A founding member of NOW Ensemble, pianist Michael Mizrahi is one of those musicians who is endlessly fascinated by everything (his undergraduate studies were a three-pronged focus in music, religion and physics) and is, as a result, endlessly fascinating himself.

Join us Thursday at 7 pm to hear a performance by NOW Ensemble, Chiara Quartet and Matmos celebrating two CD releases at the Greenwich Village venue (le) Poisson Rouge.

Few composers personify New York's young new-music scene in quite the same way as Judd Greenstein. As a composer, he has been commissioned by the ETHEL string quartet and by the Minnesota Orchestra. New Amsterdam, the label he co-founded with composers Sarah Kirkland Snider and William Brittelle, serves as an umbrella for many of the city's most celebrated young composers and ensembles, including his own NOW Ensemble of new-music virtuosos. In 2011, he inaugurated the Ecstatic Music Festival, bringing together indie rock, jazz and classical music for a series of cross-genre concerts and collaborations.

On Wednesday, Feb. 1 at 7 pm in The Greene Space, Q2 Music presents a live concert and videocast with a star-studded lineup of composer-performers from this season's hotly-anticipated Ecstatic Music Festival 2012. Hosted by WQXR's Terrance McKnight, the show includes performances by composer-percussionist Jason Treuting, multi-instrumentalist Angélica Negron, and musical polymath Jherek Bischoff.

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The inaugural Ecstatic Music Festival at Merkin Concert Hall closes this March with its most concentrated month of ambitious programming to date. Featuring six concerts and two Webcasts on Q2, the festival's culmination epitomizes music-making at its most collaborative and experimental.

The Ecstatic Music Festival, a two-month event dedicated to exploring the boundaries between classical music and pop, kicked off with an eight-hour marathon last month. Check out some of the highlights on Q2.

The Ecstatic Music Festival, a two-month event dedicated to exploring the boundaries between classical music and pop, kicked off with an eight-hour marathon last month. Check out some of the highlights on Q2.

Merkin Concert Hall's Ecstatic Music Festival blazes into February with concerts from the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Roomful of Teeth, Newspeak and Darcy James Argue's Secret Society. Listen below to get the perspective of composer and festival curator Judd Greenstein as he continues his series of introductions to this month's imaginative, cross-pollenating pairings, two of which will be Web cast live on Q2 as part of New Sounds Live with WNYC's John Schaefer.

Composer Judd Greenstein recently came by the WQXR studios to explain the impetus behind Merkin Concert Hall's first ever Ecstatic Music Festival: an ambitious, 14-concert festival he's created as an experimental model for fostering collaboration among artists of different musical fields. In addition, Greenstein took us on a focused, guided tour through each intriguing concert pairing.

As unreliable as terminology can be, the phrase "indie-classical" has become the go-to description for a community of young composers and ensembles exploring the boundaries of experimental pop music and contemporary music. Composer Judd Greenstein has exerted an undeniable influence on this New Music community, in his role as founder of the adventurous New Amsterdam label and, most recently, in the curation of the ambitious Ecstatic Music Festival kicking off Monday, January 17 at Merkin Concert Hall.

The Night Gatherers, for viola quintet, was commissioned by the family of my friend, a violist, as a celebration of the life of their recently deceased matriarch. This impressive woman was a painter and long-time advocate for women's rights; one of her best paintings, “The Night Gatherers,” combines these passions in a depiction of Mexican women gathering leftover wheat from the fields in the middle of the night.