Conor Hanick

"Impromptu": something spontaneous, tossed-off, improvisatory. For composer Brian Schober, the term has a weightier significance and serves as the creative launching pad for his vast,...

Despite the bizarrely high likelihood this week of NYC's "Polar Vortex" turning unseasonably spring-like, we're nevertheless hunkering down with wintery landscape pieces for piano and percussion, anchored by the The Adams From The North, Alaskan composer John Luther Adams.

This week on Hammered! we dive deep into the music of the spectral school, exploring the sounds of Tristan Murail, Gerard Grisey, Claude Vivier and more alongside bits of "proto-spect...

One cycle ends, another begins, ushering in new priorities, new methods of organization, and probably a renewed gym membership. This week on Hammered! we honor this most momentous of metronome clicks with piano music that uniquely addresses the question of time and the temporal.

It's the time of year when candles are lit, presents are exchanged, thanks are given, and – here at Q2 Music – we indulge in two hours of hyper-modern, ravishingly beautiful keyboard music via Olivier Messiaen.

New Yorkers needn't travel far to hear music from a great composer, and this week on Hammered! we follow suit with a week's worth of borough-hopping playlists that survey New York City's young composers.

No ambiguity here. No broader historical context required. No chicken / egg complex. This week we listen to five piano concertos preluded by the smaller piano pieces from which they came.

Few pianists have impacted contemporary music more profoundly than the Frenchman Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Hear his insights and performances of Ives, Ligeti and Messiaen all week on Hammered!

Composers today inherit some pretty profound baggage. How is one able to write a single note! with all of music's most monolithic presences staring at your staff paper? One option is to ignore them, another is to talk with them.

To be a composer is to be aware of your musical family tree, and to some degree, exploit the strengths of your forefathers in order to create something novel. Stravinsky, after all, said that "good composers borrow, great composers steal!" 

There are many reasons to tip the musical hat this week: Charles Wuorinen's 75th birthday; Ned Rorem's 90th!; the one year anniversary of Elliott Carter's passing; and the centennial ...

Five days of accretive piano mayhem this week on Hammered!, beginning with music for zero pianists (all "automatic" pieces for pianola and other pianistic mechanisms), and, after adding one player and one piano per day, ending the week with repertoire for piano quartet. 

We do our fair share of obscure music here at Q2 Music, but sometimes you want to flip on the radio and simply hear the hits. This week on Hammered! we offer exactly that in conjuncti...

This week, musical genetics 101. We survey keyboard-centric pieces whose forms are born from the brief but compact strands of musical DNA that begin them. 

This week on Hammered!, we offer the finest golden nuggets from recent piano performances in and around New York City.

To honor the pianist and newly-minted MacArthur Fellow Jeremy Denk, we revisit the programs of his weeklong Hammered! residency from the 2012 American Mavericks Festival.

Sunday, September 29 at 6 pm, Q2 Music presents the final of its four-part series from the 2013 Lucerne Festival in Switzerland. 

The early modernists had Claude Debussy, the post-war György Ligeti, and the twenty-first century may very well point to the French master Pascal Dusapin as the torchbearer for reinventing the technical capabilities and sonic potential of the piano.

Sunday, September 22 at 6 pm, Q2 Music presents Pablo Heras-Casada leading this Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra in a performance of seven milestones of instrumental modernism.