Despite the nip in the Chicago air, there are plenty of shows this weekend hot enough to leave the house for.

Chris Cogburn recently curated the 10th annual No Idea Festival with six concerts in Austin and San Antonio. Hailed by the Paris Transatlantic as “one of the finest improvised festivals in the world,” this year’s gathering featured performances by nineteen musicians who made domestic treks from Austin, Houston, Jackson, and New York, as well as those who braved customs with loads of arcane gear from New Zealand, Germany, France, and Mexico.

From the moment that Ensemble Dal Niente announced that George Friedrich Haas’s widely admired work in vain would be the cornerstone of their 2012-13 season, Chicago has been buzzing about the performance.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters announced today the sixteen recipients of this year’s awards in music, which total $185,000.

The Kronos Performing Arts Association announced today that the Kronos Quartet will welcome a new cellist, Sunny Jungin Yang, to the ensemble this June. Yang will succeed Jeffrey Zeigler, who has performed with the quartet for the past eight seasons and will step down from the group this May.

Ainadamar is Opera Parallèle’s first production since changing its name from Ensemble Parallèle. This small company, founded in 1993 by Nicole Paiement, has turned their focus to contemporary opera with several successful productions over the past few seasons.

The Kronos Quartet wrapped up a three-year residency at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this month with a program devoted to San Francisco composers Dan Becker, Stephen Prutsman, Nathaniel Stookey, and Pamela Z.

It wasn’t about music in any technical sense, but really more in a social sense: How music fit into his life, how he created community, what he cared about, what he didn’t care about, and so on. The fact that Butch was fun, charming, a great person to travel with, to dine and drink with, and to hang with is something everyone who knew Butch can speak to. I would like to speak to two singular aspects of Butch’s contribution to music since he came on the scene in the ‘70s: community and conduction.

This is the second season in SFCMP’s 42-year history that has been under the artistic direction of Steven Schick, the longtime champion of contemporary music for percussion. Given the enthusiasm surrounding this Reich program, it will be interesting to see what other interests Schick and SFCMP can tap into as his tenure progresses.

Feel better and have some fun, Chicago!