The Bang on a Can collective—Michael Gordon, wife Julia Wolfe, and fellow Martin Bresnick student David Lang—took a shared fascination with modernist dissonance, minimalist process, and rock volume, and turned it into a new kind of New York institution. They founded festivals and a record label, and collectively composed evening-length works like the oratorio Lost Objects (2001) and the opera Carbon Copy Building (1999).

Join us Thursday at 7 pm for a performance of choral works by Frank Martin, Arvo Pärt, and Veljo Tormis. The concert was recorded live by the Latvian National Choir as part of Lincoln Center’s inaugural White Light Festival in November 2010.

Phil Kline is a composer of the Bang on a Can generation, championed by that collective and sharing with them good deal of common aesthetic ground, fusing an experimental sensibility and minimalist processes with rock sonics and vigor.

Like many of his contemporaries, Sebastian Currier approaches classical music with a sort of double-consciousness—infatuated with its traditions, but well aware of its limitations. Is rock music to blame?

Angélica Negrón's music is a whisper. A young composer, she has crafted a small oeuvre of concert works, each suffused with a kind of compassion, as if regarding something very small and delicate, but without condescension. She samples tiny noises, seemingly trivial sounds, and turns them into music.

Join us tonight at 7 pm for an eclectic live program of works by 20th-century composers John Harbison, Alfred Schnittke, György Kurtág, and Krzysztof Penderecki as presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Perhaps only an artist with Missy Mazzoli's self-evident clarity of purpose could have raised vacillation to an art form. Her early mentor Meredith Monk toys with handfuls of pitches, making slight variations, but playfully as well as meditatively. It's the tension created by the relentless forward motion of Mazzoli's music, that ticking pulse, that gives the music the sense of a choked-up faltering between pitches.

On Wednesday, February 8 at 7:30 pm ET, Q2 Music presents a live audio Webcast of Son Lux, Arcade Fire's Richard Reed Parry, and new-music heavyweights yMusic as part of the Ecstatic Music Festival.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that, despite his unassuming physical presence, Aaron Jay Kernis is some kind of extrovert. Listen to these titles: 100 Greatest Dance Hits, New Era Dance, Too Hot Toccata, Superstar Etudes.

For decades, rising composers, young composers working in aesthetics not yet embraced by the mainstream institutions of classical music—concert halls, symphony orchestras, universities—have had to find audiences by building and leading their own, brand new institutions. Paola Prestini has helped to build and lead VisionIntoArt, a multimedia performing arts collective, building bridges between the worlds of music, film, dance, theater, and poetry.

On Saturday, February 4 at 7:30 pm, Q2 Music and New Sounds Live present a live Webcast of the Ecstatic Music Festival’s kick-off concert, featuring Jherek Bischoff in collaboration with David Byrne, Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier, and Wordless Music Orchestra, among many others.

Few composers personify New York's young new-music scene in quite the same way as Judd Greenstein. As a composer, he has been commissioned by the ETHEL string quartet and by the Minnesota Orchestra. New Amsterdam, the label he co-founded with composers Sarah Kirkland Snider and William Brittelle, serves as an umbrella for many of the city's most celebrated young composers and ensembles, including his own NOW Ensemble of new-music virtuosos. In 2011, he inaugurated the Ecstatic Music Festival, bringing together indie rock, jazz and classical music for a series of cross-genre concerts and collaborations.

Join us Thursday at 7 pm to hear host Nadia Sirota and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen trace the overlaps of Hungarian culture in works by Haydn, Bartók and Ligeti during last year's Magyar Magic, recorded live in The Greene Space.

With the attention Paul Moravec received after his Tempest Fantasy won the Pulitzer Prize for music, one might have hoped that this would have put to rest the tired dialectics suggesting that tonality and complexity.

On January 31, 2012 at 4 pm, Q2 Music celebrates the 75th birthday of iconic downtown composer Philip Glass with a premiere Webcast of his Symphony No. 9 with conductor Dennis Russell Davies and the Bruckner Orchestra Linz.

Born in Nanjing, composer, singer, and pipa player Min Xiao-fen has become a fixture on the new-music, jazz and Chinese traditional musical scenes. Collaborations with such artists as John Zorn, Christian Marclay, Randy Weston, DJ Spooky, and Derek Bailey attest to her relentlessly exploratory spirit and open-minded approach to improvisation and music-making.

It would difficult to overstate the importance of Chou Wen-chung when it comes to contemporary music. Not only has he developed over the course of his almost 90 years a shimmering, pointillistic yet lyrical style, but he edited and completed many of his teacher Edgard Varèse's works.

This Thursday, January 26 at 8:30 pm, ET, Q2 Music streams an eclectic set of chamber and vocal works from award-winning Chinese composer Huang Ruo, as recorded live on January 10 at Greenwich Village's (Le) Poisson Rouge.

Tianjin-born and California-native composer Lei Liang joins us from a studio in Rome to discuss his creative process, the importance of putting the weight of one's life into every sounding note, and the manner in which cultural identity manifests itself in his music.