Jonathan Russell

The Bay Area is fortunate to have a number of ensembles dedicated to new music, each with its own slightly different approach. The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s spin is to frequently include a couple of old works on their programs alongside the newer ones. When you think about it, this really is a unique approach.

Tape music, and the technology behind it, has come a long way since composers first began using and manipulating recorded sounds in the 1940s. This year's annual San Francisco Tape Music Festival made clear just how far it has come, by juxtaposing classic tape pieces from 50 years ago with brand-new works. The festival ran for three nights, Friday through Sunday, at CELLspace in San Francisco.

At the ODC Dance Commons in San Francisco's Mission District, sfSoundSeries presented a Sunday concert centered on works composed for the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Founded in 1961 by composers Morton Subotnick and Ramón Sender, the Tape Music Center was at the heart of the city's musical counterculture in the 1960s.

Five of the Bay Area's many inventive musical experimentalists were on display last Friday at the Royce Gallery in San Francisco, in the initial installment of Pamela Z's summer chamber music series called "room." This first of four concerts, to be given every other Friday through July and August, was titled "Batterie!" and featured performers who all made use of percussion in some way. The concer

On Sunday night, the ODC Dance Commons in San Francisco's Mission District was full of classical music's most coveted demographic — young people in their 20s and 30s.

On Monday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players presented a polished, energetic performance of four colorful recent works by composers from the United States, Argentina, and France. The most effective of these works was Reynold Tharp's gorgeous San Francisco Night (2007), a premiere which closed the concert's first half.

What would happen if you took the “postmodern” project to its logical conclusion and eradicated the theoretical, conceptual, and practical boundaries between large genres of music like, say, classical, jazz, popular, sound experiments, and electronic composition?

Swedish trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger and British percussionist Colin Currie offered a virtuosic and highly polished performance last Tuesday at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco.

What do a Stalin-era Russian composer and a contemporary British rock band have in common? That was the intriguing question posed by Christopher O’Riley in a piano recital last Wednesday at Stanford’s Dinkelspiel Auditorium in Palo Alto. Part of the Stanford Lively Arts series, the program consisted solely of preludes and fugues from the Op.