There are some records that have distinct seasonal feels. Slint’s Spiderland is reminiscent of an ominous fall evening, while Hüsker Dü’s New Day Rising sounds like a red-hot summer day. Closer to home, Startled

"It's exciting to play new music there," Stalheim says. "You feel the history, and it's like the place is brought back to life." Bringing the feel of old Turner Hall back to life is Sofia Gubaidulina's Witty Waltzing and Igor Stravinsky's Ragtime, two compositions that turn back the clock to the days when the ballroom hosted formal dances. Caroline Mallonee's Keeping Time In a Bottle, a variation on 100 Bottles of Beer in which musicians play empty beer bottles, is a tongue-in-cheek throwback to the old German beer hall tradition. Elena Kats-Chernin's Charleston Noir and Randall Woolf's Hee Haw are digitally sequenced modern variants of antiquated dance numbers . . .

The Farrelly brothers infamously used Jonathan Richman’s music in their ’90s comedies, but for those emotional moments in their latter films when Richman’s music wouldn’t suffice, they turned to another Massachusetts musician, folk-pop singer Ellis Paul.

As riotous as his altercations with the (often bumbling) law were in his classic stoner comedies with Cheech Marin, there was nothing funny about Tommy Chong’s real life run-in with the authorities. In 2003, Chong was sentenced to nine months in jail for financing a business that sold drug paraphernalia—