Poul Ruders’s diverse body of compositions is tied together by his smooth absorption of many styles and modes. Read a full profile on the Danish composer, featured on this weekend's CONTACT! performance with The New York Philharmonic, and listen to him introduce his music.

The big news, in indie-centric corners, will be that Jace Clayton (a.k.a. DJ /rupture) is releasing a classical album. Yet even more noteworthy is the album's subject matter. Stream the entire album this week.

Given his Yale teaching post and the number of composers he has mentored there, Martin Bresnick may wind up being remembered as the Nadia Boulanger of the late 20th-century American scene: a rite of compositional passage embodied in a single instructor.

Lonesome Roads, the title track of 30-year old composer Dan Visconti's new album, gives the oft-separated styles of modernism and folk a reason to hang together. Stream the entire album on demand.

Esa-Pekka Salonen’s affection for the modern composer Witold Lutosławski has long been evident. Now the Finnish conductor has recorded a complete set of the Polish icon's four symphonies. Stream them on demand this week only. 

Now that Elliott Carter has passed, we might well bestow the title of “world’s most impressive late-blooming composer” onto the shoulders of Esa-Pekka Salonen. Read a full portrait of the Finnish composer-conductor and listen to him introduce many of his key works.

Composer Laurie Spiegel had something like a career year in 2012, at least so far as attention goes. Stream for this week only the reissue of her classic 1980 album, "The Expanding Universe."

If you thought the San Francisco Symphony's promotion of American "maverick" composers has gotten tiresome, this collection of Cowell, Varèse, Harrison and Cage may make you reconsider.

Charles Ives wrote him a letter of recommendation to Harvard. He attended the New York premiere of The Rite of Spring. Decades later, Stravinsky himself would proclaim that he had written the first American masterpiece.

Cellist Jakob Kullberg and the New Music Orchestra present cello concertos by Saariaho, Norgard and Nordheim.

Heinz Karl Gruber (or HK Gruber, depending on your program) isn’t afraid of being called silly. One of the Austrian composer’s most notorious pieces, Frankenstein!! (yes, with two exclamation points), is formally described as a “pan-demonium,” and takes as its text some would-be Austrian children’s rhymes penned by an absurdist-minded pal of Gruber’s.

This live 1984 recording of Glass's Einstein is nothing close to complete. However, it's a (smartly) edited 77-minute highlight reel from the opera, paired with a DVD of the documentary produced during the same run.

Seth Colter Walls reviews Cornelius Dufallo's release Journaling for Q2 Music. Stream the whole record in our online preview all week.

For a newcomer to Terry Riley, In C is where to begin, with its 53 melodic fragments passed back and forth between whatever instruments may have been assembled, and which are paced against the constant pulse of a piano’s top two Cs.

From time in the serialist trenches of academia to a position in the front ranks of the neoromantic movement, David Del Tredici has played a surfeit of roles over the last half-century. Read Seth Colter Walls's portrait, and listen to the composer introduce his works.

In recent decades, American composer David Lang has been best known as a founding member of the Bang On A Can collective – something of an activist-spirited composer/performer/educator outfit based in New York.

Born in 1985, Timothy Andres (occasionally billed, somewhat insouciantly, as “Timo”) works in the post-dogmatic era of contemporary American composition. This means, among other things, that Andres feels as much at home recomposing (and playing) Mozart’s “Coronation” Piano Concerto as he does taking part in a street performance of Mauricio Kagel’s Eine Brise (for 111 bicyclists).

Sitting at the crossroads of installation art, extended vocal technique and non-score-based rehearsal processes is one of America’s late-20th century masters: Meredith Monk.

Morton Subotnick has almost as many pioneering credits to his name as he does compositional ones. A leader of the San Francisco Tape Center in the '60s – a place where Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros and many others took some of their earliest aesthetic steps – Subotnick has consulted (or commissioned) the building of synthesizers from the ground up, and also recorded the first electronic-music album meant just for listening, instead of live-performance miming. (So radical!)

Nico Muhly's Two Boys, which got its world premiere at English National Opera on Friday, was envisioned as part crime procedural, part online morality tale. Despite a choppy first act, Muhly's gripping music redeems this lurid tale.