Nadia Sirota

The Rome Prize gives fellowships to “emerging artists and scholars in the early or middle stages of their careers who represent the highest standard of excellence.” There have been so...

There must be some deep-seated, funny, psychologically-sound logic behind the release of big-budget disaster films during the hottest months. Summer is a season of excess, and this we...

In New York, this season is all about extremes of temperature, and that's what we're exploring this week: music that has something to do with the steamy, lethargic, A/C-shivery weirdn...

Cued Up dives head first into the fearless, mystical sound world of composer-vocalist Meredith Monk. Recorded live in The Greene Space, Monk and Vocal Ensemble and the Todd Reynolds Q...

My friends, it’s been so long! I’ve missed you all! I’ve been mostly in London and Reykjavik since we last talked, the former city to see Nico Muhly’s opera Two Boys (so good) and the latter to record viola things and schvitz. Along the way I played some great little shows, and one of the highlights of my trip was a recital with organist Jamie McVinnie and Nico Muhly at Westminster Abbey.

After a truly fabulous end-of-the-season run (our first pledge drive! MATA and VOX and Wordless, oh my!), I am taking a little June hiatus to go concertize and record around Europe. Rest assured, I'll be reporting back with exclusive videos and anecdotes from various projects, (cough, Nico Muhly's first opera, cough), so I won't be divorced from planet Q2, but I figured I'd take this week to play some of my favorite things (in Oprah's absence). One of these, apparently, is absurd overuse of parenthetical phrases in writing (I could switch to footnotes? Something something David Foster Wallace).

I am so unbelievably proud of Q2. This week marks our first ever pledge drive! (The public radio geek in me is pretty blissed-out by this, btw.) This is your chance to show how much N...

New York is still bustling with festivals, festivals, festivals! This week in particular, there's some impressive programming courtesy of one of our favorite chamber ensembles, eighth blackbird. The versatile sextet has set up a short festival, called Tune-In beginning this Wednesday at the Park Ave Armory, based on Stravinsky's famous quote: "Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all.”

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I don't envy composers. In addition to working long hours in relative isolation, the life of a young composer can sometimes seem pretty demoralizing; like actors, composers are constantly applying for various positions and experiencing rejection. Grants, festivals, teaching positions, awards, all of these plaudits are achieved via an application process that can feel extremely elusive.

How do you take your coffee? What's your favorite time of day? What's your favorite part of the Chicken? What's your favorite part of the Tofurky? With whom do you identify in Star Wars?

Host Nadia Sirota writes: Mania-inducing it may be, but there's something super satisfying about being ridiculously busy. Yesterday, I flew back to New York City from a really lovely set of shows in the Twin Cities as part or their String Theory Festival, then almost immediately proceeded to a recording studio where my group yMusic began to get sounds for our debut record. Yay!

Composing isn't always a solitary activity. This week, Nadia Sirota explores a variety of different composer collectives, including Bang On a Can, the NOW Ensemble, Sleeping Giant, Ears Open!, and Common Sense.

This Sunday at 2 p.m., listen to the Kronos Quartet share the stage with the Young People's Chorus of New York City at (Le) Poisson Rouge. The concert includes premieres by Laurie And...

To be quite frank, while I’m a fan of every smoked, oily fish, trout may be my favorite, though trout can be wonderful in a variety of additional contexts! Instead of smoked, how about evoked in an art song and morphed into a quintet for strings and piano by Schubert? That’s some delicious trout.

It's mid-January. It's cold. It's dark. There's no holiday in sight. We need to listen to some big, moving works to get the blood flowing again! There is no better way to combat the January blahs than exposure to massive, multimedia works. (Not an FDA approved treatment for SAD, don't sue me! This is more like a, um, suggestion.) This week, we're exploring what is surely an ill-advised theme for a radio show: music with a strong, visual component.

My head is spinning, there have been so many amazing live events this season! I've been lucky enough to enjoy many of these nocturnal happenings and to be able to share many of them with you via the magic Internet. As such, this coming (Spring) season of Cued Up is going to be dynamite! We've got thirteen amazing performances, all recorded in and around our fair city. 

This week, Cued Up on Q2 presents a concert of tech-savvy classical intimacy with Zoë Keating and Todd Reynolds, along with an interview with the artists led by Radiolab's Jad Abumrad.

Sacred, secular, set to poetry or neutral syllables, vocal music can be found in most every corner of the New Music world. The voice is perhaps the most flexible and expressive instrument out there; everything from oboes to guitars is compared to it. There is something instantly rousing and sort of, well, human about vocal music. It translates emotion in a very visceral way.