Relevant Tones

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.

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 Huang Ruo and founding violist of the Del Sol Quartet Charlton Lee.

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’ Book of Imaginary Beings — a  collection of fantastical creatures culled from literary and  mythological traditions around the world.

Seth Boustead talks with Carla, Rafael and author Stephen Asma.

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.