20 Under 40: Young Shapers of the Future (Music and Dance)
The future is unwritten. It is also right around the corner, and, if, as science fiction author William Gibson noted, it is not evenly distributed, more and more young people around the world are reaching toward it to shape it, improve it, and make it more equitable. These “shapers of the future” work in many fields and endeavors, embracing every corner and intersection of health and medicine, science and technology, and business and entrepreneurship. They are people of ideas, framing the intellectual questions and concerns that will guide future thought. They are scholars, builders, designers, architects, artists, teachers, writers, musicians, and social and political leaders. While under the age of 40 (as of January 2023), the 200 shapers of the future that we highlight in this series have already left their mark on the present, and we expect to see much more invention, innovation, creation, and interpretation from them in times to come.
Here, in our Music and Dance category, we have profiled, in the past, such familiar young stars as Adele, Misty Copeland, and Lorde, but we highlight now some less familiar names nonetheless making headlines around the world.
Julie Budet (39)
Born in Saint-Brieuc, a small city in the French region of Brittany, Julie Budet took an early interest in both music and acting. She has worked extensively in both areas, appearing in roles under the stage name Yelle in the film La Stratégie de la poussette (2012; The Stroller Strategy) and the popular television miniseries J’ai 2 amours (2017; I Love You 2), among other productions. Yelle had more visibility, however, as a singer fronting a band of the same name. In 2005 she attained a certain notoriety with a combative, decidedly adult single that called out a noted French rap star for misogyny. It took the fourth spot on the French pop charts, earning Yelle a recording deal, which materialized with her debut album, Pop-up, in 2007. Yelle sang exclusively in French, and her music, sometimes referred to as “infectious pop,” won her three appearances at the iconic Coachella music festival in California, as well as a strong audience among young listeners in the United States. The most recent of her four albums to date, L’Ère du Verseau (2020; “The Age of Aquarius”), is markedly more mature than her earlier work, featuring a coronavirus-inspired meditation on mortality and what some have interpreted to be a bittersweet “love song to France.”
Courtney Barnett (34)
Born in Sydney, Australia, Courtney Melba Barnett grew up there and in Tasmania, where she attended high school and art school in Hobart. Her mother, a ballet dancer, encouraged her to pursue her interest in music. Her early forays were in post-punk and grunge combos, but she had her first solo hit in 2013 with a loping country- and psychedelia-tinged song called “Avant Gardener,” in which a city dweller’s efforts to develop a green thumb on a hot day result in a trip to the hospital. The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas, on which the song appears, was a critics’ favorite internationally, and it contains numerous other examples of Barnett’s deadpan humor, literate songwriting, and irony-laced social criticism. Her debut album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, earned a best new artist nomination for a Grammy in 2016. Her second album, Tell Me How You Really Feel, was released in 2018, with Barnett answering the title with the jaunty tune “Crippling Self-Doubt and a General Lack of Confidence.” She released Things Take Time, Take Time in 2021.
Rihab Chaieb (34)
Born in Tunisia, Rihab Chaieb moved with her family to Montreal when she was two years old. She was an excellent student in high school, but music did not enter the picture until a math teacher suggested that she take up singing. She did—though at first in a heavy metal band before entering McGill University’s Schulich School of Music, where she discovered her full lyric mezzo-soprano range and studied classical music and opera in earnest. She won first prize in the prestigious Gerda Lissner Foundation International Vocal Competition in 2016; she was also part of the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program in New York City in 2015–18. She has sung with the Glyndebourne Festival in England and the Canadian Opera Company and elsewhere. She remarked that “opera doesn’t necessarily have to be done solely in an opera house,” and she intends in the future to perform in nontraditional venues and for nontraditional audiences.
Gary Clark, Jr. (37)
Born in Austin, Texas, Gary Clark picked up a guitar when he was 12 years old and was soon playing with some of the city’s best-known musicians. Music impresario Clifford Antone, whose club Antone’s is perhaps the city’s best-known blues venue, brought Clark onstage there when he was still a teenager. Under the tutelage of players such as Pinetop Perkins and Jimmie Vaughan, Clark learned the blues canon. He branched out from traditional blues to rock and rhythm and blues, joining Eric Clapton at the 2010 Crossroads Festival and opening for the Rolling Stones and the Foo Fighters, among other acts. His major-label debut album, Blak and Blu, appeared in 2012 and earned him a Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Performance. He toured for a year and a half before returning to the studio, releasing his fifth album, This Land, in 2019, its title cut a bitterly wry response to the neighbors’ shocked reaction to a young Black man’s buying 50 acres of prime ranchland in the Texas Hill Country. The album won a Grammy, and its title track won two. Clark has also worked in film, appearing as an actor in John Sayles’s 2007 movie Honeydripper and writing the score for the 2006 film Lenexa, 1 Mile.
Jacob Collier (27)
A brilliant vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, Jacob Collier was born in London and raised by a single mother who was a teacher at the Royal Academy of Music. His grandfather also taught there, and the family often sang and played together. Collier sang in operas such as The Magic Flute and The Turn of the Screw, studied jazz piano, and took a strong interest in music theory, which later led him to deliver seminars at MIT and other venues on what he calls “reharmonization,” a new way of conceiving chord structure. He began recording multitrack performances at home that featured harmonies in as many as eight parts. He released his first LP, In My Room, on which he played every instrument, in 2016, a year after he performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival. His four-album cycle Djesse, featuring hundreds of guest appearances, is expected to be completed in 2022, three of its parts having already been released. Crossing genres, inventing instruments, and collaborating with artists around the world, Collier may well be the most innovative musician at work today.
Germán Cornejo (35)
Born in Zárate, a small city near Buenos Aires, Germán Cornejo began to study the traditional tango dance form when he was 10 years old. He spent five years studying at the Gatell Conservatory of Dance, earning acknowledgement as a master of the form, and then studied other dance styles and acrobatics, earning a master’s degree in choreography from the National University Institute of Art. He won seven gold medals in tango competitions in the capital, and he and his dance partner, María de los Angeles Trabichet, won in the stage tango category of the world tango championship in 2005. He regularly partners with Gisela Galeassi, another prizewinning artist; one memorable venue in which they performed was a 2012 stage show in Las Vegas in a revue hosted by Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony. They later opened for Lopez at her first solo concert in Buenos Aires. Cornejo now teaches tango in Buenos Aires and is considered one of the country’s most expert practitioners of the dance.
Michaela DePrince (27)
Ballerina and author Michaela DePrince was born in the West African country of Sierra Leone, her birth name being Mabinty Bangura. During the country’s civil war of 1991–2002, she lost her parents. Discriminated against in an orphanage because of her vitiligo, she led an unhappy early childhood. While at the orphanage, however, she cherished a magazine whose cover photograph depicted a ballerina, and, after she was adopted by an American family in 1999, she began to take ballet lessons. In 2010 she won a full scholarship to the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at American Ballet Theatre in New York City. She later joined the Dance Theatre of Harlem in New York before becoming a member of the corps de ballet of the Dutch National Ballet in 2013, a year before publishing her memoir, Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina. While working her way through the ranks at the Dutch National Ballet, she advocated for ballet companies internationally to provide more opportunities for Black women. She joined the Boston Ballet in 2021.
Jackie Evancho (21)
A native of Pittsburgh, Jacqueline Marie Evancho was fascinated as a young girl by the stage hit Phantom of the Opera. Encouraged by her parents, she brought that fascination into the serious study of classical and operatic music, and by the age of 10 she was making news after her debut on America’s Got Talent, singing the Puccini aria “O mio babbino caro.” Best-selling albums and concert appearances followed, and Evancho gained distinction as the youngest solo artist to release a platinum album and the youngest person to headline a concert at Lincoln Center in New York City. She recorded albums that cross over from the classics to the songbook of pop standards, show tunes, and holiday songs, performing and recording with Tony Bennett, Barbra Streisand, and other long-established artists. She also performed at official presidential events for Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
AyseDeniz Gokcin (34)
Born in Ankara, Turkey, Ayşedeniz Gökçin grew up in a musical household. While her mother was pregnant with her, Ayşedeniz was so active during a showing of the film Amadeus that her mother decided, as Gökçin told an interviewer, that her daughter would become a classical musician. At the heart of her family’s home stood a grand piano, which she took to immediately, becoming a skilled player in her youth. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and a master’s degree from the Royal Academy of Music in London. Well liked by critics for both her accomplished, fluent playing and her inventive repertoire, AyseDeniz Gokcin, as she now styles her name, likes to surprise her audiences. And so she does: one standout in her catalogue is an EP in which she renders three songs by the rock band Pink Floyd in the style of 19th-century composer Franz Liszt, and she has similarly reworked songs by the American rock group Nirvana. More traditionally, her recordings also include works by Ludwig van Beethoven and Frédéric Chopin. She continues to resist being confined to a genre, often mixing rock and classical tunes in concert.
Haim
Often spelled Chaim, the word Haim in Hebrew means “life.” It is also the family name under which three sisters from Los Angeles, Este Arielle Haim (35), Danielle Sari Haim (32), and Alana Mychal Haim (30), perform in an energetic, sometimes even frenetic rock trio. The daughters of an American mother and an Israeli father who was a professional soccer player, the three began to perform together as children, drawing from their parents’ collection of classic rock for inspiration. (Their band, with their parents on drums and guitar, debuted at Canter’s Deli in Los Angeles.) Today Este plays bass, and Danielle and Alana share guitar duties, augmented by a drummer and occasionally other musicians. The group played a five-year-long international tour beginning in 2012, building a huge following while releasing their first album, Days Are Gone, in 2013, lauded by the likes of Taylor Swift and Jay Z. Their third album, Women in Music Pt. III, appeared in 2020. The women have been likened to ’70s-era Fleetwood Mac and to the rock group Heart, mixed in for good measure, but they can go from lyrical ballad to fierce headbanging on a moment’s notice.
Momo Hirai (26)
Born in Kyōtanabe, in Kyoto Prefecture, Japan, on November 9, 1996, Momo Hirai began to study dance at the age of three, practicing and performing with an older sister. Dubbed a “dancing machine” by the popular press, Momo (the Japanese word for “peach”), as she is popularly known, won a dance competition at the age of 16 that earned her a spot on the Japanese television show Sixteen, pitting contestants in musical and performance elimination competitions. Although she finally lost in the sixth episode, the talent agency behind the show brought her back, in 2015, as a member of the South Korean K-pop group Twice, joining the nine-member group, an outgrowth of Sixteen, along with one other Japanese performer, Sana Minatozaki. (Six members are Korean, and one is Taiwanese.) Twice, the top-selling K-pop girl group in 2016 with an unabashedly bubble-gum sound, has a formidable presence on the Korean and Japanese music scenes thanks to a prolific program of releasing CD albums and singles, as well as dozens of music videos; the group has since been ranked as the best-selling K-pop girl group of all time, selling more than 100 million albums worldwide despite having no English-language market presence until its song “The Feels” was released in October 2021; it charted in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Momo has also appeared as a backup singer and dancer in other videos by Japanese and Korean artists and is considered something of a cultural ambassador between the two sometimes rivalrous nations, as well as one of the best dancers in a group known for its skillful choreography.
Jamala (38)
Susana Alimivna Jamaladinova was born in what was then the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic, now Kyrgyzstan, to a Tatar father and an Armenian mother. Her father’s family, along with other Crimean Tatars, were exiled to Central Asia during World War II—Joseph Stalin suspecting them of sympathizing with the German invaders—and it was not until 1989 that they returned to their ancestral land. Jamala, as she is professionally known, studied at the Simferopol Music College and the Kyiv Conservatory, training in opera. It was as a pop singer that she made her mark, though, recording in Russian, Ukrainian, and English. In 2016 she won the Eurovision Song Contest with her song “1944,” about the mass deportation of her father’s people. She has recorded six albums and appeared in several films, including the 2020 comedy Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.
Kendrick Lamar (34)
Born in Compton, the Los Angeles suburb that has been an incubator for the West Coast rap sound, Kendrick Lamar Duckworth began creating mixtapes and performing as a teenager, using the pseudonym K. Dot. Seven years would pass before the rapper and singer would release his first recording using the name Kendrick Lamar. Accepted as a peer by pioneers of the West Coast sound, such as Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, he signed to the Aftermath Entertainment label and released his first album, good kid, m.A.A.d. City, in 2012. The autobiographical concept album was critically acclaimed and debuted at number two on the Billboard chart, earning him seven Grammy nominations. His second album, To Pimp a Butterfly (2015), was even better received, with President Barack Obama declaring one of its cuts, “How Much a Dollar Cost,” to be his favorite song of the year. He produced and performed on the soundtrack album for the film Black Panther in 2018, and he remains at the forefront of contemporary rap music.
Lil Nas X (22)
Born in Lithia Springs, Georgia, Montero Lamar Hill, aka Lil Nas X, grew up with an inquisitive approach to all genres of music, learning from each of them. His eclecticism was rewarded when, in 2018, he wrote a brief but clever song called “Old Town Road” that turned on an unlikely mix of classic country and hip-hop, prompting controversy and debate over what constitutes “country music”; some wondered whether the debate would even have occurred had Hill not been Black. Marketed heavily through social media, at which Hill excels, it was the longest-running number one song on Billboard’s charts. Hill made additional headlines when he came out as gay in 2019. His debut album, Montero (2021), was an immediate best seller. With scarcely a note of country in its mix, it instead turns on propulsive rap, pop, and rock beats and confessional lyrics that often speak to a sense of isolation and loneliness.
Declan McKenna (23)
Born in London and raised in the exurbs of the English capital, Declan McKenna grew up in a scholarly and political household and excelled in the humanities. He also excelled at music, and in 2015, when he was still in school, he won the Glastonbury Festival prize for best emerging talent, earning him a slot on the much-in-demand schedule. (He was slated to return to the festival in 2020, but the coronavirus pandemic forced its cancellation.) From the first, McKenna’s songs, influenced by the glam rock of two generations earlier and by the Britpop of a generation before, had a strong political dimension: his first release, “Brazil,” criticized the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) for playing the World Cup in a nation beset by poverty and human rights abuses. “Brazil” earned international airplay and landed on the alternative/indie charts in the United States. Other songs of his address transgender rights, the arms trade, climate change, and similar concerns. Although he does not consider himself a political singer as such, it’s safe to say that McKenna shows no signs yet of backing away from controversy while continuing to develop a sound that is very much a work in progress.
Hera Hyesang Park (34)
Born in South Korea, Hera Hyesang Park trained early on to be a classical and operatic singer. She received a bachelor’s degree at Seoul National University and a master’s at the Juilliard School in New York City, where she studied with Renée Fleming and other noted artists. Praised by critics for her mastery of bel canto and her expressive coloratura technique, she has won numerous competitions, including first prize in the 2016 Gerda Lissner Foundation International Vocal Competition and in the Zarzuela division of the 2015 International Operalia. In 2019 she performed with the Serbian-born performance artist Marina Abramović in the opera 7 Deaths of Maria Callas; in previous years she had starred as Amore in dancer Mark Morris’s staging of Christoph Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice and as Gilda in Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto, both at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera. She often returns to Korea to perform, singing folk and religious songs as well as her operatic repertoire. “Music is the basic statement for life—it doesn’t need to be classical,” she told Opera News. “It can be music just for fun.”
Olga Smirnova (30)
Born and raised in Saint Petersburg, in what she described as a very ordinary family that had nothing to do with the art form, Olga Smirnova studied at the Vaganova Ballet Academy in that city. She trained with Lyudmila Kovaleva, principal dancer of the former Kirov Ballet, whom she cites as her chief influence. When she graduated at the age of 19, Smirnova was signed to the Bolshoi Ballet as a soloist, and in 2016 she became the company’s prima ballerina. She has performed internationally, both as a soloist and as a guest artist with troupes such as the American Ballet Theatre and the Vienna Staatsballett. Smirnova has been honored with important international awards, including the Dancer of the Year Award in 2014 from Positano Premia la Danza—Léonide Massine, the 2012 Soul of Dance Rising Star Prize from Ballet Magazine, and the 2009 Grand Prix Award of the Mikhailovsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg. Her emotive 2013 performance as Nikiya in Marius Petipa’s 1877 tragedy La Bayadère attracted the attention of the international dance press, in which she was lauded both for her physical strength and the expressive beauty of her dance. In November 2021 she headlined the Bolshoi’s theatrical production of Bolshoi Ballet in Cinema: Spartacus, with a score by Aram Khachaturian.
Victoria Song (34)
Song Qian was born in Qingdao, China. At the age of 11 she moved to the country’s capital to attend the prestigious Beijing Dance Academy, studying ballet, gymnastics, and traditional dance forms. Entering a dance contest after graduating, she was recruited to sign with a talent agency and began to work as a model and commercial actor in South Korea. In 2009, known as Victoria Song, she became part of the all-female pop band f(x) while appearing on two South Korean reality series. She returned to China in 2012 to appear in a dramatic television series and act in film. In 2018 she released her solo debut, the single “Roof on Fire,” which reached the number two position on the Chinese Billboard chart and appeared on her first solo album, Victoria, released in 2020 through her Shanghai-based production studio. One of China’s most popular celebrities, she is an active supporter of UNICEF and has worked in several of the agency’s charitable campaigns.
Ali Stroker (34)
A native of New Jersey, Alyson Mackenzie Stroker was paralyzed as a result of an automobile accident when she was two years old. She went on to become a singer and actor, studying at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. After graduating, she took roles in numerous television series, including the ensemble drama Glee. It was onstage that Ali, as she is known, made an indelible mark, winning the role of Ado Annie in a Broadway revival of the musical Oklahoma! and performing a memorable rendition of “I Cain’t Say No.” The theater at which the show ran had lacked backstage wheelchair access, but Stroker’s presence prompted the owners to install lifts and ramps. Something similar happened at Radio City Music Hall, where in 2019 she became the first wheelchair user in Broadway history to be awarded the Tony for her stirring performance. Along with acting, Stroker is a motivational speaker with an inspiring message: “Turn your limitations into opportunities.”
Nobuyuki Tsujii (34)
Nobuyuki Tsujii, popularly known as Nobu, was born on September 13, 1988, in Tokyo, Japan, to a physician father and a mother who once worked as a broadcaster. He has been blind since birth, but his exquisite sensitivity to sound has been with him since the age of two, when, without training, he began to form chords on a toy piano. He began formal lessons at the age of four, and three years later, in 1995, he took first prize at the All Japan Music of Blind Students competition, sponsored by the Tokyo Helen Keller Association. It was the first of many honours and prestigious appearances. In October 2005, at the age of 17, he won the Critics’ Choice award at the International Frederic Chopin Competition in Warsaw, and, two years later, began performance studies at the Ueno Gakuen University of Music in Tokyo, from which he graduated in 2011. In 2009, Nobu tied for first place in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, the first Japanese and the first blind performer to win the prize. A composer as well as pianist, Nobu has contributed original scores to Japanese television programs and films. In addition, he has released several CDs and DVDs, among them performances of works by Frederic Chopin, César Franck, Johannes Brahms, and Claude Debussy, and many other canonical classical composers. His appearances include recitals and concerts at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris, the Royal Albert Hall in London, and New York’s Carnegie Hall, and he remains in high demand internationally today at the age of 34. A documentary about him, Peter Rosen’s Touching the Sound — The Improbable Journey of Nobuyuki Tsujii, was aired on American public television in 2020.