Podcast appearances and mentions of Nadia Sirota

Christopher Rountree is probably best known as the conductor of the LA-based new music ensemble known as Wild Up. Over the last 14 years he and that band have played with Bjork, done live film scores to movie screenings, and embarked on a multiyear recording project of the long forgotten and now rediscovered music of Julius Eastman. But Christopher Rountree is also a composer, and his latest work is called 3 BPM. It seems like it might be his reply to the rise of AI in music, because he describes the piece as “a musical framework for being together.” In an open score that could be part map, and part game, the ensemble performs the entirety of 3 BPM in-studio.  The ensemble for this New York in-studio includes:  Christopher Rountree, voice / synthCatherine Brookman, voice / synth  Nadia Sirota, viola  Adam Tendler, pianoPhong Tran, electronicsTaylor Levine, electric guitarRachel Beetz, flute 3 BPM by Christopher Rountree with Wild Up | HOCKET | Nadia Sirota

For this year's season finale, Darin sits down with Bill Addison, the LA Times Restaurant Critic, for a look back on the year that was 2023.  They chat about the stories that the culinary scene shared, the evolution of new restaurants, and the 101 Best Restaurant List that just came out. Then we head into the archives for a performance from Nadia Sirota, a one-woman contemporary-classical commissioning machine. A big thank you to everyone who supported the show this year and we'll see you all in 2024! Snacky Tunes: Music is the Main Ingredient, Chefs and Their Music (Phaidon), is now on shelves at bookstores around the world. It features 77 of the world's top chefs who share personal stories of how music has been an important, integral force in their lives. The chefs also give personal recipes and curated playlists too. It's an anthology of memories, meals and mixtapes. Pick up your copy by ordering directly from Phaidon, or by visiting your local independent bookstore. Visit our site, www.snackytunes.com for more info.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support Snacky Tunes by becoming a member!Snacky Tunes is Powered by Simplecast.

ÖVERSÄTTNING: Azar Mahloujian UPPLÄSNING: Stina Ekblad Lyssna på alla avsnitt i Sveriges Radio Play. DIKT: ”En annan årstid” av Ahmad ShamlooDIKTSAMLING: Allomfattande kärlek (Arash förlag 1994)MUSIK: Meredith Monk: Autumn variationEXEKUTÖR: Bohdan Hilash, basklarinett, Courtney Orlando, violin, Todd Reynolds, violin, Nadia Sirota, viola, Ha-Yang Kim, cello och John Hollenbeck, slagverk.

Shara Nova has released five albums under the moniker My Brightest Diamond and has composed works for The Crossing, Conspirare, Cantus Domus, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Roomful of Teeth, many community choirs, as well as yMusic, Brooklyn Rider, violist Nadia Sirota, Aarhus Symfoni, North Carolina Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, American Composers Orchestra and the BBC Concert Orchestra, among others.In 2019, she composed for over 600 community musicians and the Cincinnati Symphony in celebration of their 125th season, a piece entitled "Look Around," with director Mark DeChiazza. Her baroque chamber p'opera “You Us We All” premiered in the US in October 2015 at BAM Next Wave Festival. With co-composer and performer Helga Davis, Nova created a four-screen film entitled “Ocean Body,” along with director Mark DeChiazza, which premiered at The Momentary in August 2021, shortly followed by the premiere of “Infinite Movement,” her baroque masque for 100 musicians, set to text by artist Matthew Ritchie, which premiered at The University of North Texas in November 2021.Ms. Nova is the featured singer on “The Blue Hour” with the string orchestra A Far Cry and co-composers Rachel Grimes, Angélica Negrón, Sarah Kirkland Snider and Caroline Shaw on Nonesuch Records (Sept ‘22). A collection of songs by Nico Muhly with Detroit's acclaimed wind ensemble Akropolis Quintet also features Ms. Nova's voice entitled Hymns for Private Use (Oct ‘22). A number of music composers, including Sarah Kirkland Snider, Bryce and Aaron Dessner, Steve Mackey and David Lang have created works specifically for her voice. She has collaborated with Matthew Barney, The Decemberists, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Sufjan Stevens, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, and many others.Shara has a couple different branches to her life:Singer and Composer Branch: https://shara-nova.com/Pop Music Branch: https://www.mybrightestdiamond.com/Instagram: @mybrightestdiamondTwitter: @MyBrightestDmndWriting on Substack: https://substack.com/profile/91251132-shara-nova

The third instalment of our series on this year's Oscar hopefuls, featuring discussion of Don't Look Up (Adam McKay), Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi), The Hand of God (Paolo Sorrentino), and The Lost Daughter (Maggie Gyllenhaal). SAG nominations: 01:44 - 12:04 Don't Look Up: 12:31 – 26:16 Drive My Car: 26:16 – 39:23 The Hand of God: 39:23 – 49:23 The Lost Daughter: 49:23 – 1:00:15 Intro Music: “Don't Look Up" by Ariana Grande feat. Kid Cudi (from Don't Look Up) Exit music: Étude 3” by Nadia Sirota (from The Hand of God)

Dig into a conversation between Gabriel Cabezas,  Gabriella Smith, and Nadia Sirota for their new collaboration: Lost CoastAnd, register here for a free online event:Music preview, video premiere by Darian Donovan Thomas and q&aIn partnership with Bedroom CommunityWith support from Anne Carayon and Dan PennieTuesday, February 2 at 7:30pm CST Composer Gabriella Smith, whose music has been described as “high-voltage and wildly imaginative” (Philadelphia Inquirer) and “the coolest, most exciting, most inventive new voice I've heard in ages” (Musical America) comes together with Sphinx Medal of Excellence recipient cellist Gabriel Cabezas on Lost Coast, a forthcoming album that addresses both the natural beauty of the planet and humanity's hand at destroying it. Recorded in Iceland's famed Greenhouse Studios during the extremities of the country's far-northern daylight cycle, Lost Coast sees Cabezas's virtuosic cello playing layered acoustically with Smith's arresting vocals to create an addictive and unexpected palette, deployed with Smith's trademark compositional ingenuity.

A few years ago, while interviewing violist Nadia Sirota about the making of her podcast Meet the Composer, I was struck by something she said: “Somebody being joyful about something in their life is wonderful. Like that’s actually kind of something that we need in this world… And it’s fascinating to listen to people talk about stuff that they love, because it requires a little bit of vulnerability. And that’s the kind of excitement that brings you to love something yourself.” This idea, of celebrating joy and earnest enthusiasm, stuck with me, and inspired the making of this podcast. In each episode, you’ll meet people with interests ranging from fish sauce to astrology to duct tape, learn where their love comes from, and you might just begin to share their passion as well. Enthusiast!’s 10 episode first season premiers October 14, with episodes releasing every Wednesday until December 7. Subscribe today in your favorite podcast app. Follow Enthusiast! on Twitter: @EnthusiastFM Follow Nadia Sirota on Twitter: @NadiaSirota

Susan suggested a bunch of things to read about the philosophy and ethics of listening, for you to follow up: * Talk: The science of conversation by Elizabeth Stokoe * Yo! And Lo! The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons by Mark Lance and Rebecca Kukla * Dotson, Kristie. "Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing", Hypatia 26.2 (2011): 236-257. [link to .pdf (http://www.victorkumar.org/uploads/6/1/5/2/61526489/dotson-2011-hypatia.pdf)] * Medina, José. "Varieties of Hermeneutical Injustice 1." The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice. Routledge, 2017. 41-52. And here are some other things for you to explore that came up in our conversation: * I mentioned the following book at one point: Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the dark: The untold history of people power. Canongate Books, 2010. * Susan talked a bit about the ethical work done by Elizabeth Edenberg, (http://elizabethedenberg.com/) which emphasises how participants to discussions often have a wide range of commonly held values. * She also mentioned a Horizon-2020 research project at the University of Manchester that looks into youth radicalisation: it's called the Dialogue about Radicalisation and Equality, or DARE (http://www.dare-h2020.org/). * I mentioned the 'deep listening (http://deeplistening.org/site/)' programme of composer Pauline Oliveros. A great introduction to her work can be found on this episode (https://www.newsounds.org/story/performer-part-two-pauline) of WQXR Q2's awesome 'Meet The Composer' series with host Nadia Sirota here. A performance of Oliveros' 'Tuning Mediation' can be seen in 360º video recorded in binaural sound here (https://www.newsounds.org/story/make-radio-met-cloisters-pauline-oliveross-tuning-meditation). * In this regard, Susan also mentioned the following work: Cavarero, Adriana. For more than one voice: Toward a philosophy of vocal expression. Stanford University Press, 2005. You can find Susan online on twitter (@susannotess (https://www.twitter.com/susannotess)), and her academic webpage is here (https://susannotess.wordpress.com/), where you can find links to her work, including this excellent article: * Listening to People: Using Social Psychology to Spotlight an Overlooked Virtue. Philosophy, 94(4), 621-643. As ever, please get in touch to send any thoughts, responses, ideas, reactions, feedback or ideas about this episode or any of the others, it's always great to hear from you, particularly if you want to say encouraging things. To drop me a line you can just head over to the contact (https://www.generousquestions.co.uk/contact) page, or tweet at me on twitter (@drjoemorrison (https://twitter.com/DrJoeMorrison)) The theme music is from li_serios05 (https://store.broken20.com/album/li-series-05-jack-on-piano) by TVO on Broken20 records (https://store.broken20.com/) under Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Nadia is a musician I’ve crossed paths with many times in many green rooms but never really got to know. green room honesty: I was afraid to talk to her. She was good. I was not. Pretty simple. She’s amazing at what she does and thinks long and hard about her music and her podcasts (which you should check out) called Living Music and Meet the Composer. I thoroughly enjoyed this chat. You can her work at www.nadiasirota.com

43: Nadia Sirota Nadia Sirota is the host and co-creator of Meet the Composer and an acclaimed violist. “I actually feel like somebody being joyful about something in their life is wonderful. ... There's this temptation when you're in college, and definitely when you're in conservatory, to try to find the right constellation of things to hate. That will make other people think you're smart. And it's really tempting, and it's really easy, in some levels, to sort of fall into that kind of negative world. In classical music, God knows there's so much tearing down of people and of technique and of whatever. ... It's so boring, and it's fascinating to listen to people talk about stuff they love because it requires a little bit of vulnerability. And also that's the kind of excitement that brings you to love something yourself.”

Nadia Sirota is Juilliard-trained violist who hosts Meet The Composer, a podcast that shifts the conversation around classical music by featuring interviews with modern-day composers. She’s also worked with artists ranging from Kesha to Paul Simon. Plus, she explains how being on tour led to a love of aquariums, and Nerdette connects her with the Senior Curator of Fishes at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium.

Civvie; An Ant and an Atom; Jeff Greinke; SubtractiveLad; Nadia Sirota; Building Castles out of Matchsticks; Sote; Andy Haas; The Purveyors of Free Will; Jim James; Pye Corner Audio; Bing & Ruth; Golden Retriever; Cares; White Poppy; TalSounds; Visible Cloaks; Do Make Say Think; Brasstronaut; Tiny Vipers; Kid Koala / Emiliana Torrini; Bonobo; Austra & New Order.

Meet the Composer is 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 really fascinating conversation with the Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas (if you haven’t heard the episode yet, go check it out!). 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, first recording of Haas’ 9th String Quartet. The whole thing! Featuring the fantastic JACK Quartet. The JACK Quartet has spent years performing and championing an older piece of Haas’, his 3rd String Quartet. They played it so well, in fact, Haas decided to write his 9th quartet specifically for the JACKs, taking full advantage of their superpower: just intonation. So we figured, what could be better than having the JACKs over to Q2 Music to bring this piece to life? Like his 3rd String Quartet, this piece comes with an unusual stipulation: it is to be performed in complete, india ink, can’t-see-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face darkness. So turn out the lights and join Meet the Composer and the JACKs for the first-ever recording of this spectacular piece of oddly-tuned awesome. –Nadia Sirota

On today's episode I talk to violist Nadia Sirota. Based in New York, Nadia is a Juilliard-trained violist best known for her singular sound and expressive execution and she's worked with a number of amazing contemporary composers like Nico Muhly, Judd Greenstein, and Missy Mazzoli. Her debut album First Things First was released in 2009 on New Amsterdam Records and was cited as a record of the year by The New York Times. In addition to her work as a soloist, Nadia is a member of yMusic, ACME (the American Contemporary Music Ensemble) and Alarm Will Sound, and has lent her viola to recording and concert projects by artists such as Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors, Anohni and Arcade Fire. In 2015, she won a Peabody Award for her podcast Meet the Composer.  This is the website for Beginnings, subscribe on iTunes, follow me on Twitter.

On this week's Snacky Tunes, Greg Bresnitz interviews Claire Wadsworth of the restaurant La Copine. La Copine began as a pop-up kitchen in 2009. Chef Nikki Hill partnered with singer-songwriter Claire Wadsworth in Philadelphia, where they started their business serving farm-to-table brunch on a food cart. In 2012, Nikki and Claire moved to California. Now living in Yucca Valley, they have opened their first restaurant in Flamingo Heights. After the break, a live in-studio performance by violinist Nadia Sirota. “A one-woman contemporary-classical commissioning machine” (Pitchfork), violist Nadia Sirota is best known for her singular sound and expressive execution, coaxing works and collaborations from the likes of Nico Muhly, Daníel Bjarnason, Valgeir Sigurðsson, Judd Greenstein, Marcos Balter, and Missy Mazzoli. Her debut album First Things First (New Amsterdam Records) was named a record of the year by The New York Times, and her follow-up Baroque (Bedroom Community and New Amsterdam) has been called “beautiful music of a higher order than anything else you will hear this year” by SPINMedia website PopMatters. Nadia also hosts the Meet the Composer podcast on Q2 Music, exploring the work of living composers through her interviews and musical selections.

The death knell for classical music has been ringing for decades. Yet many say the music is not only alive, it's kicking! Join us for a fascinating, up-close-and-personal conversation with two highly original voices – Alexander Shelley, Music Director of the NAC Orchestra, and Andrew Potter, Editor of the Ottawa Citizen. With special guest Nadia Sirota ,violist and host of WQXR's Q2 Music Meet the Composer podcast.

Hi, I’m Nadia Sirota, host of Meet the Composer (MTC). MTC is a podcast that confronts the artists and art that move us, using radio storytelling to tease out what makes these pieces and people tick. We aim to share the music we love with anyone who is down to listen. Music can be tricky to talk about, so when words fail, Meet the Composer uses all of the tools in our arsenal – sound design, phrasing, underscoring, and sonic embroidery – to share what we love about music with our audience. MTC is art and artists, exposed. Just a few weeks ago, we were blown away to hear that MTC won a 2015 Peabody Award, broadcasting's highest honor, praise which put us in the heady company of Radiolab and This American Life. The Peabody committee described MTC as “Fascinating, intelligent, enlightening podcasts devoted to the work of current classical composers. The show integrates music with thoughtful conversation about it without distracting from either.” We've been humbled by the overwhelming reception from our listeners. Since the show launched in June 2014, listeners from 183 countries have downloaded MTC more than 540,000 times! We've also had big shout-outs from The Guardian and The New York Times with the headlines “Meet the Composer: the podcast that's demystifying classical music” and “With ‘Meet the Composer,’ Nadia Sirota Illuminates New Music.” Both seasons were funded in large part by your contributions via Kickstarter, so, honestly, we could not have made this happen without your support. We hope we have rewarded your trust with beautiful, composed radio, and we want to start making you more.  With our upcoming third season, we are excited to take on new formats for the show and to follow creative themes past individual composers to stranger and more exotic conclusions. An emphasis on the driving forces that compel composers to put pen to paper will be a key component of Season Three. We will continue to profile composers but also unpack breakthrough pieces and dig into those moments when musical styles clashed, flirted and mutated between all types of composers, both living and dead! We will continue to compose radio with probing interviews, expert commentary and through-composed sound design. Learn about our current and critical Kickstarter campaign and help today to make Season Three a reality. 

Vanguards of the New York indie classical scene, composer Nico Muhly and violist Nadia Sirota embody the meaning of "classical reincarnated" in an electrifying concert. Nadia Sirota joins Alexander Shelley in the Canadian premiere of Nico Muhly's Electrifying Viola Concerto. This much anticipated work was commissioned by an international consortium of orchestras and organisations made up of Orquesta Nacionales de España, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Festival of Saint Denis and National Arts Centre Orchestra. Nadia Sirota's debut album, First Things First (New Amsterdam Records), was a New York Times 2009 record of the year, and she can also be heard on albums by Grizzly Bear, yMusic (a new music ensemble who commission Sufjan Stevens, Son Lux, and other young American composers),Jonsi, the National, Ratatat, Doveman, My Brightest Diamond, and Arcade Fire's Grammy-winning The Suburbs.

  Nadia Sirota is a busy lady. She’s a violist and recording artist, she’s a member of yMusic, Alarm Will Sound, and ACME (the American Contemporary Music Ensemble), she commissions work from new composers, she collaborates with classical and rock music makers (Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly, Jónsi, and Arcade Fire to name a few) and she’s the host and co-producer of Q2 Music’s contemporary classical music podcast, Meet the Composer. In this episode of Classical Classroom, Sirota talks about new classical music, from what to call it (Alt classical? Concert music? Music?) to the people who are making innovative work right now. Hear music so fresh it will make your clothes smell good.    Music in this episode: Clip from Meet the Composer, episode 10 Andrew Norman “Music in Circles” Caroline Shaw “Partita for 8 Voices” Donnacha Dennehy “Gra Agus Bas” Nico Muhly “Drones and piano” Audio production by Todd “Touché” Hulslander with whale song by Dacia Clay and editing by Mark DiClaudio. To learn more, check out Nadia Sirota’s website. 

LPR Live, a new podcast showcasing music recorded live at Greenwich Village's Le Poisson Rouge, launches with a throwback to Steve Reich's seminal 1988 Different Trains for string quartet and tape, performed by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME). Steve Reich undoubtedly stands as one of America’s most influential composers. He also admits to being one of the most influenced musicians of his generation, combining the disparate sounds of jazz, African drumming, American experimentalism, and more. In Different Trains, written in 1988 and scored for string quartet and pre-recorded tape, Reich adds a deeply personal narrative to this melange of musical influence and creates one of his most affecting musical statements. This episode features performances by Caroline Shaw and Ben Russell, violinists; Nadia Sirota, violist; and Clarice Jensen, cellist, and interviews with Jensen, Shaw and Reich himself. The music was recorded on September 11, 2012; hear the complete show. Steve Reich’s Different Trains was featured on LPR Live by permission from Boosey & Hawkes. Visit Boosey on the web at www.boosey.com.

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 others; his collaborators live and create in an environment that is just foreign enough to instigate surprising, brilliant results. He curates community on a grand scale, corresponding with dozens of people a day, and is the hardest working person I have ever met. Nico lives his life out loud, and his music is stunning, hilarious, touching, and brilliant. - Nadia Sirota

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 make a piano technician start to sweat. The first couple people to do this type of thing were crazy Americans, Henry Cowell and John Cage. Definitely take a moment to check those guys out, if you have a sec. Anna, very much in keeping with her timbral language, uses these techniques to carve out massive swaths of sonic texture, creating a huge universe in a relatively limited time frame. A couple weeks ago, Cory Smythe, pianist for the International Contemporary Ensemble, stopped by the Q2 Music studios to create the beautiful world premiere recording. –Nadia Sirota

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 forces, she somehow summons these massive sonorities — detailed, elegant tapestries with a seductive gravity, which pull the listener in with their gradually revolving color and texture. - Nadia Sirota

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. However, when the third movement of this work, "Turbulent but flowing," proved too logistically complex to be performed, it was essentially put in a drawer, where it has remained for the last thirty-some years.  That’s where we come in! MTC has enlisted the fabulous Parker Quartet to help us rescue this lost movement, with the help of MTC producer Curtis Macdonald playing the role of, as Ingram put it, “the mad scientist in the middle.”  Except in our contemporary take on the piece, all the delays and echoes are created with software instead of hardware.  The Parker Quartet is: Daniel Chong, violin Ying Xue, violin Jessica Bodner, viola Kee-Hyun Kim, cello We hope you enjoy the Lost Movement! - Nadia Sirota Special thanks to publisher Peermusic Classical for allowing this usage.

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, a brilliant pianist and all-around sensitive 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: This is not your typical pre-concert hosting, and the content is not your typical pre-concert banter. Each episode of LPR Live will weave together a variety of voices that bring you into the heart of the beast of this dynamic downtown, underground performance space and into the personal aspects of the music’s creation and presentation. This is a podcast that will let this exciting new music take its first (digital) breath. Production will create a sonic space where each strand is able to “converse” with its surroundings, and the richness and multi-dimensionality of the voices themselves will create the form, almost like eavesdropping on a conversation in the performer’s greenroom. Join me in welcoming LPR Live into the podcasting family, and stay tuned for more Meet the Composer goodies in the weeks to come.  -Nadia Sirota

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... after Justice Ginsburg, of course! The composer’s program note is below: "The starting point for the music is light kinetic energy, which is then developed into more dramatic gestures and rapid exchanges among the three instruments. The piece advances in spinning motion, moving from the original luminous fabric into more thematic patterns or towards the inertia of slow choral textures, 11 before returning into the original weightlessness and starting a new flickering spin. As a result, we hear three musical elements–kinetic texture, thematic motives and slowly moving choral material–in constantly changing combinations and orchestrations. I wrote this piece in New York, while watching from my window the changing light and colors of Morningside Park. Besides providing me with the name for the piece, perhaps that continuous transformation of light on the glinting leaves and the immobile trunks of the solid trees became the inspiration for the musical materials in this piece." I hope you enjoy!-Nadia Sirota Light and Matter (2014) is published by Chester Music, Ltd. Commissioned by the Library of Congress Dina Koston and Roger Shapiro Fund for New Music (in honor of the 90th anniversary of Concerts from the Library of Congress), Britten Sinfonia and Norrbotten NEO, and co-commissioned by the Aeolian Chamber Players in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Bowdoin International Music Festival. Engineering credits: Michael E. Turpin

The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music brings together some of the best and brightest composers working today. I spoke to three from this year's lineup as we listened to some of their pieces. Harpist/composer Hannah Lash confided her love of tuned percussion and hidden structure. Missy Mazzoli discussed her "River Rouge Transfiguration" – inspired by the iconic Ford auto plant–and "Vespers for a New Dark Age": secular music with sacred sources. Nico Muhly reflected on cartoon travelogues and Disneyfied gamelan in his piece "Wish You Were Here" and his "technical exercise with a heart of gold," "Étude #3" featuring violist Nadia Sirota.

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 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 there to begin with. Kaija is famous for writing moving, visceral works full of difficult new instrumental techniques. She often writes for acoustic instruments with almost subliminal electronic manipulation — it's hard to tell where the performer leaves off and the electronics begin, and she's written full scale operas, often with strong, historically-inspired female protagonists, grappling with huge themes, love and death, that kind of thing. - Nadia Sirota

Q2 Music celebrated the launch of its inaugural podcast, Meet the Composer, on Tuesday, June 24 at 7 pm with a music party and live video webcast in The Greene Space at WQXR.  Hosted by Nadia Sirota, the evening included interviews with all five members of Season One of Meet the Composer, including the two most recent Pulitzer Prize winners, John Luther Adams (2014) and Caroline Shaw (2013), as well as fellow innovators Andrew Norman, Marcos Balter, and Donnacha Dennehy. The concert featured a star-studded array of dynamic, award-winning performers: flutist and International Contemporary Ensemble artistic director Claire Chase performs Balter's Pessoa; Hotel Elefant performs Adams's Red Arc/Blue Veil; Attacca String Quartet performs excerpts from Norman's Peculiar Strokes; Cellist Hannah Collins performs Shaw's in manus tuas; and Bang on a Can All-Star pianist Vicky Chow, cellist Ashley Bathgate and violinist Todd Reynolds perform Dennehy's Bulb. Watch video of the entire show: Q2 Music’s Meet the Composer pays homage to the landmark show of the same name hosted by Tim Page for WNYC in the mid to late '80s. Thanks to New Music USA for their flexibility with the use of the “Meet The Composer” name, which became famous though their legacy organization founded by composer John Duffy.

1 - "Concerto em Ré maior/D Major, RV. 208" (Vivaldi). Nicola Benedetti, violino/violin. Scottish Chamber Ensemble, 2 - "You'd be so nice to come home to" (Cole Porter). Anita O'Day. Billy May & His Orchestra. 3 - "Minha terra" (Barrozo Netto). Nelson Freire, piano. 4 - "Opus 1, N. 2: Minuetto gracioso" (Francesco Zappa). Frank Zappa & Barking Pumpin Digital Gratification Consort. 5 - Canto Yanomami/ Brazilian indian chant 6 - "Part II: Material in a Handsome Stack" (Nico Muhly). Nadia Sirota, viola. Nico Muhly, piano. 7 - "He is Hanging by His Shiny Arms, His Heart an Open Wound with Love" (Van Wissem-Jarmusch). Jozef van Wissem, alaude/lute. Jim Jarmusch, voz, violão e guitarra/voice, guitar and electric guitar. I am Heloisa Fischer and you can find more about my work in classical music at facebook.com/heloisafischer.