Meet the Composer

We continue our investigation of the odd, wrong-side-of-the-tv-set role of The Performer with a deep dive into the "Sonic Meditations" of pioneering American composer Pauline Oliveros. Pauline manages to smudge at the distinction between composer, performer and audience with these simple, text-based pieces, which somehow pack an emotional wallop far larger than their few lines might suggest...

We are thrilled to bring you a WORLD PREMIERE recording as our first bonus track of Season Three! Our previous episode, The Performer: Part One, featured, among other things, a fascinating conversation with the Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas. As we are a talk show about music, we are always dying to simply play some MUSIC, and so today we bring you our exclusive, world premiere recording of Haas’ 9th String Quartet. The whole thing! Featuring the fantastic JACK Quartet...

We're kicking off Season Three with a look beyond the composer to the performer, that unusual intermediary between the artist and the audience. How do performers from different cultures, who speak different languages, come together to perform the same piece? What happens when an ensemble completely messes up.....

We conclude the week-long ramp-up to our next and third season with an interview with the legendary, charismatic Leonard Bernstein. Though mostly known for his work as a composer (West Side Story) and conductor (New York Philharmonic), Leonard Bernstein was also a consummate evangelist for classical music. This conversation focuses on Bernstein's efforts as a music educator and the role that education played for host Tim Page in his music criticism...

A blast from the past featuring the composer Libby Larsen. Larsen explains how living in Minneapolis facilitated her success as a composer, and how federal regulations in Title IX provided an uplift to women composers in the U.S. This week, we're revisiting interviews conducted in the 1980s by the influential music critic and educator Tim Page. His show, which aired from 1981 until 1992, was called Meet the Composer and featured some of the most towering musical figures of the previous century...

Otto Luening was a forefather of experimental electronic music and a life-long educator, flutist and composer. In this 1985 interview with host Tim Page, from the original WNYC program called Meet the Composer, Luening tells the story of his first electronic experiments and wonders why audiences had found new interest in some of his earliest works. We also take a look at Alvin Lucier, another tape music maverick, as we prepare for the start of our new season on Monday...

We continue the week-long ramp-up to our next and third season with an interview with the widely influential patriarch of 20th-century experimental music John Cage. In this conversation with host Tim Page, Cage explains how his strenuous connection with music precipitated his experiments with silence, ambient noise and spirituality. Page offers his own straightforward critique of Cage's discoveries and reiterates the need for objectivity and seclusion in music criticism...

As we build up to the launch of our third season next Monday, we thought we'd look back at the original WNYC radio program Meet the Composer from the mid-'80s, hosted by the illustrious music critic Tim Page. We'll share excerpts of his interviews with some of the most exciting figures in contemporary music, but before that we wanted to check in with Tim himself, a man for whom music has been an enormous force in his life, in his career, and even for his psychological well-being...

Help us make a third season of the Peabody Award-winning podcast about the creative musical process, with host Nadia Sirota. Learn more about our ambitions for next season and help make Season Three a reality by backing our Kickstarter campaign today at www.q2music.org/kickstarter.

I'm so excited to share today's Meet the Composer bonus track with you. Last October, I traveled to Detroit to perform the US premiere of Nico Muhly's viola concerto with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under Maestro Leonard Slatkin. The orchestra has graciously agreed to let us use the second movement of the viola concerto for our show for three months, so this is our first ever LIMITED-TIME bonus track...