Avant-garde

In the music on composer David Bird's new album, the hardness and coldness of actual metal seem almost literally audible.

"While the world is waiting for the UFC Freedom 250 on June 14 at the White House, I challenge President Putin to a cage match," says Pussy Riot.

A work like this asks us to exercise our patience, something in short supply these days – to listen closely to a spread of sound over time without imposing expectations on it.

The man-machine duality of a soloist performing alongside a recording has what in the pre-robotic, pre-AI age we might have called a futuristic quality. Today it touches on the "uncanny valley" effect.

The Taiwan Philharmonic Chamber Ensemble and Taiwu Ballads Troupe vocal ensemble unveiled a panoply of fascinating, mostly Taiwan-rooted music that incorporated Western classical, contemporary avant-garde, and Indigenous music.

Sometimes musicians create an atypical instrument combination simply because they have similar tastes or just like working together. Not so here – there's no sense of anything forced, or absent.

The placement of the different instruments in the listener's ears creates a sense of surrounding space; the bleed of one tone's decay into the attack of the next seems to smooth over the passage of time.

Despite the presence of Stravinsky's 'Firebird,' it was a large new work by Pulitzer Prize winner Ellen Reid that proved the program's creative centerpiece.

In this music Liang raises the process of creation to such an esoteric level that the substance thins out almost to the vanishing point.

It's quite possible to enjoy (or disdain) the music without thinking or knowing anything about music theory. A little bit Charles Ives, a little bit Raymond Scott, a little bit Looney Tunes, it conjures a fusion – really a plurality of fusions – all its own, and all with tongue in cheek.