Music

“Do something,” the producer Gene Redd instructed the drummer George Brown and the bassist Robert “Kool” Bell during an early recording session in New York. “Say something! Sing something.”That prompt in the...

That work grew and grew and grew, as Richard reveled in the opportunity to say his “two cents’ worth about everything.” Finally published in six volumes by Oxford University Press in 2005...

With its earsplitting rounds of cannon fire and triumphal spirit, Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” has been a staple of Fourth of July festivities across the United States for decades, serving as a rousing...

Nedda, the leading female character of Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci,” must die rather than consummate true love. The soprano Ermonela Jaho, who makes her debut in the role at London’s Royal Opera House this...

When the British TV host Bamber Gascoigne unexpectedly inherited a 350-acre estate in 2014 from his 99-year-old great-aunt, he was stunned by the inheritance tax bill he was facing, not to mention...

The documentary “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song” illuminates the unpredictable paths taken by a singer-songwriter and his music. The directors, Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine (“Ballets Russes”), trace Cohen’s career...

Richard Taruskin, a commanding musicologist and public intellectual whose polemical scholarship and criticism upended conventional classical music history, died early Friday in Oakland, Calif. He was 77.His death, at a hospital, was...

PARIS — The first time I sang, it was by ear. I imagine that’s often the case. Toddlers join their favorite characters in Disney movies or echo their parents with mumbled renditions...

An event record that sounds like an off-the-cuff late-night studio session, “Hot ____” is lean verging on spare, measured verging on reticent. Individually, everyone’s verse is frisky, but Cardi B’s the most...

Martin C. Dreiwitz, who drew on his twin passions for travel and classical music to found the globe-trotting Long Island Youth Orchestra, conducting his student musicians before audiences as close as Great...