Relevant Tones

Sarah Cahill’s The Future is Female is a three volume series, which celebrates and highlights women composers from the 17th century to the present day. These recordings feature more than 70 compositions by women around the globe and includes many première recordings. Austin Williams chats with Sarah ahead of the release of this extraordinary three-volume album on March 4th.

We celebrate Twosday (2/22/22) with antiphonal pieces selected by host Austin Williams.

In 2015 we corresponded with several composers from Ukraine, at that time openly at war, about the challenges they faced. With Ukraine in the news again and the future again uncertain, we feature another small sample of the incredibly vibrant music being created by Ukranian composers today.  Music by Valentin Silvestrov, Bohdana Frolyak, Ludmila Yurina and Virko Baley. 

Eschewing the collection of traditional titles that describe single elements of her body of work, The Honourable Elizabeth A. Baker refers to herself as a “New Renaissance Artist” that embraces a constant stream of change and rebirth in practice, which expands into a variety of media, chiefly an exploration of how sonic and spatial worlds can be manipulated to personify a variety of philosophies a...

Award-winning composer Jimmy López Bellido has been performed by leading orchestras and his music has been heard in some of the world’s most prestigious venues. His opera based on the bestselling novel “Bel Canto” was premiered by Chicago Lyric Opera to great acclaim and he served as the Houston Symphony’s Composer-in-Residence from 2017 until 2020. Seth Boustead talks with him about his new album...

Angel Island – Oratorio for Voices and Strings  by Huang Ruo is inspired by the poems carved into the walls at the detention center at Angel Island Immigration Station during the Chinese Exclusion Act years. This new work, commissioned by the Del Sol Quartet, takes an unflinching look at discrimination and immigration issues in our nation, past and present.  Host Seth Boustead talks with...

Based on the rap song of the same title by Nas, Undying Love is a tragic love story set in 1960’s Queens, New York. Stephen Anthony Rawson talks with composer/librettist Steve Wallace and Artistic Director of Hearing in Color LaRob K. Payton about this collaborative project. 

2021 is a wrap!  Matt, Austin, Seth and Stephen choose some of our favorite album releases of the year including music by Pamela Z, Danielle Eva Schwob, Third Coast Percussion, Sergio and Clarice Assad and more!

Composer Douglas J. Cuomo’s Seven Limbs, written for and featuring Nels Cline and the Aizuri Quartet on Sunnyside Records is a ritual in seven movements, based on the Seven Limbs – a fundamental Tibetan Buddhist practice of purification.  Doug talks about the music and his collaborative experience with host Austin Williams.

Taped live as part of the third night of the 2021 Relevant Tones Festival, this is the album release party for Carla Kihlstedt and Rafael Oses' stunning collaborative project Necessary Monsters.  Necessary Monsters is a collaboration between composer/musician Carla  Kihlstedt and poet Rafael Osés. It is a contemporary song cycle based on  Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges...

A cowboy from Texas, Martín Quiroga's music makes use of traditional compositional techniques and a unique harmonic language in order to honor the musical forms of the past while capturing the harmonic language of the present.  Stephen Anthony Rawson talks with him about his music and the Space City New Music Festival which he directs. 

Hearing In Color is a Chicago-based organization dedicated to sharing music, stories, and composers, that have been historically excluded from musical spaces, with its community.  Stephen Anthony Rawson talks with Artistic Director LaRob K. Payton and composer Steve Wallace. 

Jonathan Hannau is a Chicago-based composer and pianist devoted to the  surreal, minimal, abstract, and colorful possibilities of music.  Austin Williams talks with him about his new album Pieces I Wrote on a Cold Winter Night. 

Hailed as the "future of chamber music," string quartet Brooklyn Rider is a powerful force for musical creativity. Matt Dosland talks with cellist Michael Nicolas about several recent projects.

Described by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as a “rising star”, composer Elijah Daniel Smith is quickly establishing himself as one of today’s leading young composers.  Longtime friend and fellow composer Austin Williams chats with him about a big new commission from the CSO and his approach to music-making. 

For the second night of the Relevant Tones Tenth Anniversary Festival we were honored to welcome architect Daniel Libeskind and Open House New York's Dorothy Dunn to the stage.  We screened a special preview of several videos from Access Contemporary Music's upcoming Songs About Buildings and Moods video series exploring the intersection between music and architecture and had a fabulous discu...

The opening night of the Relevant Tones Tenth Anniversary Festival featured an exciting multi-media concert of music inspired by Rube Goldberg machines. We were joined by Rube’s granddaughter Jennifer George who is also the director of the Rube Goldberg Institute, and an all-star roster of musicians for an unforgettable evening.

Indian-American composer Reena Esmail  works between the worlds of Indian and Western classical music, and brings communities together through the creation of equitable musical spaces.

Annie  Gosfield, whom the BBC called "A one woman Hadron collider" lives in  New York City and works on the boundaries between notated and improvised  music, electronic and acoustic sounds, refined timbres and noise. Her music is often inspired by the inherent beauty of found sounds,  such as machines, destroyed pianos, warped 78 rpm records and jammed  radio signals. Step...

In 1949 a 23-year old composer named Daphne Oram wrote a pioneering new work for two orchestras, live electronics and turntables that was subsequently lost for decades.  Only vague references survived until composer and archivist James Bulley rediscovered the complete score in 2015. He enlisted composer and turntable artist Shiva Feshareki to help him realize the electronics using the technol...

ACM's Thirsty Ears Festival is Chicago's only classical music street festival combining stellar performances with great craft beer from Empirical Brewing. We did an intimate live broadcast the night before from the ACM School of Music featuring performances by Michael Hall, the Wurtz-Berger Duo and the Quijote Duo.

Composer inti figgis-vizueta writes "magically real musics through the lens of personal identities, braiding a childhood of overlapping immigrant communities and Black-founded Freedom schools—in Chocolate City (DC)—with direct Andean & Irish heritage and a deep connection to the land."  Stephen Rawson talks with them about music, poetry, magical realism and more.

We feature three works that recast age-old myths from a woman's perspective. Milica Paranosic's Penelope and the Geese reimagines the Odyssey from Penelope's point of view.  We talk with her about the opera and feature three key scenes. And Marisa Michelson's Naama's Ark tells the flood myth from the perspective of Noah's wife and Salvatore Sciarrino's La Nuova Euridice lets Orpheus' famous b...

A palimpsest is a manuscript whose original text has been scraped or washed away and overwritten with a new one, often many times over.  The original text is still present but visible only in fragments. This concept has inspired composers to overlay music in similar ways to fascinating effect. We feature a small sample of musical palimpsests. Music by Kevin Ernste, George Benjamin, Paul Novak...

Texu Kim writes music that's fun, often humorous yet sophisticated, detailed and connected to his South Korean heritage in fascinating ways. He's also the only composer we know to offer "major-league cuteness” (Broadway World) while also demonstrating “surprising scope.” (San Diego Story)