The contemporary performing arts in New York have no better friend than GWEN DEELY. She’s as devoted and busy an audience member as they come.  (All the more so, since she’s got a day job and doesn’t get free tickets like us critics.) I visit her in Manhattan regularly and she always gives me a report of the great events she’s attended. This year she seemed to have had a lot of peak experiences, including her own...

Around 1998 when I was pulling together artists for the disc “Lesbian American Composers,” Laura Kaminsky wrote me a rather curt letter about the whole project. A simple “No, thanks” would have sufficed. I’d actually forgotten about that, having put out of my mind some of the stormier aspects of bringing to market that title and the two volumes of “Gay American Composers” discs at...

With five entries in each of more than 100 categories, the nominations for the 52nd annual Grammy Awards (announced on December 2) surely include plenty of gays and lesbians. But scanning the classical nominations, we’ve got: Conductor Marin Alsop’s recording of Bernstein’s Mass nominated for Best Classical Album Guitarist Sharon Isbin’s “Journey to the New World” nominated for Best Instrumental...

After being a fixture in lower Manhattan for several decades, lesbian composer Eve Beglarian has gone on a yearlong quest in search of America. For her exploration of the heartland she’s traversing our continent’s major artery, the Mississippi River. Her journey began in August at the river’s headwaters in Lake Itasca, Minnesota. With a car, a kayak, and a bike, plus the company of various fellow travelers (friends who...

The San Francisco Opera has announced commissions of new operas from Mark Adamo and Jennifer Higdon.  Adamo’s third opera, The Gospel of Mary Magdelene, is slated for June 2013 premiere and will feature the composer’s own libretto.  Higdon will collaborate with writer Gene Scheer for a piece to premiere in fall 2013, though no theme or topic is yet announced.

Composers keep score. That’s actually a pun, because “score” is a term for a piece of music when it’s written-out on paper. But composers do keep count and not just of beats. More often than not, they also keep a tally on how many times their music gets played each year.  That’s especially the case when it comes to orchestral performances, because if a conductor leads a full orchestra in your music then it means...

The words “sound” and “art” taken together make a pretty good definition for music itself, but “sound art,” as a composite term, actually refers to a particular strain of creativity. Rather than the stringing together of notes on a printed score, as in traditional musical composition, sound art is more the shaping of sonic elements, usually with very high-tech tools or in some rather low-tech primitive manner....

In 1988, accordionist and composer Pauline Oliveros made a recording with a trombone player and a percussionist inside a 2 million-gallon empty cistern buried 14 feet below ground at Fort Worden, near Port Townsend, Wash. The resulting CD on New Albion Records was titled “Deep Listening,” a play on the unusual location and also an apt description of the trio’s meditative and reverberant improvisations. Soon...

Imagine a music that is created more by listening than by playing notes. The sounds are determined by the time and place in which the musicians gather, and the players are guided not so much by a score but by their heightened sensitivities to each other, their environment and their common values of collaboration. Such is the sonic universe of Pauline Oliveros, a 70-year-old composer and accordionist, internationally known...