Frank has details.

Sequenza21 blogger Charles Griffin is having the World Premiere of his Concerto for Chamber Orchestra on May 3 by the Westchester Chamber Orchestra.  The concert is scheduled to begin at 8 pm  at Christopher J. Murphy Auditorium in the Murphy Science Building, corner of Summit and North Avenues, on the campus of Iona College in New Rochelle.  There is a short conversation between the composer and WCO Artistic Director Barry Hoffman here.  In another part of the forest, Aguavá New Music Studio, run by our amigos conductor Carmen-Helena Téllez, composer Cary Boyce and flutist/producer Alain Barker, are staging a concert called Of

No longer so newlywed Molly Sheridan has a new baby…well, actually, it’s a blog, but it’s almost the same thing.  Check it out.

Today is National Record Store Day. Music sellers throughout the country are celebrating in a variety of ways, from special sales and promotions to instore performances. Given the challenges that have faced “brick and mortar” record stores in recent years – internet retailers, digital downloading, and plummeting CD sales among them – I’m glad there’s a day to celebrate with the people who’ve helped me find many musical treasures. To find out if your local retailer is participating, visit www.recordstoreday.com.

by Patrick Durek Since its inception in 1985, Cygnus Ensemble has been at the forefront of chamber groups dedicated to expanding the repertory. Generating works for subsets of its unorthodox instrumentation—two guitars, cello, oboe, flute, and violin—has been its primary mission, and while premieres by well-known composers (Charles Wuorinen, Meyer Kupferman, and Milton Babbitt) have been given, it is the group’s championing of works by up-and-coming composers that has perhaps been most significant. Robert Martin, Jonathan Dawe, and Robert Pollock have all written multiple works for Cygnus Ensemble and are now firmly rooted in the Northeastern milieu that Wuorinen, Kupferman,

Anybody seen the new Met production of Satyagraha? [youtube]sMtDI539bvI[/youtube]

By Ralph van Raat Usually, when thinking of contemporary classical music, one thinks of the rather abstract and cerebral music of the decade right after the Second World War. Some of this so-called serial music in my opinion is very exciting, sometimes purely beautiful, and sometimes incomprehensible. However, one cannot deny that, for the listener, there seem very few similarities or references to any other kind of music, making it hard to appreciate modern music without some thorough study. In a revolt against the lyricism and romanticism of pre-war classical music, young composers such as Boulez and Stockhausen broke with