Anastasia Tsioulcas

This month, some very old songs from India and England rub shoulders with new sounds from Madagascar and Japan — along with one emerging Hawaiian hit, courtesy of Pixar and Disney.

Unfortunately, the summer touring schedule has been wracked by visa problems for international artists trying to enter the ...

Gunther Schuller, one of America's most wide-ranging musicians — a French horn prodigy and tireless advocate for bridging classical music and jazz — died Sunday morning in Boston, his son Ed Schuller said. Gunther Schuller was 89.

Extraordinarily active and influential as a composer, conductor and educator, he was also ...

Composer Terry Riley turns 80 Wednesday. He's been called the father of minimalism for his groundbreaking 1964 work In C. But his influence has spread far beyond, sparking the imaginations of many artists, from cutting-edge electronic musicians to rock gods.

Riley's musical footprints have been followed by generations of ...

For this year's edition of Make Music New York, we come not to praise the dead, but to sing the blues and create a new "exquisite corpse."

This Sunday, June 21 at 4 p.m. ET, join NPR Music and regulars at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola at Jazz at Lincoln ...

Why is classical music so hard to enjoy on streaming services? In one word, it's metadata. Metadata is the information that coexists with every digital music file: each and every piece of information about a selection of music that a listener might find useful to know, and what makes the ...

Margaret Juntwait was the mellifluous voice of the Metropolitan Opera's Saturday live radio broadcasts. She was also a longtime host at NPR member station WNYC in New York. Juntwait died Wednesday at age 58 of complications from ovarian cancer. The Met and WNYC have each offered tributes.

#NPRreads is a feature we're testing out on Twitter and on The Two-Way. The premise is simple: Correspondents, editors and producers throughout our newsroom will share pieces that have kept them reading. They'll share tidbits on Twitter using the #NPRreads hashtag, and on occasion we'll share a longer take here ...

One of the biggest pleasures of listening to global music is hearing artists wed the past, present and future — especially as they create smart, innovative juxtapositions of elements you might think have no musical or cultural commonalities. And this month's roundup is full of those kinds of surprises.

If ...

Updated at 6:40 p.m. ET with defendants' response.

Was it a laudable snapshot of cross-generational jamming, or taking advantage of a jazz titan?

That's the question at the heart of a lawsuit that has been filed on behalf of pioneering alto saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman, now 85 years ...

Nepal is very much on all our minds right now, with the devastating loss of life and history in Saturday's massive earthquake. As it happens, one of Nepal's most famous brass bands, the Everest Band Baja, was recorded in January in Durbar Square, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that ...

Valentina Lisitsa is a pianist whose worldwide reputation was built on social media. She is now experiencing a major backlash due to what she's been writing on Twitter.

It came to a head with the cancellation of Lisitsa's scheduled performances Wednesday night and Thursday night with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, ...

#NPRreads is a new feature we're testing out on Twitter and on The Two-Way. The premise is simple: Correspondents, editors and producers throughout our newsroom will share pieces that have kept them reading. They'll share tidbits on Twitter using the #NPRreads hashtag, and on occasion we'll share a longer ...

When you're all grown up, you — at least theoretically — put away childish things. But there are exceptions, as violinist Hilary Hahn proves in her latest recording project.

The album is a pairing of two concertos she's been playing since she was just 10 years old: 19th-century ...

The international megastar Stromae has a seemingly boundless love of music across genres. And if his tune "Carmen" seems vaguely familiar, it's because the track is a reworking of an operatic classic, the "Habanera" from Bizet's opera Carmen. "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle que nul ne peut ...

Taraf de Haïdouks burst onto the international scene a quarter of a century ago as an incredible Rom (Gypsy) group from Romania, with blistering violins and lightning-fast cymbaloms set off by bouncing accordion and double bass. Since their formation as an international touring band back in 1990, their older generation ...

Dogs barking, wind howling, ice crunching, then the sudden "ch-ch-ch-ch" of a sawing beat: That's composer Derek Charke's opening salvo in his transporting piece Cercle du Nord III.

Charke wrote this piece in 2005 for the Kronos Quartet, who premiered it the following year. It includes an ...

Just as we hit springtime (finally!), I think I've found the happiest song to greet the season. It comes courtesy of Tal National, a band from the West African country of Niger. This rollicking track is called "Zoy Zoy," which is also the name of their new album.

Tal National ...

The eyes of the pop music world are on Austin, Texas this week. Thousands of bands and fans have descended upon the city for the South by Southwest music festival. Austin is also home to its own music scene year-round — and one of its more unusual groups ...

It was nearly 20 years ago, back in 1997, that the Buena Vista Social Club became an improbable worldwide sensation: a group of mainly elderly (and some younger) Cuban musicians, performing traditional son music for an album produced by Ry Cooder. The combustible success of that first project ...

Ethan Hawke might strike you as an unlikely guide to classical music. But in directing his first documentary, Seymour: An Introduction, he created an intriguing and ultimately profoundly moving tribute to a largely unknown artist, 86-year-old pianist Seymour Bernstein.

A student of Clifford Curzon, Nadia Boulanger and Georges ...