On Tuesday (June 2), South Korea’s Market News reported that the band’s Thai member Lisa had been deceived by her former manager “A”, who offered to take care of the artist’s real-estate but actually lost the money in gambling.

The manager has resigned and has returned some of the stolen cash. YG Entertainment said it will help Lisa recover her losses.

Take David Plylar, lead curator in the music division at the Library of Congress. In considering how he could continue the library’s mission to commission new music (about 600 pieces since 1925), Plylar reached for an idea he’s had on his bookshelf for 20 years.

When he was in school studying music composition, he read “The Decameron,” 14-century author Giovanni Boccaccio’s masterful collection of 100 stories as told by 10 acquaintances isolating from the bleakest stretch of the plague in a secluded Italian villa.

“I always wanted to write a piece about it, doing something with this idea of having multiple viewpoints presented,” Plylar says in a phone interview. “But of course, the problem was that I was just myself and didn’t have time to do 100 pieces.”

He still doesn’t. But Plylar did detect parallels between Boccaccio’s tales – which served as tethers to a world left behind by its sheltering tellers – and our current circumstances.

Working with other curators and specialists at the library over the past month, Plylar assembled 10 pairs of composers and performers to collaborate remotely on short solo compositions (between one and three minutes) that he’s calling the “The Boccaccio Project.” The pieces will be recorded and premiere on the LOC website over 10 days starting June 15 and continuing on weekdays through June 26.

Though taking only structural cues from “The Decameron,” Plylar expects the 10 works – the manuscripts of which will be archived by the library – to be as wide-ranging in tone and tenor as the text’s 100 tales, largely due to the project’s unique pairings and the unusual demands of remote collaboration.

The New York-based pianist Jenny Lin is collaborating with California composer Cliff Eidelman. Oboist Andrew Nogal and pianist Daniel Pesca of Chicago’s Grossman Ensemble are taking on works by Baltimore composer Richard Drehoff and Indiana-based Aaron Travers, respectively. Flutist Nathalie Joachim of Chicago’s Flutronix is paired with composer (and fellow flutist) Allison Loggins-Hull. And members of ensembles including San Francisco’s Del Sol String Quartet and New York’s Wet Ink Ensemble are teaming with composers such as Luciano Chessa, Erin Rogers and Ashkan Behzadi.

Violinist Jannina Norpoth of the New York-based PUBLIQuartet and composer Niloufar Nourbakhsh both had operas in progress when the pandemic struck and cleared their calendars.

“I was so uninspired to finish [the opera], I was really creatively kind of dead,” Nourbakhsh says over a Zoom call. “And then when this came up, because it’s so short and we have to get it done so quickly, it just gave me a lot of creative energy. It got me out of the hole that I was in.”

Norpoth, her neighbor in hard-hit Brooklyn, could relate. “As somebody who thrives off of working with other people all the time,” she says, “a lot of the places where I gather inspiration are just not there right now. So this was a really nice way to connect, even virtually.”

Nourbakhsh’s piece for Norpoth, “A Shared Solitary,” incorporates field recordings of the city (specifically its noisy nightly celebration of health-care workers) as well as a delay system she created in the programming language Max. At first, Norpoth’s notes stretch out and gently overlap, but over three minutes, their sound gradually tightens toward an ecstatic climax. Things change fast, it seems to say. But Nourbakhsh’s elastic approach to time and the music’s mediation through technology both feel like ways to capture this unsettling moment, if only for a few minutes.

Elsewhere in New York, composer and sound artist Miya Masaoka hasn’t left her high-rise apartment since early March. The pandemic forced cancellations of two premieres – an orchestral work and a Noh opera – a residency and a commission.

For her, the opportunity to quickly collaborate with cellist Kathryn Bates of the Del Sol quartet was a way for a familiar relationship (Masaoka wrote a string quartet for Del Sol in 2010) to explore an uncertain condition.

“I think the situation of these quarantines, these lockdowns, is that at times it’s really dark, and then at times it can also be a really creative space,” she says over Zoom. “It can flip-flop in a day and it can flip-flop in two minutes.”

Her piece for Bates, “Intuit (A Way to Stay in This World)” reflects this shifting sense of the present, capturing everything from the dizzying influx of daily data to the intense compression of our attention spans.

“You’re in this moment and you’re just trying to keep your feet on the ground,” Bates says of Masaoka’s piece. “There are these ebbs and flows in the way the music moves. For me, it’s what it’s like to be in this present. Every minute is different, every hour is different. It feels like it’s never going to change and yet it’s constantly changing.”

For both artists, Plylar’s initiative offered a way to be heard beyond the walls of their apartments, but also a heartening signal that they’re not alone in trying to keep the music going.

“I think as individual artists, we’re maybe already able to pivot very quickly,” Bates says. “But to see the great stuff that’s happening as the organizations are able to do things they’ve never done before, I think that’s really fantastic.”

And the feeling is mutual for Plylar, who, after just a few weeks, has already started receiving finished scores. He expects the forthcoming recorded performances to be enhanced by their tight timelines and technological constraints – features that lend the project a documentary subtext and “show what the situation is in a real way.”

“I’m amazed to see how adaptable these musicians are to the circumstances in which they find themselves,” he says. “We’re kind of embracing this element of making do with what you have.”

To encourage customers to return following the lifting of the state of emergency, the Japan Karaoke Box Association has drafted a set of guidelines detailing recommendations on how the industry can safely resume. They call for a limit on how many people can be in one box — typically a small booth smaller than a motel room — and for people to wear masks “and/or other protective gear that covers the eyes and face” while belting out the latest hits.

A national pastime and cultural export, karaoke unfortunately ticks every box in the government’s guidelines of environments to avoid: crowded, cramped and potentially laden with virus-carrying droplets. But that didn’t stop customers from lining up outside outlets of Manekineko, Japan’s largest karaoke chain, as they reopened for business on Wednesday in Kanagawa, south of Tokyo.

“We’re asking for everyone except the person singing to wear masks,” said Hitomi Baba, a spokeswoman for chain operator Koshidaka Holdings Co. “We’re also giving out a mask to each customer where possible, and where we can’t, giving disinfectant sheets instead.” About half of the chain’s 527 outlets across the country have resumed business.

Japan lifted its state of emergency nationwide on Monday, as new infections and overall hospitalizations dropped to fractions of the peak. The government has warned people they must adjust to a “new lifestyle,” with recommendations covering everything from how to commute and shop to the right way to enjoy leisure and hobbies.

Some recommendations may be easier to obey than others, however. An organization representing theme parks, including the operators of Tokyo Disney Resort and Universal Studios Japan, unveiled a set of measures to reduce risk at the parks. Among the recommendations was one calling on customers to refrain from screaming on roller coasters and attractions and, of course, to wear masks while on the rides.

Countries around the world are cautiously reopening their economies as people try to resume a sense of normality while mindful that the virus could return in second waves until there is a vaccine for widespread use.

People in Japan have begun to speak of the “With Corona” era, meaning a time in which people live with the virus as part of their everyday lives and try to reduce risk of infection, instead of sheltering at home to avoid it. Japan’s approach to the pandemic has assumed that the virus won’t be wiped out, with small clusters already spreading days after the emergency was declared over.

Amid lingering questions over why Japan hasn’t seen anywhere near the level of cases and deaths from the virus as other countries, the nation’s experts have credited advice given early in the pandemic to avoid what they term the “Three Cs” — closed spaces, crowded places and close-contact settings where the virus is thought to spread most easily.

The seven-week loose lockdown — which requested some firms to close and urged residents to stay home, albeit no penalties for disobedience — has pushed many businesses to the brink, and left industries scrambling to create environments where customers will feel safe spending.

“Companies that don’t take care of their customers will be subject to fierce criticism if it comes to light,” said Tomoki Inoue, chief analyst at NLI Research Institute. “That’s a risk, so everyone will be looking to turn behavior into daily habits.”

Japanese TV shows will begin filming again, with one widely reported book of guidelines from Nippon TV calling for kissing and action scenes to be avoided to the extent possible, no meetings over lunch, and for actors to dress and microphone themselves.

“Japanese organizations like to create rules,” said Rochelle Kopp of Japan Intercultural Consulting, who advises and trains Japanese firms. “And Japanese individuals like to have rules so they know what’s appropriate or not. Going along with what the rule is, what has been determined, is very important.”

In Tokyo, the metropolitan government has laid out a three-stage reopening road map for when businesses can resume operations. While the government can’t force businesses to close during the pandemic, a name-and-shame campaign against outlets that defied calls to voluntarily close, such as pachinko parlors, was highly successful in securing cooperation. Karaoke booths can resume in stage three, while gyms may be reopened in stage two of the plan, which is reported to begin as early as Saturday.

High-end fitness gym operator Rizap Group Inc., which saw its shares drop as much as 59% this year during the pandemic as it closed outlets, has gone as far as announcing that it will provide coronavirus antibody tests to more than 6,000 employees and trainers, and in principle test all new clients.

“We have established our own safety and security standard protocol, ‘Rizap Standard With Corona,’ as a new normal, developed under the guidance of infectious disease control doctors,” the company said in a statement.

One sector that has yet to get guidance from the authorities is Japan’s nighttime entertainment sector, known as “mizu shobai,” meaning “the water trade,” which spans everything from casual bars where young women chat to customers to prostitution, which is in large parts legal.

Hostess bars, where female escorts pour drinks and chat with multiple tables of men throughout an evening, have been particularly singled out as a source of multiple infection clusters. The government has continued to urge people to avoid them, with several of the recent cases identified in Tokyo linked to such outlets, according to an NTV report.

With no end to the situation in sight, some have resorted to opening hostess bars online to alleviate the financial hit. Customers can choose a bar of their choice, and chat and virtually drink with a hostess or other customers in an webcam “nomikai” or drinking session.

Whether it’s a small bar or a fairly large one, you can’t avoid close-contact settings with these places as hostesses need to socialize with customers, said Mayuko Igarashi, who started an online bar. “We launched it May 14 and it’s been full house the past four, five days.”

“Doja Cat, Ariana (Grande), Camila (Cabello), Cardi B, Kehlani and Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé have had number ones with songs about being sexy, wearing no clothes … cheating etc,” the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter wrote. “Im fed up with female writers and alt singers saying that I glamorize abuse when in reality I’m just a glamorous person singing about the realities of what we are all now seeing are very prevalent emotionally abusive relationships all over the world.”

Backlash to Del Rey’s post arrived swiftly. Without denying that double standards exist within the music industry, critics found fault with her decision to name a largely black roster of female artists before stating that “there has to be a place in feminism for women who look and act like me.” Pieced together, her claims seemed to insinuate that these artists hadn’t faced the same level of criticism in their careers.

“Lana Del Rey really threw a bunch of black women under the bus before saying that feminism needs to accommodate women like her,” writer Zito Madu tweeted. “It’s art.”

Without naming the singer, writer Fariha Róisín tweeted, “thinking about how white women seem to be not as threatened or enraged by gatekeepers, or successful white men, or the countless disparities of capitalism – but by successful black and brown women that they really want to bring down, humiliate and dismiss.”

Del Rey addressed the backlash in the comments section of her post Thursday evening, writing that it “is sad to make it about a WOC (woman of color) issue when I’m talking about my favorite singers.”

“And this is the problem with society today, not everything is about whatever you want it to be. It’s exactly the point of my post – there are certain women that culture doesn’t want to have a voice it may not have to do with race I don’t know what it has to do with,” she continued, adding in another comment: “when I said people who look like me – I meant the people who don’t look strong or necessarily smart, or like they’re in control etc. it’s about advocating for a more delicate personality, not for white woman – thanks for the Karen comments tho. V helpful.”

Themes of abuse are woven throughout Del Rey’s work, most notably in the title track of her 2014 album “Ultraviolence,” which references the Crystals’ 1962 single “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)” in the chorus. (The album title could also be interpreted as a reference to Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel “A Clockwork Orange,” in which “ultraviolence” is a term that refers to unprovoked, brutal violence.) Some critics at the time did express concerns over Del Rey’s handling of abuse: Time magazine, for instance, wondered whether the song glorified domestic violence and quoted a 2013 Fader interview in which pop singer Lorde referred to Del Rey’s previous record as “so unhealthy for young girls to be listening to.”

In her Instagram post, Del Rey wrote that this assessment characterized reviews of her work “up until recently,” a reference to the critical success of last year’s “Norman F—— Rockwell.” But she still found fault with the coverage of that album, and stirred controversy by publicly refuting NPR writer Ann Powers’ claim – in a largely positive review – that Del Rey adopts a persona in her music.

“Here’s a little sidenote on your piece – I don’t even relate to one observation you made about the music,” Del Rey wrote in response to Powers tweeting the review. “There’s nothing uncooked about me. To write about me is nothing like it is to be with me. Never had a persona. Never needed one. Never will.”

The tweet sparked conversations on social media about the purpose of music criticism, and who it serves. Powers, for her part, told the Los Angeles Times she respected Del Rey, and that “it is a critic’s responsibility to be thoughtful and honest to herself in responding to artists’ work, and an artist’s prerogative to disagree with that response.”

Perhaps Del Rey will feel differently toward reviews of her upcoming album, due for a Sept. 5 release. She concluded her Instagram post by stating that it would include “tinges of what I’ve been pondering.”