Relevant Tones

Host Austin Williams curates a listening experience with themes of feedback. Feedback is often associated with harsh sounds that are created when a microphone is placed too close to the speaker that it is amplified through.

While this is a way feedback can be aurally achieved there are many ways composers implement feedback and other broad strokes of recursion into their works! We cut back to an interview that Austin had with Paula Mathusen this past summer and listen to how she implements these ideas into her works.

We also look at feedback systems that composers create be-it through specific mic and speaker arrangements or internal feedback systems with no-input mixing. 

Access Contemporary Music's popular Sound of Silent Film Festival celebrates twenty years of presenting modern silent films with newly commissioned scores performed live.

Host Seth Boustead features a few of his favorite scores from the last twenty years.

Host Austin Williams has guest Liam Marchant on the show to discuss the relationship to kinetics and music, relating to a variety of aspects within the music.

We use specific pieces to make points across the show to offer aural guides to the listeners for what Austin and Liam are discussing. It’s a broad topic with even more details than we can cover in an hour, we’ll certainly be back to chat more about this!

Copland House is a major force in contemporary American music dedicated to fostering greater public awareness and appreciation of our nation’s composers and their work in all of its many forms.

Copland House continues Aaron Copland’s incredible legacy of supporting his fellow composers and their work includes composer residencies, performances and recordings by resident ensemble Music From Copland House, and educational and community outreach programs.

Host Seth Boustead talks with Artistic and Executive Director Michael Boriskin about this incredible legacy.

Copland House is a major force in contemporary American music dedicated to fostering greater public awareness and appreciation of our nation’s composers and their work in all of its many forms.

Host Seth Boustead talks with Artistic and Executive Director Michael Boriskin about this incredible legacy.

Featured music includes Quartet for Piano and Strings, mvmt 2 Allegro Giusto by Aaron Copland

On the Immortality of a Crab by Matthew Browne

Tasveer by Reena Esmail

Without Words by Ugay Liliya

entwining by Paul Novak

Michael Ned Holte is a writer, independent curator, and educator based in Los Angeles, as well as the Associate Dean for the School of Arts at CalArts.

He has held exhibitions at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, and the Hammer Museum, to name only a few. He has also written monographic essays on artists including Charles Gaines, Richard Hawkins, Alice Konitz, Shio Kusaka, Caitlin Lonegan, Roy McMakin, Steve Roden, Clarissa Tossin, and Shirley Tse. 

On today’s episode, Stephen Anthony Rawson talks with Michael about his recent book, Good Listener: Meditations on Music and Pauline Oliveros. This book is a result of a year-long performance of Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Meditation XXI, which asks the question: “What constitutes your musical universe?”

Yuval Noah Harari’s breathtakingly expansive book Sapiens is a monumental achievement that comprehensively summarizes human history, behavior and thought from primordial times to today.

The book is also the inspiration for a 50-minute piano work by composer Sean Hickey recorded by pianist Vladimir Rumyantsev on Sono Luminus records and available on March 14, 2025.

Host Seth Boustead talks with Hickey about Harari's book and this fascinating new musical release.

Shara Nova is a composer, vocalist, and producer currently creating from Detroit, Michigan. Shara has released six albums under the monikerMy Brightest Diamond and has composed works for The Crossing, Conspirare, yMusic, Brooklyn Rider, Roomful of Teeth, Aarhus Symfoni, and American Composers Orchestra among many others. 

In 2024 she starred in the Tony Award Winning musical “Illinoise” on Broadway, directed by Justin Peck, co-written by Jackie Sibblies Drury with music by Sufjan Stevens, witha live album released on Nonesuch Records.

Host Seth Boustead features a variety of pieces by composers who ask the performers to vocalize in some way while also playing their instrument.

Music by Frederick Rzewski, George Crumb, Daniel Bernard Roumain and Tom Johnson.

Access Contemporary Music has just released the second season of their PBS series Songs About Buildings and Moods in which they commission music inspired by historically and culturally relevant buildings and film a performance of the piece in the building that inspired it.

Host Seth Boustead features new pieces by Liza Sobel Crane, Ledah Finck, Michael Kropf, Amy Wurtz, Felipe Perez Santiago and Danielle Eva Schwob inspired by the Stony Island Arts Bank, Peabody Library, Fisher Building, the Wrigley Building, a former convent in Mexico City and the Brooklyn Tower.