The lushness and easy melodiousness of these four orchestral works is almost startling, given Ziporyn’s (b. 1959) history, but it is certainly not an unpleasant surprise. An essential element in the texture of this music derives from the large percussion section, reflecting the composer’s intense and life-long interest in gamelan music. ... The gamelan world does not dominate the current release, but it is nearly always lurking in the shadows, if it is not now and again bursting through in a more exuberant fashion.

Meredith Monk's (b. 1942) music has been linked to the sacred vocal works of Hildegard von Bingen, the 12th-century mystic abbess and composer. It's often been said that Monk's voice can sound simultaneously ancient and new. She certainly belongs to a group of singer/composers who reacted to the vibrato-laden ornate antics of 19th-century opera, and sought to return to the clarity found in medieval ars nova and chant, as well as Eastern European folk traditions. I remember the poet Robert Pinsky once saying that if you want true inspiration, don't look back one generation or even two, but delve way back into the distant past, to the origins of language and art. Monk has created timeless music.

Robert Erickson (1917-1997) is one of the most interesting and neglected American composers of the latter half of the twentieth century. This recording features compositions from 1963 to 1977 that embody the characteristics for which his work became most recognized: a heightened interest in the atmosphere of a piece, an obsession with timbre, ways of varying the sound of a work with experiments in new technique, and explorations into the new worlds uncovered through the invention of tape recording.

Like the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, much of the music here has a quality of timeless lament, of inconsolable sorrow. Tenderly human in expression yet superhuman in scale, it seems to contemplate our condition from a very great height. Mr. Marshall (b. 1942) enhances this effect by interweaving conventional instruments with prerecorded, computer-manipulated sounds or with live devices, like digital delay. The fusion of electronic manipulation and human intention is seamless but never slick.

Written in 1900, Enescu’s Octet for Strings combines the chromatic richness prevalent in Vienna at the time with a refined sense of formal structure. After World War I, he was increasingly influenced by the folk music of his native Romania, the effect of which is subtly echoed in the Quintet for Piano and Strings of 1940, heard here in its first recording. In the hands of Kremer and his ensemble, both works are revealed to be masterful and distinctive pieces that deserve to be more widely known.

While the sound of early instruments is reminiscent of chiaroscuro Baroque splendours, the bandoneon calls up the urban world of the tango. Combining the two, as Daniel Brel (b. 1950) does in his works, blurs these distinctions, allowing the instruments to speak with their own voices. The result is an extremely personal type of music that is both poetic and poignant, born of the moving encounter between Daniel Brel and Vincent Dumestre and his musicians.

...Matthew Smith (b. 1953) builds up his Symphony No. 8 in Four Movements (2003) from the raw sounds of six 1/16-size Suzuki violins, eight jaw harps, strings, and percussion and his Symphony No. 4 in Five Movements (2001) from a smaller assortment of stringed instruments. The bowed sounds and overlapping percussive tracks combine into distorted abstract patterns akin to electro-acoustic music, often with eerie, futuristic touches; Smith's use of open strings in fifths also anchors his music in the past by summoning memories of sixteenth century viols.

Paul Doornbusch (b. 1959) creates extraordinary and unusual sounds for instruments, computers, and electronics. ...The four vocalists [in Strepidus Somnus (1996)] perform with earpieces, upon which each hears and reproduces a track of precomposed vocal material, ranging from coital gasps to whispering in an algorithmically-fractured English, reminiscent of the teasing impenetrability of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. ... Here the emphasis is ...on the creation of a nightmarish sonic landscape whose inhabitants leer and convulse like Bosch’s demons.

Brooklyn Rider have built a programme around Debussy's iconic String Quartet, embedded rather than leading off, that is both self-referential and rich with history. The result is chamber music simultaneously on a very large scale and an alien sub-atomic landscape, which explores texture and space with scientific determination and a steady artistic temperament.

Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy (b. 1970), whom the New Yorker has called "a star of Dublin's active new music scene," makes his Nonesuch debut with Grá agus Bás. This ambitious set features a pair of dramatic pieces written for two very different but equally extraordinary voices - former Afro-Celt Sound System vocalist Iarla O’Lionáird and American soprano, and Nonesuch label-mate, Dawn Upshaw. Often described as a post-minimalist, Dennehy, says British music magazine The Wire, "has a sound world all his own." Here he uses elements of Irish traditional culture as a springboard to create work with no visible roots - a borderless music that is mysterious and elegiac, as deeply moving as it is utterly transfixing.

A Different World, much like the marriage between Kathryn Lockwood and Yousif Sheronick, represents an organic amalgam of cultural traditions and musical styles. The collaboration of a classical violist and world percussionist captures disparate worlds merging. The musical styles on this ground breaking disc range from Classical to Klezmer, Middle Eastern to Jazz. The confluence is natural and unforced.

Cellist Maya Beiser’s latest CD for the Innova imprint seeks to craft music that celebrates the rich multiculturalism of the Iberian peninsula. Using medieval Spain as a jumping off point, Beiser has commissioned a collection of works that celebrate Christian, Jewish, and Muslim musical traditions. The participants frequently interweave stylistic and ethnic boundaries. The results are frequently engaging musical hybrids.

The two concertos by Thomas Koppel (1944-2006) on the present disc are fresh, lively, and often moving works that, although written in a freely tonal idiom, never become anodyne. Instead, the ear is continuously challenged by shifting colors and harmonies, and most certainly by the virtuoso solo writing that Michala Petri handles with considerable aplomb.

Steven Mackey (b. 1956) has a rock background like Tüur, and when he plays electric guitar figurations in Heavy Light from this deftly played and atmospherically recorded New World CD, that background comes to the fore, or at least to the middle-ground. He says he is using rock as a form of vernacular, or folk-reference, in a serious context. So sometimes, think Zappa. Mostly, though, the three works here sound like serious, witty, chromatic chamber music, with the whole of the last century on board.

Three transformative works by three Hungarian composers—Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4, Sz. 91; Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 1; and Kurtag’s 12 Microludes for string quartet, Op. 13—conspire to create a program steeped in the incessant sonics of the 20th century.