard-bearing traditionalists, and the versatile bassist Matt Brewer to record “Mesmerism,” an album of jazz classics and lesser-known pieces from the canon. Horace Silver’s “Enchantment” is usually played as a tautly rhythmic samba, but the trio retrofits it, with Diehl putting the lush precision of his harmonies to work over a loose-limbed, shuffling beat from Sorey. RUSSONELLO More

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      50 Years Later, the Rothko Chapel Meets a New Musical Match

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      Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” written for the chapel’s anniversary, is a tribute to the first music performed in the space.Before Tyshawn Sorey composed a note of his latest work, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, he spent hours inside its octagonal temple containing more than a dozen dark canvases.Immersing himself in Mark Rothko’s fields of seeming black, Sorey noticed that the paintings shifted subtly over time — and that time itself appeared to dissolve. The colors changed to match the sun coming through the chapel’s skylight. When he would go outside and return, his adjusting eyes made it feel as though the works were coming to life.Few people can give Rothko the time or space to perceive what Sorey saw. But “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” something of a sonic distillation of what he experienced, might give them an idea. Written for the chapel’s 50th anniversary — and delayed a year because of the pandemic — his new work will premiere there on Saturday, ahead of a staged presentation at the Park Avenue Armory in New York this fall.The piece is in part a tribute to one of Sorey’s heroes, the composer Morton Feldman, whose “Rothko Chapel” was written in 1971 for the building, a project by the arts philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil. Feldman’s piece — scored for percussion, celesta, viola, choir and soprano — was an abstract analogue to Rothko’s canvases. Deceptively formless, it is music to be inhabited. But near the end, the viola plays what Feldman called a “quasi-Hebraic melody” that he composed as a teenager, an invocation of and memorial to his (and Rothko’s) heritage.The Feldman is “a special piece,” said Sarah Rothenberg, the artistic director of the presenting organization DaCamera, which, with the chapel, commissioned Sorey’s premiere. “It’s a remarkable synergy between space and music that has become a kind of ambassador.”In conceiving a 50th-anniversary commission, a new ambassador was desired. Sorey came to mind, Rothenberg said, because of how he engages with the history of Black Americans — a parallel to the chapel’s civil rights-minded mission. And his style, she knew, had been shaped by Feldman.Sorey, 41, was first exposed to Feldman’s music in college, when he heard his teacher Anton Vishio practicing “Piano.” “It was just beautiful,” Sorey said, adding that the music, its sonorities and its patience “really spoke to me more than anything else I was listening to at the time. Pretty much any composition I’ve written is in some ways inspired by Morton Feldman. It’s hard to shake off such an influence.”Maurice Peress conducting the premiere of Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel” in 1972.Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Hickey-Roberston, via Rothko Chapel ArchivesAlong with other influences, including Roscoe Mitchell, Feldman taught Sorey the goal of reaching a place in music where time no longer seems to exist and a listener can become truly present in the moment. “Every sound has its own world at that point,” Sorey said. “You could talk about the technical parts, but the quality that I want to get out of it is presentness.”For “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” he chose virtually the same instrumentation as “Rothko Chapel” — in a way that the director Peter Sellars, who will stage the piece at the Armory, said reflects lineage in music, “how your granddaughter has your grandmother’s eyes.” But in lieu of the quasi-Hebraic melody, Sorey quotes, in his refracted style, the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” He added a piano (played by Rothenberg, doubling on celesta) and changed the soprano soloist to a bass, which he felt better matched the tone of the paintings.Sellars recalled that when he went over the score with Sorey for the first time, they looked at the part and, more or less at the same time, said who they wanted to sing it: the bass-baritone Davóne Tines. Sorey has contributed treatments of spirituals to Tines’s “Mass” recital program, a collaboration that began after Tines first heard what would become “Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine,” Sorey’s evening-length work inspired by the life of Josephine Baker, written for the soprano Julia Bullock.“I realized he was able to open meaning in text by recreating it in his voice,” Tines said. Together he and Sorey have revisited the catalog of spirituals, because, Tines said, “Tyshawn is able to reveal the truer psychology of what those songs mean.”The Rothko canvases, Sorey said, change color with the sun coming through the skylight.Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Michael Starghill Jr. for The New York TimesFeldman referred to “Rothko Chapel” as a “secular service.” While Sorey emphasized that Feldman is just one of the influences on “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” the idea of a secular service is what he aims for; it’s why he prefers to call his performances rituals. And it permeates this work, beginning with the first measure: Lasting indefinitely, it is a dissolution of time in which tubular bells resonate at near silence, with pitches of two chords struck at random as the other performers enter the space.“It’s kind of a similar feeling to when I first walked into the chapel,” Sorey said. “It’s almost this cathartic sort of emotion, the moment you get when you walk in there; it’s like a religious experience. So by having the resonant sound happening, and you’re not sure what to make of it — it’s almost a ceremonial, spiritual thing going on. You’re eliminating any sort of external obstacles, for that type of clarity that I think Rothko was always going for in his art.”Once the choir joins later, its members sing without vibrato, staggering their breaths to create seamlessly suspended streams of sound that, Sorey said, are not unlike the paintings surrounding them.“To me, the voices are like these panels,” he added. “The sonorities are expressive, expressing a certain type of emotion, like tragedy or grief. So like Rothko, my sonorities and the way I choose to use these voices is not so much about being abstract as much as expressing this feelingful experience. And I’m seeing the listener being surrounded by these ever-changing emotions.”“Like Rothko, my sonorities and the way I choose to use these voices is not so much about being abstract as much as expressing this feelingful experience.”Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Michael Starghill Jr. for The New York TimesFew people — about 300 people over two performances — will get to experience the premiere this weekend. But there are plans to release an album of the work on the ECM label, as a follow-up to its 2015 release of “Rothko Chapel,” which featured artists, including Rothenberg, who return for “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife).”Then, in late September, the piece will travel to the Armory, where the audience will be immersed in panels by Julie Mehretu, an artist whose abstractions share preoccupations with Sorey and Rothko. On the surface, this cavernous space could not be more different from the intimate chapel. But, Sellars said, “what’s beautiful about the Armory is, it can create the occasion for something.”He continued: “What Tyshawn is creating is memorial space. Rothko and Feldman created memorial space from silence, from grief, from darkness, where you could feel the presence of erased histories and erased lives that are nonetheless present and moving and speaking within these fields of darkness. ­Feldman and Rothko brought their histories to that space. And I think this group of artists will, too.”Details are still being worked out — such as whether to hide the choir — but at the very least, Sorey said, it will “become more intensified” than the presentation in Houston.“How can we make it more of a ritualistic or ceremonial event?” he added. “How can we intensify the spiritual, metaphysical matter in which the piece is received? That’s what I want: to really magnify that experience.” More