Yarn/Wire, by Bobby Fisher

This almost was called The Rest Is News.

Among the great many kindnesses that Alex Ross has shown me during our years of collegial labor are his occasional nods to my notorious list-making penchant. Mulling what to call this latest addition to my own blog, in which I'll round up some of the noteworthy news and newsworthy notes with which I'm constantly showered, as Alex does regularly, I considered returning the favor.

Nah. Too crass. Still, there's your acknowledgment that this was his idea first.

|| Springfest 2015, a showcase featuring emerging composers and performers from the UC San Diego Department of Music, starts next Tuesday, April 7. It runs through April 11, with concerts day and night at Conrad Prebys Music Center and selected events at The Loft (UCSD). The festival's Immersion event, which includes sound installations, films, a gamelan ensemble, and a performance of The Sinking of the Titanic by Gavin Bryars, follows on April 19 at the Birch Aquarium; details are on the festival's website. ||

|| Composer James Tenney is the subject of a concert to be held at Abrons Arts Center in New York on Saturday, April 11 at 4pm. Presented by the Artists' Institute as part of a season dedicated to artist Carolee Schneemann (with whom Tenney shared creative and romantic ties for the first decade of her career), the concert focuses on Tenney's pithy Postal Pieces; details are here. ||

|| On Sunday, April 19, David Robertson leads the Julliard Orchestra in a 90th-birthday salute to Pierre Boulez at Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center. Included on the program are Boulez’s Rituel (In memoriam Bruno Maderna) and Originel from “…explosante-fixe…,” as well as Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Read an essay by Ara Guzelimian, with comments from Boulez and Robertson, here; learn more and buy tickets here. ||

|| Yarn/Wire, the quartet of pianists Laura Barger and Ning Yu and percussionists Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg (pictured above), has launched a new recording series on Bandcamp, devoted to pieces generated by its Yarn/Wire/Currents collaborative residency at Issue Project Room; included on the first volume are compositions by Thomas Meadowcroft, Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri, and Christopher Trapani. The group has some big performances coming up: On May 7, it plays music by Klaus Lang, Annea Lockwood, and Nate Young as part of Tectonics Festival New York; on May 9, it gives the U.K. premiere of Round-Up by Sufjan Stevens at the Barbican, under the auspices of Mountains and Waves, a festival curated by Bryce Dessner; and on July 15 the group performs new pieces by Raphaël Cendo, Misato Mochizuki, and Tristan Murail for the Lincoln Center Festival. Before all of that, Yarn/Wire holds its annual fundraising gala in a private home in New York City on April 20; details here. ||

|| Torus, a new collection of chamber works that Yotam Haber composed between 2007 and 2014, is due out on April 28 from Roven Records, a new contemporary-classical wing of the GPR label. Featuring performances by Mivos Quartet, Contemporaneous, pianist Eric Huebner, and more, the disc already has been named WQXR-FM's CD of the Week for the week of April 27. ||

|| Speaking of Eric Huebner, his new CD of Schumann's Kreisleriana, Elliott Carter's Night Fantasies, and Stravinsky's Trois mouvements de Pétrouchka, just out on New Focus, is a recording to be savored. More here. ||