There is a version of the classical music industry we like to talk about — the concert halls, the Stradivarius provenance, the standing ovations — and then there is the industry underneath it: the raw materials, the supply chains, the resources we extract and shape into the instruments that carry sound into a room. Most of us never think past the first version. The Final Bow, a short documentary co-directed by Iona Horton and Luisa Barone, asks us to.

I met Iona in February at the DocShop industry track of the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Montana, where The Final Bow had its world premiere. We ended up a row apart in a session on solving the documentary distribution dilemma. Iona piped up during the Q&A pushing back on a notion introduced by the panel — that filmmakers had to choose between mission, money, career, and audience. Her question was “Why not all of it?” That instinct is, in a way, the whole film.

Six months later, The Final Bow is part of the inaugural Yahoo x Nonfiction Hotlist, chosen from over a thousand submissions — with a live screening on August 23rd at American Dream Mall in New Jersey, with cellist Coleman Itzkoff performing outside the theater.

I learned of the Nonfiction Hotlist in December 2025, while reconnecting with some longtime colleagues at the Producers Guild of America Holiday Party. What started as a LinkedIn Post a few years ago, has turned into a volunteer-led endeavor, whose core mission is to bypass risk-averse industry gatekeepers, connect independent creators with vital resources and audiences, and build sustainable pathways for ambitious storytelling. This is a huge overlap in the Venn diagram between Iona and myself.

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The Shift

Iona is not a classical musician:

“I am a singer, and I did play the flute, but never professionally.”

and she came to filmmaking from the other side of the subject entirely. She trained as a geologist and spent close to a decade as an environmental consultant working in supply chains and resource management, before taking the documentary programme at Columbia Journalism School. The Final Bow is her debut; it won the duPont/Judy F. Crichton Award and screened as a Top 10 finalist for Best Short at Big Sky. The film found her, not the other way around: while in her partner’s violin shop in Brooklyn, Brazilian bow salesman walked in one day trying to sell some wholesale — and started talking about pernambuco, the wood nearly every professional bow is made from, and the mounting trouble sourcing and exporting it.

“This is, for me, what I just love about the serendipity of life and the universe. All of my films start by chance encounters. I just hear something, or I meet someone, and it really piques my interest, and I follow the thread. I think that’s why it works, because I’m learning as I go as well — I don’t come in with a lot of pre-held conceptions or an agenda. I just want to enter these people’s world.”

About six months later, as part of the Columbia Journalism School’s documentary program, Iona recalled this story. She called the bow salesman in Brazil. One contact led to another — the International Pernambuco Conservation Initiative, the New York Botanical Garden, an agroforestry scientist in Bahia, the manager of Brazil’s Pernambuco National Park. She learned that pernambuco, or pau-brasil, is the tree Brazil is named for — its red dye coloured European textiles for centuries, until synthetic dyes replaced it — and that the Atlantic Forest it grows in, once stretching the length of Brazil’s east coast, has lost 90% of its original area over five hundred years, even though 70% of Brazil’s population still lives within it.

The stakes weren’t abstract, either. CITES — the same international body that regulates the ivory trade — had pernambuco on the agenda for its late-2025 meeting, weighing a ban on the wood’s cross-border movement. New policy took effect this past March; the next review comes in 2028, with a mandate that the population and trade practices actually improve, or the ban returns.

The Vote

While Iona and Luisa were able to go to Brazil thanks to a Pulitzer Center Post-Graduate Reporting Fellowship, production and subsequent delivery for The Final Bow wrapped amidst the buildup to that CITES meeting without knowing how it would end. It’s worth filling in what actually happened, because the outcome only sharpens the film’s argument. As Heidi Waleson reported for Symphony Magazine, delegates convened in Samarkand, Uzbekistan from late November into early December 2025, where Brazil formally proposed moving pernambuco to Appendix I — the treaty’s highest protection tier, one that would have made it essentially impossible for touring musicians to carry a pernambuco bow across a border. After intense lobbying from orchestras, musicians’ unions, and bow makers — including direct intervention from French president Emmanuel Macron — the Parties instead kept pernambuco on Appendix II, opting for a new permit system rather than an outright ban.

The film’s own thesis was playing out in real time: the people closest to the wood turned out to be its most effective advocates. The advocacy that shaped the outcome came from across the whole ecosystem the film follows: North American professional bodies like the American Federation of Musicians and the League of American Orchestras, trade organizations like the International Alliance of Violin and Bow Makers for Endangered Species, and — just as prominently — local voices on the ground, including musicians from the São Paulo Symphony and the International Pernambuco Conservation Initiative, the same coalition of bow makers Iona had already spent months getting to know. Readers who want the fuller account of who argued what can find it in Waleson’s reporting, linked above.

None of it is settled. The permit system requires proof that a bow’s wood was harvested before September 2007, and Brazil retains the right to bring the Appendix I proposal back at the next CITES conference — the same 2028 deadline Iona is racing to get ahead of with her follow-up film. The music industry effectively won a three-year window to prove the system it’s building — traceability, documentation, reforestation — actually works.

The advocacy hasn’t stopped with the vote, either: the League of American Orchestras keeps a running “Know Your Bow” resource for musicians and bow owners navigating the new documentation requirements, updated as the permit system rolls out.

That collective effort — professional unions, trade groups, and local advocates all pulling toward the same outcome — is exactly what Iona and Luisa built their film around.

The (absent) villain

It’s a familiar documentary device (and too easy with this subject) to frame a story as “us-vs-them”: musicians and bow makers on one side, conservationists and environmentalists on the other. Iona and Luisa resisted that from the start, and found the opposite dynamic at play. Marcelo Lopes, CEO of Fundação OSESP (São Paulo Symphony Orchestra), argues in the film that musicians can be advocates for reforestation. Yung Chin, of the International Pernambuco Conservation Initiative, has spent thirty years — with a coalition of bow makers across Europe and North America — trying to plant a sustainable supply of a tree that takes thirty years just to become harvestable.

But the film needed a human voice to convey the material and the emotional impact of all of this. She found Coleman Itzkoff, a cellist she’d seen perform in an intimate salon setting and met with a few times over coffee.

“You’ve got to speak to a musician and understand how they relate to that tool, which I have learned through the course of making this film — I couldn’t have fathomed the connection that these musicians have with their instruments. It’s their voice; an extension of their body. It’s so visceral, this connection that they have, which I just couldn’t have understood before working with Coleman. The man’s basically a poet — the way he so emotionally talks about the music, the bow, his cello, what it all means to him — it just brought that to life.”

“You can feel the soul of these instruments,” Coleman himself says in the film. Some musicians could tell Iona everything about their bow’s provenance — who made it, who’d played it before them — and still not know what it was made of. That disconnect, she said, is the real subject of the film: not ignorance, but distance from the material world our objects come from.

The Pivot

Iona spent years writing environmental reports that, by her own account, almost nobody read: “I’ve been writing reports for years, and no one reads them — or very few do. They just want the one-page summary, even though you’ve spent months, sometimes years, writing several hundred pages.”

“I really believe that you have to change people’s hearts first, and then you’ll change their minds, and then you’ll get action. If you just try to intellectually engage someone, it’s unlikely to result in actual change. That’s why I’m all about telling these stories in a way that tickles people’s brains — you think it’s going to be a music documentary, and then it turns out to be an environmental documentary. But it’s still a music documentary. That’s our world — it’s messy, it’s complicated, it’s interlinked.”

Film, for her, is the most multisensory medium available for that first, emotional step — the one that makes people feel a stake in something before they’ve decided to think about it. The Final Bow works because it doesn’t announce itself as an environmental film. It announces itself as a music film, and the environmental story arrives as a discovery, the same way it arrived for Iona in that violin shop.

This is the throughline I keep chasing on this platform — not classical music as an echo chamber and navel-gazing, but as a lens onto the human stories that help us widen our perspective. Viva Verdi! did this by walking into Casa Verdi, the retirement home Verdi himself built for musicians in Milan, and finding that the real story wasn't the institution — it was watching people who'd spent a lifetime making sound simply refuse to stop. The Final Bow does something similar with a tree most of us have never heard of: it doesn't open with a supply-chain briefing, it opens with a cellist describing his bow as an extension of his own body, and lets the audience follow the thread outward from there.

What the full 18-minute film here:

Iona is already working on a follow-up, Heartwood, that would move past the crisis into the solutions — the agroforesters and farmers in Brazil building sustainable plantations, the reforestation efforts racing to rebuild the Atlantic Forest before 2028. She’s applying for grants, including with National Geographic. In the meantime she and Luisa are opening the door to community screenings — the Brooklyn Music School, the Brazilian consulate in New York, hopefully Brazil itself — for anyone willing to organise one.

This is what I mean by storytelling as activism: not persuasion by data, but by proximity. A film can’t ban a chemical or plant a forest. What it can do is make a stranger care enough to ask the question Iona asked in that violin shop — how have I never heard about this? — and go looking for an answer. Hearts, then minds, then action.

Watch and learn more:

• The Final Bow — Big Sky Documentary Film Festival

• Filmaker Page - Iona Horton

• Email: ionahortonfilms@gmail.com

• Film Festival at DREAM LIVE PERFORMING ARTS CENTER

  • The Final Bow screens Sunday at 5:20 pm with filmmakers in attendance, and Coleman Itzkoff performs live at 4:00 pm.

• Film Page on Yahoo x Nonfiction Hotlist

• Yahoo x Nonfiction Hotlist — Documentary Short Film Selections

• “The Sustainable Bow” — Heidi Waleson, Symphony Magazine

• CITES — Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species

• International Pernambuco Conservation Initiative (IPCI-USA)

• SOS Mata Atlântica

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Ethereal cosmic tones from a vibraphone

Transports us to another realm of make-believe.

Nods to Debussy’s “Afternoon” in the flute.

Out walks a triangle in motion with “paint” splattered.

Even on their rabbit clutched.

Caught in play.

A rabbit’s ears sprouted off a headpiece attached to a gown built like a piece of sculpture.

Balloons blew up into full-on architecture.

Wun’s own explanation was that he built the whole collection as a kind of mirror held up to his darker instincts, just to see what was on the other side of it. What he found was childhood — not the sanitized version, but the real one, where wonder and fear live in the same room and nobody bothers separating them.

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Look 3 is the one Cardi B wore. And that look is what sent my brain somewhere very specific: to a set that opens up like a storybook, cream walls painted with black French script, a production I got to work on twice, from two completely different seats.

That production is Laurent Pelly’s Cendrillon — Massenet’s operatic Cinderella. It premiered at Santa Fe Opera in 2006, where I was working in the rehearsal department, watching the whole thing get built from the inside out. It’s toured the world since, and in 2018 it finally landed at the Met in time for a company premiere. Something this fantastical and grandiose is now in the Met repertoire even in a shortened version for the family-friendly holiday season.

Pelly built that whole production out of one memory: his grandmother reading him the Perrault fairy tale as a kid, out of a picture book with big fancy lettering. So he didn’t just adapt the story — he staged the memory of being read to. The set is the book. Three walls, and the entire fairy tale is hand-lettered across them in French. You’re standing inside the story before anyone even sings a note. And once you’re in there, the whole thing gets gloriously over the top — huge silhouettes, a stepmother whose costume tells you she’s awful before she opens her mouth. It’s whimsical as hell. It’s also some of the most disciplined stagecraft I’ve ever seen in an opera house.

That’s the part people miss. Nobody sings in real life — opera has always lived in a heightened reality, same as fairy tales do. That’s not a flaw, that’s the whole point. When Pelly writes the fairy tale across the walls, or when Wun turns a model into a couture stuffed animal, they’re doing the same job: using big, silly, “unserious” images to sneak past people’s defenses so they’ll actually feel something. You can’t walk up to grief or cruelty head-on — people flinch. But wrap it in a glass slipper and a talking fairy godmother, and folks will walk right into the middle of it without a fight. Sci-fi and comic books work the same way. Take something out of literal reality and, somehow, it gets easier to see clearly.

And yet we’ve got this bad habit, as grown-ups, of treating “whimsical” and “immature” like they’re the same word said at different volumes. I know this one personally. My own excitement, my own weird left-turn associations — I’ve had that read back to me as somebody-not-being-serious. My brain does fire off in odd directions sometimes. But here’s what I’ve noticed: the second I show I can also be disciplined and methodical about something, that “immature” read disappears instantly. It was never really about the whimsy. It was about whether people had seen proof yet that the whimsy came with a mind that could also buckle down.

During the August 12, 2026 total eclipse in Iceland, Björk sported Look 24 Robert Wun design. At the same time, she played Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra during this divine and other-worldly moment.

Because imagination isn’t the opposite of discipline — it’s one of the hardest forms of it. Wun’s balloons aren’t decoration; by his own account they’re structural, built with the same seriousness as the sharpest tailoring in the room. Pelly’s storybook set isn’t a cute gimmick slapped onto a fairy tale — it’s a childhood memory turned into scenic engineering that has to hold up for each performance, travelling to different opera houses, for what is now years. Whimsy that actually works is always the product of somebody paying very close attention.

I think about my own summers as a kid, writing “chapters” of books about Transformers and GoBots — one page each, lined paper, front side only. My mother took every single one of these off my hands without a single critical word. Knowing her, and knowing she’s a Virgo through and through, that was probably the single greatest act of restraint of her whole life. She never told me the plots didn’t hold together. She just asked what happened next. That was the entire intervention. She protected the imagination and let the discipline show up on its own time — which it eventually did.

Whimsy and maturity are never actually enemies. Maturity is what lets whimsy survive contact with the real world. Whimsy is what keeps maturity from turning to concrete. Wun said his process was “inspired by the unserious, created seriously.” I can’t think of a better way to describe what happens when the lights go down on a set that used to be a bedtime story — or what happens on a kid’s bedroom floor with a stack of lined paper about robots that turn into trucks.

The kid doesn’t go anywhere when you grow up. It just needs somebody willing to take it seriously enough to help build something with it.

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Most people met William Orbit through Ray of Light, and fair enough — the 1998 album is a hallmark of how far a pop star can push her own sound and still land at the center of the culture. Always at the center of club culture, with her legacy of advocacy for LGBT rights, Madonna’s album reaffirmed her status as Queen of Pop. Orbit produced it, and the shift in tone from what came before is unmistakable, even if you’re not listening for it.

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But how many of us knew him beyond that record? I was a musical nerd who heard the difference in texture and approach and went looking for where it came from. What I found was a producer with roots in trance, electronic, and classical music — and an album called Pieces in a Modern Style.

The record’s actual history is stranger and more interesting than the “Madonna’s producer moonlights in classical” version. Orbit first released it in 1995 on his own N-Gram label. That version barely existed, as it was almost immediately pulled from shelves after Arvo Pärt objected to Orbit’s treatment of two of his compositions. The album that most of the world knows didn’t arrive until 2000, reissued through Madonna’s Maverick label with the Pärt pieces swapped out for Beethoven, Vivaldi, Handel, and Mascagni. That’s the version that climbed the charts and became shorthand for what electronic-classical fusion could sound like.

I didn’t know any of that structural backstory when I was in undergrad. I just knew that 1995 and 2000 sat like bookends on either side of my formal education in Philadelphia — Pieces in a Modern Style on one end, Ray of Light somewhere in the middle of the shelf, and by the time I graduated, I understood Orbit’s catalog as a kind of private syllabus, running parallel to the one the university handed me.

That parallel syllabus is part of why I chose a university in a major city instead of a conservatory. I wanted the local culture and its noise to shape my education alongside the institutional pedagogy — not instead of it. Living in Philadelphia, I always presented myself as a “resident who’s currently studying music” rather than one just there for a finite duration. I wanted to be part of the community of the city and those who shaped the culture. I did stay in Philadelphia well beyond my graduation from my studies.

A university in a city hands you the craft training and then throws the whole civic ecosystem at you besides: opera companies, dance companies, benefit concerts, drag bars playing Björk next to jazz clubs playing Ellington. I wanted the friction.

Orbit’s connection to Samuel Barber is where all of this became personal instead of academic. His electronic rendition of the Adagio for Strings — released as the album’s lead single, though the version that actually got radio and TV play was a Ferry Corsten remix — is probably his single most recognizable piece of work outside the Madonna catalog.

I was a chorister with the Opera Company of Philadelphia at the time, and our chorus master, Donald Nally, invited a group of us to sing at a one-night benefit called Shut Up and Dance — a fundraiser produced and performed entirely by dancers of the Pennsylvania Ballet on behalf of MANNA, the Metropolitan AIDS Neighborhood Nutrition Alliance. It’s where I first crossed paths with Matthew Neenan and Ian Hussey, two dancers I’d go on to know for years afterward — Neenan already building the choreographic voice that would eventually lead him to found BalletX, Hussey a few years away from becoming the benefit’s producing director himself.

We sang Barber’s Agnus Dei — the same Adagio melody, retexted for choir.

Barber himself trained at Curtis Institute of Music, a few blocks from where I was living and singing. We were never in Philadelphia at the same time, obviously, but there’s a cosmic something about working on piece in the same city where the composer lived that changes how you hold it.

Rehearsals were rehearsals.

But when we were at soundcheck

lined up against the back of the stage to give the dancers room,

and the piece started,

and dancers ran onstage in a circle

and began pulling each other down mid-jump,

one by one,

like a life cut short.

It didn’t take much imagination to know what that image was standing in for.

I was young. I remember understanding, maybe for the first time, that my voice wasn’t just an instrument for me — it was something I could hand to a room full of people who were actively grieving, actively trying to reconcile how a community absorbs a plague like that and keeps going. That’s not a lesson a conservatory curriculum was going to teach me on its own. That’s a lesson a city, a benefit concert, and a composers’ most famous piece of music taught me together.

William Orbit didn’t write the Adagio. He just heard something in it worth amplifying and handed it to a much bigger audience than Barber ever had in his lifetime. That’s most of what a producer does, honestly — and most of what I’ve tried to do since, in whatever room I happen to be standing in.

Further reading on Orbit’s late-career reappraisal: The Guardian and LA Times both ran strong retrospectives this week.

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From the SoHo Rep website:

During the exposition, the central character ideates on the sound of the music. César insists on a baritone saxophone. The wind player enters the stage cradling the bari sax nearly as tall as she was, and I was gone. I’ve loved that instrument since summers at COTA (Celebration of the Arts) Cat in the Delaware Water Gap in the ‘90s, trading bars with Lew Del Gatto, standing in Maynard Ferguson’s orbit, while I was a jazz and concert bands during my high school years. That low, patient voice under everything — it’s the sound of holding a room together. Around it, the composer built a score as mixed as the company itself: guitars, keys, percussion pulled from a dozen traditions, strings threading through. Disparate instrumentation as the point, not the problem.

Bring what you have, and we’ll make what we can — and it will be special.

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The central character carries a name they didn’t choose — inherited from someone slain at the very gathering the play returns to — and spends the piece negotiating what that inheritance means: identity, exclusion, the accident of not having been there, parents who’ve spent decades metabolizing the same loss. Reconciliation isn’t resolution. It’s integration. You keep carrying it, and you keep moving.

Coming on two years since lost my boyfriend’s sudden passing, at 44, I’ve been finding my way through something similar — grief that reroutes you emotionally and, unexpectedly, professionally too. Watching that stage, I remembered: we come to the table with what we have.

The cosmos is astounding. We are still community. I was reminded of this as I reunited with one of the cast members Rubén Flores, whose second act scene brought up all of these emotions.

I started that first night, at The Potluck, from a kind of distance — someone else’s inheritance, someone else’s ghosts, staged in front of me. But the pull was mine. Grief doesn’t stay where you point it; it recognizes itself in any room willing to hold it, and I felt it reach across the footlights and take hold. Witnessing is its own kind of communion, but it isn’t the whole practice. The next night, I found the rest of it — not distance, but proximity. Not watching healing happen to someone else, but doing the thing I actually know how to do: showing up, again, for the people and the music that have carried me through three decades, and letting that ritual do what ritual does.

Oh, these little earthquakes

A brother’s classmate handed me Little Earthquakes in high school, and it did something no other record had: married conservatory-trained piano technique to confessional songwriting sharp enough to draw blood. Tori Amos had grown up steeped in classical performance, and here she was bending it toward something raw and contemporary — poetry carrying the full gravitas of real feeling. Twenty-first-century art song, delivered a few years early.

In Times of Dragons, her eighteenth studio album, trades the interior reckoning of past records for something more communal: a metaphorical fight for democracy against tyranny, staged as a woman escaping a husband who’s shed his human disguise for one of a lizard demon. She becomes the one thing capable of facing him down — a dragon herself, backed by a chorus of women who’d rather risk themselves than let each other fall.

Thirty years of her concerts have buoyed me alongside millions of people hungry for the same thing: understanding, connection, a place to put the feeling. I’ve crossed paths with Tori herself a handful of times — soundchecks, meet-and-greets, a tour bus doorway here and there — but it’s the reunions with fellow devotees that undo me. Last night I embraced friends from four decades of shows, and got to watch someone experience her live for the first time.

Of all the shows I’ve seen her play, this one sat on the darker end. Night 1 of 2 at the NYC Beacon Theater leaned in early — “Precious Things,” “Crucify,” “Pandora’s Aquarium,” songs that don’t flinch from conviction and vulnerability. Both “Precious Things” and “Crucify” usually land near the end of her sets; pulling them up front was its own kind of tell, a sign of just how much intensity this particular night was carrying. Then she stripped everything away for a solo, tour-debut “Me and a Gun,” sung with nothing behind it. The reckoning with atrocity was the frame for the whole night, and what it takes to keep standing afterward was the answer she kept circling back to.

Then, deeper into the set, an alarm cut into another tour debut, “The Waitress”. Someone had pushed open an emergency door, and what should’ve been a two-second interruption turned into a low, grinding drone under the whole song. She restarted the song and as we anticipate, let is wail for “I believe in peace, bitch!”

Then, after, she turned the continued disruption itself into material — offering the improvised detour as a kind of tactic, a way of describing how you overcome an obstacle without pretending it didn’t happen. It became the through-line of the night: not avoiding the alarm, but building around it. By the time she got to “Yo George” — her old, pointed needle at a Bush-era presidency, reanimated with a fresh improvised intro — the room understood exactly what kind of resilience she meant.

Her instinct for live performance still surprises the audience — no two setlists alike, tour debuts, a malfunctioning door turned into a lesson in real time. And where her records have often turned inward, this one calls outward: fortify the collective, fight like dragons, vanquish what’s trying to burn the house down.

Two nights, back to back — one stage addressing inherited grief, and another acknowledging the present tension.

Confrontation, reflection, and a resolve that actually nourishes.

Wow.

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And even here when I documented my cultural excursion to Germany.

I have watched a lot of matches over the past two months and even was blessed to attend the Round of 32 match between my beloved Deutschland vs Paraguay.

While that was not the outcome I desired, the experience was beyond fulfilling and emotional. Die Mannschaft will return and it’s great to see other countries represent so well. Cabo Verde is my winner of the 2026 World Cup.

This weekend I was in Detroit and attended a match for my beloved Detroit City FC. I’ve been a supporter since 2021 and still hold my season tickets.

I watched the World Cup final at the Detroit City Clubhouse and wasn’t really able to experience the much beleaguered inaugural halftime show - out of respect for the customs of the beautiful game as well as, well… I was in a wonderfully rowdy place.

Those of us who have been following international football tournaments, it came as an ick that a halftime show would actually take place. Even FIFA has strict rules regarding the duration of the halftime break. According to The Times, “The half-time break at the World Cup final is expected to be about 30 minutes long to accommodate FIFA’s star-studded show — breaching the maximum time of 15 minutes permitted under the Laws of the Game.” When is the other time that this breach of this Law? Last year in the United States for the Club World Cup.

This in itself is controversial as in 2011, the International FA Board rejected a proposal by the South American confederation citing the “negative impact on player welfare and safety resulting from a longer period of inactivity”. Eventually they relented for the 2024 Final of Copa America and beloved Colombian Shakira performed a halftime show. Where? Miami, USA. Ah, American exceptionalism and global cringe.

Global broadcasters were concerned about providing game analysis for their audience and the global audience just wanted the commercialization of the world’s game to just end!

Now that I’m home, I watched the full show (I guess FIFA is FIFAing and won’t allow you to watch on Substack):

For the 2026 World Cup Final, the English rockstar Chris Martin (Coldplay), curated a Pangea of performance snippets (snippets around the 2-minute mark) included the following performers and setlist:

• Madonna (Michigan, USA): “Music”

• Gustavo Dudamel (Venezuela), the New York Philharmonic, the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, & The Muppets: “Seven Nation Army” (a nice nod to a major football chant by a band from Detroit)

• BTS (South Korea): “Dynamite”

• Justin Bieber (Canada): “Everything Hallelujah”

• Shakira (Colombia) & Burna Boy (Nigeria): “Dai Dai”

• The Muppets, Coldplay, & the PS22 Chorus (Staten Island, USA): “Believe in Love”

Now come of the performers are beloved by me and many - I was THRILLED to learn PS22 Chorus was invited and that’s a nod to Chris Martin’s inclusion. Shakira can solve world peace with an appearance and has proven that multiple times. Madonna… icon of the world. The Muppets?!?! Dudamel and the orchestras? They really made a buffer for any negative reviews. It was an onslaught of sound, color and frenetic energy - similar to the constant run of uninterrupted action of a true half of a football match (until “hydration breaks” were added).

All this kerfuffle and switching up the run of a program sparked in my mind the 1912 opera, Ariadne aux Naxos - a hilarious comedy with music by Richard Strauss and libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

The story: A dinner is running long and the Majo-Domo informs the two disparate groups - one a a saucy burlesque troupe (in other productions it may be cleansed to be a comedian dell’arte troupe), and the other a serious (read: pretentious) opera company - they must mash up their two offerings together. Pared down, it turns into a rivalry between “art” and “entertainment” with two factions forced to work together for the richest man in Vienna’s amusement. Hilarity ensues.

For a captive audience within the opera house, the chaos and denouement between comedy and bliss is welcome. Rather than being a message of love to the 1.8 BILLION viewers of the 2026 World Cup audience, it hammered a message of tempestuous arrogance by FIFA and one of the host countries.

When Moulin Rouge! The Musical opened at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre on July 25, 2019, it opened with “Lady Marmalade.” Not buried in Act Two. Not as a callback. As the first thing you hear — the signal that you are now inside a world where desire is the organizing principle, sequins are load-bearing, and a French proposition from the stage is not a scandal but a greeting. The show won ten Tony Awards. Before that, in 2001, the Baz Luhrmann film put “Lady Marmalade” back on top of the Billboard Hot 100 for five weeks via Christina Aguilera, Pink, Mýa, and Lil’ Kim, won a Grammy, and introduced the song to an entire generation that thought they were discovering something new.

They weren’t. They were rediscovering something that had already happened at a considerably grander address.

On October 6, 1974 — forty-five years before Moulin Rouge! opened on 45th Street — Labelle performed “Lady Marmalade” at the Metropolitan Opera House. Not in a jukebox musical. Not as a cover of a cover. As themselves: Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash, in Larry Legaspi silver spacesuits with featherwork and chrome, before a sold-out crowd they had personally instructed to arrive dressed in silver.

The Met. The one at Lincoln Center. The one that seats nearly four thousand people and has held Caruso and Callas. That Met.

The Met just doesn’t have a cast recording.

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Here’s the thing about that crowd. It wasn’t the Met’s usual subscription audience. It wasn’t the rock kids or the art-school set either. The crowd that packed the Metropolitan Opera House for Labelle on October 6, 1974 was predominantly Black, prominently queer, and dressed — because Labelle told them to be — in silver. Highly adorned Black gay men who had been following Labelle through the disco circuit. Lesbians from feminist collectives. The kind of crowd the Met had never held before and wouldn’t know quite what to do with after.

Labelle had built this audience deliberately and on their own terms. Before the Met booking, “Lady Marmalade” was playing the discos, and Labelle would drop in, dance, and personally tell the room about the upcoming engagement at Lincoln Center. They advertised the show in After Dark, Michael’s Thing, and Interview — gay publications, not the classical music press. The Continental Baths, where Bette Midler had been building a cult following for a towel-clad gay audience twelve blocks from Lincoln Center, was part of the same ecosystem. Labelle wasn’t trying to cross over to the Met’s audience. They were bringing their own audience into the Met’s building. Those are two very different things.

And their audience came.

Patti LaBelle, decades later, still lights up describing it: “Everybody came in with something silver on. I remember Debbie Allen was there, Cher was there, the Cycle Sluts. Some people had their behinds hanging out with their little, whatever they had on.”

New York Times critic John Rockwell was there too. His review, filed October 11 under the headline “Labelle at Met: Sequins, Regions and Acoustics,” is one of the most candid documents of what that night actually looked like. Rockwell noted that Labelle’s fans were “neither the literate punks that love The Who nor the soft and furry creatures that flock to Melanie” — and then, with the arch precision of a man who knew exactly what he was describing, observed that “if one wanted to be catty about it, one could suggest that Sunday’s crowd was the Met’s opera audience come out of the closet: there can rarely have been so many bearded gentlemen in dresses, razzle-dazzle sequins and arched eyebrows at a Met performance before.”

Read charitably, Rockwell is processing something the culture didn’t yet have clean language for. Read accurately, he is an eyewitness to the Metropolitan Opera House being claimed by Black queer culture — and writing it down for the newspaper of record in October 1974. Rockwell knew the room he was sitting in. He just hadn’t been in one like it before.

Which raises the obvious question: how did this happen? Who opened that door?

The Metropolitan Opera’s General Manager in October 1974 was Schuyler Chapin, who had inherited the job in 1972 after the sudden death of his predecessor, Göran Gentele, in a car accident in Sardinia. Chapin was, by any account, an expansive thinker about what a major cultural institution could contain — he brought Beverly Sills to her Met debut, invited Danny Kaye for young people’s concerts, and was that same year actively planning a Met production of Porgy and Bess with Leonard Bernstein. The Labelle booking fits the pattern of a man who understood that the house needed to breathe.

But the exact paper trail — whose desk the booking landed on, who made the call, whether Chapin personally signed off or whether it was Vicki Wickham’s salesmanship that walked it through a particular door — remains undocumented in any publicly searchable source. Chapin’s 783-page oral history at Columbia University, recorded in 1977, covers his tenure in exhaustive detail. It has not been fully digitized. The Met Archives hold the administrative record from that era. The answer is almost certainly in one of those two places.

This is not a trivial gap. It is the most interesting question the Labelle Met performance poses to anyone running a performing arts venue today. Someone inside that building said yes to something the broader culture was actively arguing about — “Lady Marmalade” was being banned by radio stations, condemned from church pulpits in Seattle, and had its lyric changed to “Do you want to dance with me?” by CBS for a Cher television appearance. The Met held it anyway. What was the internal conversation? What made it possible? Those questions belong to performing arts leaders now, not just historians.

“I don’t limit myself. I’m all sexes. I don’t know what a heterosexual or a bisexual or a homosexual or a monosexual is. I don’t understand the differences.” - Nona Hendryx, 1975

The costumes were the work of Larry LeGaspi — gay, Puerto Rican, working-class Jersey City — who was simultaneously dressing Kiss and Funkadelic and who understood that a spacesuit is armor and an invitation at the same time. Silver chain mail loincloths, rhinestone headdresses, flight helmets, handcuffs worn at the hip. Nona Hendryx, in the Rolling Stone cover story that followed — the first time an all-Black act appeared on that magazine’s cover — stated the group’s philosophy without equivocation: “I don’t limit myself. I’m all sexes. I don’t know what a heterosexual or a bisexual or a homosexual or a monosexual is. I don’t understand the differences.”

This was 1975. Six years after Stonewall. It was not a diplomatic statement. It was the whole argument.

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When Labelle walked onto the Met stage in silver, they were not performing assimilation. They were annexing the grandest concert hall in America for a vision of Blackness that was extraterrestrial, erotic, and free — and they brought four thousand people with them who knew exactly what they were there for. Afrofuturism is not simply an aesthetic. It is a philosophical insistence that Black people have a future, that they belong to modernity and to whatever comes after modernity, and that the imagination is a political instrument.

Now hold all of that — the sold-out Met, the Black queer crowd in silver, the aisles full of dancing, Nona Hendryx in a flight helmet declaring herself all sexes, Patti LaBelle descending on rings and wire like a goddess sex machine while “Lady Marmalade” bounced off the same acoustics that held Enrico Caruso — and set it beside what was coming.

Five years later. July 12, 1979. Chicago radio DJ Steve Dahl organized Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park. Fans paid 98 cents for a White Sox ticket in exchange for a disco record to be blown up on the field between games. Nearly 50,000 showed up. They chanted “Disco Sucks.” They stormed the field and set fires. Ushers noted that the records brought for destruction weren’t only disco — they were soul, funk, and R&B, music associated with Black artists broadly. Nile Rodgers of Chic watched the footage the next day and said it felt like a Nazi book burning.

The history is not subtle. Disco was music built by and for Black, Latine, and queer communities, and the backlash against it was a backlash against them. In 1974, Labelle brought those communities to the Metropolitan Opera House and the institution said yes. In 1979, 50,000 people came to a baseball stadium to burn their records.

“Lady Marmalade” survived it. Of course it did.

This weekend, it comes home.

Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City presents Nightbirds, The Music of Labelle on June 28, featuring founding member Nona Hendryx alongside original Labelle musicians at David Geffen Hall — across the plaza from the Met stage where it all started fifty years ago. Outside on the plaza, Summer for the City‘s iconic disco ball turns in the summer air, scattering silver light across the same Lincoln Center campus where Rockwell once sat trying to find the words. The crowd knew then. The crowd will know this weekend. Silver still means something.

And the story isn’t over. A new rock opera — titled Labelle — is in development, written by Nona Hendryx in collaboration with two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Tony winner Lynn Nottage (Sweat, Ruined). It will track how Labelle broke barriers of race, gender, and genre while blending rock, funk, soul, and glam into a sound that transformed the music industry. Hendryx has described it as an immersive celebration of artistic liberation and cultural defiance.

Which, by the way — all musicals are operas. Not all operas are musicals. What LaBelle did at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1974 was both and neither. The institution on 45th Street eventually caught up. With a rock opera in development and Hendryx back at Lincoln Center this weekend, “Lady Marmalade” and the Black strength behind it may have a few more years left on Broadway yet.

We need a bit of sun. June is a lot - Black Music Month, Pride Month, Juneteenth, the official start of Summer, and Father’s Day. This spans at least 25 years of experiences and kicking back.

And now on Soundcloud:

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1. “It’s Summertime” - Morcheeba (Kent, England)

Just a feel good track to start the playlist from one of my favorite groups. Skye Edwards’ voice is sparkling on this collab with Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner.

Filmed in 2018 when times were a bit different:

2. “I Like It Hot” - Honey Dijon, Greentea Peng (Chicago/London)

Honey Dijon - one of the titans of the house music scene, currently bouncing between gigs and events. This track from her latest album, Nightlife brings back the cool on a hot summer day.

3. “It’s Love (Trippin’) - Goldtrix feat. Andrea Brown (London, England)

25 years later, this track is still slaps. The first of a couple tracks that are throwbacks. This one-off collab has staying power for years to come with he rolling bass indicative of drum n’ bass producers brought to 2000s house.

I was living in Philly when this hit, but I was today year’s old to learn (or maybe reminded) it’s a “cover” of Illy Jilly from Philly!!!

4. “Travel light - Sound Support Remix Edit” - Kraak & Smaak (Leinden, Netherlands)

My Duchies are back - where Goldtrix getting a little darker with its groove, Travel Light let’s the sun shine in

We saw the winter pass

Springtime last

Summer strollings

We watched the silver lining

Hearts were smiling

Shining all the way

5. “Pawa! - Crazy P Disco Dub” - Asha Puthli, Say She She (India/Brooklyn)

From DJ Mag “Released to mark Sunday’s International Women’s Day (8th March), ‘PAWA!’ is a disco-funk track that celebrates “feminism and the power of togetherness”. It’s the first collaboration between the legendary Indian disco vocalist and the US group.”

I love the Brooklyn-based trio Say She She and looking forward to finally catching them in person soon!

6. “Love’s Theme” - Groove Armada (London, England)

Groove Armada another 90’s mainstay (like Morcheeba) is back with a sample of Ashford & Simpson’s “Get Out Your Handkerchief”

On my favorite label, Glitterbox

7. “Superbloom” - Jessie Ware (London, England)

The title track of the album brings the orchestral decadence of laidback summer patios and pool days. Looking forward to catching her live for the first time this autumn.

Jeff loved her podcast with her mum and we listed to many-an episode while on our summer roadtrips.

8. “Femme Hysteria” - Haute & Freddy (LA via Houston/Detroit)

The band so nice they appear on the list twice!!! Amazingly theatrical songwriters for pop stars and now out on their own, Haute & Freddy are so much fun!!!!

I caught them on tour in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, but they’re coming back opening for Melanie Martinez.

REQUEST: Anyone know them directly?!?!? Inspired minds want to know!!!!

9. Crutch” - Love Spells (Houston)

Bringing it down for a little “summertime sadness” Sir Taegan Harris as Love Spells defies expectations with the etherial shoe gaze timbre of his voice.

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NON-ENGLISH BLOCK

10. “Pixels” - Mado (Paris, France)

Kickin off our Euro block, and snapping us back in a bop, even if it continues the ennui - the French chanteuse Mado - unsigned, Leo - love her

tout vole

ou va le pire ?

j’ai tout recollé y’a plus rien qui m’anime

sad boy

tu peux le dire

c’est trop difficile d’assumer qu’elle se dise

mon cœur réduit en pixels

et c’est le bug de tout mon système

tête brûlée sous le soleil

elle a mis feu à mon logiciel

—

everything’s flying apart

where is the worst of it heading?

I’ve glued it all back together, but nothing moves me anymore

sad boy

you can say that

it’s too hard to accept what she says to herself

my heart reduced to pixels

and it’s a glitch in my whole system

hothead under the sun

she set my software on fire

11. “Bibidi Bobidi Bu” - Ditonellapiaga (Rome, Italy)

Margherita Carducci is the pop sensation whose second album, Miss Italia lands her ont

O the global scene. I think I need to make another excursion to Italy, though, just to catch one of her shows. I don’t mind.

Dicono che quando meno te l’aspetti,

Improvvisamente

La vita ti mette di fronte a un bivio tra

La scelta del cuore e la più conveniente

Ma c’è ancora chi mente

Chi dice che in entrambi i casi non ci perdi niente

Ma ci perdi sempre

—

They say when you least expect it,

Life suddenly brings you to a crossroads between

Following your heart and taking the practical path

But there are still those who lie

Who say you lose nothing either way

But you always lose something

12. “Volando Voy” - Amaia (Pamplona, Spain)

THANK YOU PUBLIC RADIO for getting me into this incredible Spanish artists!!! Ok I seem to be in a kick of Spain lately - maybe it’s the Iberian vibe of so many cultures living there for centuries.

For the playlist, I chose her cover of Kiko Veneno’s “Volando Boy”

Señoras y señores

Sepan ustedes

Que la flor de la noche

Es pa´ quien la merece

Enamorao de la vida

Aunque a veces duela

—

Ladies and gentlemen

Let it be known

That the flower of the night

Belongs to the one who deserves it

In love with life

Even though it sometimes hurts

13. “Salam” - Mestiza (Spain)

These Andalusian divas… O. M. G. Dios mio. The mixture of flamenco, house, and other influences from the area (an area where Christianity, Judaism, and Islam lived in harmony for centuries) combine to transport us to La Mancha. The windmills don’t hurt…

The song “Salam” (“peace”) is from their album “Spanish Chica” A universe where flamenco roots, Arabic influences, Latin electronic music, fashion and feminine energy merge into one continuous visual journey.

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GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN

14. “Chakzilla” - Chaka Khan (Chicago)

Age is nothin but a number… Chaka Khan keeps reminding us this and has a new album coming out in September.

Chris Rizik writes, “Emerging from her friendship with pop songstress Sia, “Chakzilla” is a campy dance number, the video for which has Chaka dominating a metropolis landscape like a science fiction movie giant.”

“And like the theme behind so many invasion flicks, the song is a story about breaking out – in this case, breaking out from years of waiting for the right lover who would let the singer’s unguarded brilliance come through.

15. “Dance the Pain Away” - Haute & Freddy

This song is just so good and every time I listen, the ending lick segues beautifully to

16. “Number 1” - Goldfrapp (Bristol, England)

Any excuse to listen to Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory’s tunes is fine with me! I was able to catch Alison solo as the opener for Scissor Sisters last May, but it may be the last time for the foreseeable future. She recently announced probably not touring the Americas cited “demand” ugh! We shall see if the blue dot scare adds to this concern.

17. “Buzz and Tommy“ - MantaRayBryn (South East Cornwall, England)

From his IG: “This track started as a list of advice to my younger self, but soon became me trying to throw a lifeline to those stuck in a deep dark closet, and also an homage to the real Buzz and Tommy (go and look it up). Anyway get loose to it, learn the dance moves, get with someone hot, be gay to it.”

18. “I Feel So Free - Peggy Gou Energy Mix” - Madonna (Bay City, Michigan)

Madge’s new album arrives in July. She’s already made appearances at Coachella, Tribeca Film Festival, and even Times Square, in partnership with Grindr.

This remix gives me a Danceteria vibe and I’m not mad.

19. “Feelin’ Good Tonight - Rimarkable Remix” - Louie Vega, Willy Soul, Funki Cadets (NYC, Detroit)

Fresh off Movement Festival last month, I will always bring Rimarkable into the mix. It was absolute kismet during lockdown I listened to her mixes on the Defected/Glitterbox Radio shows and got me hyped for my move to Detroit. Her sets are always different and with so much depth.

The FADER: What is the importance of Movement Festival to Detroit Techno?
Rimarkable: The importance of this festival is that here you are getting the source that has transcended genres and gone to different countries, different planets, different galaxies. This is the birthplace of techno and it’s important to always reference the source. What’s also amazing is that Detroit is on the river, so that frequency is traveling even further and further and further. If you come to the festival, you can be a part of that frequency.

20. “Nightmare (Sinister Strings Mix)” - Brainbug (Ceggia, Italy)

Pride 2001. Caligula. Hammerstein Ballroom, NYC. Full orchestra onstage for one of the most iconic tracks of the era. Victor Calderone remembers and shared the VHS transfers!

“After months of planning and rehearsing in my home, the moment finally arrived. At 4 a.m., the curtain opened at the Hammerstein Ballroom to reveal an unannounced 50-piece orchestra performing alongside me as “Nightmare” by Brainbug echoed through the room.

For a few magical minutes, classical and electronic music collided in a way that felt completely unexpected and deeply emotional. The energy in that room erupted and was unlike anything I had ever experienced before.”

21. “Hustler” - Simian Mobile Disco (London, England)

20 years later, this track brings me into the Italo-modern era a la Reggio Emilia’s Benny Benassi.

22. “Healer” - D’Leesa (Atlanta)

After hustlin’, we need some healing. Soft, Sapphic Soul. Bedroom Pop

This came up on my YouTube today and the bass line along with her voice is perfection!!!!

23. “All the Lovers” - Kylie Minogue (Melbourne, Australia)

Celebrating 40 years performing, Aussie diva mixes it up with the Abbey Road Session of her track from Aphrodite. I’ve seen her at the aforementioned Hammerstein Ballroom, Edinburgh Castle, and now MSG but I’ll give you the visual splendor of her arena tour in Europe. I don’t know we’ll be able to experience these productions any time soon.

24. “Disco Apertivo - Boys Shorts Remix” - Ursula 1000, Sarah Maison (Brooklyn/Hyères, France)

Jeff would always appreciate an Italo-inspired track and this poolside sip is no exception

25. “They Say Vision - Robbie Rivera Vocal Mix Part Two” - Res (Philadelphia)

Another 25 year old track. Res is one of the most underrated writers and this track stays with me all this time.

She’s been re-releasing her work and I’m thrilled its become available digitally than on my CDs.

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Imagine an idyllic pre-summer day in May in New York City. This is the period between the annual wrap-up of traditional performing arts seasons and the beginning of the summer offerings. You’re fortunate to spend some time and explore the city that never sleeps - and also has countless offerings. I was privileged to have this opportunity a few weeks ago.

I chose to have a lunchtime excursion to the Brooklyn Navy Yard Building No. 269, the home of Agger Fish Corp., which serves as an importer, exporter, and processor of marine products. When it’s not full of fish, sometimes the building is used for other events, including US Presidential election debates

Industrial. Blacked-out windows. A bunker of some sort. The structure lends itself to become what the producer wants it to be. As I walk in, music fills the space, not as background, but as the architecture of a greater presentation. The songs are twenty-five years old. The experience feels like it was made this morning.

This is Motion Picture House: Kid A Mnesia, the latest iteration of a creative universe that began when Radiohead locked themselves in a studio in 1999, decided to abandon everything that had made them famous, and made two of the most important albums of the century. Delivered by 12 large trucks, the immersive exhibition draws from the eerie aesthetic of the Radiohead albums Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001), as well as art created by frontman Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood. The experience culminates with a 75-minute film. This experience, which started in earnest at Coachella in a bunker, will travel from Brooklyn to Chicago, Mexico City, and San Francisco. I say “in earnest” because this iteration was delayed by a global pandemic. Six years later, it’s not become a fully realized event - not in an art gallery, but in a space removed from the art industrial complex to another industrial complex. Someone negotiated those rights. Someone is producing those transfers. The work didn’t just survive twenty-five years — it was, whether by accident or design, structured to continue.

That distinction — between work that survives and work that is structured to continue — is the question I want to sit with here. Because performing arts organizations talk endlessly about legacy, relevance, and longevity, and very few of them build the creative infrastructure or negotiate the agreements that would make any of those things actually possible.

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A Twenty-Five Year Timeline That Wasn’t a Plan

Ok, we need to start at the beginning, because the timeline matters.

Kid A - 2 October 2000

October 2000. Kid A is released with no singles, almost no press, no traditional promotional machinery at all. Radiohead toured Europe in a custom-built tent with no corporate sponsors. Instead of interviews, they released short animations. Instead of radio play, they used the internet — then barely a promotional tool for anyone — to reach audiences directly. The album was, by the logic of the music industry at the time, an act of commercial suicide.

It won the Grammy for Best Alternative Album. It was nominated for Album of the Year. Rolling Stone eventually ranked it the twentieth greatest album of all time.

The tent was not a liability. The refusal of conventional infrastructure was not a risk. It was, in retrospect, the first signal that Radiohead was building something whose value would outlast the promotional cycle.

Amnesiac - 30 May 2001

Six months later, Amnesiac — recorded in the same sessions but held back because, as the band said, releasing it all felt like too much — arrived with singles, music videos, and a North American tour.

The sister album. The companion text.

Two distinct artifacts made from the same raw material, released into the world separately, finding separate audiences, occupying different critical spaces.

And then, for twenty years, the work existed. It was listened to, written about, studied, covered, sampled, argued over. The canonical rock critical establishment built much of its 2000s vocabulary around it. But the work itself was finished. Filed. Complete.

Except it wasn’t.

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Divertisement 1: GooglyMinotaur, Chatbot before ChatGPT or: What Radiohead Knew About Audience Infrastructure in 2001

Before we get to the reissue and the exhibition at the fish building, I need to bring GooglyMinotaur into this story, because it is the most important data point in this entire story for arts administrators, and almost no one in the performing arts has ever heard of it.

In June 2001, simultaneous with the release of Amnesiac, Radiohead launched an instant messaging bot on AOL Instant Messenger. It was called GooglyMinotaur, named for the figure on the Amnesiac album cover — a minotaur in a red coat, painted by Thom Yorke and longtime collaborator Stanley Donwood. Developed by a company called ActiveBuddy under contract with Capitol Records, the bot provided tour information, band facts, MP3 downloads, and exclusive content. It also, in the language of the era, made idle conversation. You could talk to it. It talked back.

The record label, representing and facilitating the desires of the artist, hired a specialized company to partner with their artist, and another tech partner to be the platform.

By November 2001 — five months after launch — GooglyMinotaur was on 387,000 buddy lists and had received more than 36 million messages. By the time it was switched off in March 2002, it had exchanged approximately 60 million messages with nearly one million different people.

Let that number sit for a moment.

One million individual audience touchpoints.

Zero singles on the radio.

In 2001.

Radiohead — or rather, Radiohead’s label and their digital partners — understood in 2001 that the album was not the product. The album was the entry point. The relationship with the audience was the product. The infrastructure to sustain that relationship was the investment.

The question of how to build genuine, scalable, iterative contact with an audience — contact that feels like conversation rather than broadcast — remains largely unsolved in this sector. Radiohead solved it accidentally, on AIM, twenty-five years ago, for an album with no singles.

DIVERTISEMENT 2: Stanley Donwood and What a Thirty-Year Collaboration Actually Looks Like

No account of this work is complete without naming Stanley Donwood, the professional name of Dan Rickwood, who has created every piece of Radiohead’s visual artwork for over thirty years, beginning with the My Iron Lung EP. He and Yorke were classmates at University of Exeter.

For Kid A, Yorke & Donwood abandoned digital manipulation entirely and used paint for the first time — large canvases worked with knives and sticks and a textured building compound, then photographed and edited in Photoshop. They were deep in the data on environmental collapse during this period; the mountain range that became the cover was, in Donwood’s words, “some sort of cataclysmic power.” For Amnesiac, he explored London as a labyrinth, scanning blank pages from old books and overlaying photographs of fireworks, Tokyo tower blocks, Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons drawings, and lyrics Yorke printed on a broken typewriter.

None of this is branding. It is visual thinking developed in genuine parallel to the music. This is typical of a new opera production or album, of course. However, over the years, Yorke, Donwood, and Godrich were able to utailize their assets from previous iterations making new work from the same source material - a video game, a physical bunker, a spatial audio remix — as a living archive of creative intention.

That continuity is only possible when the creative relationships are treated as permanent infrastructure rather than project-specific engagements. Most performing arts organizations hire a set designer for a run. They almost certainly don’t negotiate the right to reuse that visual work twenty years later. Radiohead’s thirty-year collaboration with Donwood is the proof of what it looks like when they do.

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When the Plan Fails, the Work Continues

Kid A Mnesia - 5 November 2021

In November 2021, twenty-one years after Kid A was released, Radiohead put out Kid A Mnesia — a three-disc compilation that gathered both albums plus a third record, Kid Amnesiae, comprising previously unreleased material from the original sessions. The deluxe edition included an art book and a cassette of B-sides called Kid Amnesiette.

Yes, in the world of the PROFITABLE recorded music industry, this could look like a cash-grab anniversary package. This “yes, and” was also an archival act — and it was only possible because the original sessions had been documented with sufficient depth and discipline that two decades later there was still unreleased material worth presenting. Demos and rarities are the honey to a fervant fanbase. Kid Amnesiae is a third way of hearing the same creative moment, a different path through the same forest. The fact that it existed at all says something important: Radiohead and their collaborators treated the recording process itself as something worth preserving beyond the albums it produced. The archive wasn’t an afterthought. It was a resource.

For performing arts organizations, the parallel is not subtle. How many world premiere productions are documented in any form beyond a few photographs and a closing-night recording of dubious audio quality? How many design archives — the sketches, the models, the lighting plots, the dramaturgical notes — survive the strike? How many new works disappear not because they lack value but because no one thought to keep the material that would make a future remount, a touring production, or an anniversary revival actually possible?

The reissue was the setup. What happened next is the argument.

Kid A Mnesia Exhibition - 18 November 2021

Kid A Mnesia Exhibition was originally conceived as a physical installation — a walk-through experience of the albums’ visual and sonic world. It was scheduled. It was designed. And then the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible. The logistical problems were real and the timeline was gone.

Most arts organizations in 2020 faced a version of this. Productions canceled. Seasons gutted. The nearly universal response was to mourn what couldn’t happen and wait for conditions to return to normal. A smaller number pivoted to digital streaming of live performances — a medium that mostly exposed how unprepared the sector was to think cinematically about work designed for a room.

Radiohead’s team did something different. They took the visual and sonic materials of the planned physical installation and built a walking simulator in Unreal Engine — the game development platform that powers some of the most graphically sophisticated video games in the world. Developed by Namethemachine, Arbitrarily Good Productions, and Epic Games in collaboration with Yorke, Godrich, and Donwood, Kid A Mnesia Exhibition was released thirteen days after the Kid A Mnesia compilation — as a free download.

It had no enemies. No score. No levels. No way to die. Players moved through abstract virtual rooms, encountering artwork, listening to music, following no prescribed path. Jay Peters at The Verge called it “worth checking out as a very literal expression of the idea that video games can be art.” NME described it as “a deeply beautiful solo trip through what appears to be an apocalyptic wasteland, before little pockets of beauty show themselves in unexpected places, poking out of the darkness.” The New Yorker named it one of the best games of the year and wrote that it “provokes exploration, reflection, and a new way of listening.”

A new way of listening. To albums released in 2000 and 2001.

Like all of us, I yearned for anything that helped my cabin fever, especially approaching wintertime. I downloaded the Epic Games app and proceded through the game. It was a beautiful exploration, but I needed to be led. I’m not up for open world gaming and this was more that way than an objective-driven experience. It’s funny because it’s precisely the feeling I have when I go to a traditional museum.

The pandemic constraint did not diminish the work. It opened a medium the physical installation never could have reached. A walk-through installation in a gallery serves hundreds, perhaps thousands of visitors over a run. A free download on PlayStation 5 is available to anyone with a console and an internet connection, globally, indefinitely. The audience for the Kid A universe expanded in 2021 not despite the cancellation of the physical show but because of it — because the team had the creative flexibility, the archival depth, and the institutional relationships to make the turn.

That is the lesson that has almost nothing to do with technology and everything to do with producing philosophy. The question is not whether you can build a video game. The question is whether, when the plan fails — and in live performance, the plan always eventually fails — you have built the underlying work with enough richness and your collaborators with enough trust that transformation is possible rather than just loss.

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Motion Picture House: Kid A Mnesia

The physical installation that COVID canceled finally opened at Coachella in April 2026. The collaborative work and the ACTUAL canvases of York & Donwood’s visual work. The walkthrough exhibit was an opportunity to experience scale or the work and the profound impact visual art can have while in the same room as it. That tactile energy is divine.

The music recording producer Nigel Godrich remixed the work in Spatial Audio, which experiencing the 75-minute film simultaneously on four screens in community with other New Yorkers was astounding. I was energized and received moments of emotional excitement and also tears of despair. I guess I am an extravert.

But it opened into a world where a significant new audience had already encountered the work digitally, had already developed a relationship with its visual language and spatial logic, and arrived at the bunker not as strangers but as returnees. The video game was not a substitute for the physical experience. It was the preview that made the physical experience land harder.

Five years of iteration, a pandemic in the middle, and the work came out the other side more present than it started.

The Five Roles on a Creative Timeline

(And Why Your Organization Needs to Know Which One It Occupies)

Here is where I want to get practical, because the Kid A Mnesia story offers something that is genuinely useful for anyone producing or commissioning or presenting creative work.

There are at least five distinct positions an organization can occupy on the timeline of a creative work:

Creator — The artist, the maker, the originating intelligence. In the performing arts, this is the composer, the librettist, the choreographer, the playwright, the author.

Commissioner — The entity that funds or enables the creation of original work, often in exchange for certain rights, windows of exclusivity, or producing credits. In opera, this is frequently the company that co-commissions a new work with three other organizations for a joint world premiere.

What they commissioned was a production. What was created was a work. These are not the same thing.

Producer — The organization that brings the work to audiences in a specific context, with specific resources, at a specific moment. A producer shapes the work through casting, design, budget, and interpretation. But the producer’s relationship to the underlying IP — the music, the libretto, the score — is almost always subordinate to the creator’s and often undefined past the initial production run.

Facilitator / Reissue Manager — The entity that manages subsequent iterations: the remount, the touring production, the cast recording, the archival presentation, the anniversary edition. In Radiohead’s world, this is whoever negotiated Kid A Mnesia, the 2021 compilation, and the deal that put the music inside a free downloadable video game published by Epic Games (more on this later.)

Presenter / Exhibitor — The organization at the end of the chain that puts the work in front of a live audience in a specific venue and market. The presenter typically has the least claim on the underlying IP and the most transactional relationship to the work: we are showing this here, on these dates, for this fee.

Most performing arts organizations do not stop to ask themselves which of these roles they are actually in, or what their agreements entitle them to as the work evolves over time. They negotiate a production license. They mount the show. They close the run. They move on.

And then, fifteen years later, the work becomes culturally significant, and someone else manages the revival, the film adaptation, the touring production, the immersive experience in a custom-built bunker — and the organization that developed it, nurtured it, took the artistic risk on it, has no structural claim to any of that future value.

This is not hypothetical. It is the operating reality of almost every new work development program in American performing arts.

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The Programming Question: What If the Opera Were the Anchor?

There is a third dimension to this story that moves from IP strategy into something more immediate and more exciting for producing organizations: the question of programming as curatorial argument.

The Kid A Mnesia universe didn’t expand through sequels. It expanded through context. The video game was not a sequel to the albums. It was an entirely different medium for experiencing the same material. The physical installation is not a concert. It was a spatial encounter with sound and image that happened to use music you might already know.

This is a producing model that the performing arts can borrow without needing to be Radiohead. Consider what it would mean to treat an opera production not as an event but as an anchor for a broader curatorial argument.

The Marriage of Figaro arrives. But the Marriage of Figaro doesn’t arrive alone. It arrives in the context of a screening of Milos Forman’s Amadeus at the local art cinema — the film that introduced an entire generation to Mozart’s world through the lens of jealousy and genius and the terrifying proximity of mediocrity to greatness. It arrives alongside Ragnar Kjartansson’s Bliss, the twelve-hour performance installation in which a single scene from the opera is sung on loop for the duration of a full day, until the boundaries between repetition and revelation dissolve entirely. It arrives preceded by a symposium, a commission, an installation, a film — all orbiting the same creative gravity.

The opera is not diminished by this context. It is amplified by it. The audience that walks into the theater has been living in the world of the work for weeks. They are primed not for passive consumption but for genuine encounter.

This is curatorial programming rather than calendar programming. It requires longer planning horizons, more complex partnerships, and a different relationship between the producing organization and its community. But it generates something that a single-production calendar almost never can: the sense that what you are attending is part of something larger, that the evening matters beyond itself, that the organization programming it has a point of view and is willing to build a world around it.

Radiohead built that world over twenty-five years, largely without meaning to, because the work was rich enough to keep generating it. Organizations can build it deliberately, with intention, starting now.

What You’re Building When You Build a World

Let me close with the question your board probably isn’t asking.

The Kid A Mnesia story is instructive here not because Radiohead planned all of this — almost certainly they didn’t — but because the work was built with sufficient creative integrity and sufficient underlying richness that it kept generating possibilities. The question for producing organizations is not how to predict which work will have that generative power. You cannot know that in advance. The question is whether your agreements, at the point of creation, give you any meaningful role in what happens when the work proves to matter.

When the Motion Picture House: Kid A Mnesia bunker was built at Coachella, someone was credited as its producer. Someone negotiated the transfer agreements to Brooklyn, and Chicago, and Mexico City, and San Francisco. Someone manages the relationship between the original creative team — Yorke, Donwood, Godrich — and the presenting venues and the exhibition infrastructure. That someone has a role on the creative timeline. That role has value. That value was established, at least in part, by agreements made much earlier in the process, when the work was new and its future was unknowable.

The performing arts sector’s failure to think clearly about this is not a legal failure. It is a creative failure. It reflects an implicit assumption that new work is a product with a finite lifespan, that the production is the work, that what we are building closes on a Sunday night.

The Kid A Mnesia story suggests something different. It suggests that the production is the first sentence of a much longer story, and that the organizations and artists and collaborators who shape that first sentence — if they’ve been thoughtful about their agreements, if they’ve documented their process, if they’ve built the creative relationships to sustain future iteration — have the standing to keep telling it.

The voices are here. The infrastructure, in most cases, is not.

What would it mean to build it?

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This time last year I was on my self-imposed artist-in-residence in Europe - reconnecting with my overseas community and myself.

Here’s the post I wrote from afar:

This year, I’m reconnecting with my colleagues and the music which is a result of experience and observation - evolving through each iteration of interaction and industry. I look forward to everyone’s contribution and nourishment over the weekend.

Reading ’s memoir Grace Notes, in preparation for our chat next week, also inspired me to share a mix I made many many many moons ago.

If you can, come to our in-person event on May 28th in Cambridge.

As Memorial Day weekend marks the unofficial (capitalistic) start of the summer, usually with warmer weather and sunshine), this mix is inspired by the urban convergence of humans - either block party, concrete pool parties, cookouts or other city-adjacent vibes.

One hour.

Continuous mix - sometimes seamless, sometimes not (that’s how you know it’s not edited and one take!)

I’m not sharing the tracklist, but the vibe - bring up some of the energy for the weekend - however you enjoy.

LISTEN HERE ON SOUNDCLOUD

What are your weekend activities?

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Today’s video essay from PBS’ SoundField (thank you, public broadcasting!!) traces the lineage of the My Chemical Romance’s landmark 2006 album The Black Parade back to 19th-century Romanticism. The Black Parade, structured as a rock opera about a dying man whose death arrives in the form of his most powerful childhood memory, embodies the movement’s core preoccupations: mortality, grandeur, the supernatural, and bittersweet longing.

The connections are not merely thematic. The album’s orchestral swells and military percussion echo the dramatic fanfare of Romantic-era composers like Tchaikovsky. Its visual language — ornamental black uniforms, fire-lit imagery — mirrors the paintings of the period. Even its lyrics are nearly indistinguishable from Romantic poetry in direct comparison.

What the video ultimately argues is that Romanticism never left. It resurfaces across generations — in gothic rock, in Lana Del Rey’s digitally-nostalgic aesthetic, in new adaptations of Frankenstein and Dracula, and in emo’s theatrical embrace of darkness and feeling.

Each generation rewrites the same emotional grammar: the rejection of cold rationalism in favor of passionate, often mournful, human experience. The vehicle changes. The hunger doesn’t.

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Programming as Dramaturgy: Deepening the Operatic Experience

For works steeped in Romantic ideology — Verdi, Wagner, Donizetti — the audience’s capacity to receive the emotional argument of the piece depends heavily on what precedes it. But how these events are presented can make or break the vibe for the audience to keep their attention. Pre-performance lectures, curated listening guides, and post-show conversations with artists and scholars transform a single evening into a cultural encounter. Also, consider these events are for those who have already bought tickets. What is your company doing before they buy the ticket?

When a company programs a production of Don Carlos alongside contextual materials about the French Revolution’s influence on Schiller’s source drama, or pairs La Traviata with contemporary readings on social stigma and class, it activates the work’s latent power. Audiences arrive not as passive witnesses but as informed participants.

This matters enormously for audience development. New attendees often report feeling locked out of opera — intimidated by language, convention, or perceived elitism. Thoughtful contextual programming dismantles that barrier. It signals that the company trusts its audience’s intelligence and wants them inside the argument. Over time, this builds not just ticket buyers but genuine advocates — people who carry the work into their communities because they understand what it meant.

The performing arts have always been in the business of shared meaning-making. Programming around a production is simply that work done upstream.

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Time After Time: Planning the Programming

The mistake most performing arts organizations make is treating audience development as a marketing problem. It isn’t. It’s a dramaturgy problem — and the timeline for solving it begins far earlier than the season brochure.

Twelve weeks out, you plant the seed: This is not the moment to sell tickets. It is the moment to introduce a world. A production of Tosca doesn't begin with Puccini, it begins with Rome, with political imprisonment, with the psychology of jealousy and sacrifice - essayistic social content, thematic essays, contextual curiosity.

Eight weeks out, the creative team enters the public conversation. Director interviews, composer notes, and a strong thematic argument delivered to your email list will do more conversion work than any discount code.

Six weeks out, you open the door: free lectures, community salons, rehearsal content that says you are welcome in this room.

Four weeks out, you make the ask — and it lands, because the groundwork is already laid.

Two weeks out, you deepen commitment for buyers and activate word-of-mouth.

The curtain going up is not the finish line. It’s the moment the relationship you’ve been building for three months finally gets to speak.

Is it a jump or a leap?

When does your organization start thinking about the audience?

Not the ticket buyer — the audience. The person who doesn’t yet know they want to be in the room, but would, if someone met them where they are with the right question at the right moment.

Where does that conversation live in your production cycle? Is it a marketing decision, made four weeks out when the campaign launches? A programming decision, made when the season is announced? Or does it happen earlier — in the room where the director and dramaturg are first asking what this work is for, and who it’s speaking to?

Which departments own it? And are they talking to each other?

Because the organizations doing this well have stopped treating audience development as a promotional problem that arrives at the end of the process. They’ve moved it upstream — into casting conversations, into curatorial framing, into the earliest creative decisions.

Where does it live in yours?

We’d love to hear how your organization thinks about this. Drop your answers in the comments — or better yet, share this with the colleague who should be reading it.

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Drag has always been an act of defiance disguised as spectacle. Sasha Velour’s Travesty, which recently played Washington, D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, makes that argument with visceral, visual force — and grounds it in exactly the kind of queer history most institutions would rather archive than stage.

I’ll admit my first instinct, when I heard the title, sent me somewhere else entirely. Travesty — the word landed as theatrical vocabulary before it registered as provocation. In Shakespearean performance, travesty roles were standard practice: boys and young men costumed as women, because women were barred from the stage entirely. The word shares its root with transvestism — both derived from the Italian travestire, to disguise, to cross-dress — and that etymology runs deeper than costume. It runs through centuries of performance history in which gender was always, on some level, a construction the stage made visible.

Velour knows this lineage. Travesty, her show, is precisely about reclaiming that history from the footnotes — restoring the bodies, the bars, the burning fields, and the silk gowns to a story that official culture has repeatedly tried to rename, recharter, or simply demolish.

The show follows the queer life of a single theatrical space across centuries: “a witch burning in a field, an underground gay bar rising up against police, a clown balancing on a high wire”. Velour — writer, director, and sole star — moves through these incarnations via jaw-dropping lip-syncs, embodying a lineage of queer artists who made their biggest impact with whatever was at hand, in whatever shadows allowed them to exist. The show’s closing number frames remembrance as a radical act, a deliberate epitaph for all the spaces and souls that history tried to erase.

That framing matters urgently right now. The show’s central conceit was born from a real act of erasure: Velour discovered that the AMC Empire on 42nd Street was originally built in 1912 as the Eltinge Theatre, named in honor of Julian Eltinge, the highest-paid Broadway star of 1910 and widely considered the first famous drag queen in America — whose name was later chiseled off the building when the times turned hostile. Travesty is the ghost story that building deserves.

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From a design perspective, the production is fun - utilizing projections and lighting illuminated the sparse stage almost like a Sondheim Follies-style concept. Whether the dramaturgical architecture fully coheres is a fair debate; I found the story more impressionistic than narrative - akin to a cabaret where the narration threads the story from performance to performance. But the show’s ambitions have clearly resonated far beyond D.C. Following the Woolly Mammoth engagement, Travesty heads to Europe for an extensive tour spanning Amsterdam, Belfast, Dublin, London, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Berlin, and more — with U.S. and Canada dates already announced as coming soon.

The musical architecture of Travesty is itself worth examining as a formal proposition. The show is structured as a compendium of successfully field-tested lip-sync performances — something closer to embodied interpretation which Velour is known for, not the competitive, referential lip-sync of drag competition television, which they also happen to win with this performance aesthetic. Velour moves through Portishead, Florence and the Machine, and Björk, each song assigned to a specific historical character and era. The closing number, Annie Lennox’s “Love Song for a Vampire,” honed in front of live audiences before finding its place as the show’s elegiac final statement. You can feel that road-testing in the performance — it has the confidence of a number that knows exactly what it does to a room.

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But the track that stopped me cold, at least in experiencing the show, was Abbey Lincoln’s recording of “Lonely House” — the aria drawn from Street Scene, the post-World War II opera composed by Kurt Weill, the recently arrived German refugee, with a libretto by Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance’s most celebrated poet and activist. The opera premiered on Broadway in 1947, and the aria entered the American songbook through multiple interpretations across genres. Lincoln’s recording carries the full weight of that lineage — and hearing it surfaced inside a drag performance feels like exactly the kind of cross-pollination serious art keeps refusing to permit itself.

That is the mechanism I keep returning to. Opera and the classical tradition have always absorbed the popular; Weill was doing it in 1947, Britten was doing it, Gershwin never stopped. What we’ve lost is the reciprocal current — the willingness of contemporary artists working in serious forms to treat a club track or a pop song as primary text, not as guilty pleasure. DJ culture does it without apology. Cover artists do it. Velour does it, and in doing so makes a quiet argument that the boundary between art song and the contemporary songbook was always more institutional than aesthetic.

That is the mechanism I keep returning to. There was a time — mid-century, roughly — when the traffic ran the other way: operatic and art song material was absorbed into popular culture because audiences wanted it there. Weill’s melodies, Gershwin’s harmonies, the great Broadway-adjacent composers who straddled both worlds — their work circulated because the gatekeepers hadn’t yet decided that serious music required protecting from the general public.

Songwriters made work available for reinterpretation the way pop artists now release stems for remixing — the radical cover, the genre transplant, the Johnny Cash version of “Hurt” that made Nine Inch Nails sound like a hymn. Velour is operating in that same spirit of open-source inheritance. Where that traffic stopped flowing, and why serious music eventually walled itself off from this kind of exchange, is a question worth its own conversation.

Birds of a feather

Travesty didn’t arrive in Washington in a vacuum. The city has its own deep, undersung relationship with queer performance history — one that a separate event running concurrently with Velour’s Woolly Mammoth engagement made electrifyingly clear. On March 29, Woolly Mammoth and Principe Dynamics co-presented DC Drag: Birds of a Feather, a community town hall at Eaton Hotel’s The Crystal centered on THE SWANN — a new chamber opera in development by composer Tamar-kali, with libretto by Carl Hancock Rux and direction by James Blaszko, telling the story of William Dorsey Swann.

The Washington stop was not a debut but a milestone. THE SWANN began in 2023 as a digital short commissioned by Catapult Opera — an early, compressed attempt to locate the emotional center of a figure most Americans had never encountered. What the development process has revealed, town hall by town hall, is that the work keeps finding audiences who already feel the urgency of the story even before they know Swann’s name.

Swann himself — a formerly enslaved man who organized elaborate, multi-racial drag balls in Washington in the 1880s and became the first American on record to mount a legal defense of LGBTQIA+ people’s right to gather — is not an abstraction to a DC community. He is geography. He is local. And what the evening revealed was that what truly disturbed the authorities in Swann’s era was not drag itself, but something more threatening: prosperity, integration, and beauty that refused to be poor. As one participant observed, the police reports mention men in dresses once, but catalog the food, the clothing, the silks and satins, and the scents over and over. The question that haunted Swann’s era — and our own — was plain: How could Black people, who were supposed to be poor, get all of this finery?

Tamar-kali’s answer to how the opera holds that weight without collapsing under it was direct: “We are not what was done to us.” And the room felt it. A mother of a trans daughter, who received a panicked email from her child’s gender-affirming care clinic mid-event, spoke to the work’s present-tense power: “I was so struck by the repeated phrase, ‘I was beautiful, I felt beautiful,’ and the incredible courage it takes to understand how profound that is.”

Remembrance, in that room, was unmistakably resistance.

The work continues its development this July at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, where a workshop will bring together further musical material and newly developed scenes — the product of residencies at Harlem Stage and REACH: Office Hours in 2024 that deepened the chamber opera’s dramaturgical spine. Another community talkback is planned, pushing the conversation further into the story’s interior and closer to the shape a full production will take.

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From the Hall to the Ball to the Rialto

Scale changes everything — and not always for the better. Cats: The Jellicle Ball, which transferred to Broadway’s Broadhurst Theatre after a much-discussed run at PAC NYC in 2024, is the most instructive case study right now in what happens when queer cultural idiom gets lifted into the commercial mainstream and handed a Broadway-sized budget.

The premise is genuinely inspired. Cats — Andrew Lloyd Webber’s maximalist spectacle drawn from T.S. Eliot’s poetry, which ran on Broadway from 1982 to 2000 and briefly revived in 2016 — has always been, at its core, a show about outcasts competing to be seen, to be chosen, to ascend. Ballroom culture is an underground LGBTQIA+ subculture that arose in 1920s New York, dominated specifically by Black and Latino queer communities — the scene most famously memorialized in the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning. The structural logic holds: a Jellicle Ball was always a competition for beauty and survival. The reimagining simply names what was always implied.

But I walked in wary. Ballroom culture was born in the margins, by communities excluded from white gay spaces who built their own architecture of belonging. That history carries weight, and Broadway has a long institutional habit of absorbing subcultures, filing down their edges, and rarely sending the check back to the community that generated the material. Variety’s Frank Rizzo noted that co-directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch keep things “in a constant state of fabulousness” — which is true, and also the thing that made me nervous. Fabulousness without accountability is just spectacle.

What changed things was the second act. The directors paid joyous, respectful homage to ball culture — casting Junior LaBeija of Paris Is Burning fame as the old theater cat Gus, and projecting vintage photographs of actual ballroom denizens throughout the decades for all to see. The founding mothers of the form were named as source, not backdrop.

Credit is owed to the marketing team, who understood that the show’s ambitions required more than clever campaign imagery. Glossaries of ballroom terminology — walks, categories, houses, realness — were made available before audiences ever took their seats. Social media was used not merely to sell tickets, but to educate: sharing the history, the stakes, the cultural lineage the production was drawing from. The algorithm works far better with this tactic than the passive aspect of posting partners and resources on their website.

Too many producing organizations perpetuate their own elitism by assuming their audience already knows the story — the context of the conflict, the world the drama inhabits. Access to that kind of education is a privilege, and the teams that recognize it as such, and work actively to democratize it, are doing something that matters well beyond the marketing department.

That distinction — between decoration and acknowledgment, between borrowing and honoring — is the line every production working with living cultural material has to locate and hold. The Jellicle Ball finds it, though it takes an intermission to get there. And yes, there is an irony in invoking performative as a cautionary term about a show that is, by design, entirely and gloriously performative. Not every production earns that grace period — or deserves it.

Moral accountability and a producer’s responsibility

The phrase art is political has been repeated so many times it has nearly stopped meaning anything. The version that still has friction is the one Cesar A. Cruz gave us: art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. That assignment — and it is an assignment, not a suggestion — lands differently when you apply it to a Broadway house with a $299 top ticket, or to a town hall in a D.C. hotel where a mother is reading a panic-inducing email from her daughter's gender-affirming care clinic while listening to a composer describe what it costs to feel beautiful. Both of those are stages. Both of those are political acts. The difference is in who is being asked to do the uncomfortable work — the audience, the artist, or the institution — and whether the people producing the work have thought carefully enough about where those lines fall. Producers are not neutral parties. They choose what gets made, how it gets framed, who gets cast, and which communities receive the proceeds of a story built from their own history. That is not a curatorial function. It is a moral one.

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I sequenced the entire playlist to be cyclical, so when it repeats, it does so gently. Coincidentally, it connects in another way: Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The composer of the first track is a professor of English Literature there, and the composer of the final track is a graduate of the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University, Joy Guidry.

A Bundle of Sticks

I have a wonderfully personal connection to the bassoon instrument. I played the baritone saxophone in high school, which sometimes replaced bassoon lines in orchestra-to-band transcriptions. While living and studying in Philadelphia, I had two roommates, not simultaneously, who were both bassoonists. The daily frustration and neurosis coming from the bedrooms of the musicians whiddling the perfect double reed helped me develop some calm empathy for the plight of the bassoonist.

One roommate completed his Doctor of Musical Studies in Bassoon Performance and insisted we call him “Dr. Faggot.”

Faggot derives from the Old French/Latin for a bundle of sticks or twigs used as fuel, and a bassoon (from the Italian fagotto) shares that exact etymology: a bundle of reeds. The instrument and the slur are, literally, the same word in different languages. That's not a metaphor. That's history. Joy Guidry — a Black, queer, trans woman playing this instrument as an act of radical self-expression — inhabits that overlap in a way that no one else in contemporary music does quite so completely.

Radical self-love, compassion, laughter, and the drive to amplify Black artmakers and noisemakers comprise the core of bassoonist and composer Joy Guidry’s work. Their performances have been hailed by The San Diego Tribune as “lyrical and haunting...hair-raising and unsettling.” A versatile improviser and a composer of experimental, daring new works that embody a deep love of storytelling, Joy’s own music channels their inner child, in honor of their ancestors and predecessors. In every aspect of their practice, Joy seeks to support, hire, and promote Black artists.

Joy holds a bachelor’s degree in Bassoon Performance from the Peabody Conservatory and a Graduate Performance Diploma from the Mannes School of Music. They have performed with the Dance Centre Kenya Ballet Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, and have been a featured soloist in Yvette Jackson’s opera “Fear is their Alibi” that premiered at the 2021 PROTOTYPE festival. They have been commissioned by National Sawdust, Long Beach Opera, JACK Quartet, and the I&I Foundation, and they have attended and been featured by prestigious festivals including the Spoleto Festival USA and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. In addition, Joy Guidry is the winner of the 2021 Berlin Prize for Young Artists for her Radical Self-Love program, which toured extensively.

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Adolf Alzuphar’s profile of Joy is a great piece: “Joy Guidry was first a saxophonist [oh, look at us?!?]. She grew to disdain the competitive all-state saxophone culture in Houston, Texas, where she grew up. During a period of doubt, Guidry heard Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4 and Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. Those pieces persuaded her to try the bassoon.”

But the orchestral world began to reveal its frictions. Alan Pedder for The Line of Best Fit writes, “She was resentful of the fact that the bassoon is often seen as ‘some kind of honkytonk instrument’ in the orchestra world, and her practice became focused on finding the lyricism and beauty she knew was within her reach.”

"I could just not do it. I could not figure out melodies, I was so afraid, and I just played really really really aggressive bassoon all the time — to the point where my wrists were hurting. Like tearing my bassoon the fuck up, not in a good way."

She started improvising in 2018, trying to figure everything out. The noise scene, received her with open arms — and a certain useful incomprehension.

"Leaving the classical world completely at this point, I went really into the noise scene, and I was accepted with very open arms. People were like, 'I didn't know bassoon could do that.' And I was like, 'I didn't, either.'"

The turn from noise toward something more interior arrived through a moment of play. The album Amen technically started in 2021. Guidry had been asked to do one of the Silk Road Ensemble solo concerts at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In between other performers coming in, she tried to record something. "I played this minute and thirty seconds or two-minute little bassoon melody kind of messing around, and I felt good about it. I was like, 'This is pretty.' Then I got home and I listened to it, and I was like, 'Oh. Wow. Yay!' It was just this way I hadn't played bassoon in a while."

Writing Five Prayers (2025) was an extensive practice of escapism and learning how to find peace while different traumas were constantly being reawakened. Guidry was able to rediscover her voice again and relearn the roots of her artistry.

And this is where I encountered Joy Guidry - on the Elevator Music YouTube channel. The elevator is a space of temporal intimacy, where however long you are there, there can be a moment of stillness, of transportation, of ephemeral tension that encapsulates you and the audience. This combination of Joy’s music and space took my full attention.

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I Will Always Miss You

"I Will Always Miss You" was the second single from AMEN. The song operates in the register of presence — staying with the feeling rather than processing it away. The synths don’t underline the emotion; they hold it, the way water holds something suspended. And the bassoon, warm-grained, unmistakably human in its breath, speaks into that held space like a voice that has stopped performing grief and is simply in it.

This is music that understands the difference between mourning and missing. Mourning is a ritual with a shape. Missing has no shape.

The Spring Equinox Playlist — Ending the Cycle

A playlist built for the equinox is inherently about transition — the body registering a shift before our consciousness catches up. I’ve received direct feedback that this playlist feels a bit more “personal”, given the timing of my late partner’s birthday, and well, perhaps this is true. That Guidry’s music lands at the end of this cycle is not accidental. Everything she makes positions itself as music for the aftermath: after the grief, after the noise, after the fighting. Her spirituality is the root: “I have to nurture and honor that before I can go on any stage and play the synth, play Ableton, play bassoon — play anything.” There’s something deeply equinoctial in that statement. Before the performance of anything new, there is a reckoning with what preceded it.

“I Will Always Miss You” as a playlist closer refuses resolution while also refusing despair. It holds the season’s ambivalence — the warmth that’s arrived but the cold that still visits, the green that’s come but the grey that lingers — in exactly the way Guidry holds grief in that track. Not processed, not finished, not yet spring, not still winter. Present with it.

The cycle doesn’t close so much as pause. Which is all the equinox really is: a held breath before the earth keeps turning.

Feel Fully

Joy Guidry’s music doesn’t ask you to feel better. It asks you to feel fully.

In a culture that rewards the skip button, her music insists on the whole spectrum.

According to Joy, improvisation is spiritual practice. So is listening. Not the passive, background kind — but the kind that requires you to arrive without expectations and stay through the difficult parts.

So here's the question: when was the last time you let a piece of music find you — not as background, not as mood management, but as a mirror held up to something you hadn't yet named?

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Drew Daniel’s origin story is inseparable from the queer underground of early-1990s San Francisco. A go-go dancer in the city’s gay discos before he was anything else, he met his future partner and collaborator Martin Schmidt — M.C. Schmidt — while dancing at Club Uranus, one of the city’s legendary queer industrial nights. That meeting launched not just a relationship but an entire artistic practice.

Matmos

“It’s always been a band, a relationship, and a lifelong collage,” Daniel has said. Matmos was founded in San Francisco in 1995, and built its reputation on the use of wildly unconventional samples: amplified neural activity from crayfish, the recorded sounds of surgical procedures, freshly cut human hair. It was conceptualism at its most bodily and irreverent, and it attracted attention far outside the experimental underground.

Matmos collaborated with The Kronos Quartet, Yo La Tengo, and Björk, where I first learned of the band, working with the singer on her Vespertine (2001) and Medúlla (2004) albums. Björk described their practice utilizing “microbeats” - the intricately layered use of recordings and sounds - which informed her delicate and intimate approach of the album around twilight. Check the live “crunch” of walking as well as the chittering electronics in the clip below.

I was able to catch this tour at Radio City Music Hall October 2001. I came up from Philadelphia with some friends and brought my aunt along since I had an extra ticket. It’s still one of my favorite shared experiences with her. (And yes, the title “Emotional Landscapes” is from Björk’s song, “Joga”)

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With Your Sensibility, but House

It was out of a dare that The Soft Pink Truth was born. Producer Matthew Herbert challenged Daniel to make a house record “with [his] sensibility — but house.” Daniel, by his own admission, knew relatively little about the genre, but the dare unlocked something. He responded with the 2001 Soft Pink Missy 12-inch, followed in late 2002 by the Promofunk 12-inch, which included an infectious reworking of Vanity 6’s “Make Up” featuring Blevin Blectum, and “Gender Studies,” described as a dancefloor-bound clinic in sample stitching.

After 25 years, Promofunk is still an ear worm that frees my brain from wallow - basking in the otherness of crunchy and non-pristine, yet glamorous beauty.

Like myself, many people first encountered The Soft Pink Truth through this trilogy of covers albums, in which Daniel approached hardcore, black metal, and crust punk from an “explicitly queer perspective”. The debut full-length Do You Party? (2002) — assembled from those early 12-inches and additional material, what one reviewer called a “Funkenstein” robot; the even more subversive. Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth? (2004) consisted entirely of house covers of classic hardcore and punk songs; and Why Do the Heathen Rage? (2014), Daniel’s motivation to immerse completely in the fantasies driving black metal’s most extreme imagery and implicate himself in doing so — not a cheap shot at someone else’s credulity, but something with genuine stakes. It was, like all his best work, both loving and adversarial at once.

The queer, quirky veneer of The Soft Pink Truth’s covers gave me an entry to the more carnal angst-ridden work of hardcore and punk. At the time I felt to “delicate” to experience these bands live for my own conditioned/psychosomatic fear of being bullied and punished. Cut to my later adulthood, I learned these audiences were just as welcoming, if not more inclusive, as we enjoyed our individual and cerebral expression together.

While there’s a 10-year break between albums (2004-2014), Drew was busy with other pursuits. While back at Berkeley for graduate studies, he wrote a dissertation entitled " 'I Know Not Why I Am So Sad': Melancholy and Knowledge in Early Modern English Portraiture, Drama, and Prose." After receiving his Ph.D. in the spring of 2007, his family relocated to Baltimore, where he began his tenure as a Professor in the English department at Johns Hopkins University.

Gentle is Punk, and so is Community

By 2020, in the aftermath of Trump’s election, Daniel pivoted radically with Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? — a “lush suite” of ambient and minimalist composition that PopMatters called the most “impactful release” of his career. The project had always been about the tension between the body and the mind, between dance floor utility and intellectual subversion. In its best moments, The Soft Pink Truth doesn’t resolve that tension. It dances inside it.

“Years ago, a friend was DJing in a club and a woman came into the DJ booth and asked ‘is it going to get any deeper than this?’ and the phrase became a kind of mantra for us. What did she really want? This album was created as an attempt to imagine possible musical responses to her question.”

Throughout the ten songs of the album, “Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This?” (2022) the provocation to go “deeper” prompts promiscuous moves across the genres of disco, minimalism, ambient, and jazz, sliding onto and off of the dancefloor. To craft the album during COVID and social isolation, Daniel assembled a fourteen piece virtual disco band from friends and allies across the genre spectrum and across the world evoking the Love Unlimited Orchestra found on classic Barry White albums.

Sarcasm is the Gen X energy we need

Drew continued with this sense of community and connective collaboration with his latest album. From the segment below:

“Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever” (2026) is sarcastic-sounding title. The album is about mixed emotions - feeling great joy and love, but also fear about your own survival and your own mortality.

I started to make music that had rhythmic chassis or forms. In the process, I started to experiment with writing parts for piano, harp, and strings. I soon felt that I didn't want to use the soft synths and emulations of those instruments, but to really have players play those parts on those instruments. Without really intending to I made an orchestral record.

What you're hearing are strings played by Ulash Kurugulu, who is a violinist and string arranger based in Istanbul. I would take elements that I made with fake strings with general MIDI tools. [Ulash] transcribed it, made it into an arrangement, and then multitracked himself. So he would sit there and record one part, re-record another part, and build up 46-49 layers of violins, and 18 layers of violas, and multiple layers of cellos. In the process, something that started very skeletal and tentative became something much more elaborate.

In the video Daniel continues talking about the inspiration of the album. He realized the pop music intent wasn’t true to his emotions of the moment.

“Three years ago. I started to notice everything costs more like food, travel, clothing, and medical care. When I started to notice that it was summer. Every couple days Baltimore was hotter and hotter. Martin and I would go for a walk every day in the hot sun. Every day, it's getting hotter and hotter on this planet; every day it's getting harder and harder simply to make ends meet. I started to forecast and imagine like, “Am I just gonna struggle more and more until I die on a planet that's gonna get hotter and hotter until we're all burned to death? And it just made me more afraid of my own survival. And also more grateful for having Martin's love in my life, and extreme gratitude for the privilege I have. This kind of deep sense of dread about a one-way ticket towards death. I wanted to make a music that emotionally is always at cross purposes where it's very beautiful at times, but then it keeps having little panic attacks, or little breakdowns, or little moments of doubt internal doubt, or collapse.

Given my own personal traumas since Summer of 2024, I have my bias to the attraction of such feelings and spirals. Pitchfork considers “Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever” the third in a trilogy, exploring the importance of community, collectivism, and solidarity, in both joy and defiance. What this album evokes, as a purely instrumental one, is what many of us feel in most symphonies. The beautiful marriage of acoustic instruments and electronic manipulation is an evolution of the journey in my own idea of “classical” music in the 21st Century.

Oh I’d love to hear a chamber ensemble perform this work!

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The recordings that The Soft Pink Truth have created in recent years can be reimagined for the acoustic rooms of orchestra halls, just as many of Björk’s songs have done as well.

Who wants to work on this with me?

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Something has been quietly leaving American public life for thirty years. Not all at once — just position by position, buyout by buyout, until the infrastructure that once connected the performing arts to the broader public largely wasn’t there anymore.

The numbers tell a consistent story. By 2011, according to the Knight Foundation, an estimated 50 percent of local arts journalism jobs in America had vanished. Classical music once had around 65 full-time newspaper critics nationwide — that number is now closer to a dozen. This past February, neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post had a classical music critic on staff. The reviews sections, the dance columns, the theater desks — gone, mostly quietly, mostly without fanfare.

What fills the void tends to be press releases, social media posts, and a thin layer of underpaid freelancers covering ground that full-time critics once held. It’s not nothing. But it’s not the same thing, and everyone in the field knows it.

Here’s what makes it complicated: this isn’t just about nostalgia for print. The “tyranny of clicks” has become the driver of editorial decisions — and the arts will never generate the metrics of sports or breaking news. The incentive structures of digital media were never designed to sustain the kind of patient, expert coverage that the performing arts require. That’s a structural problem, not a temporary one.

And yet the work keeps getting made. Orchestras, opera companies, dance troupes, theaters — producing at extraordinary levels, often with fewer resources than ever, into a media landscape that has largely stopped paying attention.

There’s no single fix for this. But there is a question worth asking seriously: what does the field actually need from journalism, analysis, and cultural storytelling right now — and who’s listening for the answer?

The field has known this for a while. And at least once, in a serious and well-resourced way, it tried to do something about it.

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A Knight in shining amour

When the Knight Foundation mentioned the vanishing of arts journalism in 2011, they and the National Endowment for the Arts jointly launched the Community Arts Journalism Challenge — an eight-city competition seeking new models for local arts journalism in the digital age. That summer, 233 ideas were submitted. The ambition was real: find something that works, fund it, and let it spread.

Three cities ultimately received full implementation grants — Charlotte, Detroit, and Philadelphia. Charlotte built a multi-partner journalism alliance anchored at UNC Charlotte. Philadelphia partnered Drexel University with the Philadelphia Daily News. Detroit launched CriticCar, a mobile video booth that would capture audience reactions leaving performances.

I should be transparent here: I have lived in both Philadelphia and Detroit for several years and did contract work for the Knight Foundation during my time in Detroit. I share this story and perspective with genuine admiration for what Knight has done for the arts in so many communities and continue to do. But that also comes with the complicated perspective that proximity tends to produce.

These projects unfortunately, did not achieve lasting institutional sustainability beyond their grant periods. CriticCar Detroit left no ongoing digital footprint. The Charlotte Arts News Alliance generated real activity but no permanent infrastructure. The structural problem that the Challenge identified in 2011 — “no clear solutions have yet emerged to sustain locally relevant coverage” — remains essentially unanswered today.

I say this not to diminish what Knight and the NEA attempted. The intentions were serious, the investments genuine, and the projects creative. What the Challenge ultimately revealed is that you cannot grant-fund your way out of a market failure.

Start somewhere and pivot

Knight kept moving and shifted its model: from community-scale grants for citizen journalism experiments toward investing in the professional development of individual journalists.

In late 2023, the University of Michigan Arts Initiative and Wallace House Center for Journalists jointly created the Knight-Wallace Arts Journalism Fellowship — a specialized program designed to underscore the importance of arts reporting and criticism in American journalism, explicitly acknowledging that arts reporting and criticism is disappearing nationwide as newsrooms struggle financially. The inaugural fellow was Anastasia Tsioulcas, a correspondent on NPR’s Culture desk and classical music critic for the New York Times — the first journalist to hold such a dual role. The 2025–26 fellow is Brittany Moseley, a culture and arts reporter for Signal Akron. It’s a meaningful program. It also serves one fellow per year. The gap it’s responding to is vastly larger than one fellowship — however well-funded — can address.

That’s the honest state of things. Serious people, serious resources, serious intentions — and a problem that keeps outpacing the solutions aimed at it.

“Where do we go from here”

^ Yes, this phrase has been with me since the 1996 film Evita starring Madonna premiered this lead single.

The work keeps getting made. Orchestras, opera companies, dance troupes, theaters — producing at extraordinary levels, often with fewer resources than ever, into a media landscape that has largely stopped paying attention.

There’s no single fix for this. But there is a question worth asking: what does the field actually need from journalism, analysis, and cultural storytelling right now — and who’s listening?

That’s what this survey is about. Not a pitch, not a product launch. Genuine curiosity, informed by fifteen years of watching this problem persist, from Detroit to Boston and everywhere in between.

Ten minutes. Mostly multiple choice. Findings published openly — for the field, not for us.

→ [Take the survey — and tell us what you think the field needs]

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This survey needs to matter.

Data from a few dozen responses is anecdote. Data from 500 is a picture. And a picture is what turns this from a personal project into something the field can actually use — in conversations with funders, in editorial decisions, in the broader argument that the performing arts deserve rigorous, sustained attention from journalism.

That’s the goal: 500 responses before we close the survey and publish the findings report.

The most useful thing you can do right now — if any of this resonates — is share it. With a colleague. With your board. With the group chat where people in your corner of the field actually talk. One forwarded link from the right person can move the needle more than a dozen social media posts.

The report will be free, openly published, and available to anyone who wants to use it. No paywall, no institutional gatekeeping. If the findings are useful to you, they’ll be useful to your network too.

So — thank you for taking the survey. Now help us make it count.

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Panic at the Disco!

For Kylie Minogue, one of my personal icons of pop, whose fifteenth (15!) album Disco was largely recorded at home during lockdown, the result was a joyous gift to everyone who “missed the days of balancing cocktails while squeezing through packed dance floors”. Much of 2020's music provided a stark contrast to one of the most troubling, isolating years in recent memory — and the world danced, bodies still moving, faces covered.

While I’ve seen Kylie in person several times on tour in various iterations, I was heartbroken that this album wouldn’t have proper touring support. However, like all of us, both Lipa & Minogue adapted; presenting of-the-moment livestreams from studios in London. Every arts organization did the same - rushing to get the content on the screen. Their stage production teams pivoted to be screen teams. Some worked, some didn’t, but the value of these appointment-viewing connections during a time of existential anxiety assuaged us all. Kylie’s livestream debuted November 7, 2020 - coincidentally the same day the results of the United States presidential election were announced by the national press.

The disco albums were an act of liberation and catharsis through the drum machine: synthetic, solar, deliberately buoyant. The escape hatch worked — until the moment arrived when we no longer needed to escape, but to feel.

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The Year of Emotional Landscapes

If 2020 was the year humanity danced its way through catastrophe, then 2026 is the year we brought our emotions into full orchestral production. The pendulum has swung, as it always does, but this time with unusual force and specificity.

Rosalía’s Lux, critically praised on several lists of 2025 Album of the Year, is a complete departure from previous offerings which fuse flamenco with electronic architecture. Deeply spiritual, exploring divinity with grandiose effect, Lux dissolves the membrane between grief and ecstasy, until you cannot locate where one ends and the other begins. Even sonically, composer Caroline Shaw’s arrangements for the London Symphony Orchestra and Guy-Manuel de Christo (formerly of Daft Punk) matches a perfect balance on the album.

RAYE’s This Music May Contain Hope is a title that functions as a warning label and a prayer simultaneously — a survivor’s document written in orchestral swell and raw confessional. The album contains 17 tracks including the London Symphony Orchestra (again!) and Nashville Music Scoring Orchestra and a big band, set in four different “seasons” that span the complexities of human emotion.

The Soft Pink Truth’s Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever, which goes from MIDI composing to live analog recording back to sampling, asks the question that the whole era is quietly terrified to answer: what do we do with joy when we know how quickly it ends?

What unites these works is not genre but method: the marriage of electronic precision with acoustic warmth, synthetic texture with symphonic weight. These are records that want to be felt in the chest, not just heard in the ears. The computer is no longer the escape hatch — it is the connective tissue binding the human voice to something larger than itself.

The cultural atmosphere has shifted from relief to reckoning. And the sound that matches a reckoning is, and has always been, orchestral.

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The Performing Arts Has a Window — And It Is Open Now

There is a moment, recurring in the history of Western music, when popular culture and concert culture arrive at the same emotional address from different directions. We are in one of those moments now, and the performing arts — the orchestra in particular — has an opportunity it would be negligent to squander.

The commercial music landscape of 2026 is gravitating toward what might be called emotional enormity: large feelings given large sonic containers. Strings, brass, choral weight, dynamic range that moves from intimate whisper to overwhelming surge. This is not nostalgia for the symphonic tradition — it is a new generation of artists independently arriving at the conclusion that some human experiences cannot be adequately held by a 3-minute single produced entirely in a bedroom. The market is signaling a hunger that the concert hall has always been equipped to feed.

But there is a deeper argument here than market positioning.

Catharsis machine

Human beings are living through a period of collective emotional incoherence. The political landscape has fractured the shared vocabulary of values. Algorithmic media has siloed feeling into private echo chambers. Language — which we rely on to negotiate our inner lives with one another — has been weaponized to the point where many people no longer trust it. In this environment, music that bypasses the semantic and goes directly to the somatic is not a luxury. It is a necessity.

This is the argument the performing arts has been too modest to make about itself: that the live orchestral experience is one of the last remaining spaces where a room full of strangers can feel the same thing at the same time, without mediation, without algorithm, without the screen’s cold remove. The catharsis that Aristotle identified in Poetics as the function of tragedy — the purging of emotion through structured artistic encounter — is precisely what a society in this condition requires.

The concert hall is a catharsis machine. We should say so out loud.

“Yes, and” the 21st century compositions

Composers working at the intersection of electronic and acoustic traditions — from Caroline Shaw to Arca to the artists reshaping what an “album” can mean in 2026 — are demonstrating that the tools of popular production and the tools of symphonic writing are not opposed but complementary. Orchestras that understand this will recognize new commissioning opportunities, new programming frameworks, and new audiences who are already culturally primed for what the concert experience delivers, even if they have never sat inside a concert hall.

London Symphony Orchestra, The Heritage Orchestra, Metropole Orkest, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra all get this.

The programming implication is not to chase trends but to meet the cultural moment with something it cannot get anywhere else: duration, physical presence, the irreducible fact of human beings producing sound together in real time. A Rosalía fan who has spent three months letting Lux rewire their nervous system is not a hard sell for a program that pairs a new commission with Arvo Pärt. They’re already there, emotionally. The performing arts industry simply has to be willing to speak their language long enough to open the door.

The zeitgeist is not asking orchestras to become something other than what they are. It is asking them to REMEMBER what they are — containers for the inexpressible, architecture for the emotions a society cannot yet put into words — and to say so with the confidence the moment demands.

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I hemmed and hawed - mainly because of jealousy, but on Monday, I attended The Mayhem Ball. I quickly went to my vault of digs and thought of Jujubee:

Lady Gaga's Mayhem Ball is the rare pop tour that earns the word "theatrical" without apology. But we knew this. Any Lady Gaga appearance is above and beyond the norm. I heard more and more from the initial Coachella appearance that this would be as operatic as it gets.

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Opera for a pre-show

The preshow playlist as everyone files in was entirely orchestral and operatic. Even the reddit thread is curious about the music:

Here it is on Spotify:

Welcome to the Opera Haus

Structured in four acts and a finale — each with its own visual identity, narrative arc, and costume aesthetic — the show is less a concert than a piece of theater, drawing on the same dramaturgical logic as opera while deploying the production infrastructure of a mid-sized Broadway show, nightly.

The main set piece is a Colosseum-like opera house with balconies and boxes, designed by Es Devlin and Jason Ardizzone-West — two designers whose collective credits run from the Metropolitan Opera (see this current run of Tristan und Isolde) to Beyoncé's Formation World Tour and the 2012 London Olympic closing ceremony. (Fascinatingly, Es’ designs for the Met’s production of Otello directed by Bartlett Sher premiered in 2015 on the heels of these monumental occasions and returns in the 2026-27 Season.) That set travels to 87 venues.

Writing in The Conversation, Harriet Fletcher, author of Gothic Celebrity: Fame and Immortality from Lord Byron to Lady Gaga, argues that the Mayhem Ball is not spectacle for its own sake, but the latest expression of a continuous tradition linking celebrity culture to gothic literature and theatrical form:

“The production is bursting with macabre theatricality — skeletons, doppelgängers, zombies, candelabra, cloaks, veils, dreams, and nightmares — incorporated into intricate set designs and showstopping costumes, with themes of pain, death, and rebirth framing the show's entire narrative.”

The article traces this lineage from Romantic-era celebrity — Lord Byron, Polidori's vampire — through to pop's contemporary negotiation with mortality and image decay, positioning Gaga as a self-conscious architect of her own gothic mythology. “In western culture, our relationship with celebrities revolves around a tension between renewal and decay — we want celebrities to be immortalised, and gothic can be found in the moments when that expectation is disrupted.”

This framing maps directly onto Es Devlin's design philosophy, which treats the stage not as backdrop but as the dramatization of internal states. The gothic tradition and the operatic tradition were never separate, and Gaga's show simply makes that convergence visible.

With a company of 32 dancers, a full live band, 11 audio engineers, and a lighting operation requiring a lead designer, associate designer, programmer, and director, Every city sees the same cinematic show, at arena scale, with the same steel-cage opening gown engineered by Jet Sets and the same gondola gliding across the catwalk for "Shallow." The argument that institutional performing arts organizations make about the complexity and cost of live production — the number of skilled artists and technicians required to put a night of live performance in front of an audience — is the same argument the Mayhem Ball makes, at a volume that most opera companies will never approach.

Here’s the show by the numbers (that I could research):

Production Numbers

Tour Scope

• 87 total shows across Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania

• Tour runs July 16, 2025 – April 13, 2026

• 1,403,116 total tickets sold (based on 68 reported dates)

• $296,453,685 total gross (reported)

• Originally planned at 32 dates; 13 additional shows added due to demand

• 4 continents visited

Box Office

• $208,956,518 grossed from the first 51 reported dates

• 969,718 tickets sold across those 51 dates

• Average ticket price: $215.49

• North American leg alone: $102.6 million gross from 27 reported dates — Gaga’s highest-grossing run in any single territory across her career

• Madison Square Garden: 6 sold-out dates, 81,585 total tickets, $26.4 million gross

• Billboard projected total gross to exceed $300 million

Performing Company

• 32 dancers — the largest dance company of any Gaga tour to date (prior tours averaged 12; the Chromatica Ball had 16)

• [40: the only larger Gaga dance ensemble was her 2017 Super Bowl halftime performance]

• 1 full live band (headcount not publicly specified, but I see 5-piece band drummer, keyboards, and guitars)

• 2 versions of Gaga onstage simultaneously in key sequences (Gaga + the Mistress of Mayhem)

Show Structure

• ~2.5 hours runtime per show

• ~30 songs per setlist

• 4 named acts + a finale + encore

• 15 costume changes per show

Stage & Set

• 25-foot Tudor red steel cage gown engineered by Jet Sets (structural engineering company, not a fashion house)

• Main set piece: a Colosseum-like opera house with balconies and boxes

• Pendulum-shaped catwalk extending into the audience as a B-stage

• A gondola transported across the catwalk runway for “Shallow”

Creative & Production Crew (Named Roles)

• 2 production managers

• 1 tour manager

• 1 stage manager

• 1 show caller

• 1 screens producer

• 1 creative agent

• 1 lead lighting designer (F9 — Fragment Nine)

• 1 associate lighting designer + PixMob programmer

• 1 lighting programmer

• 1 lighting director

• 11 named audio crew members

• 7 named production staff

• 5 personal security personnel

• 3 costume stylists (Topo Studio, HARDSTYLE)

• 5-person brand/digital team (Yung Studio)

Vendors & Specialist Contractors

• Scenic & automation: TAIT and JetSets (2 companies)

• Lighting and video supply: Solotech

• SFX/pyrotechnics: Pyrotec

• Video content and show direction: Human Person

• Brand identity, OOH, merch, UX/UI, animation, font, 3D, creative coding: Yung Studio (10 distinct creative disciplines)

• Shopify development: Commerce UI

• Creative coding: Viso Haus

• Footwear modifications: Disco Daddy Studio, Lacey Dalimonte

Fashion / Costume

• Custom designs credited to: Sam Lewis, Athena Lawton, Manuel Albarran, Dilara Findikoglu, Francesco Risso (Marni), Matières Fécales, Seth Pratt, Gyouree Kim, Louis Verdad

• Accessories: Chrome Hearts, Yaz XL

• Footwear: Stuart Weitzman, Steve Madden (with handmade modifications)

Pulling back the curtain

The Mayhem Ball and a fully staged opera production are not as different as the industry tends to assume. Both require a structural engineer to build a gown. Both require a lighting programmer to translate a director's emotional intent into a cue sheet. Both require a show caller to hold the whole architecture together in real time, night after night, in a different city, in front of an audience that has no idea any of this is happening.

That invisibility is the problem — and it is a problem of our own making. It’s a conundrum we must face - the magic of theater and theater-making vs. including people and cultivating the potential makers of that magic. The performing arts have historically been reluctant to show the machinery, treating the seamless surface of a production as the art itself and the labor behind it as something to be concealed in the wings.

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But the evidence from the Mayhem Ball points in exactly the opposite direction. When audiences understand that a 25-foot steel cage gown required a structural engineering firm, that a 32-person dance company represents nearly three times the scale of a standard touring production — their relationship to the event changes. The experience does not diminish when the work becomes visible. It deepens.

This is the argument for production transparency as a genuine audience development strategy, not a promotional afterthought. The breakdown of a tour like the Mayhem Ball — or a mainstage opera production, or a Boston Baroque livestream reaching audiences in 60 countries — reveals something that no amount of season brochure copy can convey: that live performance is one of the most complex collaborative acts in human culture. It requires disciplines that most people spend their professional lives developing independently — structural engineering, lighting design, wardrobe construction, broadcast direction, audio systems, scenic automation, brand identity, digital architecture — and it asks those disciplines to disappear into a single unified experience, on cue, every night.

The potential audience for that story is enormous . A teenager who wants to study fashion design does not yet know that a career in theatrical costume construction exists. A software developer who loves live music does not yet know that creative coding is a credited discipline on a global tour. A broadcast engineer at a local television station does not yet know that live opera distribution is one of the most technically demanding and culturally significant forms of their craft. These are not peripheral audiences for the performing arts — they are future practitioners, collaborators, and advocates who have simply never been shown the door.

The case studies here — Es Devlin moving fluidly between Tristan und Isolde and the Mayhem Ball’s arena-scale set; Yung Studio applying ten creative disciplines to build a living brand identity that fans could carry out of the venue and into their daily lives; a production manager and a show caller holding together 87 nights of theatrical infrastructure across four continents — make that door visible. The more the field commits to this kind of transparency, the more it expands who feels invited to walk through it.

The question is not whether art and entertainment are different. The question is whether we are willing to show people everything it takes to make either one — and trust that the answer will not break the spell, but deepen it.

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Thoughts?

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A convergence of celebrations is where I am personally. Jeff’s birthday is March 11 - marking a personal confrontation of where I thought I was going and where I need to now go. Reflection and vision.

It’s a time for spring cleaning after a time of reflection. What serves you now? This playlist is a manifestation of this idea - a 21st century song cycle of works transcending genre, orchestration, language.

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OVERTURE

The Soft Pink Truth - Mere Survival Is Not Enough

Electronic musician Drew Daniels’ solo project, The Soft Pink Truth, releases their latest offering, I’d like to call “accidental classical”. Using recordings of analog instruments and manipulating with electronic tools brings a fresh perspective and instrumental poetry. So much so there will be a full article devoted to their work and oeuvre.

Daði Freyr - Good Enough

Icelandic darling who came to notoriety during lockdown and Eurovision, Daði comes back with an affirming track for relationships.

Robert Görl - Irgendwann ist jetzt

German industrial composer and one half of the band Deutsche Amerikanische Freundschaft comes back with producer Sylvie Marks for the lead single from their upcoming album. A romantically charged, urgent synth track that asks: When does someday become now?

Camille Yarbrough - Take Yo Praise

Some times you need to go back to the original and praise it like we should…

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ACT ONE

Obongjayar - Lipdance

Nigerian singer based in London isn’t pressed by other suitors, let’s live in joy.

Gorillaz, Omar Souleyman, Yasiin Bey - Damascus

The song features American rapper Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def) and Syrian singer Omar Souleyman taken from previous recordings during the Plastic Beach era. The 4th singles on The Mountain, it was performed at the ‘Together for Palestine’ fundraising concert on 17 September with the London Arab Orchestra and included a special intro by Yasiin Bey, in which he recited the English translation of Imam Muhammad b. Nāsir al-Darʿī’s ‘The Prayer of the Oppressed’

Rochelle Jordan - Ladida

LA-based artist Rochelle Jordan is on tour currently. I’d like to thank my Bay Area buddy to the tip to catch this. Detroit’s WDET says, “Across the record she gives a masterclass in restraint. She does not belt; she glides, letting breath, phrasing and tone do the heavy lifting. That approach is on full display on the cut we are about to get into.”

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ACT TWO

Suzane - Champagne

A little Baroque electro pop from French chanteuse Suzane.

From a Francophile who’s also in the Bay Area “Even though the world is in shambles and everyone is going through some challenges, this hopeful song serves as a reminder that there are still special moments in our lives that must be celebrated (alcohol optional!)”

Decius - Dearly Be Lovers

London-based dance group formed by two brothers remind us of Prince’s holiness within nebulous synth house melodies.

Channel Tres - Free Your Mind

Cali-raised rapper Channel Tres came into my world via Australian group Flight Facilities and Triple J Radio station. A throwback here to one of the greatest girl groups to keep your heart and mind open.

Marine Neuilly - Confetti (Kraak & Smaak Remix)

I guess I’m in a 90’s block with French fashionistas, cuz here’s Paris-born DJ with full inspiration from the era

Confidence Man - 17

Australian duo are back and on tour this month bringing their Confident Music for Confident People

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ACT THREE

Rosalía, Björk, Yves Tumor - Berghain (Conrad Taylor Remix)

Rosalía stormed the Brit Awards earlier this year, just in time for her world tour. The tour features an orchestra and Rosalía dancing en pointe….

Chrissa Sparkles - fuck ice

Heard this on the pre-show playlist at the Peaches show in Detroit. You’ll hear more from her later.

Princess Superstar, Two Planets, Eloise Keeble - YUM-ME

The Bad Babysitter is back with a mid-career resurgence since the 2023 film “Saltburn” where she was “Perfect”

Plack Blague - Man On Man

Nebraska-based duo opened for Peaches in Detroit. We need more midwest leather industrial queer bands in our time.

Kneecap - Liars Tale

Their lead single to the forthcoming album FENIAN takes a shot at the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The group is a constant reminder that art is inherently political, particularly with expression.

From the video director, Thomas James, ““A whirlwind of Irish mythology, of satire, of anger. A vehicle for what the boys have been through, but likewise, for what everyone is witnessing. It’s not often you get to work with a band who have a genuine fire, and a selfless interest in trying to help people. And that for all of us involved, was important.”

A$AP Rocky - PUNK ROCKY

A nice fusion with Danny Elfman and A$AP Rocky on the SNL performance. Can’t find it on YouTube, but available here

Wet Leg - mangetout (The Dare remix)

Headed on the festival circuit this summer, here’s a remix of the song which already appeared on our playlists

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ACT FOUR

Peaches - Be Love

Going strong for 25+ years, Peaches is back with a full album. Evoking 80’s Joan Jett punk feminism and aggressive vulnerability.

Take it in the heart, look at it inside

Searching all around, home, where I hide

I wanna get out, I wanna leave it dark

But I know, I gotta hit the mark

Drill through the grate, lift up the weight

Give it some space before it’s too late

I wanna be love

Tori Amos - Stronger Together

If you know me, you know I Stan Tori Amos for decades. Her words: Stronger Together” is the culmination of our relationship as it is transformed with The Daughter choosing to stand by me no matter what challenges lay ahead. Whatever we will face in the future, we make a vow to each other that we’re Stronger Together..

Goldie, Rufige Kru, Submotive - Sandcastles

Goldie returns with his Ruffle Kru moniker and the full album Alpha Omega as a “deep, intense and intelligent love letter to club culture”

EPILOGUE

Jill Scott - Pressha

Illy Jilly from Philly reminding us to stay grounded within the cosmos

Joy Guidry, Scott Li - I Will Always Miss You

Full circle song cycle concludes with the bassoonist composer Joy Guidry who gently cradles the aches and pangs of loss.

Another composer who deserves her own article… coming soon

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This week, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters publicly urged the Department of Justice to block the Paramount Skydance $111 billion pending acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery. The union said the proposed merger poses a “direct threat to film and television workers nationwide,” including nearly 15,000 Motion Picture Teamsters. The union said it submitted a detailed report this week to the DOJ’s Antitrust Division outlining its concerns.

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Back in September 2025, Deadline discussed the history of such mergers, including Disney-Fox-ABC-Marvel and immediately recent SkyDance-Paramount merger.

It’s a lot of history to digest, and I really enjoyed UsefulCharts’ video “Timeline of TV & Film Industry Consolidation”

The American media landscape has evolved from a loose network of independent studios and broadcasters into a concentrated system dominated by a small number of powerful conglomerates. In the early twentieth century, film studios such as Paramount, MGM, and Warner Bros. shaped the emerging language of cinema, while radio networks like NBC and CBS carried storytelling directly into American homes.

Stage (Vaudeville) > Radio > Moving Pictures

We could unpack the Vaudeville circuits and how the stage musical Gypsy portrays the fading Vaudeville circuit, capturing the grit, ambition, and relentless touring that defined early twentieth-century American show business.

Government regulation and cultural policy played an important role in shaping this environment. The Motion Picture Production Code, commonly known as the Hays Code, governed Hollywood storytelling from the 1930s through the late 1960s, enforcing moral guidelines that limited depictions of sexuality, crime, and social conflict.

During the early twentieth century, major studios built lavish movie palaces in cities across the United States—cathedrals of cinema designed to elevate filmgoing into a grand communal ritual. These ornate theaters, with gilded interiors and massive screens, reflected Hollywood’s growing cultural power and helped establish movies as America’s dominant form of popular storytelling.

Even throughout the evolution of delivery systems, the stories utilize older forms of storytelling. In Detroit, the Fox Theater, which was built for the movie studio (Netflix and Amazon buying movie theaters in New York and Los Angeles is from an older playbook), hosts a premiere of a musical created by the movie studio.

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Moving Pictures > TV

Meanwhile, federal policies and regulatory frameworks—particularly those shaped by the Federal Communications Commission and later legislation such as the Telecommunications Act of 1996—allowed for greater corporate consolidation across media industries. These legal shifts opened the door for film studios, television networks, and telecommunications companies to merge, producing the media conglomerates that dominate the industry today.

TV > Streaming

In the streaming era, technology companies have become the newest generation of film studios. Platforms such as Netflix, Amazon, and Apple now finance and produce original films and series, operating much like the Hollywood studios of the early twentieth century. Apple Studios, founded in 2019, exemplifies this shift by producing films and series directly for streaming distribution.

Movie Palaces > Concert Venues

In the streaming era, companies such as Netflix and Amazon have stepped into roles once held by traditional studios. To qualify their films for the Academy Awards, both companies have purchased and restored historic theaters, allowing their productions to receive theatrical screenings required for Oscar consideration. This revival has had an unexpected cultural benefit. Many early twentieth-century movie palaces—once abandoned or neglected—have been carefully restored as vibrant concert venues and screening spaces, transforming architectural landmarks into cultural anchors that help revitalize neighborhoods that had long suffered from economic decline.

Yet throughout these changes, the core function of storytelling has remained remarkably constant. Technology has transformed the methods, through which stories reach audiences—from cinema screens to radio waves, television broadcasts, cable networks, and streaming platforms—but the fundamental human desire to share narratives persists. Stories allow societies to examine identity, conflict, and aspiration. Over the past hundred years, technology has not replaced storytelling; it has simply expanded the tools through which humanity continues to imagine, communicate, and connect.

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A son of a ballet dancer mother dismisses her career’s art form and opera while losing “14 cents” of his following. One friend posited this was a deep state publicity campaign from international opera companies to drive engagement.

Welp opera and its value has come into the zeitgeist and conversation.

I don’t care about TC - his comments were rude; breaking the backs on which he stands, but what I’m more annoyed about is the reactionary BS in the moment the Opera Industrial Complex (OIC) is doing - you should be promoting “opera” year-round and the positive aspects of in-person performance by humans - not the transactional sales which it’s usually conditioned to do.

Reactionary marketing may generate momentary attention, but it does little to build the lasting value the arts urgently need. Chasing controversy or viral moments replaces sustained storytelling, community engagement, and artistic vision. Without consistent advocacy for why live performance matters, institutions miss the chance to cultivate deeper relationships and enduring cultural relevance.

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THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’

An investigative reporter covering the world of culture and an arts and culture reporter who often covers legal issues for The New York Times discuss the Met’s precarious financial picture.

General manager Peter Gelb continues to push for broader audiences through new works and cross-cultural outreach, even floating ideas like inviting Bob Dylan to perform at the opera house. The discussion revisits the familiar critique that operas are “too long,” yet that argument rings hollow in a cultural moment when blockbuster films regularly stretch past two- or even three hours and arena tours—like Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour—reach similar lengths without even offering an intermission.

I don’t have all the answers for an opera industrial complex (OIC) that occasionally sounds like it’s waiting for a bailout—Wall Street style. But I do have a few thoughts about identifying the problems, which feels far more useful than the field’s favorite pastime: staring at our collective belly button.

Mind you - Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour was OPERATIC in scale, theme, resonance and at moments, performance:

VENUE OBSOLETION

Are opera houses fitted with 21-century production options? As we discuss every so often, Wagner’s Ring cycle was produced for the with the mechanisms of the time. Is that still true, regardless of aesthetic reasons?

ANALOG EXPERIENCE AND ENHANCEMENTS

With venue updates is also presentational updates. I just came back from Detroit where I heard a fully acoustic concert opera (Turandot at Music Hall) and one with audio enhancements (The Handmaid’s Tale). Both are called “opera”, but presented differently serving different purposes based on objective. One’s was to hear the music and focus on performance of a 100-year old opera; the other fully staged presentation of a 25-year old opera which may have had its own specific performance directives. Are opera companies able to program, produce or present both?

What is opera for the 21st century?

John Berry in his article in The Times discusses who should compose and create operas - mainly from the storytelling point of view.

“Commissioning contemporary stories for opera is a big challenge, and it is not just about money: it is about creating stories that spark the audience’s attention,” Berry told The Times.

“If opera wants to own the zeitgeist in the performing arts, then it needs to commission stories that have bigger impact.”

I wholeheartedly agree! The Shining is one recognized property and one of the most produced modern operas. I’ve discussed this idea about adaptations previously. I posit that it’s already happening just not in the opera industrial complex (OIC). I’m not saying we need to adapt Harry Potter or Stranger Things, but that’s been done to financial and critical acclaim.

OPERA OR SONG CYCLE

“Opera” just means “a great work” and the opera industrial complex (OIC) keeps going with “grand opera” as it’s base (Faust, Carmen, Magic Flute among the canonic exceptions).

Last month, I was very fortunate to attend the performance of “Emily - No Prisoner Be” at Carnegie Hall with the incomparable Joyce DiDonato and string trio Time for Three performing the complete work composed by Kevin Puts with text by Emily Dickenson.

The experience was nothing short of extraordinary. In the quiet aftermath of Covid—when isolation forced many of us to ask, what can one person possibly do in moments of overwhelming doubt and upheaval?—this kind of performance felt like fuel. Through a communion of time, tangible, visceral, and electronic sound carried century-old words forward, reminding us that art endures and speaks across eras.

The work also suggests something quietly radical: that even a single voice, a single act of creation, can matter. In a world that often makes us feel cripplingly immobilized by crisis after crisis, the individual contribution—however small—still has the power to resonate.

These four musicians communed and communicated together to demonstrate this hope - even in the last number with the composer joining in and ultimately, the entire 2800-member sold out audience singing in unity.

It also underscores that the operatic experience isn’t confined to grand opera houses. A song cycle or recital, when approached with imagination, production value, and theatrical commitment, can feel just as operatic—an intimate form capable of the same dramatic scope and emotional impact.

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Other great works? Like the Cowboy Carter tour as mentioned? Lady Gaga’s Mayhem Ball. The pre-show consisted of 9 minutes of opera!

And the upcoming Lux Tour by Rosalia… divinity as a theme in opera? Groundbreaking…

They’re sold out everywhere in arenas bigger than opera houses, with multiple dates in various markets. Imagine performers with such artistic prowess collaborating with the OIC?

Billy Corgan leveraged his home town Lyric Opera of Chicago for “A Night of Mellon Collie & Infinite Sadness”

Björk tried 25 years ago to have her Vespertine tour with orchestra in Opera House - successful in Europe, not so in USA - regardless it was sold out in venues.

Another former Kardashian spouse had a series of “operas” of Sunday Services that moved around the art world and venues. I attended the silver-painted iteration in Miami in 2019.

NOTHING IS DYING, IT’S EVOLVING

Opera and ballet will never die - they’re cornerstones of cultural expression. Artists who create will never die. Storytelling will never die. However, the business which produce the works ebb and flow and change.

Perhaps we can all take some advice from another A-list film star… Harrison Ford

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NOTE: This is not our Championship winning set with The Firebird, but with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture.

A Russian composer who basically blew up the rulebook of classical music, Igor Stravinsky worked with the Ballets Russes delivering shock waves through Paris with The Firebird and later detonated The Rite of Spring, whose jagged rhythms and pagan fury sparked an actual riot.

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Openly queer, restless, and always reinventing himself, he stayed decades ahead of his time, proving modern music could be dangerous, physical, and thrillingly new all at once and uncompromising. Who knew back in 1910 Stravinsky’s sounds would continue pushing the boundaries of creation.

65 years later, a computer technology company in Australia needed audio samples to introduce their new product:

The Fairlight CMI (Computer Music Instrument) was the first commercially available digital synthesizer with a sampling function, a technology able to digitally reproduce acoustic instruments and sample any sound in the world.

Known at Orch5 Hit, the programmers just happened to have the record on a shelf nearby and “sampled” it to build their catalog for producers to tool around with their new CMI.

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Here are some modern-era songs which incorporate the Orch5 Hit: (thanks Mind Flux):

Back to The Firebird, those familiar with the entire ballet may have heard excerpts in various iterations. and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra has their own playlist:

The Salsoul Orchestra was formed in 1974 by vibraphonist and producer Vincent Montana Jr., emerging from Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International. Blending lush strings, driving percussion, and symphonic disco, they helped define the orchestral sound of the mid-1970s dance era. Their recordings powered the rise of Salsoul Records and influenced club culture worldwide. Montana’s “Magic Bird of Fire” showcased his signature fusion of classical grandeur and infectious disco rhythm.

Here’s one of my favorite interpretations of The Firebird from The Salsoul Orchestra, with the Ernie Flatt Dancers on the final episode of the Carol Burnett Show in 1978.

Taking a deeper dive, here are some more samples you may learn and appreciate. Innovation is retooling existing work…

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