SoundLives
SoundLives, a NewMusicBox podcast, is brought to you by New Music USA, the resource for adventurous creators and listeners in the US and beyond. This program is funded in part by: the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts; the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs – and listeners like you.
Episodes
August 16, 2023 • 59 mins
Growing up in Soviet-era Lithuania, where people were often afraid to express their real feelings, Žibuoklė Martinaitytė discovered early on that music was safer than language and that it could enable her to express her innermost feelings without self censoring. It ultimately led her on the path to becoming a composer whose music is performed all over the world. Although Žibuoklė now divides her time between a democratic Lithuania...
Mark as Played
July 20, 2023 • 59 mins
inti figgis-vizueta creates music that carefully balances experimentation and practicality. In her conversation with Frank J. Oteri, she likens her compositions to plants which have the ability to grow and change when different people performing them. And in the last few years inti's music has been championed by an extremely wide range of musicians from Roomful of Teeth to Ensemble Dal Niente to the Kronos Quartet.
Mark as Played
June 1, 2023 • 45 mins
Brandee Younger has carved out a very unlikely music career for herself, a classically-trained harpist who went from making her jazz debut over a decade ago to being an in-demand leader and collaborator in a wide range of musical genres. How she has transformed this instrument seems without precedent. But a huge role model for her was Dorothy Ashby, a jazz and later R&B harpist and composer who, in the years since her death, has be...
Mark as Played
April 4, 2023 • 56 mins
The story of Tina Davidson's life, which is the basis of her newly published memoir Let Your Heart Be Broken, is extremely intense but also a rewarding reading experience just like the emotional roller coaster rides in so many of her musical compositions make for very compelling listening. She explained to Frank J. Oteri in this conversation recorded in March 2023 that "when you write about yourself, you really make yourself incred...
Mark as Played
February 15, 2023 • 59 mins
Composer Kevin Puts takes pride in keeping secrets, both by being understated in his interactions with people and by never initially giving away all the goods in his music, preferring, as he tells Frank J. Oteri, "to keep something in reserve so that there's a payoff for the attentive listener." But in their hour-long conversation, he'll reveal some of the secrets behind The Hours (his Metropolitan Opera debut), and Contact (his tr...
Mark as Played
December 7, 2022 • 52 mins
The new music community has been impacted, inspired and transformed by Tania León as a musical creator--as well as an interpreter, educator, and organizer--for decades. In the last two years, the rest of the world has caught up with her. In 2021, she received the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her extraordinary orchestral composition Stride which was given its world premiere performance by the New York Philharmonic just a few weeks b...
Mark as Played
October 19, 2022 • 55 mins
Elena Ruehr’s prolific output is a by-product of her maintaining a consistent composing schedule (five hours every day from Noon to 5:00pm) as well as her never-ending inspiration from the visual arts and her constant reading (four books a week), plus her desire to communicate with listeners. As she explained to Frank J. Oteri in this hour-long conversation about her music which features excerpts of nine of her compositions, "It's ...
Mark as Played
August 10, 2022 • 45 mins
Victoria Shen's needle nails technique, which was appropriately earlier this summer in a Beyoncé video, is just one of many new approaches to making sounds that Shen (who performs under the moniker Evicshen) uses in her provocative performances and installations. But even though all the sounds she makes, and often all the devices she uses to make them as well, are her own creations, she is ambivalent about describing herself as a c...
Mark as Played
June 29, 2022 • 60 mins
While the idiosyncratic graphic scores of 2022 Pulitzer Prize winning composer Raven Chacon are stunningly original in their conception and have been recognized as works of visual art in their own right (several are in this year's Whitney Biennial), they have a larger social purpose. WARNING: A little bit after the 44 minute mark in this hour-long podcast there is an excerpt of a musical performance involving shotguns.
Mark as Played
May 16, 2022 • 57 mins
For Anthony Davis, whose compositional aesthetics are an amalgamation of several different musical traditions (jazz, Western classical music, gamelan), different kinds of music recall different emotional states and experiences in terms of what the music implies. So it's inevitable that he has devoted so much of his compositional energies to opera, and in particular to using the operatic medium to tell stories that either deal with ...
Mark as Played
March 23, 2022 • 54 mins
How we perceive sound on a psychological level as it unfolds over time is key to the sonic experiences that Sarah Hennies creates. Despite the extremely broad stylistic range of her output, everything from her early collaborative work as part of an experimental rock band to a multimedia documentary to extended duration solo and chamber music compositions for various instrumental combinations, it all shares a concern for extremely p...
Mark as Played
February 28, 2022 • 59 mins
Composer, arranger, conductor, and teacher Alice Parker has been a fixture of the choral music community since working with the legendary Robert Shaw Chorale when she was fresh out of college in the late 1940s. As she explains to Frank J. Oteri. Parker has devoted herself almost exclusively to music for the voice, since she strongly believes that people find their common ground through
singing together. Read more at NewMusicBox:
h...
Mark as Played
January 18, 2022 • 59 mins
For Huang Ruo, music--like theater--exists in a four-dimensional space. As he explains to Frank J. Oteri in this latest episode of NewMusicBox's SoundLives podcast, there is also a larger purpose in most of Huang Ruo's work, whether it is to call attention to stories of people, particularly Asians and Asian-Americans, whose voices have often not been heard, or to provide an environment for reflection and healing.
Mark as Played
December 8, 2021 • 60 mins
Among the recurring themes in talking with composer-pianist-conductor Matthew Aucoin is generosity and risk-taking, something that is in abundance in Aucoin's own music as well as his personality. Over the course of an hour, Aucoin talks with Frank J. Oteri about his opera Eurydice, which was just performed at the Metropolitan Opera; the first commercial recording of his music; his just released new book about opera, The Impossible...
Mark as Played
November 3, 2021 • 53 mins
NEA Jazz Master and three-time Grammy Award-winner Terri Lyne Carrington was practically born into jazz, but she is not a traditionalist. By embracing elements from rock, rhythm and blues, and hip-hop into her own compositions, she is making music that is very much about the present moment. And in founding the Berklee Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice and now partnering with New Music USA on the new Next Jazz Legacy program, Te...
Mark as Played
September 9, 2021 • 56 mins
Spending an hour chatting with Renée Baker about her more than two thousand musical compositions and perhaps almost as many paintings was inspirational as well as motivational. Especially during this time when the ability for anything we do to have a certain future seems somewhat precarious at best. But Renée does not let anything deter her and while her music is extremely wide ranging and gleefully embraces freedom of expression, ...
Mark as Played
August 4, 2021 • 51 mins
"Music is supposed to have meaning," says Dr. Adolphus Hailstork whose music captures the tribulations and the occasional triumphs of African Americans in this country. Hailstork's 80th birthday year got off to an impressive start with a performance of his music as part of the Presidential Inauguration ceremony of Joe Biden. Since then there has been a world premiere of a concert aria he composed to commemorate the centenary of the...
Mark as Played
July 7, 2021 • 56 mins
A week after her first live concert performance since the pandemic, composer & percussionist Susie Ibarra talked with us about: a year of making music under quarantine; her collaborative approach to working with other musicians; her explorations of jazz, classical music, traditional Philippine music, and even indie rock; drums as melodic instruments; and the gender stereotyping of percussion in different genres and cultures.
Mark as Played
May 5, 2021 • 53 mins
For the past 20 years, Ricky Ian Gordon has been creating works for the stage—operas, musicals, or one-of a-kind music/theater hybrids—and getting them produced one after another, seemingly without a pause. But 14 months ago, everything came to a screeching halt as the world went into lockdown due to the pandemic. Read a full transcript of this conversation over at NewMusicBox: https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/ricky-ian-gordon-my-way-o...
Mark as Played
April 2, 2021 • 50 mins
The only thing that is almost as exciting as watching and listening to a multimedia performance by Pamela Z is to hear her talk about it which she does for almost an hour in a fascinating conversation with Frank J. Oteri that spans a wide range of topics including: creating and performing during the pandemic; her artistic beginnings as a singer-songwriter and how she transitioned into an experimental composer; a difficult encounter...
Mark as Played
Popular Podcasts
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Anna Sale explores the big questions and hard choices that are often left out of polite conversation.
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people.
A straightforward look at the day's top news in 20 minutes. Powered by ABC News. Hosted by Brad Mielke.