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Even playing in total darkness, the JACK Quartet offers illuminating insights.

John Zorn’s compositions presented at The Cloisters contained a bonanza of musical ideas, rolling in unnervingly peculiar waves and presented in clumps and clusters like audio versions of found art. 

A concert of five composers, and three of them women – bravo to the JACK Quartet not just for inimitable execution, but for programming as well.

The musical objects ranged from Phyllis Chen’s custom music-box to a Chinese food take-out box that sounded as if birds were chirping inside. Occasionally, the amalgam of twinkling noises was joined by a titter of laughter from the fascinated audience.

Pam Tanowitz presents two world premieres, a duet and a group work, at the Joyce Theater in her customary balletic-breakdown fashion.

Formed under the artistic direction of Yo-Yo Ma, the Silk Road Ensemble, a collective of distinguished performers and composers from more than 20 countries in Asia, Europe and the Americas, took to the stage at Carnegie Hall Wednesday evening. Looking up at Perelman stage, you'd never guess the group was no more than a small ensemble.

There’s more than one way to blow a trumpet, and the (figuratively) innumerable players at Roulette in Brooklyn accounted for many of them Wednesday night. While Tuesday’s performance at the same venue was the first in the 2013 Festival of New Trumpet Music (FONT), this second concert was much more frank in its orientation, putting the instrument and its idiomatic style directly in the spotlight.

It can be difficult to focus on the music at (Le) Poisson Rouge, a venue “serving art and alcohol” on Bleecker Street in New York. During any of their widely varied avant-garde and new music sets, you will hear forks clinking against plates and see waiters striding across the space to deliver drinks to the audience members, seated around tables or at the bar.

On Thursday evening, not a seat was vacant in Alice Tully Hall for The Holy Visions, the inaugural concert of Lincoln Center Festival’s three-day performance series honoring John Zorn’s impending birthday. The series is just a small installment in Zorn@60, an international celebration of one of New York’s most revered avant-garde composers and musicians, who will turn 60 on 2 September.

John Zorn doesn’t look 60. He looks 35, or whatever age it is where you’re still just about young enough to get away with wearing baggy camouflage pants. “And that’s how it’s done!” he yells through his mic at the end of the first half, over huge applause and cheering from this passionate Barbican audience.

Jennifer Koh and Ensemble LPR helped celebrate the five-year anniversary of (Le) Poisson Rouge Friday night, with a lively program of works by John Zorn, Charles Wuorinen and Ludwig van Beethoven. The club-like atmosphere of LPR was in full swing before the show began, waiters ferrying salads and glasses of wine as percussionists adjusted their instruments on stage under colored blooms of light.

Thursday night at The Kitchen, the exceptional new music ensemble Either/Or performed a diverse selection of five works all composed in the past two years.

International Contemporary Ensemble’s debut London concert was a small-scale affair, tucked away in Hall 2 of Kings Place on a Sunday afternoon. But this talented group still gave us a great taste of why they’re such big news in the United States, with a pleasantly varied programme of new and recent music curated for them by Londoner and long-time collaborator Dai Fujikura.

When it comes to new music, the parameters by which we usually observe classical musicians often fade away. In this case we are speaking about eight cellists, and given this program, it would be of little use to comment on the purity of their sound. Tonight’s scores, in fact, frequently required the sound to be pierced and dirty.