Oliver Knussen’s recently released album of eight short works that have never been recorded before is swathed in the cadences of memorial and elegy. Stream the entire album in full for this week only.

"New Music Show" features the talents of five British-based composers with backgrounds as disparate as the London club scene, noise rock and installation art as well as so-called classical music.

Cold Blue Two presents 14 distinctive ways to make clear, "pretty" music, by composers including Harry Partch, John Luther Adams, Ingram Marshall and others.

Composer Laurie Spiegel had something like a career year in 2012, at least so far as attention goes. Stream for this week only the reissue of her classic 1980 album, "The Expanding Universe."

Like an only slightly lower-strung version of Carl Stalling's Looney Toons scores, Derek Bermel's music often changes its mind halfway through a phrase, doubles back and becomes something completely different.

If you thought the San Francisco Symphony's promotion of American "maverick" composers has gotten tiresome, this collection of Cowell, Varèse, Harrison and Cage may make you reconsider.

Listeners familiar with the music of Missy Mazzoli are unlikely to be shocked by her latest CD, Song from the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt, which suggests the gentle, queasy motion of an ocean liner.

The word “maverick” is overused in the contemporary music world. But in the case of composer Michael Harrison and cellist Maya Beiser, the descriptor is deserved.

The a cappella octet Roomful of Teeth have trained in non-Western traditions and have collaborated with several fashionable composers. Hear the results on their debut album.

Cellist Jakob Kullberg and the New Music Orchestra present cello concertos by Saariaho, Norgard and Nordheim.

A new recording of Imogen Holst’s choral works provides a valuable introduction to an area of the musician's life that has until now been woefully neglected.

The prominent new music sextet called eighth blackbird performs music by Stephen Hartke, Thomas Ades, John Adams and Missy Mazzoli, featuring instruments like the flexatone and harmonica.

Sigurðsson’s latest release, "Architecture of Loss" was conceived as an accompaniment to choreographer Stephen Petronio’s ballet of the same name. The album is at once cinematic and intimate, alternating moments of textural ambiance and intense lyricism.

The music on this disc, by a range of rising young composers, is nothing short of gripping from the first note to the last, and it's thanks largely to the intense focus of these highly individual musicians.

This live 1984 recording of Glass's Einstein is nothing close to complete. However, it's a (smartly) edited 77-minute highlight reel from the opera, paired with a DVD of the documentary produced during the same run.

Philip Glass began composing for organ early in his career, and in a way, he never really stopped: His orchestration bears a resemblance to the tradition of Bruckner or Franck, treating the sections of the orchestra like the stops on an organ.

While somewhat overwhelming to stomach in a single listen, pianist Joshua Pierce's “John Cage: A Tribute” is one of the most powerful and listenable cross-sections of Cage’s work to date.

As the circumstances of composer Viktor Ullmann's life became more brutal, his music only became lovelier, more polished, and more playful this new recording indicates.

Seth Colter Walls reviews Cornelius Dufallo's release Journaling for Q2 Music. Stream the whole record in our online preview all week.