Music Features

It really is spring, and our thoughts turn to... Now is the Time, Sunday, April 14th at 10 pm. Why not make up a story, and let the boys start. Eric Whitacre's emotionally surprising A Boy and a Girl leads us to the fresh Gate of Michael McDermott. A Charles Wuorinen Divertimento, bracing and lively, hints at—

Wait; now it's the girls' turn—a Tell-Tale Fantasy, perhaps, here told by Jane Brockman. Then six multi-tracked trumpets blast us into Lois Vierk's brilliant Cirrus, and all that's left, after all that story, is a single human voice. Joelle Wallach brings in a tenor to sing up into the silence. It really is spring.

We're still waiting for spring to really get here on Now is the Time, Sunday, April 7th at 10 pm. Carlos Carrillo's plummy Como si fuera la primavera (As if this were spring) features clarinet, and Emma Lou Diemer's Before Spring, the violin.

Jason Barabba's Conjecture spins clarinet with orchestra, and eighth blackbird performs Thomas Albert's Thirteen Ways, his consideration of the Wallace Stevens poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," which inspired their name. And what about that eighth way? "I know noble accents / And lucid, inescapable rhythms; / But I know, too, / That the blackbird is involved / In what I know." Maybe they know when spring will arrive.