Anastasia Tsioulcas

In today's weird news: We learned via our pal Brian Wise of member station WQXR that the august judges of Miss America 2014 in Atlantic City on Sept. 15 will include not just former *NSYNCer Lance Bass and comedian Mario Cantone, but also one ...

It's already August 8, which means you've got maybe three or four weeks left to complain about preseason football, inadequately shield yourself from the scorching heat of the sun, and communicate with your kids about something other than why they haven't done their homework. So why not get cracking on ...

Stories of old friends finding each other again aren't all that surprising in the age of Facebook and Twitter. But sometimes, those reunions can lead to the opportunity of a lifetime. A chance encounter between a tourist and a mirror maker in an Algerian bazaar led to the reuniting of ...

It's been six years since Andy Palacio and the Garifuna Collective brought the beautifully rich music of the Garifuna people to international consciousness. Their 2007 album Watina became an instant classic, and probably did more than anything else to bring this culture and language to an international audience. But less ...

PROGRAM:

Kronos Quartet & Superhuman Happiness: Suite from How to Survive a Plague (world premiere)

Kronos Quartet, Abena Koomson & Sahr Ngaujah: Fela Kuti, "Sorrow, Tears and Blood"

Recently, I've been reading a lot about hyperpolyglots: freakishly talented, assiduously hardworking and wonderfully curious individuals who, usually by choice ...

Mozart, Charles Ives and Brian Eno: an unlikely trinity of musical idols, except if you're Timo Andres. The 27-year-old American composer and pianist weaves all of their DNA into his new album, Home Stretch, and the results provide thought-provoking glimpses into how the past ...

This is the kind of opportunity most classical musicians can only dream about: to be invited to spend part of the summer with an orchestra touring the world — Washington, Moscow, St. Petersburg and London — with two of the biggest names in classical music, conductor Valery Gergiev ...

There is magic in pure sound. And few know that truth as well as the quartet called So Percussion and the installation artist and drummer Eli Keszler — artists who, before this spring, had never met. We thought that they might find kindred spirits in each ...

How did I miss this before today? Well, thanks to the sublime Maria Popova and her site Brain Pickings, I am now among the millions of folks who have encountered the equally sublime Vi Hart on YouTube. The self-described "mathemusician" (and occasional cook) explains ...

Not very long into our online discussion of what makes an American symphony great, we started asking for suggestions of benchmark works on social media. And critic Will Robin responded nearly instantaneously:

Will's prompt got me thinking. Glenn Branca renders his music on a huge scale: ...

We taped this Field Recording shortly after Hurricane Sandy devastated communities in and around New York and New Jersey. One of those affected was drummer Nasheet Waits, who had lost his kit in the storm's waters. Luckily, the Steve Maxwell drum store in midtown Manhattan was willing to lend a ...

Sunday in Cardiff, Wales, young American mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton joined an elite cadre of classical artists as the newest winner of the highly prestigious BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition. Barton also took home the 2013 Song Prize. (A third award, the Audience Prize, went to British ...

June 21st has come to be one of our very favorite days on the calendar. It's not just the first day of summer (though there is that). It's also time for Make Music New York, which presents about 1,000 — yes, 1,000 — free outdoor concerts across the ...

The violin and viola that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart played himself are in the United States for the first time ever. The instruments come out of storage only about once a year at the Salzburg Mozarteum in Austria. The rest of the time, they're kept under serious lockup. I ...

Not everyone gets to celebrate his or her 19th birthday the way Conrad Tao will: On June 11, he'll release a major-label debut album and curate the first day of his own three-day new music festival in Brooklyn. But if any musician is primed for such ...

A few weeks ago, we asked you to take the last minute of Stravinsky's famous music for The Rite of Spring, transform it into something new and post your creations to YouTube. And boy, did you guys deliver, just in time to mark the ballet's 100th ...

Composer and pianist Vijay Iyer and filmmaker Prashant Bhargava transport Igor Stravinsky's imagined springtime religious ritual to India, where such a celebration is real: the joyous...

Composer, pianist and software engineer Stephen Malinowski has created one brilliant solution to an age-old problem: how to communicate and understand what's going on in a piece of music, particularly if you don't know standard musical notation. Over the course of some forty years, he's honed what he calls his ...

We're celebrating the centennial of Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring in a big way around here. Throughout this coming week and until the actual 100th anniversary Wednesday, May 29th, you'll be hearing, watching and reading some incredible work inspired by this riveting — and game-changing — piece of art.

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Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring turned Paris upside down upon its world premiere in Paris May 29, 1913 — and we're asking you to help us celebrate this groundbreaking work's centennial.

This one piece paved a new artistic path not just for musicians but for all ...