How do you take your coffee? What's your favorite time of day? What's your favorite part of the Chicken? What's your favorite part of the Tofurky? With whom do you identify in Star Wars?

Host Nadia Sirota writes: Mania-inducing it may be, but there's something super satisfying about being ridiculously busy. Yesterday, I flew back to New York City from a really lovely set of shows in the Twin Cities as part or their String Theory Festival, then almost immediately proceeded to a recording studio where my group yMusic began to get sounds for our debut record. Yay!

Composing isn't always a solitary activity. This week, Nadia Sirota explores a variety of different composer collectives, including Bang On a Can, the NOW Ensemble, Sleeping Giant, Ears Open!, and Common Sense.

This Sunday at 2 p.m., listen to the Kronos Quartet share the stage with the Young People's Chorus of New York City at (Le) Poisson Rouge. The concert includes premieres by Laurie Anderson, Maria Schneider and Aleksandra Vrebalov.

To be quite frank, while I’m a fan of every smoked, oily fish, trout may be my favorite, though trout can be wonderful in a variety of additional contexts! Instead of smoked, how about evoked in an art song and morphed into a quintet for strings and piano by Schubert? That’s some delicious trout.

It's mid-January. It's cold. It's dark. There's no holiday in sight. We need to listen to some big, moving works to get the blood flowing again! There is no better way to combat the January blahs than exposure to massive, multimedia works. (Not an FDA approved treatment for SAD, don't sue me! This is more like a, um, suggestion.) This week, we're exploring what is surely an ill-advised theme for a radio show: music with a strong, visual component.

My head is spinning, there have been so many amazing live events this season! I've been lucky enough to enjoy many of these nocturnal happenings and to be able to share many of them with you via the magic Internet. As such, this coming (Spring) season of Cued Up is going to be dynamite! We've got thirteen amazing performances, all recorded in and around our fair city. 

This week, Cued Up on Q2 presents a concert of tech-savvy classical intimacy with Zoë Keating and Todd Reynolds, along with an interview with the artists led by Radiolab's Jad Abumrad.

Sacred, secular, set to poetry or neutral syllables, vocal music can be found in most every corner of the New Music world. The voice is perhaps the most flexible and expressive instrument out there; everything from oboes to guitars is compared to it. There is something instantly rousing and sort of, well, human about vocal music. It translates emotion in a very visceral way.

I cannot over-represent how much I enjoy the holiday season. The months between Halloween and New Years contain the right weather, amazing performances and so much festivity! I like festvity. Ergo, this week, leading up to the big holiday kickoff that is Halloween, we'll be as festive as possible. Get ready for some S-C-A-R-Y music on Q2.

This Sunday, Q2 offers live performances by two high-impact bandsembles from New Sounds Live and the Ecstatic Music Festival: the politically conscious Newspeak and Darcy James Argue's left-field big band Secret Society.

I am still reeling from the incredible spectacle and absurdly musically-satisfying event that was Inuksuit at the Armory last week. While many pieces written on this scale can be at best a fun gimmick, this was a moving, compositionally pristine work that happened to be absolutely massive. When I was excitedly recapping the event with a participating piccolo player, we found ourselves comparing Inuksuit to The Gates in Central Park: something that could well have been graceless and unwieldy that was executed so well as to be really, really wonderful.

By way of a live concert at Brooklyn's ISSUE Project Room, Q2 brings composer and percussionist Aaron Siegel's slowly evolving monolith of sparkling drone, Science is Only a Sometimes Friend to our listeners this Sunday, February 27 at 2 p.m.

How do you take your coffee? What's your favorite time of day? What's your favorite part of the Chicken? What's your favorite part of the Tofurky? With whom do you identify in Star Wars?

This week, (Le) Poisson Rouge offers listeners an ultra-intimate concert featuring contemporary piano queen Gloria Cheng, and the Calder Quartet performing works by Messiaen, Saariaho, Stravinsky and Boulez.