On this edition of Living Classical with Tyler Kline: For composer and violinist Nalah Aiden Palmer, progress came in the form of turning corners – the tops of hills finally reached, in a mentor's words. Turning takes that image as its title and its premise, written for the violin instructor who witnessed the climb. Then: Peter Van Zandt Lane built Coastal Portrait: Cycles and Thresholds from real environmental data–measurements of temperature, salinity, and sea level gathere

On this edition of Living Classical with Tyler Kline: Anchored by the anthem "Lift Every Voice and Sing," Omar Thomas's Of Our New Day Begun is built from the traditions of the Black American church – singing, stomping, clapping, the sound of refuge in trying times. Thomas wrote it in memory of the nine lives lost at Charleston's Mother Emanuel church in 2015, holding both grief and grace in the same music. Then: Inkjaw by Luke Garrigus blends traditional notation with hand-d

On this edition of Living Classical with Tyler Kline: A dialogue between piano and orchestra – sometimes contentious, sometimes unified – runs through Paola Prestini's Hindsight: Let Me See the Sun, a concerto that coalesces by its close into a single whistling line. Shaped by the composer's own experience as an immigrant artist, the piece holds both the optimism and the fragility of voices calling out for equity. Then: What happens to a rhythm when you stretch it far enough

On this edition of Living Classical, Tyler Kline marks July 4th with music by living American composers—from a piece inspired by the Star-Spangled Banner's 200th anniversary to works rooted in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the desert Southwest, and the architecture of Chicago. A survey of the people, places, and ideas that make up this country, told through the composers writing American music today. Music by Allison Loggins-Hull, Jessie Montgomery, Katherine Bergman, Marcus Maro

On this edition of Living Classical with Tyler Kline: Juhi Bansal's Land of Waking Dreams begins in the desert backcountry, under a night sky: pointillistic stars, shifting blues, wind across open plateaus. Written for solo piano, the piece moves through that murky nightscape the way the eye moves across darkness: slowly, finding shapes. Then: Orun, in the Yoruba religion, is both an origin and a destination – the invisible dimension where ancestral wisdom accumulates and flo

On this edition of Living Classical, Tyler Kline marks Juneteenth with music by living Black American composers. Featured this week: Ahmed Alabaca's Mere Mortals, holding to the conviction that human life is precious and deserves compassion; Alvin Singleton's Time Past, Time Future, a piece that moves between Thelonious Monk and Bach in search of balance; Valerie Coleman's Tracing Visions, which shifts between an elegy and a Zulu battle cry for unity; and a setting of a Harle

On this edition of Living Classical with Tyler Kline: Vivian Fung's Violin Concerto grew out of two things happening at once – a friendship with a violinist who wanted to understand where Fung's ideas came from, and a tour of Bali that brought those ideas into sharp focus. The result draws on gamelan sonorities, odd meters, and a cadenza with a single instruction: "play like a rock star." Then: In most concertos, the soloist leads and the orchestra follows. But Dai Fujikura's

On this edition of Living Classical with Tyler Kline: Toru Takemitsu described Dreamtime the way he described dreams themselves–short episodes suspended in seeming incoherency that somehow form a whole. Written for dance in 1981, the piece moves through a shimmering orchestral texture where melodic shapes surface briefly, pass, and dissolve before anything quite resolves. Then: A William Meredith poem about the beautiful randomness of perceived systems–stars, islands, relatio

On this edition of Living Classical with Tyler Kline: Immigration rarely accounts for the emotional cost of leaving–the grief, the inner conflict, the world you build in your mind versus the one you find. Joe Kye's Safe Harbor holds all of it, weaving Korean and American folk music with his own text into a piece that moves from a childhood lullaby to a personal mantra for rooted self-empowerment. Then: Lei Liang first encountered the folk music of Taiwan's aboriginal tribes a

On this edition of Living Classical with Tyler Kline: Nubia Jaime-Donjuan composes from the intersection of two worlds–a cellist and composer raised in Sonora, Mexico, drawn to the cultural and natural textures of her environment. Tyler Kline shares two of her works, including Danza Mestiza, a piece that links Spanish and Mexican musical traditions in a single dance. Then: Conceived in Iceland, Linda Buckley's Friður pairs piano with an electronic track that creates an atmosp