The three chamber works on New Thread Quartet‘s Saxifraga speak vociferously on behalf of the saxophone ensemble’s commitment to new music. Favouring texture and atmosphere over melody and traditional compositional forms, the group’s second New Focus release utilizes multiphonics, alternate tunings, non-pitched sounds, and other techniques to navigate unconventional sonic territories. Such explorations are consistent with the quartet’s avowed mission to present daring new music for the saxophone and to use its high-level playing in the service of living composers.
The NYC-based saxophone quartet comprises Geoffrey Landman (soprano), Kristen McKeon (alto), Erin Rogers (tenor) and Zach Herchen (baritone), though Jonathan Hulting-Cohen is…
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Composer 
Although she has been releasing albums since 2011, the Serbian-born New York resident, composer, pianist, performer and improviser 
The frightening ubiquity of artificial intelligence can be enough to concern any artist who possesses even a modicum of creative dignity. However, acclaimed Canadian composer 
Composer 
Performing with veteran free improv percussionist William Winant, Zeena Parkins – probably one of the greatest living harpists – returns with a poetic, magickal set inspired by visual artist Jay DeFeo.
Many releases highlighting women composers have appeared in recent years. What distinguishes the latest one from violinist Laura Kobayashi and pianist Susan Keith Gray (aka 
The music of Estonian composer 
Joe Hisaishi Conducts… documents a concert given at Tokyo’s Suntory Hall on 31 July 2024. There Hisaishi performed his own ‘The End of the World’ suite in a version as well as his friend and colleague Steve Reich’s ‘The Desert Music’.
Bringing old music styles and forms to contemporary audiences isn’t a task for just any artist. Korean-American composer and pianist 
Double bassist 
Timed to coincide with the centenary of the French composer’s death, Satie Surprises is noteworthy for many things, including the absence from Christina Bjørkøe’s hour-long recital of his ever-popular Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes.
Several fairly well-known figures came together in making this Alpha release; there are soprano Barbara Hannigan, the piano duo of Katia & Marielle Labèque, and the composers 
To know Erik Satie a century on from his death is likely to know either Trois Gymnopédies or the later Gnossiennes. Amid the progressive milieu of fin de siècle Paris, Satie brought a clarity through simplicity (though not, it should be pointed out, ease) that cast aside centuries of escalating compositional excess running hot in the blood of contemporaries like Wagner, Strauss, Mahler and Rimsky-Korsakov elsewhere in Europe. Each of Satie’s series were harbingers of the coming century, belatedly credited in some circles as the origin of modern ambient music. As Dutch conductor and professor Reinbert de Leeuw once observed, “Satie was, in a manner of speaking, starting European musical history all over again.”