A piece of American music seldom stays fresh, even surprising, to succeeding generations of audiences. Datedness sets in so quickly, while nostalgia takes a long time to show up. George Crumb’s “Black Angels” is an exception. Written almost 40 years ago during the height of the Vietnam War, “Black Angels” is scored for electric string quartet and is subtitled “Thirteen Images from the...

ALBANY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Troy Savings Bank Music Hall March 26, 2010 Music director David Alan Miller and the Albany Symphony Orchestra have made a virtue out of performing lots of new little works by emerging composers. Eager for the opportunity, the youngsters gladly take the modest commissions and write under tight deadlines. The results are usually diverting and forgettable. A substantial new three-year grant from the...

Call them the children of Kronos. No, not the Greek Titan, who ruled Earth and the heavens, but the Kronos Quartet, the San Francisco-based ensemble founded in 1973 that reinvented the string quartet. With an exclusive dedication to contemporary music — from minimalism to salsa — the Kronos created such a hip and flamboyantly costumed image that it was dubbed “classical music’s fab four.” Today,...

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...