Conor Hanick

The timbral language of the harpsichord intriguingly, if not unexpectedly, connects the modern and pre-Classical eras. This week on Hammered! we explore that lineage by juxtaposing music from the Baroque era with more recently written scores, all composed for the harpsichord.

Almost all cogent musical structures are built on some kind of repetition or cycle. This week on Hammered! we decode the musical cycles behind some of the century's most fascinating architectural blueprints.

The mark of a well-constructed album is that its individual parts form a greater whole, each work elevated through the connections made with adjacent tracks. Tune in this week on Hammered! for five such albums.

Brooklyn-based composer Ryan Anthony Francis draws on the influences of artist M.C. Escher, author Haruki Murakami and poet Wilhelm Muller. Hear what they've told him this week at 10 am on Hammered!.

It's our winter pledge drive. All this week on Hammered! we pass the mic among a collection of composers to introduce their own works for piano. It's one of many features that you hea...

Differentiating the piano from other percussion instruments is partly, and perhaps most meaningfully, its ability to imitate the human voice, to sound cantabile. This week on Hammered! the piano takes center stage and accompanies itself in a series of one-instrument art song recitals. 

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 inv...

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-spect...

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...

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 f...

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 inv...

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.