In January, the innovative string-band Ethel recorded works by eleven student composers of the Chickasaw Nation. The album will be released on Thunderbird Records in June, and is the first of its kind. Q2 brings you exclusive interviews with Chickasaw Nation composers Courtney Parchcorn and Cruise Berry by Ethel violinists Cornelius Dufallo and Mary Rowell, along with excerpts from their compositions.

Zhou Long simultaneously embraces and transcends our notions of traditional Chinese classical and contemporary Western classical music. Madame White Snake is a beguiling articulation of Zhou's vision.

Lisa Bielawa is a 2009 Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition and a guest blogger for Q2. She is currently spending a year composing at the American Academy in Rome and this week she writes about international artistic collaboration.

This week, Q2's Composer Introduction Series features the music of Caleb Burhans. Sample pianist Danny Holt's Innova recording of Burhans In Time of Desperation and download it for free during this exclusive, week-long Q2 spotlight.

Hear the New York Philharmonic’s inaugural CONTACT! concert this week on Q2, and read what the blogosphere is saying right now.

As I spend more time in the community here at the American Academy in Rome, I realize that being a performer as well as a composer brings so many more ways to integrate into community life, and to open myself up more completely to the various influences of Rome on my musical imagination.

Steve Reich has graciously allowed me to share a few emails from his correspondence with eighth blackbird during the composition and preparation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2008 work Double Sextet. I hope these shed a little light on his creative process. You can also read an interview I did with Steve here.

1985 (I guess it must’ve been) was the first time I sat down with Steve Reich to ask him to write for Kronos. 

The members of So Percussion spend a lot of time and energy performing Steve Reich’s music. His contributions to percussion music loom over the still-emerging genre. They are so fun to listen to, play, and discuss. When we sat down to write some thoughts on this legacy, it really came pouring out!

Steve Reich once told me: “The musicians who can play my music with the right rhythmical feel are being born now…” Practicing the classical music repertoire is not enough to prepare you for playing his music.

I first met Steve Reich in January 1995. Bang on a Can had started a chamber orchestra for which I was the conductor. Our first concert that January featured Reich's Eight Lines.  After that concert, Michael Gordon introduced me to Reich.

Writing about Steve Reich’s music feels like writing about a family member or a childhood friend: There are too many stories and too many strange intimacies to really create a coherent narrative. I first discovered Reich as a teenager; I’m pretty sure Music for 18 Musicians was the first album I bought, and then I got deep into it very quickly.

I'm not a first -- or even second -- generation Reichian: I was still in grade school in the late '60s when the Bob, Russ, etc. were taking the bus down from Wesleyan to rehearse what became Drumming in Steve's loft. He entered my consciousness my freshman year of high school, when Betty Jacobsen -- a hip, elderly "Materials of Music" teacher -- tore our heads open with It's Gonna Rain.

Steve Reich’s music first came to my attention during my university years in the mid '70s. I was beginning to find my own way into a life in music and art, and the power and innovation in his early works—the amplified Pendulum Music (perhaps the first formal use of amplified feedback in a composition), tape pieces such as Come Out and It’s Gonna Rain, the encyclopedic Drumming, and the mind-blowing Four Organs provided huge inspiration.

One of my high-school jobs was as a stock boy in a classical music record store. A perk of this job was that I got great discounts on records and I would buy anything that caught my attention. One day around 1973 I noticed a Columbia Records release with a violin in a rainstorm on the cover. It was a recording of two recent pieces - Violin Phase and It's Gonna Rain. I bought it.

Steve Reich has taken over the Do You Q2 blog. For each of the seven (plus one) days of Maximum Reich, Q2 reveals a new portrait of Reich from those with deeply personal connections to the man and his music.

An eventful two weeks here, including the first public performance of Don Byron’s and my work last Saturday as part of the 46th annual Nuova Consonanza Festival marathon concert and concluding with Thanksgiving dinner at the Academy.

This past month, I’ve been involved in a particularly lovely version of my freelance life, working on some fantastic projects all over the world.

Mode Records is a label based here in New York City, and for over 25 years they've recorded and presented modern classical, avant-garde, and new music.

It seems strange to introduce myself as your blogger in Rome, seeing as how I'm currently in CDG airport in Paris. But I’m on my way back to Rome now, where I’ve been living for the past two months as a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.