Modern Notebook

On the next Modern Notebook with Tyler Kline: Aart Strootman’s Descend is a gentle tide of sound — slow, glassy, and immersive. Strings drift in silvery layers, surfacing and folding back on themselves in waves that feel tactile and luminous. There’s a quiet, rhythmic shimmer beneath it all, like a faraway rattle rolling in with the current.Then: How do we hold on, even as everything changes? That question lies beneath The Impermanence of Things by Michael Zev Gordon. Across thirteen brief movements, the piece slips between motion and stillness, with fleeting echoes of Couperin, Debussy, and Mahler surfacing like memories.

On the next Modern Notebook with Tyler Kline: Andrea Casarrubios wrote Herencia — meaning both “heritage” and “inheritance” — not with a genre in mind, but with specific performers. She imagined the musicians of Sphinx Virtuosi stepping onstage, each carrying their own personal and cultural history, converging into a collective intention to illuminate the world through music.Then: Martin Bresnick’s Mending Time draws inspiration from Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall, and the famous line: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Scored for four saxophones, the piece reflects on the walls we build — for safety, for expression, for division — and invites us to consider how those barriers might also be mended.

On the next Modern Notebook with Tyler Kline: How do we process loss, or even violence — collectively or alone? In his piece Manusa, composer Dorian Wallace turns to the five stages of grief as a guide, crafting a deeply human meditation through sound.Then: After dark, the world transforms — and in Moth x Human, composer Ellie Wilson gives voice to that unseen world. Using real moth activity data, she crafts an interspecies performance where field recordings, instruments, and sonified biodiversity blend into a vivid nocturnal soundscape.

On the next Modern Notebook with Tyler Kline: Precision meets pulse in Seven Eleven — a hypnotic piece by Swiss composer Nik Bärtsch, known for fusing minimalism, jazz, and groove into something entirely his own. Built on interlocking rhythmic cycles, the music moves with the quiet intensity of a ritual: calculated, entrancing, and alive in the hands of percussion.Then: For composer Sinan C. Savaşkan, The Sleep of Reason began as a dreamlike hallucination — a looping, microtonal tune he couldn’t shake on a tense overnight bus ride through London. That experience, alongside memories of Goya’s eerie etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, evolved into a solo flute piece full of shadows, symbols, and unresolved questions.

On the next Modern Notebook with Tyler Kline: Composer Daniel Thomas Davis calls What if We’re Beautiful an experiment in musical gift-craft — a set of movements stitched together like handmade sonic objects. With its boisterous charm and delicate sincerity, the piece includes a hurdy-gurdy tune that’s as playfully heartfelt as the friendships it honors.Then: Lila Meretzky’s For Linda Catlin Smith is a quartet written in tribute to one of her key influences. Smith’s music often lives in the realm of ambiguity — subtle, spacious, and shaped by her love of painting and literature — and Meretzky’s piece seems to breathe in that same quiet way.

On the next Modern Notebook with Tyler Kline: Drawing from the Korean folk song Jeongsun Arirang, Hyunjoo Byon’s Arari unfolds in five variations — blending traditional modes and modern textures. With oboe and piano weaving between tonalities, the piece becomes a quiet dialogue between Eastern roots and Western technique.Then: Combining solo viola and percussion might seem unlikely — but Kalevi Aho leans into that contrast in his Moonlight Concerto. Six interconnected movements unfold with shimmering sonorities, ancient ritual influences, and rare percussion instruments like waterphone, Thai gongs, and moon gong.

On the next Modern Notebook with Tyler Kline: Memories of friendship linger beneath each short movement in Hugi Gudmundsson’s Coniunctio — moments on park benches, in bars, on quiet walks. Composed for cello, the piece unfolds in brief, focused chapters that reflect intimacy through gesture, space, and shared experience.Then: Luciano Berio once described a utopian dream: to build a bridge between folk traditions and modern music-making. In Folk Songs, that vision takes shape through melodies from eight cultures — reimagined not as museum pieces, but as living, breathing connections to everyday life.

On the next Modern Notebook with Tyler Kline: Steven Mackey’s Stumble to Grace traces a journey with the piano: from clumsy beginnings to a confident, contrapuntal fugue. Inspired by his toddler’s early steps, the piece moves through stages of progress and play — a portrait of growth shaped by both joy and challenge.Then: Rhythms passed from father to son form the heart of Murmurs in Time — a rare classical percussion piece by tabla master Zakir Hussain. Rooted in Hindustani tradition but shaped through collaboration, it invites performers to internalize, transform, and return each pattern in a new voice.