2025 is in the books, a year that elicited scant enthusiasm within the arts community, with a variety of political, economic and cultural factors combining to make it harder to incubate compelling new music. But such music is still being produced in places that have evaded destructiveness from the right and vulgarization from the left, and its survival attests to the resilience of a tradition that is generative, venerable and inspiring in its pluck and adaptability.

Monk in Pieces is the latest, and most biographical, in a long line of documentary treatments of Meredith Monk, noted for her synthesis of minimalism, vocalism and theater, and for an informal personality that conceals the stoic tenacity behind this iconic avant-garde performing artist.

To progressive musicians, Robert Wilson will always be most closely associated with Einstein on the Beach (1976), which in addition to being Philip Glass‘s most masterful and iconic work, is the one that most optimistically proclaimed the future of new music theater, liberated from narrative forms and the affected European accoutrements of opera singing and traditional orchestras. That disappointingly few works in its lineage have subsequently managed to approach its impact suggests that it may have been more of an outlier than a paradigm shift—a pinnacle of American minimalism at its most monumental, succeeded by a drift toward postminimalism and neoclassiciam with

Seattle Symphony unveiled its 2025–26 season, the first under incoming Music Director Xian Zhang. She brings two steady if unglamorous hands to the wheel of an organization with a troubled recent history, but only a lackluster commitment to exploratory new music.

It was a valiant effort, and one that might work better in the studio than onstage, but there’s a reason why the coupling of harp and piano, especially with an orchestra behind them, is a rare one: barring extraordinary measures (e.g., amplification, spatial separation or having the instruments play alternately instead of together), the piano will always overpower the harp. This was the unfortunate case in Seattle Symphony’s premiere of Hanoï Songs by Benjamin Attahir, a young composer who’s shown more invention in works like Adh Dhohr (a concerto for the Renaissance-era serpent and orchestra) and Al’ Asr (just given

It’s been a somber year, with wars, conflicts, and intractable cultural and political divisions weighing on the lives and thoughts of many, including those with an investment in Western art music. I’ll endeavor to assess the situation not only musically, but also against the backdrop of a serious decline in the prestige and influence of the Anglosphere’s cultural left, particularly in the US, where its ambitions have come up hard against the judgment of the general population. But let’s start with some new albums… New and monumental Sofia Gubaidulina: Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello and Bayan (Orfeo)Gubaidulina currently holds the

Elena Dubinets, the current Artistic Director of London Philharmonic Orchestra, and a longtime and much-admired leader of the Pacific Northwest music community, will be the new Artistic Director of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra starting in May 2025.

Untuxed, a series of informal, intermission-less Friday-night concerts, returned to Seattle Symphony last night in the hands of its inaugurator, Ludovic Morlot, the Symphony’s former Music Director and current Conductor Emeritus. The program consisted solely of Shostakovich’s wartime Eighth Symphony (1943), a massive piece that can betray a deficient ensemble, with its multitude of lengthy and exposed solos for woodwinds, cello and violin (whose associations with death and funeral music in European are readily embraced by its composer), and by the perennial balance challenges posed by Shostakovich, whose legacy is littered with the corpses of performances that conveyed only two