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Composer, pianist and erstwhile boy soprano Nico Muhly has been a part of Q2's musical family since the beginning. Today at 12 pm, we revisit the composer's four-part survey of his first love: choral music.

For this New Sounds, we'll listen to some electronic music from Iceland by the Australian-born composer Ben Frost.  Dark acoustically generated guitar and piano textures are expertly combined with electronically processed stabs and eruptions on Frost's record "By the Throat."  Plus, there's ambient post-rock music from Mountains, and some of Wendy Carlos' "Sonic Seasonings" from the early 70s, featuring the found sounds of wolves.

Hear from Nico Muhly's latest, "I Drink The Air Before Me," on this New Sounds.  There's also music from Jason Moran's "Ten," which features some sampled sounds as well. Plus, Michael Formanek Quartet and the new "23 Neo" along with Donnacha Dennehy's "Reservoir" for solo piano, played by Isabelle O'Connor, and more.

Since taking the helm as Music Director in 2009, the NY Phil's Alan Gilbert has been doing an annual series of new works called Contact!  To its credit, so far the series has presented some ten world premiere-New York Philharmonic commissions and one U.S. premiere. 

Listen to music by relative whippersnappers, as we serve up youth on this New Sounds program. We'll hear from Australian composer William Gardiner, just 22, who lives in Sydney.  His music, from a release called "Onliving," has a minimalist/post-minimalist/post-rock feel. 

Listen to compositions for electric violin on this New Sounds program.  We'll hear Nico Muhly's Seeing Is Believing, a concerto for electric violin, which features the Aurora Orchestra and Thomas Gould on electric six-string violin, Also, we'll hear music by John Adams from his work, "The Dharma At Big Sur" - "Sri Moonshine" for electric violin and orchestra. It's an homage to the beat poets and to minimalists, like Terry Riley, with its Eastern-tinged strings and shimmering suspended chords.  Plus, other works.

My friends, it’s been so long! I’ve missed you all! I’ve been mostly in London and Reykjavik since we last talked, the former city to see Nico Muhly’s opera Two Boys (so good) and the latter to record viola things and schvitz. Along the way I played some great little shows, and one of the highlights of my trip was a recital with organist Jamie McVinnie and Nico Muhly at Westminster Abbey.

We’ll hear the re-shaping and reworking of centuries-old music on this New Sounds.  From New York composer Charles Wuorinen, we’ll hear some of his very early works (from 1962) - pieces recomposed and reworked from a German cathedral Songbook – three of the six of his “Bearbeitungen uber das Glogauer Liederbuch.” 

On Friday, London's English National Opera gives the world premiere of Two Boys, the first opera by 29-year-old New York composer Nico Muhly. In advance, all this week Q2 presents a five-day festival hosted by Muhly himself.

For this New Sounds, we hear a work from young Irish composer Andrew Hamilton "Music for Roger Casement."  It’s a jaunty and combative work of many different textures; one hears organ and horns duking it out, while strings and oboe also tag-team in the musical brawl.  Hamilton is one of the MATA Young Composers commissioned in years past.  Also, we'll hear Steve Martland's "Horses of Instruction" a work for an 11-piece varied band that might evoke a jazz-funk summit between Reich and Stravinsky.  And a bit of a work by Nico Muhly.

Discussions of genre tend to cause bristling, bad moods and miscommunications. Genre identifiers are such ludicrously loaded terms that I tend to be shy even bringing them up (and I’m not, as they say, too terribly shy)! Yet here we are: a week devoted to composer/band leaders and those who tend to be not so category-specific.