Daniel Stephen Johnson

Composer/guitarist Scott Johnson is an inventor of a technique of generating a piece of music based on recorded speech and approximating it with musical notes.

Some of Ingram Marshall's earliest recordings are of solo, semi-improvised performances, playing an Indonesian flute and singing falsetto to an accompaniment of prerecorded electronics and live tape delays. They are mesmerizing—thick, swelling, fragrant clouds of music.

While it is true that Tyondai Braxton's father is the revered composer and improviser Anthony Braxton, their music might as well come from two different planets (neither of which is Earth). Light-years away from his father's liberated, happily baffling ensemble experiments, Braxton fils sounds more like a long-lost son of Zappa, his compositions as gaily colored, as rigidly constructed, and as outrageously, extravagantly pop as a life-size sculpture in Lego blocks.

The Bang on a Can collective—Michael Gordon, wife Julia Wolfe, and fellow Martin Bresnick student David Lang—took a shared fascination with modernist dissonance, minimalist process, and rock volume, and turned it into a new kind of New York institution. They founded festivals and a record label, and collectively composed evening-length works like the oratorio Lost Objects (2001) and the opera Carbon Copy Building (1999).

Phil Kline is a composer of the Bang on a Can generation, championed by that collective and sharing with them good deal of common aesthetic ground, fusing an experimental sensibility and minimalist processes with rock sonics and vigor.

Like many of his contemporaries, Sebastian Currier approaches classical music with a sort of double-consciousness—infatuated with its traditions, but well aware of its limitations. Is rock music to blame?

Angélica Negrón's music is a whisper. A young composer, she has crafted a small oeuvre of concert works, each suffused with a kind of compassion, as if regarding something very small and delicate, but without condescension. She samples tiny noises, seemingly trivial sounds, and turns them into music.

Perhaps only an artist with Missy Mazzoli's self-evident clarity of purpose could have raised vacillation to an art form. Her early mentor Meredith Monk toys with handfuls of pitches, making slight variations, but playfully as well as meditatively. It's the tension created by the relentless forward motion of Mazzoli's music, that ticking pulse, that gives the music the sense of a choked-up faltering between pitches.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that, despite his unassuming physical presence, Aaron Jay Kernis is some kind of extrovert. Listen to these titles: 100 Greatest Dance Hits, New Era D...

What unifies Paola Prestini's music are gifts for generating pure aural pleasure of beautifully blended watercolor sonorities and elegantly, affectingly constructed melodic lines.

Few composers personify New York's young new-music scene in quite the same way as Judd Greenstein. Listen to the composer and New Amsterdam Records label founder discuss his music.

With the attention Paul Moravec received after his Tempest Fantasy won the Pulitzer Prize for music, one might have hoped that this would have put to rest the tired dialectics sugges...

After his clarinet was stolen from a Paris phone booth, Derek Bermel explains, he gave up busking to become a goatherd in the south of the country. He has studied the music of Yemen in Jerusalem, the music of Thrace in Bulgaria, choro music in Brazil, and in Ghana the music of a xylophone-like instument called the gyil, and conducted a choir of emotionally disturbed boys at a residential center in New York City.

Nico Muhly has already managed to build not one, but around three or four careers for himself as a composer. With his work on movie scores and indie-rock albums, he has one toe inching towards pop-culture recognition, while keeping one foot firmly in the classical mainstream with a substantial body of pieces composed for the likes of the New York Philharmonic and the English National Opera. 

His earliest acknowledged works, so austerely composed that they resemble conceptual art as much as classical music, contain the seeds of nearly his entire oeuvre.

Osvaldo Golijov is an Argentinian of Eastern European Jewish descent living in Boston at the start of the 21st century, and his music is in many ways an exploration of what, exactly, ...