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China’s Communist Celebration Turns 100. Cue the (State-Authorized) Music.

China’s Communist Party Turns 100. Cue the (State-Approved) Music.

Yan Shengmin, a Chinese tenor, is known for bouncy renditions of Broadway tunes and soulful performances in operas like “Carmen.”

But lately, Mr. Yan has been focusing on a different genre. He is a star of “Red Boat,” a patriotic opera written to celebrate the 100th anniversary this week of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. Mr. Yan has embraced the role, immersing himself in party history and binge-watching television shows about revolutionary heroes to prepare.

“I feel a lot of pressure,” Mr. Yan said in an interview between rehearsals. “The 100th anniversary is a big occasion.”

A wave of nationalistic music, theater and dance is sweeping China as the Communist Party works to ensure its centennial is met with pomp and fanfare.

Prominent choreographers are staging ballets about revolutionary martyrs. Theaters are reviving nationalistic plays about class struggle. Hip-hop artists are writing songs about the party’s achievements. Orchestras are performing works honoring communist milestones like the Long March, with chorus members dressed in light-blue military uniforms.

The celebrations are part of efforts by Xi Jinping, China’s authoritarian leader, to make the party omnipresent in people’s lives and to strengthen political loyalty among artists.

Mr. Xi, who has presided over a broad crackdown on free expression in China since rising to power nearly a decade ago, has said artists should serve the cause of socialism rather than become “slaves” of the market.

In honor of the party’s centennial, Mr. Xi’s government has announced plans for performances of 300 operas, ballets, plays, musical compositions and other works. The list includes classics like “The White-Haired Girl,” a Mao-era opera about a young peasant woman whose family is persecuted by a cruel landlord. There are also new productions like “Red Boat,” which chronicles the party’s first congress in 1921 on a boat outside Shanghai.

The outpouring of artistic expression comes amid rising nationalism in China. Many artists have little choice but to comply with the government’s demands for more patriotic art, with officials in China’s top-down system wielding considerable influence over decisions about financing and programming.

“It has become very important for artists to follow the political line,” said Jindong Cai, director of the U.S.-China Music Institute at Bard College. “The government wants artists to focus on Chinese works that relate to people’s lives and positively reflect China’s image.”

Critics have denounced the so-called “red” works as propaganda. But Chinese artists say that is partly the point.

“China is very strong now and people should respect that,” said Warren Mok, a Chinese tenor who is embarking on a national tour to celebrate the centennial.

Mr. Mok said he hoped to use music to remind people about the party’s success in improving living standards in China. Still, he said it was important that patriotic works are balanced with Western music and other art forms.

“Anything you do should not be too extreme,” he said. “If you’re so insecure about your own culture, your own nationalism, you close your door. Isolation is not good for any country.”

Hundreds of performances related to the party’s centennial have already taken place, and scores more are expected by year’s end.

In Suzhou, a city west of Shanghai, the choreographer Wang Yabin recently staged “My Name is Ding Xiang,” a new ballet about a 22-year-old martyr who died during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In Nanjing, an eastern city, an orchestra recently performed “Liberation: 1949,” a symphony about the Communist revolution by the composer Zhao Jiping.

Some works deal with contemporary themes, including the party’s efforts to eliminate extreme poverty and its success in fighting the coronavirus, which Mr. Xi has held up as evidence of the superiority of China’s authoritarian model. A play called “People First” depicts the heroism of medical workers in Wuhan, where the coronavirus emerged in late 2019.

Propaganda art has a long history in China, and some of the country’s most celebrated works emerged during periods of intense political control, including the decade of bloody upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s known as the Cultural Revolution. During that time, classical music was attacked as decadent and bourgeois, and many Western composers and instruments were banned.

In modern China, music and dance from the Cultural Revolution still resonates with the public, including works such as the “Yellow River Piano Concerto” and “The Red Detachment of Women,” a revolutionary ballet.

“These cultural products have their own artistic value,” said Denise Ho, assistant professor of history at Yale University who studies 20th century history in China. “For many Chinese, there is a nostalgia for certain aspects of the Mao era.”

By reviving older works, Mr. Xi appears eager to remind the public of the party’s glory days. His government has redoubled efforts to fortify ideological loyalty among artists. This year, a government-backed industry association released a moral code for performing artists — dancers, musicians and acrobats included — calling on them to be faithful to the party and help advance the socialist cause.

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    • ‘Red Tourism’ Flourishes: New and improved attractions dedicated to the Communist Party’s history, or a sanitized version of it, are drawing crowds ahead of the party’s centennial.

Mr. Xi, in a ceremony this week at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, handed out centennial medals to 29 party cadres, including Lan Tianye, an actor often described as a “red artist,” and Lu Qiming, a patriotic composer known for the piece “Ode to the Red Flag.”

“For Xi, as for Mao, art is first and foremost a political instrument,” Professor Ho said.

The Chinese government has tried to use music, dance, television and movies in recent years to improve its image, especially among young people, many of whom have no direct connection to the Communist revolution of 1949.

A rap song celebrating the centennial, titled “100 Percent,” has been widely shared on the Chinese internet in recent days. But the 15-minute track, featuring 100 artists, has been mocked for its wooden propaganda slogans.

“Our spaceships are flying in the sky,” says one lyric. “The new China must get lit.”

Performers say they hope the high caliber of the centennial productions, including elaborate costumes, sets and visual effects, will appeal to younger audiences.

Wang Jiajun, 36, a principal dancer at Shanghai Dance Theater who plays a martyr in a revival of the dance production “The Eternal Wave,” said young people could identify with the work.

“These heroes were only in their teens, 20s or 30s when they lost their lives,” Mr. Wang said. “The stories of young people will attract young people.”

For artists taking part in the centenary, the effort has at times been laborious.

Xie Menghao, a Chinese-born graduate student in music composition in Germany, spent six months repurposing a suite of Red Army songs into a piano concerto about the Long March, a 6,000-mile retreat of Communist forces that began in 1934 and established Mao’s pre-eminence. He said he was proud of the piece, which the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra premiered last month, but added that the experience was “more like a job.”

“I just did what they said,” he said in an interview. “Every composer just thinks about the music.”

Mr. Yan the tenor starring in “Red Boat,” said he has found it easy to connect with his character, Chen Duxiu, a founder of the party. But he said rehearsals have not always been easy. Younger performers, for instance, have needed help better understanding the emotional experience of being part of the early communist struggle, he said.

“They don’t have the ideas to fight or sacrifice for the nation’s destiny,” Mr. Yan, 56, said. “I can do it in one take.”

Mr. Yan said he was confident that the show would have success in China and perhaps beyond.

“We’re depicting history, not just lecturing how great the Communist Party is,” he said. “This isn’t a communist slogan-type performance. It’s plain storytelling.”

Javier C. Hernández reported from Taipei, Taiwan, and Joy Dong from Hong Kong.

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New Report Paints Bleak Image of Range within the Music Trade

New Report Paints Bleak Picture of Diversity in the Music Industry

Yet the group’s new report, called “Inclusion in the Music Business: Gender & Race/Ethnicity Across Executives, Artists & Talent Teams,” and sponsored by Universal Music Group, shows that women and people of color are poorly represented in the power structure of the industry itself.

The variation across different job levels and industry sectors is notable. Black executives fared best within record labels, making up 14.4 percent of all positions, and 21.2 percent of artist-and-repertoire, or A&R, roles, which tend to work most closely with artists. Black people hold just 4 percent of executive jobs in radio, and 3.3 percent in live music.

According to U.S. census data, 13.4 percent of Americans identify as Black.

Women posted their highest executive numbers in the live music business, holding 39.1 percent of positions. But drilling down, the study found, most of those women were white. Even at record labels, where Black executives were best represented, Black women held only 5.3 percent of executive jobs.

The U.S.C. report is one of a number of efforts underway to examine the music industry and evaluate its progress in reaching stated goals of diversity and inclusion. This week, the Black Music Action Coalition, a group of artist managers, lawyers and other insiders, is expected to release a “report card” on how well the industry has met its own commitments to change.

Much of the data used in the U.S.C. report, the researchers said, came from publicly available sources, like company websites. The report suggests that a lack of participation in the study by music companies was a reason.

“Companies were given the opportunity to participate and confirm information, especially of senior management teams,” the report says. “Roughly a dozen companies did so. The vast majority did not.”

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Tania León Wins Music Pulitzer for ‘Stride’

Tania León Wins Music Pulitzer for ‘Stride’

In the 1990s, composer Tania León was appointed New Music Advisor to the New York Philharmonic. But the orchestra did not play any of their works at the time.

It made up for the lost time in February 2020 when the Philharmonic, as part of their Project 19 initiative, premiered the solemn and at the same time solemn work “Stride” by Ms. León, for which she commissioned 19 female composers, the centenary of the 19th amendment that made it prohibits states from denying women the right to vote.

On Friday, “Stride” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music. It is a culminating honor in the career of a now 78-year-old composer who grew up in Cuba; found a base for percussive dance works in New York; created a series of memorable orchestral pieces infused with intricate Latin American rhythms; and became an outspoken advocate of cultural diversity in music. She was also a pioneering conductor and currently directs the wide-ranging Composers Now festival.

Ms. León, who found out about the price on Friday when she left her dental office, said she started crying at the news. “My mother and grandmother were maids when they were 8 years old,” she said in a telephone interview. “My family had so much hope for me and the new generation to give us an education, and when something big has happened in my life, that’s the first thing that comes to mind.”

Inspired by the courage of the women in her family and by the suffragist Susan B. Anthony, the 15-minute “Stride” is not purely optimistic. Open brass fanfares sweep through the entire piece, a kind of periodic announcement, and jazzy wind solos snake out of the orchestral structures, but there is always a dark, restless energy lurking.

Composer Ellen Reid, who won a Pulitzer in 2019 and was part of this year’s awards committee, said she heard the Philharmonic “Stride” at Lincoln Center last year.

“It was one of the last appearances before the pandemic,” she said on the phone. “Tania has a way of weaving so many musical traditions together with such joy. She’s just such a wonderful ambassador for music and her love is infectious. “

Explosive bells ring out at the end of the piece: “Every time I think about it,” said Ms. León, “I want to hear more – all the bells of the nation.” But underneath, a West African beat shuffles – a reminder that black women originally were excluded from the right granted by the 19th Amendment.

“Under all these celebratory bells,” said Ms. León, “there is still some kind of struggle.”

Struggle and movement.

“It’s very nice to be recognized,” she added. “But the biggest gain of my life is that I was able to realize a dream that began in a very small place, far away from here, with people who are no longer here. That’s what ‘Stride’ is all about for me: moving forward. “

Joshua Barone contributed to the coverage.

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Juilliard College students Protest Tuition Enhance With Marches and Music

Juilliard Students Protest Tuition Increase With Marches and Music

The Juilliard School, one of the world’s leading performing arts conservatories, is known for concerts rather than pickets. But students protesting a proposed tuition hike occupied portions of the Lincoln Center campus this week and led music and dance-filled protests on West 65th Street when they were later denied entry to a school building.

The protests began Monday when a group of students speaking out against plans to increase tuition fees from $ 49,260 to $ 51,230 a year occupied portions of the school’s Irene Diamond building and took photos of dozen of them multi-colored sheets of paper posted on social media arranged to include the words “LESSON DEADLINE.”

On Wednesday, students said they had received an email from the administration stating that “classrooms” could not be used for after-school events without permission. “Posting signs, posters or leaflets, setting up in the lobby, requesting or distributing printed materials also requires prior approval,” the statement said.

The students returned to the Diamond building that day, marched through the halls and stopped in front of the school president Damian Woetzel’s door. At some point, some said, they knocked on his door and sang, “We know you’re in there. Will you meet the needs of the students and freeze the class? “

Protesters later said they had been banned from the Diamond building and the school told them it was investigating an incident involving reported violations “relating to the safety of the community”. On Thursday, around 20 students continued protesting on the sidewalk outside, waving posters, accusing the school of using persistent tactics to suppress dissent.

“They made it clear that they weren’t listening to us,” says Carl Hallberg, an 18-year-old acting student.

Rosalie Contreras, a spokeswoman for Juilliard, wrote in an email that the school is increasing funding, raising the minimum wage for student workers on campus to $ 15 an hour, and providing special funding for students in financial need Have available.

“Juilliard respects the right of all members of the community, including students, to express their views freely with demonstrations held at an appropriate time, place, and manner,” added Ms. Contreras. “Unfortunately, the demonstration escalated to the point on Wednesday that an employee called public security.”

Both Mr. Hallberg and another student, Gabe Canepa, said they were part of a campus group called Socialist Penguins that had called for the protests. They said they hadn’t compromised anyone’s safety.

Mr. Canepa, a 19-year-old dance student, added that the students took the tuition increase seriously because it would reduce their spending on “rent, groceries, subway fares and school supplies”.

An online petition by the group states that “the already astronomically high tuition fees” are harmful to working-class students. It added, “We are calling for Juilliard to cancel their proposed tuition increase.”

Students who participated in the protests said about 300 current students, or about 30 to a third of those currently enrolled, signed the petition.

The events at Juilliard this week seem to have been less controversial than school occupations that have taken place elsewhere in Manhattan over the years, including New York University, Cooper Union and New School, where cops with helmets and plastic shields arrested people who took over part of the school’s Fifth Avenue building in 2009. However, the conflict struck at odds.

Juilliard is also under pressure when it comes to diversity issues. In May, CBS News quoted a black college student there as saying she had been disturbed by an acting workshop asking class members to pretend they were slaves while whips, rain and racial slurs were played. Juilliard told CBS that the workshop was a “mistake” and regretted “that the workshop caused pain to the students”.

Following Wednesday’s protests, several students said they had received emails from Sabrina Tanbara, the deputy dean of studies, informing them that their access to the Diamond building had been suspended pending investigation.

The next day, Juilliard’s dean for student development emailed all students with some details about what the school was reviewing. Regarding the Wednesday afternoon protest outside the President’s office, Dean Barrett Hipes wrote: “Yesterday public security received a report of confrontational and intimidating behavior from students that led to an administrative assistant working alone in an office their own safety. “

Since the students could not enter the Diamond building on Thursday, they protested outside and asked passing motorists to honk their horns in support.

A young man was fashionable on West 65th Street. Mr. Hallberg strummed a guitar and another student plucked a stand-up bass and led a singalong of the labor standard “Which side are you on?”

Some students said they felt punished without due process.

Sarah Williams, a 19-year-old oboe student, said she wrote to Ms. Tanbara asking what specific she should have done to expel her from the Diamond building. She said she hadn’t received an answer yet.

“My resources have been eliminated without any explanation,” she said.

Raphael Zimmerman, a 20-year-old clarinet student, said he had received an email from Ms. Tanbara informing him that he would be contacted to set up an “investigative interview” to present his report on the activities outside the office of the Catch up with President late Wednesday afternoon.

“I think the many minutes we spent knocking on that door and singing were a nuisance,” he said, “essentially we are denying our right to assemble and demonstrate.”

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The Enduring Enchantment of Italian Composers’ Dramatic ‘Library Music’

The Enduring Appeal of Italian Composers’ Dramatic ‘Library Music’

One day in the summer of 2011, Lorenzo Fabrizi and a friend drove to an abandoned warehouse far outside Rome. The building’s manager, who said he bought it for around $ 100, let her in to see the contents: 10,000 vinyl LPs, by Fabrizi’s estimate. They were allowed to take as much as they wanted, said the owner; he brewed beer in the room and had no use for it.

Fabrizi was just beginning his career as a lover of rare records. This collection, previously owned by Radio Vaticana (the station owned by the Vatican), was undesirable by almost everyone in Italy at the time. But Fabrizi found something he’d never seen before: “library” music – obscure records with songs written directly for radio, television, or ad placement, in this case the lavish, string-laden, funk and jazz-informed arrangements Italian composers trained in classical music.

“When I started, there was no interest in this stuff,” Fabrizi said on a recent Zoom call from Rome, where he has been running the reissue label Sonor Music Editions since 2013. “They had printed 200, 300, 500, 1,000 copies, but they weren’t intended for stores or dealerships. They were only given to internal circles of music supervisors, journalists and people who worked on television. “

Sonor is one of several labels that have revived Italian classics from the European library genre in recent decades (in July, Nico Fidenco’s lost soundtrack for the 1977 film “Emmanuelle in America” and Sandro Brugnoli’s “Utopia” will be released). From the 1960s to the 1980s, there was a lot of money to be made with topics: TV and radio producers needed music for opening credits, action or love scenes, game show sequences or advertising. Well-trained composers had access to large ensembles and budgets, and the Italians in particular swung for the fences.

“You listen to a lot of this stuff and laugh because you think this was recorded on extremely expensive equipment, and there’s no way they thought this topic would work in a movie,” said Mike Wallace, a Collector in San Diego who produced a compilation of the works of the Italian composer Piero Umiliani in 2017. “It’s just too outside.”

The most recent album by producer and composer Adrian Younge “The American Negro” contains similar orchestral flourishes over crisp backbeats. “It was like asking classically trained musicians to do modern black music, but for Europe, so you would have these crazy orchestrations, but it still gets funky,” said Younge. “They had a lot more leeway because they weren’t making this music for a specific audience,” he added. “So if they needed something dramatic, they could just do the weirdest [expletive] and wouldn’t have to deal with someone who says, ‘This is not pop enough.’ “

Since it had no commercial life, the work of many talented composers was hidden for years. But in the late 1990s, labels like Easy Tempo began to reissue soundtracks and compilations of the Italian works. By adding these decade-old nuggets to the Venn diagram of hip-hop producers, record collectors, and fans of the short-lived lounge revival, it created a wave.

Ennio Morricone, the composer best known for his dramatic scores for the so-called “spaghetti westerns” such as “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”, was the greatest of this era of Italian music. But as collectors started digging up the recordings of Umiliani, Brugnoli and Alessandro Alessandroni, the source of talent from Italy seemed much deeper.

The rampant experimentalism of the Italian library catalog must also be examined in the context of its epoch. The late 1960s to early 1980s – known as “anni di piombo” or “years of leadership” – were full of turmoil between left, right-wing and neo-fascist demonstrators in Italy. “It was devastating,” said Fabrizi. “There were people who shot in the streets, clashes with the police.” While these composers were locked in studios, the fantastic sounds they made were like portals to another world.

In this tense atmosphere, Italy’s composers also listened to the music of black Americans. Classic rock of the era was influenced by innovators like Robert Johnson, Howlin ‘Wolf, and Chuck Berry; Boundaries were pushed by Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus; and funk and R&B simmered on labels like Stax and Motown. And then of course there were Blaxploitation movie soundtracks like “Shaft” and “Superfly”.

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“In the late 1950s to early 1970s, black music moved to the fore in cinemas. European composers, Italian composers took this sound and synthesized it with their classical teachings, ”said Younge. “And that created a musical palette that generations later inspired hip-hop producers trying to find the coolest samples. For many of us it became a treasure trove. “

For the character-based narratives of hip-hop, a genre built on finding loops from records few had heard, these compositions were practically begging. The prolific producer Madlib was one of the first to try an Italian library record for a large audience on his 2000 album Quasimoto “The Unseen”. Cut Chemist used a track from Alessandroni’s most famous release “Open Air Parade” on his 2006 LP “The Audience’s Listening”. When the Italians became known, a collectors arms race began.

“I was very obsessed with Morricone and started buying a lot of his records and then you find guys like Bruno Nicolai, Alessandroni, Riz Ortolani,” said Sven Wunder, 37, a musician from Stockholm, whose new album “Natura Morta “, Which appears on Friday, is one of the closest modern equivalents to the Italian library work. “It feels like every record freak ends up in the library at some point.”

Wunder’s first two albums, “Eastern Flowers” ​​and “Wabi Sabi” from last year, reflect the influence of Middle Eastern composers and Japanese jazz, but “Natura Morta” is a clear nod to the Italian library pool. It was mainly written during the pandemic and contains the sluggish rhythmic pulse of these 1970s classics, crowned by a 15-piece string section. (“It should be 16, but we didn’t get the right number of meters between all the players,” said Wunder about the socially distant recording session. “The double bass players had to leave.”

“Natura Morta”, which is sold and promoted in the USA by the Rappcats webshop by Eothen Alapatt (owner of the reissue label Now-Again Records) and the label Light in the Attic, is full of sensual flute, clinking Fender Rhodes solos and long melodies doubled on a 12-string guitar and harpsichord. It’s delicate, stirring music – and also something most independent artists would find difficult to afford in 2021. (It was created with the help of a grant from the Swedish government.)

Alapatt praised the album as an innovation: “They’ve been trying to figure out how to make it both homage and non-derivative.”

Most of the composers whose works Fabrizi has presented to new audiences are no longer alive and more music is being discovered; Sonor will release another Alessandroni soundtrack this summer. A major challenge, said Fabrizi, is in the business area. When larger labels consolidated their catalogs in the last few decades, the library works got lost in the mess.

“It’s insanely difficult” dealing with the major labels, he said, implying that library music is not a priority for them. “The problem is, they don’t know they own it. They don’t know because they don’t have the documents. They don’t have any original contracts. “

But collectors like Wallace find a thrill in the hunt for what’s buried in these vaults. “One thing that is very frustrating about this, but also really fun, is that we learn new things every day,” he said. “We know more than we did five years ago. We know more than last year. “

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Was 1971 the Yr ‘Music Modified Every thing’?

Was 1971 the Year ‘Music Changed Everything’?

Everything changed with the music of 1971. No, wait. It was 1973. Check if – 1974 was the year, except it was music, film, and television but only in Los Angeles.

If you’re writing a book or adapting one for television, you could do worse than picking a specific year as your organizational principle. This is especially true when you’re dealing with the tumultuous early 70s, when pop culture went up in flames and then regularly rose again.

The last to take on this challenge are the makers of “1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything”, based on the David Hepworth book “Never a Dull Moment: 1971 – The Year That Rock Exploded”. The eight-part documentary series, which was fully released on Apple TV + last week, offers plenty of evidence that their human subjects are as convinced of the premise as they usually are. “Music said something,” says Chrissie Hynde of the opening credits; “We created the 21st century in 1971,” says David Bowie.

But as difficult as it may be to avoid boomer bias – after all, a sense of generational self-esteem is anchored in the premise – it is perhaps even more difficult to limit the scope of such efforts to a single year: Did the music of 1971? really change things than ’72? What would 1969 say about that? How can you even start making the case?

“Sometimes you have to make a bold statement,” said Asif Kapadia, the series’ overall director and one of the executive producers, on a video call from London. “Our research revealed something amazing about this particular moment when it comes after the 60s, when it comes as a turning point in relation to the 70s.”

The series brings together so many captivating clips and stringing together so much recent history that it is hard to deny the results whether you buy the premise or not.

In 1971 Marvin Gaye transformed the protest song with the sublime “What’s Going On”; the Rolling Stones pounded on their raw classic “Exile on Main St”. (and copious amounts of heroin) in a rented villa in the south of France; Aretha Franklin showed her public solidarity with the imprisoned black activist Angela Davis; and David Bowie wrote the book on rock ‘n’ roll androgyny.

It was also a remarkable coming-out year for female artists. Carole King, who split from husband and songwriting partner Gerry Goffin in 1968, released Tapestry in 1971 and Joni Mitchell released Blue after her relationship with Graham Nash ended. These weren’t just great albums; there were also personal expressions of independence, resounding screams of defiance and vulnerability in a world that was still often male.

But life just doesn’t organize itself in 12 month periods, even if books and TV series dictate it. No project of this kind could provide the right context without spending time, for example with the Manson family massacre and the Altamont, California disaster in which four people died in a free concert with the Rolling Stones headline – two events from 1969, which signaled the end of the flower power era. The Kent state shootings of 1970 were another such trailblazer that helped set the table for the mood and music to come.

Even if it digresses from 1971, this is top notch cultural history with a killer beat. Sometimes you bend the rules a little.

Think Bowie, who has the last word on the series. The Man Who Sold the World was released in 1970 in the United States, but in 1971 in Bowie’s native England. He recorded the majority of “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars,” which is the highlight of the series, in 1971, but the album was released in 1972. Similarly, the Stones recorded most of “Exile” in this mansion in ’71, but they ended it in ’72, the year the album was released.

“We had a very basic rule that it had to have a very strong footprint in 1971,” said Danielle Peck, the series producer who directed four of the episodes. “It could start in 1969 and end two years later. But most of the event had to be felt in ’71 because we had to have a way to filter out all of these amazing stories. “

Of course, you can remove any ambiguity by adopting subjectivity. Pointing out that he turned 21 in 1971 – and that we probably all consider this personal milestone special – Hepworth doubles in his book: “There is an important difference between me and 1971,” he writes. “The difference is this. I am right.”

At least he thinks he’s right. When Ronald Brownstein, Senior Editor at The Atlantic, decided to celebrate a year, he chose 1974 and decided to include music, film and television. He also limited his geographic focus to the entertainment hub, Los Angeles, which was much more sleepy then than it is now.

The resulting book “Rock Me on the Water: 1974 – The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics” is a strong argument. Brownstein saw ’74 as the end of an era.

“Losing LA’s cultural supremacy has made a far greater change in American life,” he writes. “The most memorable works of Los Angeles in the early 1970s – from ‘Chinatown’ to ‘All in the Family’ to Jackson Browne’s great album ‘Late for the Sky’ – emerged from the collision of 1960s optimism with growing cynicism and pessimism of the 70s. “

But let’s play the devil’s advocate for a moment with “1971”. What if Hepworth’s Certainty is Justified? What if 1971 is really the be-all and end-all of rock and pop, and not just a year of a lot of cool music coming out? What if “I’m right” isn’t arrogance but accuracy?

A list of 1971 publications is certainly daunting. In addition to those already mentioned, there was Black Sabbath’s “Master of Reality”; Cans “Tago Mago”; the “LA Woman” of the Doors; Aretha Franklin’s “Aretha Live at Fillmore West”; “Led-Zeppelin IV”; John Lennon’s “Imagine”; Bill Withers “Just As I Am”; and Sly and the Family Stones “There’s a Riot Goin ‘On” to start with.

Not bad, says 1972. But look here: Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon”; Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly”; Lou Reed’s “Transformer”; the Staple Singers’ Be Altitude: Respect Yourself and so on.

Quality is in the ear of the beholder – only the writer Andrew Grant Jackson has depicted the meaning of the years 1965 and 1973 in book length – and to his credit, “1971” is aware of this. At best, it avoids the album checklist game that takes up the source book in favor of a decisive cultural history.

It shows the uprising in the prison in Attica and his statements about racial incarceration discrepancies and the conditions of detention in general. It deals with the obscenity allegations made by the British government against Oz, an underground magazine that sparked outrage when 20 teenagers published a special “schoolchildren” issue. (Among the publication’s loudest defenders: John Lennon and Yoko Ono.)

It was a time of social upheaval, not just great music. But they were encouraged by the music, by the empowerment of women and African American and gender warriors. Was 1971 the gold standard for pop, rock and soul? Any answer would be steeped in subjectivity. But it was absolutely a step out of the 60s into a hectic new era, difficult to define but rich in conflict and opportunity.

“I’m sure different people have different arguments,” Kapadia said, “but our point was that at that moment, with the end of the Beatles and the start of other artists, something special happened, who then create what we see now can. “was the music of the future.”

When you see 1971, it’s probably best not to worry if it was “the year music changed everything”. Perhaps it is enough just to appreciate the era and its soundtrack without checking the title.

Now let’s take a look at which albums came out in 1975.

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Entertainment

Radio Metropolis Music Corridor to Reopen to Maskless, Vaccinated Full Homes

Radio City Music Hall to Reopen to Maskless, Vaccinated Full Houses

In the latest sign of how fast vaccinations are changing, what New Yorkers can and can’t do, Radio City Music Hall plans to reopen next month to welcome full-capacity non-masked audiences – as long as every ticket holder has been vaccinated .

The music hall will welcome streams of vaccinated people past their neon tents and back into their gilded Art Deco auditorium for the final evening of the Tribeca festival on June 19, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced on Monday.

“This beautiful hall is being filled again,” said Cuomo at a press conference in the music hall. “Having Radio City back 100 percent without masks, with people enjoying New York and New York art, won’t just be symbolic and metaphorical. But I think it will go a long way in restoring that state. “

James L. Dolan, the chairman and general manager of Madison Square Garden Company, who owns the music hall, said the hall would remain open beyond June 19, but only to vaccinated people. When asked how the rules would be implemented – and whether ushers would follow the honor system or look for proof of vaccination – he admitted that some details were still being worked out.

“That’s a really good question, I have no idea,” said Mr Dolan. “We will work with the state and find a way to do this.”

The announcement came as the plans to reopen have changed and accelerated day by day.

Mr Dolan said his group’s venues would start booking concerts and other events for what he thought was a “blockbuster summer”.

Updated

May 17, 2021, 3:33 p.m. ET

“We didn’t think this was going to happen,” said Mr Dolan. “We really had planned a blockbuster fall.”

He said the group’s other venues, which also host sporting events, would allow a mix of vaccinated and unvaccinated patrons, but would give priority to vaccinated patrons. Still, he acknowledged that planners would need to make a more detailed assessment of the venues before specific rules could be put in place.

In his remarks, Mr. Cuomo emphasized that people who are not vaccinated would not be allowed into the music hall and stated in his PowerPoint: “Vaccinations have advantages!”

Although the number of new coronavirus cases in New York state is declining, the average averaged 1,864 coronavirus cases per day, according to the New York Times on Monday. Around 43 percent of the state’s residents are vaccinated, and more than half have received at least one dose of the vaccine.

The organizers of the Tribeca Festival have already announced that they will open the festivities with the premiere of “In the Heights”, the film from the Lin Manuel Miranda musical. Mr Cuomo said Monday that Pier 76 Park on the Hudson will host one of the opening screenings on June 9th.

Monday’s announcement of the revered hall’s return is the last in a series of reopenings officials have planned for the coming weeks and months. As more New Yorkers became vaccinated against the virus and federal health officials relaxed their guidelines on how to wear masks, indoor arts venues have slowly begun welcoming visitors back while adhering to capacity limits and other safety requirements.

Perhaps most notably, Broadway shows have started selling tickets for full capacity shows, some of which will begin as early as mid-September.

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Entertainment

Tawny Kitaen, Star of 1980s Music Movies, Dies at 59

Tawny Kitaen, Star of 1980s Music Videos, Dies at 59

Tawny Kitaen, an actress best known for her roles in rock music videos in the 1980s and starring with Tom Hanks in the movie Bachelor Party, died Friday at her home in Newport Beach, California. She was 59 years old.

Ms. Kitaen’s death was confirmed by a daughter, Wynter Finley, who said the cause was unknown.

Ms. Kitaen became a mainstay of MTV in the 1980s when the network had its greatest cultural influence with music videos that played all day.

With her flowing red hair and acrobatic moves, Ms. Kitaen appeared in videos for bands like Whitesnake and Ratt and looked both sultry and playful. She danced on the hood of a white Jaguar in the Whitesnake music video “Here I Go Again” and graced the cover of Ratt’s 1984 album “Out of the Cellar”.

Julie Kitaen was born in San Diego on August 5, 1961. She studied ballet and gymnastics until she was 15. After appearing in a Jack LaLanne commercial, as well as television shows and films, she was best known as Mr. Hanks’ fiancée in the 1984 comedy Bachelor Party.

But it was her appearance on music videos that cemented her image in Generation X’s imagination as a free-spirited beauty who had the time of her life.

She once described working with Paula Abdul on the set of a video.

Ms. Abdul, then a choreographer, asked her what she could do. Ms. Kitaen said she showed Ms. Abdul some of her moves. Ms. Abdul then turned to director Marty Callner and said, “She has that and doesn’t need me.” Then she left, said Mrs. Kitaen.

“That was the biggest compliment,” she said. “So I got in the cars and Marty said ‘Action’ and I did what I wanted.”

She married Whitesnake front man David Coverdale in 1989 and the couple divorced two years later. In 1997 she married Chuck Finley, a major league baseball pitcher. They had two daughters, Wynter and Raine. The couple divorced in 2002.

Ms. Kitaen later appeared on reality shows and spoke openly about her struggles with addiction to cocaine and pain medication.

In a 2010 interview with The Daily Pilot, she described her volunteering work at a women’s shelter that had abandoned abusive relationships and said she herself was a domestic violence survivor. Ms. Kitaen said that after her divorce from Mr. Finley, she became involved with a man who was physically and verbally abusive.

“You don’t want to tell anyone because if you stay you will feel like an idiot – you are protecting them,” she said. “You do everything you can to keep other people from finding out that he is abusing you.”

Michael Goldberg, Ms. Kitaen’s agent, said she had appeared on various podcasts and radio shows over the past few years and enjoyed talking about her time as a character in rock history.

“People still love hearing these stories because the rock and roll lifestyle is something we all dream of, right?” he said. “And she lived it. And had so much to say. “

Ms. Kitaen is survived by her two daughters and a brother and a sister.

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Business

What to anticipate as reside music concert events begin to reemerge put up Covid-19

What to expect as live music concerts start to reemerge post Covid-19

A concert in Red Rocks Park and the Amphitheater outside of Denver.

John P Kelly | The Image Bank unpublished | Getty Images

When 31-year-old Riley Cash from Denver received his second vaccine earlier this month, the next thing on the agenda was a concert at nearby Red Rocks Park and Amphitheater.

The outdoor venue reopened this month with limited capacity and four night shows by a band called Lotus.

The fact that concerts were already coming back came as a surprise, Cash said. But after working from home for a year, he was dying to see one of his favorite acts live.

Tickets cost about $ 91 per person, more than Cash expected. But he said he considered himself and his friend lucky to be able to get tickets within days of the sale.

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“I just want to do something,” he said.

Some smaller outdoor and outdoor concerts are starting to open up, offering shows of limited capacity in hopes of finding attendees who feel the same way.

Anecdotally, these venues say they find it easy to fill the spots they can offer.

“We haven’t put a single show up for sale that didn’t blow up right away,” said spokesman Brian Kitts of Red Rocks, near Morrison, Colorado.

The outdoor yoga series that Red Rocks is selling is also selling out quickly, he said.

While it still feels a long way off for other indoor forms of entertainment such as opera and ballet to reopen, the first sales of the available events have gotten off to a stronger start than expected, Kitts said.

That’s a big deal for the urban venue, which lost roughly $ 52 million over the past year.

“Nobody saw this coming,” said Kitts.

“There are 400 people working at the venue every night, and all of those jobs were only gone overnight,” he said.

Dixie Strange, 30, during a morning yoga session at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison, Colorado on August 22, 2020.

Mark Makela | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Ticket prices haven’t generally gone up at the start of the show season thanks to the bands and promoters, Kitts said.

However, there are new Covid-19 protocols.

There are no temperature checks on the door or requirements to prove a vaccine or a negative Covid-19 test.

However, other precautions were taken. There is a distance of two meters between groups of ticket holders, who now only occupy every second row. Masks are required in interiors such as bathrooms or in the visitor center.

The venue has also implemented touchless payment systems for all transactions.

We haven’t put a single show up for sale that wasn’t immediately blown out. “

Brian Kitts

Red Rocks spokesperson

Some of the concert dates that were canceled in 2020 have been postponed to 2021. Still, new acts are pushing not to be added to the calendar until October or even November, Kitts said.

“We will never again take for granted the ability to gather together and see a concert or go to a sporting event,” said Kitts.

While some venues report strong initial ticket sales, a recent Bankrate.com survey found that only 16% of adults bought tickets to a live event.

Concerts or music festivals were the most popular with 8% of those surveyed. Live theater or comedy followed, 6%; Professional sports or college games, 5%; or other live events that require tickets, 2%.

One reason for the lackluster poll results, which came in late March, could be that consumers are still smart about the money they lost in last year’s events, said Ted Rossman, senior industry analyst at Bankrate.com.

“We found last year that basically half of the people who had tickets to these events last year lost money,” said Rossman. “And I think a lot of people are shy about it.”

Buying tickets now presents a “calculated risk” that you may get your money or credit back if the events don’t go ahead as planned.

However, Bankrate.com found that people spend an average of $ 227 on concerts and music festivals, $ 191 on comedy or live theater, and $ 387 on games and sporting events when buying tickets.

Some of these costs may include additional security protocols.

For some venues, implementing these processes was key to getting attendees back in the door.

Rhett Miller will perform at City Winery NYC in New York City on April 3, 2021.

Taylor Hill | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

At the City Winery in New York City, the seating capacity will be expanded from the current 100 participants per show to 150 from May 1st.

This date will also usher in a new vaccination-only policy for concert-goers who can use the CLEAR app to provide evidence and fill out a questionnaire in advance. Those who have not received the vaccination can bypass the rule by having a Covid-19 test in advance or on-site on the day of the event.

“We are excited to be driving this forward, so it is psychological comfort to be in a bubble knowing that everyone around you has been vaccinated too,” said Michael Dorf, CEO and Chairman of City Winery.

Even so, the venue has no plans to relax protocols, particularly with regard to wearing masks, until the government gives the OK, Dorf said.

The City Winery has dealt with varying capacity rules and restrictions at its other locations in cities like Nashville, Tennessee. Atlanta and Chicago.

Seeing the live music ecosystem reappear was deeply powerful and very moving.

Michael Dorf

CEO and Chairman of City Winery

One constant, however, remains the same: the fans’ appetite to see live music again.

“Everything we can offer for sale now … is sold out very quickly, enthusiastically,” said Dorf.

Like many other venues, City Winery struggled to close last year as it faced ongoing rents, utility bills, and payrolls.

But it has tried to keep its ticket prices in check, which largely depend on how much the artists paid. Several night shows have helped offset limited ticket sales due to lower capacity.

As the pandemic continues to subside, Dorf also hopes these restrictions come with it.

The introductory joke he tells the audience before each show is always the same, he said.

“Please don’t get used to so much space out there,” said Dorf. “We’ll rush you and get you in here as soon as we can safely.”

The biggest win was seeing the joy the performers feel when they get back on stage and the audience when they see it.

“Seeing the live music ecosystem reappear was deeply powerful and very moving,” said Dorf.

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Entertainment

Documentary Celebrates Girls in Digital Music

Documentary Celebrates Women in Electronic Music

What kind of person do you imagine when you hear the phrase “electronic musician”? A pale, wildly dressed young man bent over an imposing smorgasbord of equipment?

I suspect the person you are imagining doesn’t look like Daphne Oram, with their cat-eye glasses, low-key dresses, and the respectable haircut of the 1950s librarian. And yet Oram is a pivotal figure in the history of electronic music – the co-founder of the BBC’s incalculably influential Radiophonic Workshop, the first woman to set up her own independent electronic music studio and now one of the worthy focuses of Lisa Rovner’s enchanting new documentary ” Sisters with transistors: The unsung heroines of electronic music. ” (The film will run through Metrograph’s virtual cinema from April 23 to May 6.)

Oram was born in 1925 and was an accomplished pianist who had been offered admission to the Royal Academy of Music. But she turned it down after recently reading a book that predicted, as she brought to the film with a palpable sense of wonder, that “future composers would compose directly in sound rather than use orchestral instruments”.

Oram wanted to be a composer of the future. She found fulfilling work at the BBC, which in the late 1940s had become a clearing house for tape machines and other electronic equipment left over from World War II. Gender norms liquefied during the war, when factories and cutting-edge corporations were forced to hire women in jobs previously reserved for men only. Suddenly the rules no longer applied for a fleeting and liberating moment.

“Technology is a tremendous liberator,” says composer Laurie Spiegel in Rovner’s film. “It blows up power structures. Women were naturally drawn to electronic music. They did not have to be accepted by any of the male-dominated resources: the radio stations, the record companies, the concert halls, the funding organizations. “

But in recent years pioneers like Oram and Spiegel have largely been written out of the genre’s popular history, mistakenly leading people to believe that in its many iterations, electronic music is and was a boys’ club. At a time when significant gender imbalances persist behind studio consoles and in DJ booths, Rovner’s film raises a still worthwhile question: what happened?

The main goal of “Sisters With Transistors” is to enliven the fascinating life stories of these women and to present their music in all its dazzling splendor. The film, personally told by Laurie Anderson, is a treasure trove of fascinating archive material from decades. Early theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore gives a private concert on this ethereal instrument, which one writer said sounds like “a soul singing”. Synthesizer wizard Suzanne Ciani demonstrates what the Prophet 5 synthesizer can do to a very astounded David Letterman in an episode of his 1980 morning show. Maryanne Amacher rattles the eardrums of her younger acolyte Thurston Moore with the sheer house-shaking volume of her compositions.

Most hypnotic is a 1965 clip of Delia Derbyshire – Oram’s colleague at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop who is perhaps best known for bringing to life the eerie original theme song, “Doctor Who” – visibly in love with her work as she is a tutorial on creating music gives From ribbon loops to the punch she just pulled out of the air.

Like Oram, Derbyshire’s fascination with technology and emerging forms of music came from the war when she lived in Coventry as a child during the Blitz of 1940 and experienced air raid sirens. “It’s an abstract sound, and it’s meaningful – and then the all-clear,” she says in the film. “Well this is electronic music!”

These 20th century girls were enchanted by the strange new sounds of modern life. In France, a young Éliane Radigue watched intently the overhead planes that were being made as they approached and retreated. Across continents, both Derbyshire and American composer Pauline Oliveros were drawn to the crackling hiss of the radio and even the eerie noises between stations. All these frequencies lured her to new kinds of music, freed from the weight of history, tradition and the impulse, as the composer Nadia Botello puts it, Amacher paraphrased, “pushing the notes of dead white men around”.

From Ciani’s crystalline daydreams to Amacher’s quivering drones, the sounds they made of those influences and technological advances proved as diverse as the women themselves. Oliveros, who wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in 1970 entitled “And name she did not write Lady Composers “would probably deny that there was anything essential that linked their music together. But the common thread that Rovner finds is a palpable sense of awe – a certain exuberance on every woman’s face as she explains how she works to curious camera teams and confused interviewers. Every woman in this documentary looks like she has a precious secret that society has yet to decipher.

Putting awe and affect on the origins of electronic music can be a political act in and of itself. In her 2010 book, Pink Noises: Women About Electronic Music and Sound, writer and musician Tara Rodgers called for an electronic music story “that motivates wonder and a sense of possibility rather than rhetoric of struggle and domination.” suggested that the early, formative association of electronic sound with military technology – the vocoder, for example, was first developed as a spy device – contributed to its steady and limiting masculinized stereotyping over time.

And then there is the commodifying power of capitalism. In the 1970s, when much of the equipment used to make electronic music was prohibitively expensive, Spiegel worked on her compositions for a while in the Bell Labs, then a hotbed for scientific and creative experimentation. As she recalls, the sale of AT&T in 1982 had an unfortunate aftereffect: “Bell Labs became product-oriented rather than pure research. After I left there, I was utterly abandoned. I had lost my main creative medium. “

Eventually, Spiegel took matters into its own hands and created the early algorithmic music computer software Music Mouse in 1986. “What all these women have in common is this DIY thing,” says Ramona Gonzalez, who records as Nite Jewel, in the film. “And DIY is interesting because it doesn’t mean that you have specifically voluntarily chosen to do it yourself. There are certain obstacles that prevent you from doing anything. “

When I saw Rovner’s documentary, I saw unfortunate parallels with the film industry. In the early silent era women were more stable and often employed in more powerful positions than many years later, as Margaret Talbot noted a few years ago in a play for The New Yorker: The early industry had “not yet become bogged down” a strict division of labor by gender ” but as time went on, Hollywood became “an increasingly modern, capitalist company,” and opportunities for women diminished.

The masculinization of electronic music likely resulted from a similar type of streamlined codification in the for-profit 1980s and beyond, although Rovner’s film doesn’t take long to delve into what went wrong. It would perhaps take a more ambitious and less inspiring documentary to capture the forces that contributed to the cultural obliteration of these women’s achievements.

But “Sisters With Transistors” is a worthy correction to a persistently short-sighted view of music history and a call to rekindle something new from what it sparked in Daphne Oram’s revered “Composers of the Future”.

“This is a time when people have the feeling that there are many dead ends in music, that there is not much more to do,” thought Spiegel a few decades ago in a clip used in the film. “With technology, I experience the opposite. During this time we find that we have only just begun to scratch the surface of what is musically possible. “