Featured Articles
Leah Reid’s Jouer U.S. composer Leah Reid’s composition Jouer won the Marcelle Deschênes Prize in Electronic Music / Prix Marcelle Deschênes pour la musique électronique in the 2024 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition (EMC) Contest. This donor-supported annual prize awards $300 to[...] Read more
The Friendly Exchanges of Germaine Liu When percussionist Germaine Liu performs, there’s more to her approach than simply striking a snare drum with a wooden stick. Liu seeks a deeper intimacy with her instruments, exploring all the sounds they might produce by closely examining each part. This is the key[...] Read more
Trauma of My Mouth In the spring of 2018, Chinese archeologists announced that they’d unearthed a four-thousand-year-old collection of jaw harps (kouxian in Chinese) at the Shimao ruins, a prehistoric site in Shenmu City in northwest China’s Shaanxi Province. These artifacts,[...] Read more
Shift Your Frequency! Ready to submit to our twelfth annual Electronic Music Composition Contest? Read the rules below and ENTER here. Please share this announcement with your friends, audiences, and communities. Our annual juried contest spotlights new[...] Read more
Di Mainstone Fashions a New Sonic Future Di Mainstone, inventor of the Human Harp, describes herself as a “bridge botherer.” But to be accurate, her bridge-bothering activities are fairly recent. Before bridges (the Human Harp has, to date, played bridges in Brooklyn, Omaha, and Bristol) came mood-sensitive kinetic[...] Read more
Charlemagne Palestine Pulls Out the Stops Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. —Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation” [...] Read more
Backward Music What function do record labels fulfill in an era of streaming and algorithmic music discovery? What do labels offer artists and listeners when the means of music access and distribution are changing at a rapid clip? Kyle Cunjak, who is a musician and the owner-operator of[...] Read more
Gong Punks and Culture Bombs Gentle and intense, soothing and exhilarating, traditional Filipino kulintang music provides the kind of richly immersive experience that makes an hour go by in what seems like a minute. The intertwining, hypnotic rhythms of its gongs and drums rise and fall as the players change tempos and[...] Read more
The Avian is the Message Songbirds have a secret language. This is something I did not fully appreciate until recently, when I became immersed in their world. What may be music to our ears is bird-speak—a mating call, an aural fence, or simple prattle to stay in touch. There are people who can understand bird[...] Read more
Gregory Oh On the first Sunday in March 2011, at the Betty Oliphant Theatre in Toronto, Gregory Oh performed in a concert featuring the works of British composer Jonathan Harvey. Oh wore a grey-collared shirt and black pants. His Fluevog shoes were shiny black with aqua laces, which even under his[...] Read more
The Restless Art of Radwan Ghazi Moumneh It’s Friday night in Montreal, and a who’s who of local musicians is packed into the back room of Casa del Popolo to check out the first public appearance of Master of Masters My Master. Nobody knows anything about the music they are about to hear. All they have to go on is an[...] Read more
Lea Bertucci composes time and space As I sit here listening to Metal Aether, the most recent full-length release from New York composer and performer Lea Bertucci, the difficulty of locating this music’s boundaries becomes increasingly clear. Bertucci’s compositions balance minimalist saxophone patterns with field[...] Read more
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