Conductor Steven Dennis Bodner, who was a passionate, fiery, radical force for new music, died tragically on Monday night after a brief illness. Steve was a fanatically devoted new music performer and advocate, who helped develop a new appreciative audience for this music during his tenure as conductor of the Williams College Wind Ensemble and the Opus Zero Band, the college contemporary music group which he founded. He was a man of incredible depth, joy and energy whose early death is not only a great personal loss to those who knew him but is an immesurable loss to the contemporary

The Takacs Quartet gave the U.K. premiere of Daniel Kellogg’s Soft Sleep Shall Contain You, a hauntingly beautiful, touching “Meditation on Schubert’s Death and the Maiden.” The BBC has made the performance available online here. Kellogg’s quartet is a simply beautiful, evocative work that comments–at times gently, at others savagely, ultimately transcendently–on the refrain of Schubert’s famous song, “Death and the Maiden” (and, by extension–and design–the string quartet which bears its name thanks to the variation movement based on this same music). It is a little gem, its biggest–and only–flaw, perhaps, that it feels slight for a piece that is

For the past week I’ve been in residence at the 2010 2010 Interamerican Festival for the Arts This is doubly significant for me: for one thing, and most obviously, it’s an excellent professional opportunity providing a very fine orchestral performance (and a second performance of an orchestral work at that!). For another, I was born and raised in Puerto Rico. Although I have been active in the U.S. and have lived most of my life there since the age of 16, Puerto Rico is still my home in a very real way and being performed by my hometown band is

  Nationally syndicated shows on NPR don’t tend to pay much attention to new music unless it’s of the indie rock variety.  But the nationally syndicated show Studio 360 (produced by WNYC in New York), spends the first part of  the program this week talking with Jennifer Higdon — not so much about winning the Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy this year (although those are the motivating factors for her being booked on the show) but, rather, on questions of relevance to anyone making a life in contemporary music from reaching audiences to the process of composition, etc.  The show