My Steve Reich odyssey has taken me to several cities so far this year, including Liverpool, Manchester, London, Cologne and New York, so it seemed fitting that at least one event marking the composer’s ninetieth anniversary year should happen closer to my doorstep, in Wales. In fact, it’s a two-hour drive from where I live to Aberystwyth, where Solem Quartet and singer Alice Zawadzki were performing as part of this year’s Musicfest Festival. Driving down the northwest coast of Wales towards Aberystwyth (through some astonishingly beautiful scenery, where the mountains tumble into the sea), it struck me that perhaps Reich’s

Alongside Steve Reich’s Violin Phase (1967), Philip Glass’ Strung Out (1968) ranks as early minimalism’s most important work for solo violin. However, unlike Violin Phase—which has received countless performances and several recordings during its nearly sixty-year shelf life—Strung Out has largely gone unnoticed. This twenty-minute work has remained something of an outlier, consigned to the periphery of Glass’ back catalogue. Even when I’ve discussed Strung Out with violinists who frequently perform Glass, several have admitted to not knowing about it. This definitive new release by gifted and versatile violinist Darragh Morgan will surely dispel any lingering doubts about the significance of this piece. It may not

Improvisation, especially of the largely unplanned and entirely freeform variety, can be a bit hit-and-miss, particularly when it becomes apparent that the performers aren’t singing (or playing) from the same hymn sheet. Nevertheless, when collective interactions click into place—as on this seven-track mini-album by Alexander Varty on guitar & electronics, Andres Kahre on percussion and electric cello, and violin virtuoso Jack M Campbell—the results can be truly striking and illuminating. No Room For Error came about through a serendipitous encounter between Campbell and longtime collaborators Varty and Kahre on Gabriola Island (which lies in the Strait of Georgia in British

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, music took another turn on its ambient axis, and ‘post-classical’ was born. Mark Prendergast had already claimed the previous century to be the ambient century, with everything from Mahler to Trance falling under its all-encompassing sonic spell. One nevertheless suspects that, had Prendergast published his book a few years later, he may have been persuaded to call it The Long Ambient Century, such was ambient and its offshoots’ enduring appeal to post-millennial listeners. For better or worse, performers and musicians from Chilly Gonzales, Peter Broderick, Nils Frahm, Johann Jóhannsson, Hildur Guðnadóttir to Ólafur

The final day of this year’s Long Play Festival appropriately began en plein air with a performance of John Luther Adams’ Crossing Open Ground – fitting for a composer whose music doesn’t simply reflect nature so much as exist within it. Led by percussionist and conductor Doug Perkins, the hour-long piece for forty musicians unfolded near the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in the tranquil surroundings of Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park. As with several other Adams works – including his Pulitzer Prize-winning Become Ocean – Crossing Open Ground emerged from the margins of silence, its opening sounds indistinguishable from the environment to which they belonged. What