Tomorrow night, Chicago new-music group Fulcrum Point will give the first two Chicago performances of The News, the new opera by the Dutch avant-pop composer Jacob Ter Veldhuis that premiered in Pittsburgh last Friday. Ter Veldhuis, better known as Jacob TV, typically writes for one or more live musicians playing along with spliced TV excerpts. His music, which, in tonality, instrumentation, and rhythm, is essentially pop, takes its melodic material from recorded speech fragments, a technique made famous by Steve Reich's early tape pieces and developed further by Scott Johnson. The News is what Ter Veldhuis refers to as a "reality opera," with edited video clips of U.S. and international news playing a duet with eight instrumentalists and two live singers. more ›

Late this Saturday night, after they complete their second weekend concert at the MCA Stage, members of the Grammy Award-winning new-music group eighth blackbird will be joined by 40-odd area musicians to perform Terry Riley's seminal In C. more ›

Wednesday night's Grammy nominations may have shaped as the Adele show, with Bon Iver crashing the party in much the same way The Arcade Fire did last year. But this is Chicagoist and we're gonna focus on the local acts. more ›

more ›

Fulcrum Point and eighth blackbird, two leading ensembles of the Chicago new-music scene, will present multi-discipline, multi-genre concerts at the Harris Theater this week. To make it even more enticing, Wednesday's eighth blackbird show has cheap tickets available. more ›

January is going to be a banner month for frugal classical music fans. By now you should know about the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Chicagoist Gift Guide special, but don't overlook the huge discount being offered by the University of Chicago Presents. more ›

eighth blackbird is offering a two-for-one deal on Tuesday's performance of Arnold Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire." The piece, a setting of German translations of twenty-one of the series of fifty poems by Albert Giraud, is a combination of high-brow Expressionism and cabaret. It's a dark, surreal journey that starts with the commedia dell'arte clown character becoming inebriated by the moon, moves through moments of fear, blasphemy, and death, and ends with Pierrot's nostalgic return to his homeland of Bergamo. more ›

Contempo kicks off its season this Saturday night with the new-music collective's resident ensembles eighth blackbird and the Pacifica Quartet performing music inspired by visual arts. more ›

This Saturday night, the Brazilian bossa nova master Leny Andrade and her trio will perform at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Andrade has been likened to Ella Fitzgerald, a comparison that goes beyond a slight physical resemblance and scatting abilities (which rival those of Ms. Fitzgerald). Her voice, although rounder and deeper, has a similar breathy, care-free quality combined with scary pitch accuracy. more ›

Honestly? Tuesday night we were totally stoked to see Titus Andronicus at Reggie's, but at the last minute we realized just how foolish we would be to pass up a chance to see what would probably be a one-time only event with Glenn Kotche joining forces with modern classicists eighth blackbird at The Harris theater. more ›

Glenn Kotche, drummer for Loose Fur and some other little local band named Wilco, plays percussion tonight with local avant-classical sextet eighth blackbird at The Harris Theater. Kotche's solo drumming is truly mind-blowing -- go on, watch one of his performances -- and we're told he will be debuting a brand new piece amongst some other familiar material. more ›