American music

During the last 25 years, Shirley has gone from the rhythm section of a rising-star rock band to L.A.’s Skid Row and, most recently, to a new career as a classical composer in his current home of Newark, Ohio. The story of Shirley’s path to central Ohio is one of loneliness and addiction, of mountaintop highs and rock-bottom despair and, ultimately, recovery and redemption. And music was the friend that led him to a new life.

At one point in time, the skies over North America were full of birds. The ravages of overhunting, industrialization, pollution and trading have silenced many of those species forever. Now American composer Christopher Tin has memorialized extinct birds in The Lost Birds: An Extinction Elegy, recently available in a recording by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and VOCES8.

What knits us to the soul of another? It’s one of the central questions of life, and it is the central question of the Philadelphia-based The Crossing choir’s recording Born: The Music of Edie Hill and Michael Gilbertson, which invites us to consider how we walk with the creatures we encounter on our path.

A new album, Summerland, showcases world-premiere recordings of orchestral works from across composer William Grant Still’s nearly 70-year career, performed by the mother-daughter duo of violinist Zina Schiff and conductor Avlana Eisenberg with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.

The Catalyst Quartet's Uncovered series will showcase neglected chamber works by composers of color. Released earlier this year, Uncovered, Vol. 2 features chamber works by the noted African American composer Florence B. Price.

It was a big idea – to commission an award-winning composer to write a splashy new percussion concerto that would be premiered right here in central…

It’s a fact both horrifying and sobering: an estimated 1.5 million children perished in the Holocaust.But those voices long silenced now ring on, thanks…

“For me, making music felt inadequate.”That’s what noted pianist Simone Dinnerstein said about the days she spent in lockdown last spring, as the…

“At this performance, it was a kind of pandemonium afterwards. The audience wouldn’t stop cheering.”That’s how the noted pianist Gilbert Kalish recalls…

The story of Desbrosses Street, in Lower Manhattan, is a story of a warehouse district turned into apartments, of people taking up residence in the once…