Ask Your Mama! will premiere at Carnegie Hall on March 16 as part of the Honor! Festival, a celebration of the African American cultural legacy curated by Jessye Norman. We saw the trailer and heard some rumors about a tone row, and just had to ask the work’s composer, Laura Karpman, a few questions.

There’s a steady stream of sound running through Lukas Ligeti’s head, and this constant state of mental invention keeps him on his creative toes.

Whether standing center stage under the spotlights or sitting just across a table while chatting over coffee, American bass baritone Eric Owens only has to utter a few lines to have his audience completely entranced.

Matmos (a.k.a. M. C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel) sits at an intersection where musique concrète, experimental improv, electronic, and pop sensibilities freely rub elbows. We asked for their recipe for making music. Read the interview…

The list of guest artists gracing Gabriel Kahane’s new self-titled album reads like a Who’s Who of great indie/classical/pop/chamber wherever-you-want-to-file-it performers, musicians linked by a shared creative impulse.

Kathryn Gould, the venture capitalist behind the Magnum Opus commissioning program, is back for a second run.

Ken Ueno is a man comfortable with a gear shift—a composer of music that thrills with its interior complexity in one case and probes the ear deeply with a simple overtone vocal line in the next. He is also as likely to pick up the inspiration for his work inside a candy store and a childhood memory as in the text of Calvino, Beckett, or Joyce.

Every day for the past year David Morneau has produced a new 60-second composition and distributed it via the Internet. His personal creative marathon is over on June 30, 2008, when he’ll post his last composition in this series.

On stage, Molly Thompson’s music comes across as honestly raw and yet sophisticatedly crafted, filled with intimate lyrics and intriguing cross-genre influences. Off stage, she’s disarmingly forthcoming—the kind of woman you could easily think of as your best friend after a 15-minute conversation. Still, her musical personality seems to draw a curtain around some more mysterious internal characters, and it keeps her audiences on their toes.

If you can’t find your favorite performing artist or arts presenter this week, check to see if they have packed their bags and headed for Denver. Don’t worry, they’ll return to you at the end of the week—hopefully armed with some new ideas and new connections formed during the National Performing Arts Convention 2008. We’ll do our best to keep you up to date with daily reports posted here on NewMusicBox, so check back often.