Women and Girls

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Want More Diverse Conductors? Orchestras Should Look to Assistants.

      by

      At top American ensembles, young assistant conductors are a far more varied group than the reigning music directors. How can the next generation come to power?It is one of the indelible star-is-born moments in music history: Leonard Bernstein, the 25-year-old assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, fills in at short notice for an ailing maestro and leads the orchestra in a concert broadcast live over the radio, causing a sensation.“It’s a good American success story,” The New York Times wrote in an editorial, following a front-page review of the 1943 coup. “The warm, friendly triumph of it filled Carnegie Hall and spread over the airwaves.”Fifteen years later, Bernstein was the Philharmonic’s music director. And the dream of ascending from the assistantship of a major American orchestra to its leadership — like rising up a corporate ladder — was cemented in the popular imagination.There are still assistant conductors, bright, talented 20- and 30-somethings hired by orchestras for stints of a few years. Indeed, there are more of them than ever, and they go by a variety of titles: assistant, associate, fellow, resident. Almost every major orchestra has at least one, and they still fill the traditional duties of Bernstein’s time: sitting in the concert hall during rehearsals to check balances and mark up scores; conducting offstage groups of musicians for certain pieces; and, of course, being ready to take the podium in case of emergency. But it is rare to see them ascend to the top jobs.And that may be a missed opportunity. When Marin Alsop steps down from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra this summer, it will leave the top tier of American ensembles as it was before she took the post in 2007: without a single female music director. This group has had only one Black music director, and just a handful of leaders have been Latino or of Asian descent.Yue Bao, the conducting fellow at the Houston Symphony, will make her debut with the Chicago Symphony at the Ravinia Festival this summer.Michael Starghill Jr. for The New York Times“It’s been a paternalistic industry to some degree for a long time,” Kim Noltemy, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s chief executive, said in an interview. “In the last 20 years it’s changed quite a bit, but there’s lag time for the top-level leadership, whether it’s management or conductors.”But it is a very different story when you look at the country’s assistants, a far more diverse group in which women and musicians of color have found success in recent years.Now there is a chance for those assistant conductors to become more than just another set of ears in a darkened auditorium. They provide an opportunity to fast-track greater diversity at historically slow-evolving institutions. The question now is how soon they will enter the topmost ranks — and whether, as major orchestras search for music directors in the coming years, they will look toward the crowd right under their noses.“It’s great to have a BIPOC assistant conductor,” said Jonathan Rush, the assistant conductor in Baltimore, who is Black, referring to the acronym for Black, Indigenous and people of color. “To have that in place is awesome. But there are still not many opportunities for you to be that person that a younger musician can look up to. Yes, I get education concerts, they’re awesome, but we would have greater impact if we were music directors.”As community engagement and outreach efforts have broadened nationwide, and become more central for leading orchestras, many assistants have added those activities to their portfolios, too. And during the coronavirus pandemic, when many artists abroad were grounded, some assistants took on new prominence. Vinay Parameswaran, the Cleveland Orchestra’s associate conductor, who had spent a few years mainly doing family concerts and leading the ensemble’s youth orchestra, unexpectedly found himself conducting multiple major programs on Cleveland’s subscription streaming platform.Vinay Parameswaran, the Cleveland Orchestra’s associate conductor, got higher-profile assignments during the pandemic. Gabriela Hasbun for The New York TimesThe differences between the assistant ranks of the top 25 American orchestras and those orchestras’ music directors can hardly be overstated. The Dallas Symphony, for example, has had three assistants since 2013, all women; one of them, Karina Canellakis, is now the chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic. Both of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s conducting apprentices since 2015 have been women. In that period, the Minnesota Orchestra’s assistants have been Roderick Cox, one of the few Black conductors appearing with leading orchestras and major opera houses, and Akiko Fujimoto, who became the music director of the small Mid-Texas Symphony in 2019.Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, who was a conducting fellow and then an assistant conductor with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has become a star, leading the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in England and making recordings for Deutsche Grammophon. Gemma New, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s resident conductor until last year, is now principal guest conductor in Dallas and led the New York Philharmonic’s Memorial Day concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.But there are still pervasive, sometimes pernicious assumptions about what a music director must look and act like — who can hobnob with donors, who can help sell tickets. And, Bernstein’s model aside, there is no clear pipeline from assistantships to directorships at top American orchestras, the way there are at many corporations.Of the current music directors in the top tier, only a handful started as assistants at the kind of orchestra they now lead. (And, in a sign of how insular this world is, two of that handful, Michael Stern, now in Kansas City, and Ken-David Masur, in Milwaukee, are the sons of musical royalty, the violinist Isaac Stern and the conductor Kurt Masur.)Andrés Orozco-Estrada, now the Houston Symphony’s music director, is the rare conductor to live the Bernstein dream, but he didn’t do it in the United States: He was an assistant at the Tonkünstler Orchestra in Vienna in the early 2000s, then rose a few years later to become its principal conductor. (European orchestras have trailed American ones in codifying assistant programs; the traditional conductor career path in Europe, especially German-speaking countries, goes through opera houses, not symphonies.)Stephanie Childress, the St. Louis Symphony’s assistant conductor, made her debut leading the orchestra in April.Dilip VishwanatThe experience paradox is part of the problem. Top orchestras demand their conductors be seasoned, particularly if they’re going to appear on prestigious subscription series. But if you don’t already have that experience, it’s hard to get it.“There are some people who are professional assistants, basically, or just they go from assistantship to assistantship,” Stephanie Childress, the St. Louis Symphony’s current assistant, said, pointing to the sense that some talented artists just cycle within those ranks without rising further.But orchestra officials insist that things are changing, accelerated by the jolt of the pandemic and the calls over the past year for greater racial and ethnic diversity.“The way it’s always been is all being rethought now,” Noltemy said, adding that resistance has been wearing down among players and listeners. “‘The orchestra won’t accept it; the audience won’t accept it’ — that has been completely deconstructed.”There are ways of increasing the chances of today’s assistants becoming tomorrow’s music directors. Orchestras could deepen their investments in their assistant programs, adding positions to broaden the pool of talent getting experience and exposure. There should be a greater commitment to giving assistants slots on subscription programs as part of their contracts; this is one Covid necessity that could fruitfully outlive the pandemic.Ensembles should make a point of looking to other organizations’ assistants when hiring for gigs. That does happen sometimes: Yue Bao, currently the conducting fellow at the Houston Symphony and a major presence in that orchestra’s streaming over the past year, will make her debut with the Chicago Symphony at the Ravinia Festival this summer.Matías Tarnopolsky, the chief executive of the Philadelphia Orchestra, said he would like to see a kind of consortium program that could rotate assistants among several top institutions, giving them broader experience. “Could a conducting fellowship be multiensemble,” Tarnopolsky said, “either within the U.S. or around the world, bridging symphony and new-music ensemble? Then you really expand the learning.”The pandemic has transformed Jonathan Rush’s time as an assistant conductor. “It’s definitely been different,” he said. “But I wouldn’t have gotten as much podium time. I’ve gotten to conduct the orchestra every single week.”Nate Palmer for The New York TimesAnd if a young conductor has a success, let it snowball. In Baltimore, Rush appeared just before the pandemic as part of the orchestra’s Symphony in the City series, and was then asked to join its next assistant conductor audition, planned for June 2020.That audition was canceled as the virus spread, but in July, Rush got another call. “Hey, listen,” he recalled the orchestra saying, “the musicians keep raving about your work in February, and we would like to invite you to be assistant conductor for the 2020-21 season.”“It’s definitely been different,” Rush added of assisting during the pandemic, which has included regular work with the orchestra’s streaming programs. “But I wouldn’t have gotten as much podium time. I’ve gotten to conduct the orchestra every single week. ”Ensembles should have a plan for continuing relationships with their assistants as those young conductors move on. Marie-Hélène Bernard, the chief executive of the St. Louis Symphony, said the organization had made a commitment to invite Gemma New every season as a guest conductor now that her resident contract is over.“For her, we have a trusted relationship,” Bernard said. “She can step outside of her comfort level and take musical risks she might not take with other orchestras she hasn’t yet visited. Nurturing is not just for the time she’s here with us.”Ruth Reinhardt, an assistant conductor in Dallas, drew raves when she jumped in for an ailing maestro. “Hopefully as we get older,” she said, “we’ll move up the ranks.”Sylvia ElzafonThis is the work that can help turn the encouragingly diverse landscape of assistant conductors into the future of the country’s top music directorships. “Getting a replacement for Marin isn’t even a tipping point,” Noltemy said, referring to Alsop’s departure from Baltimore. “The tipping point would be a significant number of women in positions in the top orchestras in the U.S.”But the field will not get there without taking risks. Ruth Reinhardt had just started as an assistant in Dallas in 2016 when she was tapped to jump in for a subscription program, replacing a veteran conductor who’d suffered a stroke. Scott Cantrell, the Dallas Morning News critic, raved: “Few artistic experiences are as exciting as witnessing a brilliant debut by a young musician.”It worked for Bernstein; we’ll see if it works for this new generation. “When I started conducting 15 years ago or so,” Reinhardt said, “people would openly tell you that you couldn’t do this as a woman. And things are changing. The jobs are more available. Hopefully as we get older, we’ll move up the ranks.” More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Marina’s Music Was Caught Between Worlds. Now She’s Making Her Own.

      by

      The musician’s albums reveal an intriguing if uneasy dialogue with her own pop persona. Her fifth LP, “Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land,” is a firm statement of self.LOS ANGELES — Marina Diamandis moved from London to Los Angeles during the pandemic fall, but she has already discovered some of the city’s trendiest literary emissaries. “Eve Babitz didn’t get her due,” she said recently, scanning the shelves at West Hollywood’s Book Soup for the author’s “Slow Days, Fast Company,” a cult favorite of California-set vignettes. “Joan Didion kind of eclipsed her.” With a wry smirk, she added, “There’s only ever room for one woman.”The 35-year-old singer known as Marina (formerly Marina & the Diamonds) is fed up with this myth of scarcity on her fifth album, “Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land,” due on June 11. “I don’t want to live in a man’s world anymore,” she proclaims in her sterling soprano on its first single, “Man’s World.” The accompanying video, directed by Alexandra Gavillet, features women of various ages, sizes and ethnicities standing like placid warriors in Technicolor tunics.The music business is its own kind of man’s world, and Diamandis has been navigating its waters since her 2010 debut, “The Family Jewels,” a boisterous collection of piano ballads, synth-pop and theatrical hip checks. “Along with British songwriters like Lily Allen and Kate Nash, she’s redefining songs about coming of age, and the aftermath, with bluntness and crafty intelligence,” The New York Times’s chief pop critic, Jon Pareles, wrote just ahead of its release.Three more albums followed between 2012 and 2019 that saw Diamandis wrestling with embracing and rejecting the mandates of the industry — striving for mainstream acceptance then pulling back, making music with the flavor of an indie artist in a major label ecosystem. The ambitious “Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land” is another kind of calibration. “The way that we treat people is linked to our connection to the planet,” she said while discussing its second single, the propulsive “Purge the Poison.” (It also has a remix featuring Pussy Riot.) “It’s all tied to a degrading of femininity. Across this album, there’s such a yearning for a focus on the feminine.”In 2019, Diamandis put out a call on social media looking for female collaborators. Sifting through recommendations from fans and friends, she formed a team that included Gavillet, the photographer Coughs and the producer Jennifer Decilveo, who has worked with Beth Ditto and Bat for Lashes. Decilveo and Diamandis, who teamed on those first two singles, wrote music together at Diamandis’s West Hollywood home over Sunbasket meal-kit dishes that she had prepared.“This is going to sound taboo, but I was drawn to the fact that Marina’s a woman, and I’m one of the only female producers in the business, and we spoke each other’s language,” Decilveo said in a phone interview. “She’s the real deal and, in this strange pop market, it’s refreshing to have somebody with lyrics that are going against the grain.”With a singsong rhythm punctuated by snare drums, Diamandis impersonates Mother Nature avenging human failures on “Purge the Poison,” including capitalism, racism, pollution, Harvey Weinstein and the treatment of her beloved Britney Spears. “On ‘Purge,’ I wasn’t trying to be nice,” Decilveo added. “I knew it needed to be a sock in the face.”The second half of “Ancient Dreams” is more inward-focused — a breakup album —  including “Highly Emotional People,” a delicate ballad interrogating male stoicism, and the plangent closer, “Goodbye.” During the pandemic, Diamandis split from her longtime boyfriend, Jack Patterson of the British electro-pop band Clean Bandit, with whom she shared a house and several cats.“On ‘Goodbye’ I was crying so hard as I was writing it that I actually couldn’t record the demo properly,” she said during a stroll near her home. Her candy-striped sundress accommodated the stifling April weather, and she covered her inky black hair with a straw hat. “Songwriting is the best cure,” she added.Growing up in a small town in Wales, Diamandis said she never demonstrated any aptitude for music, except for singing Oasis’s “Wonderwall” once when she was 9 “by the fireplace like a little Victorian child.” As a teenager, she moved to her father’s native Greece and recalled returning with “a burning, raging urge to be a singer.” She began writing and releasing music on Myspace.Over the years, Diamandis’s albums have revealed an intriguing if uneasy dialogue with her own pop persona, beginning with “The Family Jewels,” which showcased her impressive vocal range and heralded a confident, unpredictable new artist.“She was ahead of the curve,” said Derek Davies, her longtime friend and A&R representative, and a co-founder of Neon Gold Records, which released her first singles in the United States. “At the time, it was all about huge melodies and Max Martin. Marina was writing these deeply personal lyrics, which probably impeded her commercial radio viability.”“Across this album, there’s such a yearning for a focus on the feminine,” Diamandis said.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesFor her 2012 follow-up, “Electra Heart,” Diamandis said she felt pressured by her major label to work with au courant hitmakers like Diplo and Stargate. The experiment yielded the gold-certified single “Primadonna,” written with a team including Dr. Luke, which bore the influence of Diamandis’s tour dates opening for Katy Perry, but flattened her idiosyncratic style.“Post ‘Electra Heart,’ I felt kind of ashamed, like this isn’t really who I am,” Diamandis said. She pulled out her phone and unearthed a nasty review of that album that left a mark. But the intervening years have changed her mind: “Now I think it was a really cool, dark, subversive pop record that was using the American system to elevate myself as an artist. I wouldn’t do it again, but it kind of changed my life.”Diamandis wrested back songwriting control for her 2015 album, “Froot,” which became her highest-charting LP in the United States. “‘Froot’ mellowed that quite aggressive need for validation,” she said, but it raised a fresh concern: “Did that mean that I don’t have any ambition and I shouldn’t be an artist?” Diamandis was living in London with Patterson, but felt she had been more warmly embraced in America. She went on hiatus, pursuing everything from psychology to falconry. “That was probably the worst period of my adult life,” she said.Four years later, Diamandis dropped the Diamonds from her moniker, and returned with “Love + Fear.” She once again relied on cowriters, including OzGo (Pink) and Joel Little (Lorde, Taylor Swift), and as a result achieved “a more commercial sound,” she said. It armed her with both the confidence to finally leave her British management and switch to Atlantic’s U.S. division, and to revert to writing solo on “Ancient Dreams,” which she considers her best album.“It’s the closest cousin in the discography to that first record,” Davies said. “It’s her most indie, alternative record yet.”It’s also her strongest political statement, and for that she partly credits this strange and terrifying past year. “I would hope people don’t hear it as preaching,” she said. “The pandemic allowed a lot of us to step back and look at what kind of lives we’re living, and nothing feels sustainable.”Diamandis already noticed pushback online to some of her positions on current issues. “I like seeing comments like, ‘She used capitalism to get where she is,’ because it does make me think about my own place,” she continued. “But we’re all allowed to challenge the system that we’re in.” More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      A Writer’s One-Act Plays Debut, Continuing Her Resurrection

      by

      By staging Kathleen Collins’s rich psychological portraits of Black women, a theatrical group aims to enlighten, heal and inspire.“No one is going to mythologize my life,” the playwright and filmmaker Kathleen Collins said in 1984 to a group of film students at Howard University. “No one is going to refuse me the right to explore my experiences of life as normal experiences.”Collins’s insistence on portraying the ordinariness of African American women’s lives rather than reproducing the Hollywood narratives that pathologized or mythologized them is resonating with a new generation of Black women artists who have recently discovered Collins and her work. Part of what makes Collins’s writing so appealing is her attention to the complex internal struggles and external journeys, of what Elizabeth Alexander calls those “Bohemian Black women” who often work as artists and academics, and have a robust intellectual life. Because she renders them with such care and imbues them with such vulnerability, her characters have heightened insights and are aware that they are both liberated and alienated by their knowledge of how others see and stereotype them.Such rich psychological portraits of Black women are what originally drew Afrofemononomy, a group of Black femme theater artists, to Collins’s plays. In addition to adapting that Howard University speech into a monologue, they are also performing “Begin the Beguine,” a quartet of Collins’s one-acts that have never been produced before.Over the past two weekends, under a program titled “Work the Roots,” Afrofemononomy performed the title play “Begin the Beguine,” about the actress Ruby Dee and her son, the blues guitarist Guy Davis, as well as “The Healing,” “The Reading” and “Remembrance” at various locations in New York City (from a lawn in Harlem to a park in Bedford-Stuyvesant). On Saturday, May 29, they will present the premiere of a mixed-media installation called “Gold Taste” that is a response to “The Essentialisn’t,” a theatrical work by one of the group’s members, Eisa Davis. The piece will be available for viewing until June 27 at Performance Space New York’s Keith Haring Theater.Jennifer Harrison Newman dances with audience members as part of the performance.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe debut of Collins’s plays is part of a continuing resurrection of her works after her death from breast cancer in 1988 at the age of 46. Largely because of her daughter Nina Lorez Collins’s commitment to preserving her mother’s legacy, we are now able to access the gifts of Collins’s ambitions and archive, including the theatrical release in 2015 of her 1982 film, “Losing Ground”; the publication of her short story collection “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?” in 2016; and, in 2019, the arrival of “Notes From a Black Woman’s Diary,” a mélange of her short stories, plays, diary entries and film scripts.Davis, an actress and playwright recently seen in HBO’s “Mare of Easttown,” first became acquainted with Collins’s writing when she was asked to do a public reading of Collins’s short stories at the Brooklyn Public Library in 2017. But, she now realizes, Collins has been with her a lot longer. “She is a literary foremother for me that has just been under my nose all this time,” Davis said. “When Nina first gave me these plays, I was like, ‘Kathleen Collins, Kathleen Collins, Kathleen Collins,’ and then I looked at my bookshelf and I found ‘9 Plays by Black Women,’ an anthology from the 1980s, and her ‘The Brothers’ in there. It’s the only play of hers that was ever produced, [a production of the Women’s Project, now WP Theater] at American Place Theater.”A line from Collins’s play “Remembrance” on a wall at Performance Space New York reads, “Last night, I dreamt I danced in the image of God.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOnce she read Collins’s other plays, she immediately shared them with her friends and other Black female theater artists with whom she frequently collaborated in the most quotidian of ways: over dinner, on museum trips and visits to the beach, via texts, after seeing plays together, and, in the past year, over Zoom. By 2019, their casual interest in Collins’s plays turned into the more concrete idea of staging and sharing them with the broader public.“In a lot of ways, this was an attempt to take the model of our friendship and then apply it to the conditions under which we collaborate,” Davis said.The director Lileana Blain-Cruz (“Marys Seacole”) said learning about Collins’s plays enabled her to take different risks. For the project, she has thoughtfully transformed Collins’s “The Reading,” a 30-minute play that anticipated our conversations about racial microaggressions today. Set in a Black psychic’s waiting room, a tense conversation ensues between Marguerite (Kara Young), a Black fashion designer, and Helen (Amelia Workman), a white romance novelist. As Helen tries to assert her entitlement, Marguerite pushes back, and eventually denies Helen an opportunity to take up the space that she, as a white woman, feels obligated to inhabit.Amelia Workman in “The Reading.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAudience members at the performance.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesFood, books and more were on display.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“For me, the celebration and the exploration collectively around Kathleen Collins’s work is another way of seeing each other before we even knew how to see each other in existence and collectivity,” she said. “That, for me, is really moving because I was like, ‘Oh, this is somebody that I should have known.’” She added, “Now I get to discover, and I don’t have to discover alone.”In addition to the moving performance by individual actors, these plays, which were not open to critics to review, were made even more engaging because of the casting and staging. Collins wrote “The Healing” and “The Reading” with white characters but because Afrofemononomy cast from within their group, they provided a space in which Black actresses were always front and center. This gesture was intensified by the intimacy of their set. At the end of “The Reading,” the audience was led by the actress Jennifer Harrison Newman to dance with the cast, an invitation that turned the luminescent installation and graffiti scrawled wall that read “Last night, I dreamt I danced in the image of God” (a line from another Collins play in the quartet) into a communal party celebrating Black women’s creativity.April Matthis, left, and Stacey Karen Robinson perform “Begin the Beguine,” by Kathleen Collins, at El Barrio’s Artspace PS109 in Manhattan. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBy inviting us to these tender moments in which Collins’s Black female characters pull back their layers, the performances themselves transport both those fictional characters and this real-life Black cast far beyond the strict racial and gender categories that envelop them and us.“These are stories about the interior lives of Black women,” Nina Lorez Collins told me. “One of the reasons I like the “Begin the Beguine” is because it is about race, but it is also not. It’s really about the interior life of this artist, this young woman. And I just don’t think we’ve seen anything like it.” As avant-garde as Collins’s characters were in her time, they still remain singular today, giving us rare social insights into how we can navigate our unique moment of slowly returning to each other, to public spaces, and ultimately, live, in-person performances. In the foreword to “Notes From a Black Woman’s Diary,” the fiction writer Danielle Evans described Collins as “a master of the moments when the interior becomes the exterior, when all pretense drops away.”This blurring between our inner selves and the identities projected back onto Black women was at the heart of Afrofemononomy’s take on “Remembrance,” described as “a kind of personal séance.” Under the directorial consultation of Jackie Sibblies Drury (“Fairview”) and featuring Davis as The Woman and Kaneza Schaal as Collins talking to the Howard students, this becomes a conversation between two Black women who, while each giving their own monologue — one taking place in a bathroom, the other at a lectern — end up, at times, dissolving into each other. All the while they demand the audience see Black women in public with the same clarity that we see ourselves in private.April Matthis and Stacey Karen Robinson performed “Begin the Beguine” at El Barrio’s Artspace PS109 in Manhattan. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBut such revelations and reversal of gazes will also be critical to large swaths of the American theater community that is still grappling with debates about inclusion, equity and white gatekeepers as it seeks to attend to the harm of racism, and institutionalize the healing that Collins’s vision offers for her Black characters and for the Black female theater artists who embody them.After spending two weeks performing, and a couple of years studying Collins, Afrofemononomy decided to close with Davis’s music theater piece “The Essentialisn’t” in the group installation “Gold Taste,” and reimagine a much earlier moment when the Harlem Renaissance writers W.E.B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen debated racial representations in their era. It begins with the ever vexed question, “Can You Be Black and Not Perform?”Extending Collins’s legacy to Davis, the Afrofemononomy member Kaneza Schaal said, “Eisa is [also] sitting on a trove of plays she has written. And it is up to us, to see to it, that our own daughters are not the first people to produce that work.” She continued, “It is urgent to address Davis and Collins simultaneously. The intellectual harmony Eisa creates with her foremothers is astounding, and yet another extension of this fabric.”The Essentialisn’t: Gold Taste installationMay 29-June 27 at Performance Space New York, 150 First Avenue; performancespacenewyork.org. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      A ‘Hamilton’ Star Discovers Lunatic Comedy With ‘Girls5eva’

      by

      Renée Elise Goldsberry plays a delusional diva reuniting a girl group in a music biz satire executive produced by Tina Fey. It’s her midcareer moment.It could have happened in her early 20s, fresh from college, with a face like a cherub and lungs like a hurricane, when she booked an understudy role in a Broadway-bound show that never arrived. Or 10 years later, when she moved to Los Angeles and sang with a jazz ensemble. Or five years after that, back in New York for a run on “One Life to Live,” or in the decade following, spent bounding between plays and short TV stints. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Tina Turner and Jay-Z Lead Rock Hall of Fame’s 2021 Inductees

      by

      Foo Fighters, the Go-Go’s, Carole King and Todd Rundgren were also voted in, meaning nearly half of the 15 individuals in this year’s class are women.For years, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has been pummeled by criticism that its inductees — the marble busts in the pantheon of rock — were too homogeneous, and that the secretive insiders who create the ballots showed a troubling pattern of excluding women.This year the voters seem to have listened: The class of 2021 features Jay-Z, Foo Fighters, the Go-Go’s, Carole King, Tina Turner and Todd Rundgren — a collection of 15 individuals that includes seven women.That ratio alone should lend a new energy to the 36th annual induction ceremony, planned for Oct. 30 at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland.In past years, when women have been inducted, they have been far outnumbered by men. In 2019, for example, Stevie Nicks and Janet Jackson may have stood triumphant, but their earnest speeches — Jackson: “Please induct more women” — did not seem to last as long as it took to name every male bass player of the rock bands that joined alongside them.Dave Grohl, center, and the members of Foo Fighters. Grohl is already in the hall as a member of Nirvana.Magdalena Wosinska for The New York TimesThe latest inductees show a balance of genre and generation that has come to be a feature of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s expanding tent. Foo Fighters, led by Dave Grohl, represent the cream of 1990s-vintage alternative rock. Jay-Z is rap incarnate. And the Go-Go’s stand for joyful, upbeat 1980s power-pop.Each of those acts was a first-time nominee, although the Go-Go’s — the first and only all-woman rock band to score a No. 1 album on Billboard’s chart — have been eligible since 2006. (Artists can be nominated 25 years after the release of their first recording.)The Go-Go’s in the early 1980s: from left, Kathy Valentine, Jane Wiedlin, Gina Schock, Charlotte Caffey and Belinda Carlisle.Paul Natkin/WireImageRundgren, the prolific producer and multi-instrumentalist, occupies the role of the auteur from classic rock’s flowering in the late 1960s and early ’70s; Turner is a force of nature whose career has stretched from old-school R&B to MTV-era pop; and King is the singer-songwriter and conscience who brings gravitas to the proceedings.Three of this year’s inductees were already in the hall: Grohl as a member of Nirvana, Turner with Ike and Tina Turner, and King as a nonperformer, with her songwriting partner and former husband Gerry Goffin.The story of the inductions is also told by who didn’t make the cut. The voters — a group of more than 1,000 artists, journalists and industry veterans — decided against the bands Iron Maiden, Devo, New York Dolls and Rage Against the Machine, as well as Kate Bush, Mary J. Blige, Chaka Khan and Dionne Warwick.The Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti would have been the first Black musician from Africa to join the hall, but was not voted in this year. Leni Sinclair/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesFela Kuti, the Nigerian-born pioneer of Afrobeat, had been the surprise nominee this year, and was one of the artists chosen in the Hall of Fame’s fan vote — an online public poll that creates a single official ballot — thanks in part to support from African stars like Burna Boy. Kuti would have been the first Black artist from Africa to join the hall, but he failed in his first time on the ballot. (Trevor Rabin of Yes is from South Africa, and Freddie Mercury of Queen was born in Zanzibar, now part of Tanzania; both bands are in the Hall of Fame.)And LL Cool J, a titan of hip-hop who also received high-profile support this year, lost after a sixth nomination. But he has been given a musical excellence award, for people “whose originality and influence creating music have had a dramatic impact on music.” This category was once known as the sidemen award, but it is also something of a consolation prize: The producer and guitarist Nile Rodgers won it in 2017 after Chic, his band, was passed over 11 times.The other musical excellence recipients this year include Billy Preston, the keyboardist who was a frequent collaborator of the Beatles, and Randy Rhoads, a guitarist with Ozzy Osbourne.Also this year, the Ahmet Ertegun Award, for nonperformers, will go to the record executive Clarence Avant, and “early influence” trophies will go to Gil Scott-Heron, Charley Patton and Kraftwerk, the German electronic pioneers who had been nominated for induction six times.The induction ceremony is to be broadcast later on HBO and streamed on HBO Max. More

    • 100 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Where Is Country Music Making Room for Women?

      by

      For the last several years, the obstacles female performers face in country music have been widely documented and discussed, yet conditions haven’t improved much. The genre favors a handful of big stars, and offers few opportunities for growth to younger ones.That said, recently some rising singers — Gabby Barrett, Carly Pearce, Ingrid Andress, Lainey Wilson — have found success on the historically inhospitable country radio airwaves. And TikTok has provided an avenue to getting heard that elides Nashville infrastructure altogether, allowing performers like Priscilla Block a side door to a wide fan base, and then a record deal.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the myriad ongoing barriers faced by women in the country music business, and the ways they are manifested in the music itself.Guests:Marissa Moss, co-author of the Don’t Rock the Inbox newsletter and author of a forthcoming book on women in country music, “Where Have All the Cowgirls Gone?”Natalie Weiner, co-author of the Don’t Rock the Inbox newsletter and writer about music for Billboard and others More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘In Our Mothers’ Gardens’ Review: Creating Space for Black Women

      by

      The Netflix documentary sets out to show how maternal lineages have shaped generations of Black women.In the meditative documentary “In Our Mothers’ Gardens” (streaming on Netflix), the stories could warm a room in any season. Opening with a quote from Alice Walker, whose book “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” inspired the film’s title, the documentary sets out to show how Black maternal lineages have shaped the idea of Black womanhood.The director Shantrelle P. Lewis, who also appears in the film as a subject, weaves together interviews with Black women from a variety of backgrounds, including the activist Tarana Burke, the entrepreneur Latham Thomas and Professor Brittney Cooper, the author of “Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower.” The interviewees offer anecdotes about their mothers and grandmothers, and reflect on how the relationships nourished them. In one scene, Burke recalls a childhood experience of being slapped by a stranger for playing in the supermarket. When Burke’s grandmother heard what happened, she smashed the store’s window with a pipe.Lewis pairs the stories with a lovely collage aesthetic, layering the interviews with home videos, photographs and music. Sometimes, she even frames her subjects within collages of flowers, antique curios and archival images.As a director, Lewis is admirably present. She seems to have gained the trust of her interview subjects, and has taken care to create a space for openness. But as the women explore spirituality, trauma and resilience, an echo effect emerges. Sometimes that echo can sound like repetition. The film’s division into rough thematic chapters reinforces redundancies; some ideas within the “healing” segment could have fit within “radical self-care,” and vice versa. Yet such hiccups ultimately do not detract from the movie’s grace — nor from its showcase of Lewis’s natural gifts as a communicator and as an artist.In Our Mothers’ GardensNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      With Her Final Album, Rebecca Luker Bids a Fond Farewell

      by

      The much-loved Broadway soprano, who died in December, had one more miracle up her sleeve.The last solo number on “All the Girls,” the new duo album from the sopranos Rebecca Luker and Sally Wilfert, is a piece of specialty material for Luker called “Not Funny.”It’s funny.In the song, by Michael Heitzman and Ilene Reid, Luker twits her image as a “spoonful of saccharine” but also punctures it. The gist is that lower-voiced belters get all the laugh lines, possibly because it’s so “hard to land a joke up here” — in the soprano stratosphere. Playing Laurey in “Oklahoma!,” Luker complains, “I’ll sing my ass off, but Ado Annie steals the show.” Then she disproves it by ripping a thrilling high C.Luker was 58 when she last performed the number live, during a concert with Wilfert at Merkin Hall in Manhattan. That was in September 2019, 15 months before she died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as A.L.S. or Lou Gehrig’s disease.As yet undiagnosed that night, she had some trouble climbing onto the de rigueur stool, but she sounded as beautiful as ever, clearly enjoying the chance to sing songs about sisterhood with someone who was in fact as close as a sister. They met, Wilfert recalls, at a reading in 2005; when Wilfert said “I’m going to the bathroom,” Luker said, “I’m going too” and they sat “in adjacent johns,” yakking.Luker enjoyed the chance to sing songs about sisterhood with Sally Wilfert, who was as close as a sister. David AndrakoDespite Luker’s unshakable ingénue rep — built on Broadway roles including Lily in “The Secret Garden” (1991), Magnolia in “Show Boat” (1994), Maria in “The Sound of Music” (1998) and Marian in “The Music Man” (2000) — she was by the time of the Merkin Hall concert a sophisticated Broadway veteran and a complex actor, even taking over the crushing role of Helen in “Fun Home” in 2016. Though her voice remained infallibly lustrous, with classical size and control yet zero operatic fussiness, it was her intelligence in deploying it that kept her in demand well past the industry sell-by date for most stars of that repertoire.Nor did her intelligence let up as “All the Girls” was put together. Her husband, the Broadway performer Danny Burstein, says her notes for the producers were “meticulous” despite her suffering. Tommy Krasker, the head of PS Classics, her longtime label, says she listened to mixes with the “clarity of mind and healthy self-criticism” she’d always displayed in their 20 years of working together. When she thought a joke in “Not Funny” wasn’t landing as well as it might, she asked that the piano part, performed by her music director, Joseph Thalken, be rerecorded. The joke now lands like a gymnast after a handspring.What’s remarkable about this is not only that Luker’s health was quickly deteriorating, but that such a fond, full-smile, no-dud album got produced at all, let alone in the middle of a pandemic. How it happened is the kind of story that Luker, whose death came just two days before the digital release of “All the Girls” on Christmas — and in whose honor an A.L.S. fund-raising concert entitled “Becca” will be streamed on Tuesday — would have loved for its unlikeliness and bittersweet ending.Recording dates had been set for March 2020. The lockdown delayed that plan, but by the time PS Classics could safely book a studio again, in August, Luker could no longer sing. Her final performances, in “An Evening With Sheldon Harnick … and Friends” at the York Theater in March and in a three-song concert streamed from home in June, had been achieved with mounting difficulty as she gripped the arms on her wheelchair to make the notes emerge. By autumn she could not make them at all.Though it might have been sensible to abandon the album at that point, Krasker and the producer Bart Migal decided to try an experiment, attempting what Krasker calls “the first studio album made without ever stepping in the studio.” Thalken, the music director, was able to weave new orchestrations around surprisingly good recordings of the Merkin Hall rehearsal and concert; musicians recorded the new parts in their homes; the producers mixed the result; and by some miracle what emerged sounded pristine.Though Luker and Wilfert have distinctive voices, they can sound nearly identical when singing together. Genevieve Rafter KeddyBut not just pristine: rich and compelling. Though Luker and Wilfert have distinctive voices when singing separately, they can sound nearly identical when singing together. (They have the same voice teacher.) Listening to playbacks, even they could not always figure out who was who. In duets like “You Are My Best Friend” (the charming opener) and “Isn’t It Better?” (a Kander and Ebb torch song here turned into an anthem of sisterly support) something sublime happens as the two voices, blending so closely, seem to multiply even as they merge.That effect is at its height in the album’s finale, an unexpected pairing of the Patty Griffin song “Be Careful” with “Dear Theodosia,” a number sung by Aaron Burr to his infant daughter in “Hamilton.” As performed by Luker and Wilfert, “Theodosia” feels like a promise from today’s women to their spiritual daughters to leave them a safer world. “Be Careful,” whose lyric provides “All the Girls” with its title, is wrenchingly ambivalent, celebrating women’s strength but also their fragility — and ending, in this arrangement, on a daringly unresolved harmony.Which feels only right. Strong as the album is — five poetry settings by Thalken are especially lovely — it inevitably comes wrapped in a shroud of loss. I don’t mean just the loss of Luker herself. Her kind of voice (and Wilfert’s) is gradually being squeezed out of musical theater, as classically trained sopranos give way to the kind described so saucily in “Not Funny,” which Kelli O’Hara will sing at Tuesday’s concert. Most new works are written for belters.The greater loss is of course personal. Many of us, mourning a loved one, are grateful for any scrap of their voice that might be preserved in a phone message or video. That’s not Burstein’s situation. He has lots of Luker’s albums to listen to. The problem is that though they are comforting they are also devastating — especially, on “All the Girls,” that final medley, with its aching Griffin lyric: “Be careful how you bend me/Be careful how you send me/Be careful how you end me.”In any case, the albums are what Luker gave us, not him. More than her public voice, what Burstein misses most after 20 years of marriage is her private voice: the one he heard in car rides spent harmonizing together to ’70s hits on the radio.“Now it’s just me and the radio,” he says.By comparison, the rest of us are lucky. Listening to “All the Girls,” in some ways Luker’s funniest and wisest album, we get to keep her singing next to us forever.Rebecca Luker and Sally Wilfert“All the Girls”(PS Classics)Becca: A Night of Stories and Song in Memory of Rebecca LukerMay 4 at 7:30 p.m.momenthouse.com/targetals More