Taking a page out of the great Nicholas Hodges' recent programatic playbook, this week on Hammered! we re-contextualize a handful of classic etudes by throwing in fistfuls of freshly composed ones, some so difficult only a machine can play them!

A beloved addition to the NYC festival circuit, the multi-dimension and ultra-collaborative Ecstatic Music Festival kicks off this Friday. Q2 Music is its proud digital partner, and this week on Hammered!, to get into the mood, we not only survey music from the festival's composers, musicians and ensembles, but more generally embrace all things ecstatic.

What is it about the opening measures of Ludwig van Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, or Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring that generates such intense musical magnetism? This week on Hammered! we explore how the starts of pieces impact the music that follows. 

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-spectralists" Olivier Messiaen, Claude Debussy and Bela Bartok. Listen each morning at 10 am.

Here we are, pre-New Year and post-Mayan "apocalypse", confronted with another expiration of a calendar year and the contemplation of that particular sort of cosmic mystery. This week we ring in the New Year on Hammered! with the mysterious resonating body that is the music of George Crumb.

It has become a sort of holiday tradition on Hammered! to indulge in Olivier Messiaen's two-hour holiday season epic Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus. Tune in at 10 AM this week for four movements per day of this twenty movement Q2 Music Holiday Classic.

As a follow-up to our five-day pianist profile series last fall, aptly titled Solid Gould, Hammered! presents a week's worth of hour-long musical portraits of some of the great pianists of the contemporary music world, including performances from the late Charles Rosen.

This fall has seen the passing of William Duckworth, Elliott Carter and Jonathan Harvey, who died last week at age 73. This week we present the music, influences and echoes of these three compositional giants.

Two of arguably the most influential composers of the 20th century turned super old this year: John Cage and Claude Debussy . This week on Hammered! we pay homage to these modern musical titans.

Let's lead with a nerdy but apt musicological posit: the sonata is a shifty and elusive form. It contracts, expands and reconfigures to hold any type of musical material, so much so that it is perhaps most accurate to evoke the sonata's original and most basic meaning, simply "to sound."

This week on Hammered!, in coordination with our Fall Pledge Drive, we hear highlights from our vast archive of live piano performances.

Late in his life, the famed Italian pianist and composer Ferruccio Busoni felt so straightjacketed by the tonal system that he said one of the only viable method of escape was the invention of new sounds through electronic instruments.

Gerard Grisey, one of the godfathers of the spectral school, had an almost tactile relationship to sound, saying "I start more with the physical aspect of things, the physical aspect of sound, the quality of spectrums" before composing. This week on Hammered! we try to understand what the heck that actually means with a deep dive into the music of the spectral school.

Glenn Gould would have been 80 years old on Tuesday. To celebrate we've programmed an entire hour's worth of solid Gould, and, the rest of the week, profile four other titans of the contemporary piano world.

Two of arguably the most influential composers of the twentieth century turned super old this year: John Cage (100 this month) and Claude Debussy (150 last August). This week on Hammered! we pay homage to these modern musical titans with alternating selections from each’s vast piano oeuvre.

This week on Hammered! we hear five consecutive cases of works that require an extended temporal space to achieve a more slowly evolving mode of expression. Otherwise put: works that last the full duration of each episode.

The champagne may be flat but we're still riding the celebratory wave of birthday boy Philip Glass's 75th by exploring the fertile genre of post-minimalism that he helped inspire. Tune in this week at 11 am and pm for reworkings, reinventions and revampings of Glass-brand minimalism.

This week on Hammered! we explore the mountains of chamber music that includes piano(s), or, otherwise put, music for piano+. Hear music from Thomas Ades, Ezequiel Vinao, Benjamin Broening and many more.

Did you know that Stephen Sondheim was a pupil of Milton Babbitt? Or that Cage studied with Schoenberg? This week we tease out the often unexpected musical relationships between some of the last century's greatest pedagogues and their students.

This week on Hammered! we hear Schoenberg's five incomparable piano works alongside the music of composers he may – or may not – have impacted.