new music

The threads of childhood experience and cultural identity will be woven into a tapestry of sound in a concert of the Worthington Chamber Orchestra and the New World Singers of the Columbus Children’s Choir Sunday, May 5 at 5 p.m. in Worthington United Methodist Church.

Every building has a unique personality. The Overlook Hotel, the demonically possessed setting of Stephen King's novel The Shining, is now also the title character of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project's recording of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Paul Moravec’s musical works inspired by architectural forms.

As part of a nationwide new music commissioning program, the Central Ohio Symphony will open its 2023-24 season with the Ohio premiere of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain Suite.

Composer Michael Shapiro’s oratorio Voices joins poetry written by Sephardic Jews during the Holocaust, original music reminiscent of the sound world of the Terezin concentration camp and Jewish liturgical music in a testament to faith, hope and endurance.

The austere beauty of the Arctic and the rapid ecological changes in the region are the inspiration for Norwegian violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing’s most recent recording, Arctic (Sony Classical). Featuring music inspired by the Arctic’s natural wonders, the recording is Hemsing’s love letter to the north and her plea to spare this region from the devastation that some portend for it.

During the last 25 years, Shirley has gone from the rhythm section of a rising-star rock band to L.A.’s Skid Row and, most recently, to a new career as a classical composer in his current home of Newark, Ohio. The story of Shirley’s path to central Ohio is one of loneliness and addiction, of mountaintop highs and rock-bottom despair and, ultimately, recovery and redemption. And music was the friend that led him to a new life.

At one point in time, the skies over North America were full of birds. The ravages of overhunting, industrialization, pollution and trading have silenced many of those species forever. Now American composer Christopher Tin has memorialized extinct birds in The Lost Birds: An Extinction Elegy, recently available in a recording by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and VOCES8.

What knits us to the soul of another? It’s one of the central questions of life, and it is the central question of the Philadelphia-based The Crossing choir’s recording Born: The Music of Edie Hill and Michael Gilbertson, which invites us to consider how we walk with the creatures we encounter on our path.

The My Lai Massacre is one of the Vietnam War’s most notorious episodes. Now a new recording again brings awareness to the massacre and the U.S. Army officer who tried to bring it to a halt.

It has been said that life begins at 40. Columbus composer Sharon Udoh explores the upheaval of her life as a 40-year-old in a new musical work full of surprising twists and turns.