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      No Ordinary Music Gig

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      The appeal — and challenges — of being a military musician. Picture the brass section of a symphony orchestra.Now, instead of formal attire and a brightly lit concert hall, imagine the principal horn player wearing camouflage fatigues, crouching over a loaded rifle at a firing range. For the thousands of classical musicians employed by the U.S. military, this seemingly incongruous image is a reality.The military calls itself the nation’s largest employer of musicians, and its ranks include some of the country’s most coveted musical performance jobs. Seats in premier military bands are often as competitive as those in the top symphonies in the country, in part because of their stability, pay and benefits.There are aspects of the job that might require adjustment for a civilian musician, though. Band members must adhere to strict military standards — such as passing physical fitness tests, wearing a uniform during rehearsal and, most daunting of all, completing 10 to 12 weeks of boot camp with no access to their instruments.My latest story, which published this morning, explores how some musicians become service members. I spent more than eight months following the journey of one euphonium player, Ada Brooks, from her audition for the West Point Band through a freezing stint at boot camp in the Ozarks, to her first concert.In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain the unique role that military bands play in the classical music world and the intense demands that come with the job.Shipping outMusic and the military have long been intertwined. Drums were used to set the pace of marches, and fifes served as battlefield communication before there were radios. The country’s first military band, the United States Marine Band — known as “The President’s Own” — was formed by an act of Congress in 1798.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Richard Sherman, Songwriter of Many Spoonfuls of Sugar, Dies at 95

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      He and his brother, Robert, teamed up to write the songs for “Mary Poppins” and other Disney classics. They also gave the world “It’s a Small World (After All).”Richard M. Sherman, the younger brother in a songwriting team that won two Oscars and two Grammys, brought Disney movies to musical life and gave the world numbers like “A Spoonful of Sugar,” “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” and the ubiquitous, multiply translated “It’s a Small World (After All),” died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 95.The death, in a hospital, was announced by the Walt Disney Company.The careers of the Shermans — Richard and Robert — were inextricably linked with Walt Disney. Their Academy Awards were for “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” a chimney sweep’s alternately cheerful and plaintive anthem from “Mary Poppins” (1964), and for the film’s score. Their Grammy Awards were for “Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too,” shared in 1975 for best recording for children, and the “Mary Poppins” score.“It’s a Small World” was written for the Disney theme-park ride of the same name. The song plays as guests in boats pass among 240 dolls of many nations with identical faces — tiny can-can and folk dancers, mermaids and mariachi bands — plus Big Ben, the Taj Mahal and grinning farm animals.“People want to kiss us or kill us,” Richard Sherman said in a 2011 video interview about the song, which he said was “the biggest hit of the World’s Fair,” where it was introduced in 1964.The Shermans brought a musical-theater sensibility to movie songwriting. The question was never which came first, the music or the words; what came first was the idea.The framework of “Mary Poppins” did not exist until the Shermans got their hands on P.L. Travers’s beloved books about a magical nanny, a series of adventures in 1930s London with no discernible conflict or resolution. In the movie, the problem is the children’s behavior, brought on by a neglectful father. It also seemed like bad taste to employ live-in servants during hard economic times, so they moved the Banks family to the Edwardian era.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Sues to Break Up Ticketmaster Owner, Live Nation

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      Accused of violating antitrust laws, Live Nation Entertainment faces a fight that could reshape the multibillion-dollar live music industry.The Justice Department on Thursday sued Live Nation Entertainment, the concert giant that owns Ticketmaster, asking a court to break up the company over claims it illegally maintained a monopoly in the live entertainment industry.In the lawsuit, which is joined by 29 states and the District of Columbia, the government accuses Live Nation of dominating the industry by locking venues into exclusive ticketing contracts, pressuring artists to use its services and threatening its rivals with financial retribution.Those tactics, the government argues, have resulted in higher ticket prices for consumers and have stifled innovation and competition throughout the industry.“It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster,” Merrick Garland, the attorney general, said in a statement announcing the suit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The suit asks the court to order “the divestiture of, at minimum, Ticketmaster,” and to prevent Live Nation from engaging in anticompetitive practices.The lawsuit is a direct challenge to the business of Live Nation, a colossus of the entertainment industry and a force in the lives of musicians and fans alike. The case, filed 14 years after the government approved Live Nation’s merger with Ticketmaster, has the potential to transform the multibillion-dollar concert industry.Live Nation’s scale and reach far exceed those of any competitor, encompassing concert promotion, ticketing, artist management and the operation of hundreds of venues and festivals around the world.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      DOJ to Sue Live Nation, Accusing It of Defending a Monopoly

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      Live Nation Entertainment, the concert giant that owns Ticketmaster, faces a fight that could reshape the multibillion-dollar live music industry.The Justice Department and a group of states plan to sue Live Nation Entertainment, the concert giant that owns Ticketmaster, as soon as Thursday, accusing it of illegally maintaining a monopoly in the live entertainment industry, said three people familiar with the matter.The government plans to argue in a lawsuit that Live Nation shored up its power through Ticketmaster’s exclusive ticketing contracts with concert venues, as well as the company’s dominance over concert tours and other businesses like venue management, said two of the people, who declined to be named because the lawsuit was still private. That helped the company maintain a monopoly, raising prices and fees for consumers, limiting innovation in the ticket industry and hurting competition, the people said.The government will argue that tours promoted by the company were more likely to play venues where Ticketmaster was the exclusive ticket service, one of the people said, and that Live Nation’s artists played venues that it owns.Live Nation is a colossus of the concert world and a force in the lives of musicians and fans alike. Its scale and reach far exceed those of any competitor, encompassing concert promotion, ticketing, artist management and the operation of hundreds of venues and festivals around the world.The Ticketmaster division alone sells 600 million tickets a year to events around the world. According to some estimates, it handles ticketing for 70 percent to 80 percent of major concert venues in the United States.Lawmakers, fans and competitors have accused the company of engaging in practices that harm rivals and drive up ticket prices and fees. At a congressional hearing early last year, prompted by a Taylor Swift tour presale on Ticketmaster that left millions of people unable to buy tickets, senators from both parties called Live Nation a monopoly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler Headline Broadway ‘Romeo and Juliet’

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      A production featuring the screen stars, with music by Jack Antonoff, will open in October at Circle in the Square.Kit Connor, known for “Heartstopper,” is coming to Broadway in “Romeo and Juliet.”Gareth Cattermole/Getty ImagesRachel Zegler, who was in the movie adaptation of “West Side Story,” will also star in “Romeo and Juliet.”Dia Dipasupil/Getty ImagesRachel Zegler has already played a Juliet-inspired figure, starring as Maria in the 2021 film adaptation of “West Side Story.” And Kit Connor has played a Romeo of sorts, starring as a yearning adolescent in the boy-meets-boy television series “Heartstopper.”Now the two actors are bringing a new production of “Romeo and Juliet” to Broadway. Their version, which seems to be leaning into the alienation of youth in a world of violent adults, is to begin performances Sept. 26 and to open Oct. 24 at Circle in the Square Theater.The production, which announced its timing and location on Wednesday, has said little about its concept, but there are indications it will be influenced by contemporary ideas: The show is to feature music by Jack Antonoff, the Grammy-winning producer best known for his successful collaborations with Taylor Swift, and it is being marketed with a vulgarity about the plight of young people. On Wednesday, the show released a video of Zegler and Connor, in contemporary clothing and setting, flirting and dancing to a song from Bleachers, which is Antonoff’s band.“Romeo and Juliet” is one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, and this will be its 37th production on Broadway, according to the Internet Broadway Database. This production is to be directed by Sam Gold, a Tony winner for “Fun Home” who has previously directed Broadway productions of “Macbeth” and “King Lear” and who is directing this season’s revival of “An Enemy of the People.” Sonya Tayeh, the Tony-winning choreographer of “Moulin Rouge!”, will add a dancer’s sensibility to the production; she is being credited with “movement.”This revival, first announced last month, is being produced by Seaview, an increasingly prolific production company founded by Greg Nobile and Jana Shea and partially owned by Sony Music Masterworks. More

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      The Sunday Read: ‘Why Did This Guy Put a Song About Me on Spotify?’

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      Adrienne Hurst and Tanya Pérez and Sophia Lanman and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | SpotifyHave you heard the song “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes”?Probably not. On Spotify, “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes” has not yet accumulated enough streams to even register a tally. Even Brett Martin, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the titular Nice Man, didn’t hear the 1 minute 14 second song until last summer, a full 11 years after it was uploaded by an artist credited as Papa Razzi and the Photogs.When Martin stumbled on “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes,” he naturally assumed it was about a different, more famous Brett Martin: perhaps Brett Martin, the left-handed reliever who until recently played for the Texas Rangers; or Brett Martin, the legendary Australian squash player; or even Clara Brett Martin, the Canadian who in 1897 became the British Empire’s first female lawyer. Only when the singer began referencing details of stories that he made for public radio’s “This American Life” almost 20 years ago did he realize the song was actually about him. The song ended, “I really like you/Will you be my friend?/Will you call me on the phone?” Then it gave a phone number, with a New Hampshire area code.So, he called.There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez, Frannie Carr Toth and Krish Seenivasan. More

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      Portishead’s Beth Gibbons Returns Solo, Doleful Yet Determined

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      With “Lives Outgrown,” her first album of her own songs in 22 years, the pensive voice of the trip-hop group confronts maturity and mortality.“All trying but can’t escape/All going to nowhere,” Beth Gibbons sings in “Floating on a Moment” from her new album, “Lives Outgrown.” It’s an acknowledgment of mortality, of limitations, of inevitable endings. It’s also an insight that can be grim or oddly comforting. Gibbons leans tentatively toward comfort; as the song ends, children sing, “All going to nowhere” while minor chords give way to major ones and Gibbons concludes, “All we have is here and now.”For three decades, Gibbons, 59, has made herself a voice of melancholy yearning and shattered hopes. With Portishead in the 1990s and 2000s, and on her own very occasional solo projects, she has sung about alienation, grief, doubt, loneliness, fear, betrayal and tormented love. Now, on “Lives Outgrown,” Gibbons has matured without becoming complacent. “The burden of life just won’t leave us alone,” she sings in “Burden of Life.”Portishead’s two 1990s studio albums, “Dummy” (1994) and “Portishead” (1997), were foundations of trip-hop. They deployed atmospheric samples to conjure a foreboding netherworld, where Gibbons’s vocals could sound anxious, jazzy, witchy or utterly bereft. Portishead’s return in 2008, “Third,” was uncompromising, dissonant and volatile, bristling against the ways trip-hop had been smoothed into background music during the group’s hiatus.In between, Gibbons collaborated on an album with Paul Webb, a.k.a Rustin Man, the bassist of Talk Talk. “Out of Season,” released in 2002, placed her voice in more naturalistic settings, with studio bands and orchestral arrangements. “Lives Outgrown,” 22 years later, is its latter-day sequel.The album was assembled gradually over the last 10 years, while Gibbons occasionally resurfaced with other projects: composing film scores, performing Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, collaborating with Kendrick Lamar on “Mother I Sober.”Produced by Gibbons and James Ford (of Simian Mobile Disco), “Lives Outgrown” relies on hand-played instruments, but it often juxtaposes them in surreal ways. Ford alone plays a huge assortment — guitars, dulcimer, keyboards, woodwinds, brasses, even musical saw — while the drummer Lee Harris (from Talk Talk), who shares some songwriting credits, uses all sorts of found percussion, including boxes and kitchenware. For the first time in her catalog, Gibbons allowed herself to layer on backup vocals, which materialize like a ghostly sisterhood.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Antony Blinken plays Rockin’ in the Free World in Kyiv bar – video

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      The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, performed Neil Young’s 1989 Rockin’ in the Free World at a bar in Kyiv during a visit on Wednesday night. He was called on stage by the frontman of Ukrainian rock group 19.99, before he played guitar. Young’s song was written in 1989 after he was denied an opportunity to perform in the Soviet Union and was released as the Berlin Wall came down. The song choice underscored Blinken’s support for Ukraine as Russia steps up attacks on the city of Kharkiv

      Before the performance, in a message to Ukrainians, Blinken said: ‘So much of the world is with you. And they’re fighting, not just for a free Ukraine, but for the free world. And the free world is with you too. So maybe we can try something.’ Blinken is known for combining ‘music with diplomacy’, and launched an initiative in 2021 through the state department to realise that goal More