Bunita Marcus’s process of composing The Rugmaker was quite literally her process of remembering the trauma that had happened to her as a child.

There are as many ways to be caught up inside of a melody as there are melodies themselves, and each of them loops itself into our internal hardwiring in a different way.

When Zs formed, there was nothing else on the scene quite like it; they’ve succeeded in bringing intellectual music to the club scene, and, for a while, they brought their raucousness into the realms of concert music.

What is the future of “classical” music when the far reaches of a composer’s mind can be fantasized, realized, synthesized and digitally reproduced within a matter of hours, all from the comfort of one’s own bedroom, all without using a single performer or acoustic instrument?

Even as I was signing up for the American Composers Orchestra’s “Compose Yourself” classes last year, I wasn’t sure it was because I wanted to compose; but I hear a lot of new music and sometimes write about it, so I thought this would be a great opportunity to get inside the composer’s head, to understand more of the process and therefore have more insight into the music.

Though recordings are no longer especially financially remunerative in this digital age, there does exist something uniquely valuable and not reproducible: the artists themselves.

Why is it that more than three quarters of the devoted audience for classical and concert music today might not recognize even the name Henry Cowell, much less his music?

The Composer is Dead, composer Nathaniel Stookey’s collaboration with celebrated children’s book author Lemony Snicket (the pen name of Daniel Handler), is giving Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra some serious competition.

I had written an opera, and I wanted to premiere it in Bali—not exactly the jungle, but close.

If the final days of the CD are not eagerly anticipated by label managers, it’s still a topic for contemplation and ongoing discussion.