Paul Simon has always been attracted to new kinds of sounds. From his early band Simon & Garfunkel in the 1960s through solo albums like Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints in the '80s and '90s, up through his recent albums So Beautiful or So What and Stranger to Stranger , Paul has made music that does what the very best art can do: it resonates with our experience, re-frames it, and introduces new timbres and ideas. Recently, Paul’s curious mind has brought him into the world of contemporar...
Jul 10, 2017•53 min•Ep. 17
We began last week’s episode digging into the music of one particular electronic musician - the synthesist, producer and composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. Today we’re thrilled to bring you a song that you won’t hear on any of Kaitlyn’s albums. Clouds Forming Over Mount Baker was commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania’s Arthur Ross Gallery to accompany a landscape photograph by Eliot Porter. It’s a fitting collaboration, as Smith grew up on Orcas Island, where Mt. Baker is a visible feature...
Jun 12, 2017•16 min•Ep. 39
What happens when a composer writes music without pen and paper, using machines? How does that change the creative process? How does it morph the art itself? Today on Meet the Composer, our producer Alex Overington — usually behind the studio glass — takes us on a road trip to unravel the creative process of those composers who write without a score. We meet the synthesists, the samplers, the electronic musicians, and dive deep into the tools they’ve adopted to define their craft. Join us as we ...
Jun 05, 2017•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 16
For today’s Bonus Track, we’re thrilled to bring you the world-premiere recording of Bryce Dessner’s Wires , performed by Ensemble Intercontemporain! Last week, we dug into a particularly contentious moment in classical music’s history. This week, however, we’re looking at where we are NOW, a place of, well… niceness. “I think right now is a really good time to be a composer,” says composer John Adams. “And I tell young composers that. They don't believe me, but they don't know how difficult it ...
May 22, 2017•22 min•Ep. 37
It was composer pitted against composer: uptown vs. downtown, tonal vs. atonal, left brain vs right brain, and these musicians were NOT pulling any punches. Composers were antagonizing each other, questioning each other's validity, and bad-mouthing one another; it was like the second half of the 20th century was when Western Music went through middle school, and it was brutal! “If you weren't being a constructivist composer, if the music wasn't indeed about its own structure, and its own structu...
May 15, 2017•44 min•Ep. 15
Henry Threadgill’s music and community can’t be separated; there is no boundary: challenge and failure and growth in music are the same as challenge and failure and growth in life. This Meet the Composer bonus track shares an exclusive performance by Henry Threadgill's Zooid ensemble of I Never , recorded live by Q2 Music at the Village Vanguard on Oct. 2, 2016. Throughout his career, Threadgill has led countless ensembles with diverse instrumentations and personalities. And in each of them, he ...
May 08, 2017•20 min•Ep. 35
1967, Fort Riley, Kansas. Henry Threadgill is 23 years old. Knowing he’s going to be drafted into the military, he joins the Army Concert Band, hoping to focus on his passion: writing music. As he surrounds himself with new ideas, he works his influences into the music that he's arranging. Then one day, the band plays one of his arrangements of a patriotic song for an inauguration of big-wigs, and from the calm of a quietly confused crowd comes a cry from a cardinal in attendance: “Blasphemy!” O...
May 01, 2017•42 min•Ep. 14
Today's bonus track is an exclusive arrangement of a nutso, sci-fi-y electronic piece John Adams wrote in 1993. Originally part of a larger work, Hoodoo Zephyr, Coast was never intended to be performed live. However, the 20-person chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound has often been tempted by electronic works. Violinist, composer, and Alarm Will Sound member Caleb Burhans, who cut his teeth arranging works by Aphex Twin for the group, adapted Adams' work. While Alarm Will Sound has performed this p...
Mar 21, 2017•13 min•Ep. 33
What happens when the composer shows up to the first rehearsal of his brand-new piece? Would a living Beethoven sue for intellectual property? Are you the hit, or are you in the hole? For this episode, we collaborated with the 20-member chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound and its conductor Alan Pierson – with whom we're partnering on the upcoming podcast album Splitting Adams (out April 21 on Cantaloupe Music) – to take a close look at the music of John Adams, specifically his two insanely difficu...
Mar 20, 2017•36 min•Ep. 13
Today's Bonus Track is an extended cut of Pauline Oliveros' "Tuning Meditation," recorded live at the Fuentidueña Chapel at the Met Cloisters on Jan. 20, 2017. Recorded in 3D-sounding binaural audio, it's an immersive experience in which we would love you to think about participating while listening. For optimal audio quality, please listen with headphones! --- About the podcast: Meet the Composer is a Peabody Award-winning podcast that takes listeners into the minds and creative processes of th...
Mar 16, 2017•25 min•Ep. 31
We continue our investigation of the odd, wrong-side-of-the-tv-set role of The Performer with a deep dive into the "Sonic Meditations" of pioneering American composer Pauline Oliveros. Pauline manages to smudge at the distinction between composer, performer and audience with these simple, text-based pieces, which somehow pack an emotional wallop far larger than their few lines might suggest. --- About the podcast: Meet the Composer is a Peabody Award-winning podcast that takes listeners into the...
Mar 14, 2017•33 min•Ep. 12
We are thrilled to bring you a WORLD PREMIERE recording as our first bonus track of Season Three! Our previous episode, The Performer: Part One, featured, among other things, a fascinating conversation with the Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas. As we are a talk show about music, we are always dying to simply play some MUSIC, and so today we bring you our exclusive, world premiere recording of Haas’ 9th String Quartet. The whole thing! Featuring the fantastic JACK Quartet. The JACK Quartet ...
Mar 07, 2017•52 min•Ep. 29
We're kicking off Season Three with a look beyond the composer to the performer, that unusual intermediary between the artist and the audience. How do performers from different cultures, who speak different languages, come together to perform the same piece? What happens when an ensemble completely messes up... and the audience loves it? How does a piece change when it’s played nonstop for twelve hours? We explore these questions and more, taking a seat on stage as we find out what it’s like to ...
Mar 06, 2017•46 min•Ep. 11
We conclude the week-long ramp-up to our next and third season with an interview with the legendary, charismatic Leonard Bernstein. Though mostly known for his work as a composer (West Side Story) and conductor (New York Philharmonic), Leonard Bernstein was also a consummate evangelist for classical music. This conversation focuses on Bernstein's efforts as a music educator and the role that education played for host Tim Page in his music criticism. --- About the podcast: Meet the Composer is a ...
Mar 03, 2017•13 min•Ep. 27
A blast from the past featuring the composer Libby Larsen. Larsen explains how living in Minneapolis facilitated her success as a composer, and how federal regulations in Title IX provided an uplift to women composers in the U.S. This week, we're revisiting interviews conducted in the 1980s by the influential music critic and educator Tim Page. His show, which aired from 1981 until 1992, was called Meet the Composer and featured some of the most towering musical figures of the previous century. ...
Mar 02, 2017•11 min•Ep. 26
Otto Luening was a forefather of experimental electronic music and a life-long educator, flutist and composer. In this 1985 interview with host Tim Page, from the original WNYC program called Meet the Composer, Luening tells the story of his first electronic experiments and wonders why audiences had found new interest in some of his earliest works. We also take a look at Alvin Lucier, another tape music maverick, as we prepare for the start of our new season on Monday. --- About the podcast: Mee...
Mar 01, 2017•11 min•Ep. 25
We continue the week-long ramp-up to our next and third season with an interview with the widely influential patriarch of 20th-century experimental music John Cage. In this conversation with host Tim Page, Cage explains how his strenuous connection with music precipitated his experiments with silence, ambient noise and spirituality. Page offers his own straightforward critique of Cage's discoveries and reiterates the need for objectivity and seclusion in music criticism. --- About the podcast: M...
Feb 28, 2017•12 min•Ep. 24
As we build up to the launch of our third season next Monday, we thought we'd look back at the original WNYC radio program Meet the Composer from the mid-'80s, hosted by the illustrious music critic Tim Page. We'll share excerpts of his interviews with some of the most exciting figures in contemporary music, but before that we wanted to check in with Tim himself, a man for whom music has been an enormous force in his life, in his career, and even for his psychological well-being. We ask him how ...
Feb 27, 2017•12 min•Ep. 23
Help us make a third season of the Peabody Award-winning podcast about the creative musical process, with host Nadia Sirota. Learn more about our ambitions for next season and help make Season Three a reality by backing our Kickstarter campaign today at www.q2music.org/kickstarter.
May 10, 2016•4 min•Ep. 22
I'm so excited to share today's Meet the Composer bonus track with you. Last October, I traveled to Detroit to perform the US premiere of Nico Muhly's viola concerto with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under Maestro Leonard Slatkin. The orchestra has graciously agreed to let us use the second movement of the viola concerto for our show for three months, so this is our first ever LIMITED-TIME bonus track. Nico wrote the concerto in 2014, and in a lot of ways it's the fruit of 10 years of our work...
Dec 28, 2015•10 min•Ep. 21
First, a disclaimer. I wanna make something clear right off the bat here: I'm completely in the tank for Nico Muhly. We went to college together and he has been one of my best friends and most frequent collaborators ever since. But! He is deeply gifted creator, and honestly I'd feel insane not featuring him just because we're close. Okay. Nico is a composer with a very specific point of view – a rabid communicator whose personality factors massively in his work. Nico works extremely well with ot...
Dec 11, 2015•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 10
This week’s Meet the Composer Bonus Track is a world premiere recording of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s piano work Scape . Scape , like many of Anna’s works, uses extended techniques to create unique, otherworldly textures. For this piece, Anna demands quite a bit of playing INSIDE the instrument, as well as a few somewhat unconventional preparations to the instrument itself. Prepared piano basically means a piano with stuff in it, screws, thimbles, tin foil, pieces of paper, the type of thing that’ll...
Nov 24, 2015•12 min•Ep. 19
Anna Thorvaldsdottir is an Icelandic composer whose work conjures entire environments of sound, surrounding the listener in a dark and forbidding landscape. Anna thinks sonically; her music comes from a deeply non-verbal place, and she has developed a brilliant workflow which allows these ideas to remain mostly whole and unmolested through her creative process. Anna often favors massive ensembles, writing delicate and detailed parts for every player, but even when she is writing for smaller forc...
Nov 09, 2015•56 min•Ep. 9
Today's MTC bonus track is a WORLD PREMIERE! Or, apropos of its October release, we might call it a movement brought back from the dead. This undead movement was born back in 1981, when Ingram Marshall wrote a string quartet for the Kronos Quartet called Voces Resonae . The piece employed, among other things, very complicated choreography for a sound engineer operating delay units (big physical boxes about the size of say a DVD player), a task which, at the time, was completed by Ingram himself....
Oct 13, 2015•13 min•Ep. 17
Ingram Marshall is often called a California Minimalist, a title which, while not exactly geographically accurate, allies him with a loose cadre of artists writing ambient, visceral scores. It's a title he'll happily wear, but it only vaguely describes they art he makes. Ingram is kind of a throwback - a free-thinker making music on his own, music that accesses a deep, emotional place. His music leaves the listener gutted, keyed into something beyond consciousness. It's ambience with a purpose, ...
Oct 05, 2015•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 8
I'm thrilled this week to give you a sneak peek of a new Q2 Music podcast called LPR Live coming out this Fall. It's hosted by Conor Hanick, a longtime friend and radio colleague, brilliant pianist, and all-around passionate and insightful advocate for new music. The performances will come from Greenwich Village's Le Poisson Rouge, a stalwart showcase for new music in New York City and a trendsetting venue that's been "serving art and alcohol since 2009." Here's a quote from Conor about the show...
Aug 26, 2015•16 min
I am so thrilled to bring you this Meet the Composer Bonus Track! We are extremely lucky to present this recording of Kaija Saariaho's piano trio Light and Matter , taped live at the Coolidge Auditorium in the Library of Congress, just this past May 22 by the world-class ensemble of violinist Jennifer Koh, cellist Anssi Karttunen and pianist Ieva Jokubaviciute. It's lovely, colorful, and you are some of the first people to hear it! Light and Matter (2014) is published by Chester Music, Ltd ....
Aug 11, 2015•19 min•Ep. 14
Kaija Saariaho's music evokes all sorts of natural sounds, the kinds of complex, white noise-y sounds that we often tune out. She's able to take the instruments of the orchestra and pull out of them the sound of wind rustling through trees, or waves hitting the shore. She's got this ear that can hear the music in everything, but in not in a John Cage way — she's not putting all sounds on an equal playing field. Instead, she teases harmonies out of these sounds, finding notes that were aaaalmost ...
Jul 30, 2015•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 7
I am absolutely thrilled to present this week's bonus track, an exclusive in-studio performance of Meredith Monk's transcendent string quartet Stringsongs. Stringsongs is Meredith's first string quartet. Written in 2005, the piece was premiered by the Kronos Quartet. Until now, however, no recording of this entire work has been available to the public. Meet the Composer is extremely proud to present this recording, by the inimitable ACME (American Contemporary Music Ensemble). In the MTC Monk ep...
Jul 14, 2015•25 min•Ep. 12
Living legend Meredith Monk is a composer, vocalist, dancer, choreographer and filmmaker. While all of these descriptors are technically on point, none quite gets to the bones of who she is as an artist. Meredith seamlessly blends these media into arresting performance pieces that feel like rituals – rites from another dimension. Take a tour with Meredith of her longtime Tribeca home-studio: http://bit.ly/1f0Urxo
Jun 30, 2015•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 6
