The '1-Bit Symphony' composer makes big music with tiny electronics. A visit with the sound, visual and installation artist reveals hundreds of bins — from a carton marked "squeezing tools" (scissors, pliers) to one simply labeled "art."

Visit the home and work space of Tristan Perich – a sound, visual and installation artist residing in New York City who mixes live sound with 1-bit computer music.

Dutch composer Michel van der Aa has won the 2013 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. He is the second consecutive Dutch composer to win the $100,000 prize.

In order to get a better idea of the genesis of and programmatic philosophy behind Williamsburg's upcoming, $15.6 million Original Music Workshop, we asked its founder Kevin Dolan, a soft-spoken, former international tax attorney, a few questions.

On Sunday, March 18 at 3 pm, Alarm Will Sound performed music by John Cage, Edgard Varèse, Conlon Nancarrow, Elliott Sharp and Charlie Wilmoth. Hear the entire concert now on-demand.

For WQXR's Beethoven Awareness Month, Q2 Music gets back to its "500 Years of New-Music" roots and pays homage to the genre where the many strands of the composer's creative persona come into sharpest focus -- the piano concerto. Every night at 10 pm throughout November, Q2 Music streams back-to-back piano concertos, the first from the 19th century and behind the imposing shadow of Beethoven's own five masterworks and the second from today's active, international repertoire.

As we take all the generous musical suggestions you've provided and strive to channel them into a cohesive, fluid stream of music for the 9/11 weekend, we acknowledge a complicated, but inevitable, decision. We have an idea how to proceed; however, we want to hear your thoughts as to the most appropriate, respectful course of action.

Over the next few weeks, as we listen to your requiem suggestions and start to sketch out the 9/11 anniversary weekend programming, a ton of new music will be crossing our desks. But some of our recent discoveries are simply too moving to wait an additional moment before sharing: including work by a Polish film composer, a Ukrainian romantic, and a requiem based on Latvian folk songs.

John Adams was one of the first major composers to take on the challenge of writing a work to commemorate the events of September 11, 2001. His Pulitzer Prize-winning work On the Transmigration of Souls is something of a sound collage, performed by orchestra and choirs along with pre-recorded ambient sound: we hear a voice reading names of people who were lost in the towers, the choirs singing reminiscences of their family members.

Though New Yorkers will unfortunately have to wait until the Met Opera's 2013-2014 season to see a local production of Tony Award-winner Bartlett Sher's staging of Nico Muhly's first opera, Two Boys (premiering in late June at the English National Opera), it seems like we're now more than ever bombarded with the dark and lurid issues that this complex, cautionary tale raises. 

A few weeks ago, Q2 and NPR Music launched a crowdsourced project to determine who were your favorite composers under the age of 40, and by extension those pieces which were shaping our contemporary musical scene and defining what it actually means to be a composer in the 21st century. On Facebook, Twitter and the aggregating pages on Q2 and NPR Music, an international array of comments poured in, reaching almost 800 suggestions in total. With much debate and awareness of such a list's limitations, we've narrowed the field down to 100 composers, each represented by one song, and are proud to present it here in a randomized stream.

Each day from April 14-20, Q2 spotlights the mind and music of composer Gavin Bryars. Explore the many different aspects of a style informed by jazz, minimalism, Renaissance polyphony and constant experimentation.

In this 1973 interview from the WNYC archives, Milton Babbitt speaks with legendary announcer Martin Bookspan. Included are live concert recordings of performances that were not commercially available at the time.

Finally!! Brooklyn lives up to its hipper-than-hip image! Alan Pierson, the 36-year old conductor of the groundbreaking New Music ensembles Alarm Will Sound and Dublin-based Crash Ensemble, is bringing his prodigious talents and badass programmatic instincts to the Brooklyn Philharmonic as their new Artistic Director, effective immediately. Pierson has made a name for himself as a tireless advocate of innovative music through collaborations with composers such as Steve Reich, Aphex Twin, Michael Gordon and Donnacha Dennehy.

You've hopefully heard Q2's "stings" countless times by now. Stings are the pre-recorded, station-identifying short bits of music used as segues between songs. In radio jargon, they're also referred to as sweepers, stingers, radio/station imaging, bumpers, shotguns... admittedly, the radio industry has some eccentric terminology.

Kraft has finally come to New York, carrying with it the local, found-object flavor that composer Magnus Lindberg requires when installing this legacy-defining piece.

On a sweltering Friday afternoon, a group of musicians including the Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg piled into a van bound for a Staten Island junkyard. Their task? To find ingredients for the composer's 1985 work, Kraft.

Composer and performer Elliott Sharp teams up with the New York-based Dither guitar quartet to perform at the Whitney Museum tonight at 7 p.m. to perform Christian Marclay’s Chalk Board. Learn more about the performance and watch WQXR's video about the project.

Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara might not yet be a household name here in the United States, but with the release of a 4-CD set of his complete concertos, that might change. Tune in to Q2 all this week as we feature these concertos and other pieces from his vast and exquisite catalogue.