With all the richness, and pianistic splendor of last week behind us, the only suitable response involves music of clarity and sparseness. This week on the program we're balancing Aimard's high note-per-second repertoire with meditative, slow-moving, and delicate repertoire in conjunction with our Spring Fund Drive.

Join Q2 Music and NPR Music tonight at 10 pm ET for a special live video webcast that previews the American debut of composer Nico Muhly's opera Two Boys.

Few pianists have impacted contemporary music more profoundly than the Frenchman Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Hear his insights and performances of Ives, Ligeti and Messiaen all week on Hammered!

When in doubt return to the source, especially when that source is Elliott Carter, David Lang, or other informed, articulate and engaging promoters of their own music. This week on the program we let the artists do the talking.

Family ties resemble teacher-student relations in weird ways. A student's music might "resemble" a teacher's style, or sometimes try very hard to disassociate itself. This week on Hammered! we sort through the branches of four different musical family trees.

Taking a page out of the great Nicholas Hodges' recent programatic playbook, this week on Hammered! we re-contextualize a handful of classic etudes by throwing in fistfuls of freshly composed ones, some so difficult only a machine can play them!

This week on Hammered! we explore the mountains of chamber music that includes piano(s), or, otherwise put, music for piano+. Hear music from Thomas Ades, Ezequiel Vinao, Benjamin Broening and many more.

As a follow-up to our five-day pianist profile series last fall, aptly titled Solid Gould, Hammered! presents a week's worth of hour-long musical portraits of some of the great pianists of the contemporary music world, including performances from the late Charles Rosen.

Echoing the around-the-clock programming on WQXR's Bach 360 Festival, this week on Hammered!, we allow the great Baroque master Johann Sebastian Bach guide the musical conversation. Listen weekday mornings this week at 10 am.

The timbral language of the harpsichord intriguingly, if not unexpectedly, connects the modern and pre-Classical eras. This week on Hammered! we explore that lineage by juxtaposing music from the Baroque era with more recently written scores, all composed for the harpsichord.

Almost all cogent musical structures are built on some kind of repetition or cycle. This week on Hammered! we decode the musical cycles behind some of the century's most fascinating architectural blueprints.

The mark of a well-constructed album is that its individual parts form a greater whole, each work elevated through the connections made with adjacent tracks. Tune in this week on Hammered! for five such albums.

Brooklyn-based composer Ryan Anthony Francis draws on the influences of artist M.C. Escher, author Haruki Murakami and poet Wilhelm Muller. Hear what they've told him this week at 10 am on Hammered!.

It's our winter pledge drive. All this week on Hammered! we pass the mic among a collection of composers to introduce their own works for piano. It's one of many features that you hear only on Q2 Music. Pledge today to help us continue to give new music a home.

Differentiating the piano from other percussion instruments is partly, and perhaps most meaningfully, its ability to imitate the human voice, to sound cantabile. This week on Hammered! the piano takes center stage and accompanies itself in a series of one-instrument art song recitals. 

Late in his life, the famed Italian pianist and composer Ferruccio Busoni felt so straightjacketed by the tonal system that he said one of the only viable method of escape was the invention of new sounds through electronic instruments.

Taking a page out of the great Nicholas Hodges' recent programatic playbook, this week on Hammered! we re-contextualize a handful of classic etudes by throwing in fistfuls of freshly composed ones, some so difficult only a machine can play them!

A beloved addition to the NYC festival circuit, the multi-dimension and ultra-collaborative Ecstatic Music Festival kicks off this Friday. Q2 Music is its proud digital partner, and this week on Hammered!, to get into the mood, we not only survey music from the festival's composers, musicians and ensembles, but more generally embrace all things ecstatic.

What is it about the opening measures of Ludwig van Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, or Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring that generates such intense musical magnetism? This week on Hammered! we explore how the starts of pieces impact the music that follows. 

This week on Hammered! we dive deep into the music of the spectral school, exploring the sounds of Tristan Murail, Gerard Grisey, Claude Vivier and more alongside bits of "proto-spectralists" Olivier Messiaen, Claude Debussy and Bela Bartok. Listen each morning at 10 am.