Presenting a selection that spans more than two centuries of string quartet literature, Milwaukee’s Philomusica Quartet will take its audience on a tour full of musical humor, incandescence and elegance. Haydn’s charming and

Quebec instrumental band Sagapool would be well off pursuing a career in movie soundtracks. While their clarinet- and accordion-based music has roots in Eastern Europe, the branches form sparse sonic pictures suggesting the wintry landscape of northern lands. The structure of...

Few composers of “contemporary classical music,” much less opera, have found as large and welcome an audience as Philip Glass. The prolific composer and recording artist is honored for his 75th birthday with a triple-CD “best of” collection covering the late...

Tim Burton and Danny Elfman are almost as inseparable in the imagination as Batman and Robin. Most of Burton�s films have featured original scores by Elfman, whose music is integral to the mood of the pictures. Elfman will be audible throughout Burton�s upcoming film, Alice in Wonderland (opening March 5). On the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack CD (released by Walt Disney Records) El...

Godfrey Reggio�s film Koyaanisqatsi (1982), a virtually wordless montage of slow motion footage and time-lapse photography, was a visual indictment of modern society. Koyaanisqatsi�s juxtapositions implied that civilization was utterly out of sync with the rhythms of nature and racing headlong into the abyss. The film would have been considerably less moving and memorable without its original ...

When he emerged as part of New York's edgy "downtown scene" in the 1970s, Philip Glass became the target of vituperative put-downs by the older generation of modernist composers and critics in their thrall, who composed and appreciated music according to the dictates of increasingly sterile intellectual theories. Fortunately, the spirit of those composers migrated to university...