Blarf is the name actor/comedian Eric Andre sometimes uses when making music, and his absurdist and confrontational style of comedy can’t help but work its way into his sounds. Blarf has taken many forms over the years, beginning as a Zappa-inspired band with Andre and some college friends, but eventually turning into the disorienting samples […]
Their last album with works by Robert Schumann, Edvard Grieg and Tõnu Kõrvits saw the Gazzana sisters Natascia and Raffaella “achieve the highest levels of instinctive expression”, according to the French daily paper Le Monde, and one could argue that this holds even more true for their new recording with music by Sergei Prokofiev, Arvo […]
Producer and composer Hannah Peel first worked with percussionist Beibei Wang on Manchester Collective’s 2023 album Neon, which included compositions by Peel as well as Lyra Pramuk and Steve Reich. The two artists then performed a fully improvised concert together as part of Peel’s artist residency in London. Afterwards, they spent five days improvising and […]
The Colin Currie Group formed 20 years ago to honour Steve Reich’s 70th birthday with a performance of Drumming. This year, the great American composer turns 90, making this, the group’s fourth Reich album on Currie’s own label, a double celebration. Sextet, hailing from 1985, features two keyboardists playing piano and synthesisers alongside four percussionists […]
Now an avid fan of classical music, Liu taught himself how to love the art form.
The post Classical music is for everyone appeared first on The Stanford Daily.
But a single listen to Heart Songs is required to recognize how natural a fit Cassie To is for Nat Bartsch’s Amica Records imprint. As the eight pieces featured on the thirty-three-minute album reveal, the Sydney-based To composes music possessing many of the same qualities that distinguish Bartsch’s own: heartfelt, intimate, elegiac, and harmonious neo-classical […]
Founding work of minimalism, Music with Changing Parts is a piece with free instrumentation. The musicians choose which part to play among the 8 staves of the score. At each indicated cue, the musicians can change part, which produces an abrupt change of instrumentation. While the music is based on a melodic material limited to […]
Previously known as a member of Afrobeat fusionists NOMO and for his introspective indie rock songwriting as In Tall Buildings, Erik Hall reached a new audience with his acclaimed solo recordings of minimalist works during the 2020s. Turning the genre on its head, he recorded Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians by himself, multi-tracking all […]
There’s a current tendency among post-modern classical composers to paint their musical pictures, or compositions if you will, in darker overtones, but then, it just might be the mirror of the times we live in. Or, as a composer, you can devote a composition cycle to an inspirational friend and colleague who passed too early, […]
BODY SOUND brings frequent collaborators Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart together in a string trio format. The album’s pieces are all based in improvisation, and they’re all shaped by the spaces they were recorded in, which included two Chicago recording studios and the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville. Engineer and co-producer Dave Vettraino […]
Glorious Mahalia is Kronos Quartet‘s third release for Smithsonian Folkways. It follows 2020’s Long Time Passing: Kronos Quartet & Friends Celebrate Pete Seeger, and 2022’s Mỹ Lai. It’s an homage to gospel singer and activist Mahalia Jackson’s work, music, life, and friendships. The idea for the album appeared to Kronos founder David Harrington in 2013 […]
Over the past decade, Sono Luminus has done an incredible job promoting the music of Icelandic composers and granting listeners multiple opportunities to hear the wondrous music they make. It’s safe to say that names such as Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Vikingur Ólafsson, Maria Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir, and others would be far less familiar to those outside […]
Esoteric Recordings present the release of Gemini – Pieces for Piano, a brand new album by Ant. Gemini – Pieces for Piano was recorded between October 2022 and October 2025 and features what Ant describes as the best of the keyboard compositions he has written since the release of his previous solo piano album Soirée […]
With Figures of Glass (Piano Etudes – Edits), Vanessa Wagner offers a renewed listening perspective on Philip Glass’s Piano Etudes, shaping a curated selection of edited versions drawn from her acclaimed recording of the complete cycle. These edits do not alter the substance of the works; rather, they refine the perception of time, revealing the […]
Any contemporary composer would thrill at the prospect of having pianist Emily Manzo as an interpreter. She’s performed as an ensemble member in the Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner and other forward-thinking companies but is also a composer who’s written film scores and operas. As a new music advocate, she’s premiered works by John Luther Adams […]
Let’s look at the numbers: John Williams has been on this mortal plane for 93 years, and has been composing for visual media for 73 of those years. Compact discs have been a part of music lovers’ collections for at least four decades, and the “art” of John Williams on CD – a real, curatorial […]
As indicated by the title, Forward Into Light is a hopeful album, suggesting that history is tilting toward something brighter and more positive. This attitude may be in short supply these days, but its rarity makes it all the more essential. The bookends are carefully chosen, as the album begins with a piece inspired by […]
Fountain sees Emika delivering one of the most personal and emotionally resonant records of her career. Following a successful crowdfunding campaign to build a new immersive recording studio, the Berlin-based artist fulfills her promise to supporters with an album that feels both intimate and fully realized. Over the years, Emika’s work has moved fluidly between […]
How do you move from electronic dance music (or EDM, if you will), with 14 million views for your Boiler Room set, to creating a boundary-pushing label and post-modern classical music that veers into ambient? It might sound perplexing on paper, but for an inventive, classically trained composer/musician, in this case German-Italian pianist/composer David August, […]
The border wall between the U.S. and Mexico is a symbol of division, and unfortunately representative of a manufactured political climate. During a 2020 trip along this structure, Jacob Kirkegaard and cellist Mariel Roberts Musa recorded the wall itself through a set of contact microphones. This was released two years ago as the album Traverse. […]
Isabel Pine has been quietly releasing independent EPs for a while now, and it was high time that a label like Kranky would pick up her new album release, Fables. And it all seems to fall into place, with that quiet description, the album title and cover, telling a bit about what is going on […]
Vadim Neselovskyi is a Brooklyn-based composer who teaches jazz piano at Boston’s Berklee, yet as Perseverantia shows, the ties to his native Ukraine remain strong (now 48, Neselovskyi left Ukraine at the age of 17). To that end, the recording, issued on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, coincides with the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion […]
This exceptional homage to jazz pianist Bill Evans (1929-1980) honours him in so many ways it’s hard to know where to begin. Pianist Thomas Clausen, bassist Thomas Fonnesbæck, and drummer Karsten Bagge channel the spirit of Evans’ own great trios, from the classic, template-setting iteration with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian to ones involving Marc […]
Catrin Finch has been at the top her field for a long time now. The Welsh harpist was appointed to the ancient office of Royal Harpist by Prince Charles in 2000, was nominated for a Classical Brit Award in 2004 and her World Music collaborations with Seckou Keita resulted in their winning the 2019 BBC […]
Unsuk Chin describes her music as a conscious attempt to render in sound the visions she encounters in her dreams. This ear-catching profile album from Ensemble Intercontemporain presents three of the Korean-born, Berlin-based artist’s works: a triptych of visionary panels that flicker and swarm with kaleidoscopic colours. It opens with ‘Gougalon’, a playful suite inspired […]
Luminous, barely breaking the silence with miniscule gradations and returns, a Jacob’s Ladder of chimes ushers in Tyshawn Sorey’s Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), the 2022 piece for piano, percussion, viola and chorus which also serves as DACAMERA’s new label debut. A DACAMERA co-commission with Houston’s Rothko Chapel and composed in celebration of its 50th anniversary, the piece’s […]
The music of David Moore’s Bing & Ruth has typically resembled cloud systems, ocean waves, swarming shoals of fish. In the spirit of compositions like Terry Riley’s In C and Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, each of his pieces stirs diminutive patterns into unfathomably vast forces. But over the long sweep of his career, […]
Founded in Berlin in 2019, the Leonkoro Quartet is no stranger to the UK having won first prize and nine special awards at the 2022 Wigmore Hall international string quartet competition. In their new disc they explore three composers who embody the musical cutting-edge that might have been encountered in the Austrian capital either side […]
Daily 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die selection: Frank Ocean – Channel Orange – Rating: 4.5 / 5 The first couple songs I thought the album was going alright, but not living up to what I had heard about it. By the end though, this album really gets going and is just fantastic. It managed to take a slow start and turn it into something special. Favorite Videos: [#again_playlist] 뮤직뱅크 2016년…
Since their founding in 2012, the vision string quartet has stood out for its genre-defying approach and fearless flexibility — performing classical repertoire from memory, composing its own works, and blurring boundaries between classical, rock, jazz, and minimalism. In the Fields is the young quartet’s bold return — their ACT debut and first recording in […]