Here we are, pre-New Year and post-Mayan "apocalypse", confronted with another expiration of a calendar year and the contemplation of that particular sort of cosmic mystery. This week we ring in the New Year on Hammered! with the mysterious resonating body that is the music of George Crumb.

It has become a sort of holiday tradition on Hammered! to indulge in Olivier Messiaen's two-hour holiday season epic Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus. Tune in at 10 AM this week for four movements per day of this twenty movement Q2 Music Holiday Classic.

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.

This fall has seen the passing of William Duckworth, Elliott Carter and Jonathan Harvey, who died last week at age 73. This week we present the music, influences and echoes of these three compositional giants.

Two of arguably the most influential composers of the 20th century turned super old this year: John Cage and Claude Debussy . This week on Hammered! we pay homage to these modern musical titans.

Let's lead with a nerdy but apt musicological posit: the sonata is a shifty and elusive form. It contracts, expands and reconfigures to hold any type of musical material, so much so that it is perhaps most accurate to evoke the sonata's original and most basic meaning, simply "to sound."

This week on Hammered!, in coordination with our Fall Pledge Drive, we hear highlights from our vast archive of live piano performances.

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.

Gerard Grisey, one of the godfathers of the spectral school, had an almost tactile relationship to sound, saying "I start more with the physical aspect of things, the physical aspect of sound, the quality of spectrums" before composing. This week on Hammered! we try to understand what the heck that actually means with a deep dive into the music of the spectral school.

Glenn Gould would have been 80 years old on Tuesday. To celebrate we've programmed an entire hour's worth of solid Gould, and, the rest of the week, profile four other titans of the contemporary piano world.

Two of arguably the most influential composers of the twentieth century turned super old this year: John Cage (100 this month) and Claude Debussy (150 last August). This week on Hammered! we pay homage to these modern musical titans with alternating selections from each’s vast piano oeuvre.

This week on Hammered! we hear five consecutive cases of works that require an extended temporal space to achieve a more slowly evolving mode of expression. Otherwise put: works that last the full duration of each episode.

The champagne may be flat but we're still riding the celebratory wave of birthday boy Philip Glass's 75th by exploring the fertile genre of post-minimalism that he helped inspire. Tune in this week at 11 am and pm for reworkings, reinventions and revampings of Glass-brand minimalism.

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.

Did you know that Stephen Sondheim was a pupil of Milton Babbitt? Or that Cage studied with Schoenberg? This week we tease out the often unexpected musical relationships between some of the last century's greatest pedagogues and their students.

This week on Hammered! we hear Schoenberg's five incomparable piano works alongside the music of composers he may – or may not – have impacted.

Part of listening to contemporary music these days is exploring the musical tributaries resulting from a single body of music, tracing lines of influence to larger, more expansive pools and discovering unexplored oases along the way. This week we consider the new and unfamiliar, offering keyboard music never before heard on Q2 Music by known and yet-known composers alike. 

This week on Hammered! we queue up portions of Frederic Rzewski's epic musical novel The Road -- in addition to a few driving playlists of our own -- and provide five discrete soundtracks built for summer travel. Tune in all week at 10 AM

Nothing accompanies a sweated-through T-shirt and an oppressively humid summer evening like George Crumb, right? Get your dog day's musical antidote all week on Hammered! with summertime music not written by George Gershwin.

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.