When composer Jeffrey Brooks premiered The Memory Palace at Bang on a Can's summer festival at MASS MoCA in July 2023, he'd perfected the presentation of what we now know as the Stein-o-caster - a new form of prepared piano, fitted with pickups, that he conceived and designed the previous year with electronics engineer Greg Lee. As a featured instrument on two pieces from this new recording, the Stein-o-caster sets the tone for the aural atmospherics and soundscapes that transport the music into fresh dimensions of space and time. An artist of wide-ranging musical tastes, Brooks has also held a lifelong affinity for the electric guitar (Jimi Hendrix is a personal hero), so in the context of The Memory Palace, it made sense to approach longtime collaborator Mark Stewart - in-house guitarist for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and musical director for Paul Simon's touring band - for a specially commissioned piece. This became "Santuario," scored for double-neck electric guitar, and a mini-epic of sonic exploration in it's own right.

ART DECADE is a wide-ranging collaboration that unites composer, producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist Evan Ziporyn with Toronto's renowned ContaQt ensemble, led by arranger and percussionist Jerry Pergolesi. Featuring all-new interpretations of 'art rock' and ambient classics from the early '70s psych-prog output of King Crimson, David Bowie's "Berlin trilogy," and Brian Eno's Ambient 1-4 series, ART DECADE is more than just a tribute album. "Our goal is not to 'elevate' or legitimize this music," Ziporyn and Pergolesi reveal in the album's liner notes. "It's towering artistic achievement and profound influence on an entire generation is self-evident. Instead, by revisiting and inhabiting these groundbreaking works, we hope to ensure they remain a vibrant, celebrated part of the musical repertoire, retaining their punkish sense of gleeful adventure as they continue to subvert expectations and venture into uncharted territory."

In celebration of their 25th year together as one of the most adventurous and influential percussion ensembles in contemporary music, So Percussion announces the release of 25x 25. In keeping with the group's forward-looking mission, this 8-disc box set is not a retrospective; more characteristically, it's a stand-alone listening experience, featuring more than 8 hours of entirely new and previously unreleased recordings, with each piece written for, in collaboration with, and premiered by So Percussion. Over the last 25 years, the members of So - Jason Treuting, Adam Sliwinski, Josh Quillen, and Eric Cha-Beach - have been hailed for their gripping performances and wildly creative collaborations. Cantaloupe Music (the label launched by the Bang on a Can collective, which released So's first-ever album in 2004), is pleased to offer this collection to longtime fans and newcomers alike. It's both a comprehensive portrait, and a forecasting of where contemporary chamber music is heading.

Avant-jazz pianist and composer Matthew Shipp has been referred to as the "elder statesman" of the art form by DownBeat magazine, but the reach and scope of his music extends much further than mere genre. The Cosmic Piano delivers on that promise - a solo recording that taps into the deeper exploratory potential of the instrument, with Shipp channeling a lifetime of knowledge and a daunting array of influences into nearly an hour of spontaneous, enlightened and joyfully rendered music.

Composer, violinist, and NYC impresario David Handler composes acoustic and electronic music that has been described by the New York Times as "eerie and superbly wrought... exploring polarities of light and dark, the sacred and the profane." This attraction to juxtaposition is also evident in Handler's role as co-founder of (Le) Poisson Rouge (LPR), the boundary-breaking downtown New York venue that has opened doors for his fellow performers and connected audiences with unheard music since 2008. Life Like Violence explores the everyday tumult of the mind: fear, whim, rage, pain, fancy. As Handler puts it: "this is the sound of my psyche." It's music that attacks itself, eating itself from the inside out. Ideas invade and gnaw at each other. They undermine, taunt, assault, exalt, and tease. Physical gestures disrupt long narratives whose melodies are obscured, revealed, decayed, destroyed, and mourned. What emerges is a broken beauty of spirit that has endured.

Formed in 2020 and comprised of veterans of New York City's vital contemporary music community, the Anzu Quartet - Olivia de Prato, Ashley Bathgate, Ken Thomson and Karl Larson - is an ensemble dedicated to the music of our time and the recent canon. The quartet's first full-length studio release of premiere recordings features new works by Thomson (?) and fellow composer Anna Webber (?, which lends the album it's title). Relentless, kinetic and emotive, Thomson's ? reflects the pace and anxieties of modern life, while Webber's ? explores the liminal space between classical contemporary music and experimental jazz. Both works, composed between 2019 and 2022, highlight the quartet's prowess as interpreters and performers of demanding, modern repertoire, and fulfill Anzu's mission of commissioning and promoting new repertoire for the instrumentation of Messiaen's elemental "Quartet for the End of Time," a new recording of which the group will release later in 2025.

26 Little Deaths - the new album from composer, singer and violinist Carla Kihlstedt and the contemporary ensemble Present Music - celebrates the macabre wit of iconic writer and illustrator Edward Gorey (1925-2000), whose 100th birthday fell on February 22, 2025. The album is an hour-long set of 26 miniatures for singing violinist and chamber orchestra, inspired by Gorey's macabre children's book, The Gashlycrumb Tinies. Following in the footsteps of Hanns Eisler and Kurt Weill, who moved seamlessly between art song, pop song and cabaret, Kihlstedt has created a work that captures the pathos, humor and wit of Gorey's indelible images.

A Western is Michael Gordon's extended musing inspired by the legendary 1950s film High Noon, starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. It's about the Wild West, the way of the gun, classic American TV fantasies, and of course the good guys versus the bad guys. Caroline Shaw's How to fold the wind is a mesmerizing choral work that expands on the vocal acrobatics the composer has explored with her Grammy-winning ensemble Roomful of Teeth. The piece is inspired by Japanese origami, using speech, inhaled notes, wordless melodies and innovative vocal effects to fold individual voices together into a complex whole. Released together as a "split album" on CD, the two works mirror each other in a compelling array of contrasts and similarities. Each was recorded by one of Denmark's premier vocal ensembles -�A Western by Theatre of Voices, How to fold the wind by Ars Nova Copenhagen -�with each performance conducted by Paul Hillier. And although the lyrical forms of each piece couldn't be more strikingly different, somehow they elevate each other into a revelatory listening experience that expands the scope of modern choral music.

Classical Music

Like his Pulitzer-winning work the little match girl passion, David Lang's 'poor hymnal' tries to get to the core of what a religious experience can be. "What I love about hymnals," the composer writes in his liner notes to the CD, "is that they're a catalog of things a community of worshippers can agree on - a catalog that can be sung. And what the worshippers are singing about matters." 'poor hymnal' is a concert-length work written for the multiple GRAMMY Award-winning chamber choir The Crossing, conducted by Donald Nally. Lang constructed the text by stitching together lines, phrases and poignant utterances from sources as varied as the Old Testament, Mahatma Gandhi and Tolstoy - to name just a few. As Lang explains: "This piece is trying to say: The reason we are coming together is to remember how important we are to each other, and to remember how important it is that we take care of each other."

Composer/pianist Michael Harrison's Time Loops is the follow up to Revelation, a critically acclaimed Cantaloupe recording from 2007, and features "cello goddess", Maya Beiser and one track with the Young People's Chorus of New York City. Michael Harrison is known for developing one of the most distinctive musical styles in recent years; utilizing innovative tuning relationships to further develop Just Intonation - an ancient tuning system where the distances between notes are based upon whole number ratios.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music