Emmylou Harris, Kronos Quartet, and Philip Glass will be among the diverse array of artists performing at the Sydney Festival in Australia this January. Harris will give three shows, including a free set at the Festival First Night, marking her first time performing in Australia in a decade. Kronos gives the Australian premiere of A Chinese Home, with pipa virtuoso Wu Man, and performs Glass's Dracula with the composer. Glass also offers an evening of his chamber music with cellist Wendy Sutter. The Black Keys will be in Australia for the Big Day Out tour plus several newly added side shows.

Philip Glass will receive the 2010 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Opera Honors Award at The Kennedy Center Opera House in Washington, DC, tonight. The awards ceremony and concert will feature musical tributes from soloists joined by the Washington National Opera Orchestra. Also being honored tonight are soprano Martina Arroyo, general director David DiChiera, and music director Eve Queler.

Philip Glass is being honored at the Danspace Project Gala tonight in New York City. The organization is celebrating Glass for what it describes as "his significant contributions to American dance and his major impact on international art and culture." Laurie Anderson will give introductory remarks. Now in its 35th season, Danspace aims to offer choreographers a nurturing environment in which to develop and show challenging new works.

Philip Glass's seminal 1980 opera Satyagraha returns to English National Opera tonight for a nine-performance run at the London Coliseum through March 10. This follows the production's 2007 London premiere and a 2008 run at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The Times of London called the production "a masterwork of theatrical intensity and integrity." The Guardian called it “a thing of wonder."

Philip Glass is one of five recipients of the Opera News Awards, announced last week. He is the only composer to be recognized this year; fellow honoree Gerald Finley originated the role of Robert Oppenheimer in John Adams's Doctor Atomic. Original music by Glass will be featured in the Shakespeare in the Park production of The Bacchae, which opens in previews tonight in New York's Central Park. The composer will receive his first-ever BBC Prom at London's Royal Albert Hall tomorrow night, with Gidon Kremer performing his Violin Concerto.

Philip Glass and the Philip Glass Ensemble are teaming up with the LA Phil and the LA Master Chorale to present an all-Glass program tonight at the Hollywood Bowl, including "Spaceship," from Einstein on the Beach, described by the Los Angeles Times as "one of the most important and groundbreaking American operas in history," and a screening of the film Koyaanisqatsi, set to a new arrangement of Glass's score for the ensemble and orchestra. The Times says: "Glass's film music has helped make him perhaps the best-known classical composer of the last half-century." LA Weekly writes: "His progressions tend to be brilliantly subtle, forming, like gradated layers of color on canvas, some amazing aural paintings."

Terry Riley's groundbreaking Minimalist masterwork In C turns a remarkable 45 years young this year. To celebrate, Kronos Quartet has gathered about 60 performers, many of whom participated in the piece's premiere in San Francisco in 1964, to join them and the composer to perform the work in Carnegie Hall's Stern Auditorium for the first time. Playbill calls the piece "the minimalist musical be-in that altered the course of music history." New York magazine says, "Carnegie Hall’s extravaganza should yield a rich, polychrome stew of sound."

Philip Glass and the Philip Glass Ensemble gave a marathon performance of the composer's seminal piece Music in Twelve Parts at San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall Monday night. It was the West Coast premiere of the complete work, which had received its world premiere 35 years ago in New York. "I loved it," exclaims San Jose Mercury News critic Richard Scheinin. The piece, "with its youthful energy and imagination, is such a beguiling paradox. At first, it seems so narrow in sound, limited by its minimalist methods. But then, unfolding like time itself, it comes to contain so much. It opens up, grows vast."

Philip Glass will lead a diverse line-up of artists for the 19th annual Tibet House Benefit Concert tonight at Carnegie Hall, where the concert has been held since 1993. Scheduled to perform this year, in addition to Glass, the event's artistic director and the vice president of Tibet House, are Antibalas, Steve Earle, Zack Glass (the composer's son), Angelique Kidjo, Keb' Mo', The National, Patti Smith and Jesse Smith (her daughter), Techung & the Lhasa Spirits, Vampire Weekend, and monks from the Drepung Gomang Monastery in India.

Dartmouth College is hosting Philip Glass this week for a residency that culminates in a public event Thursday night titled An Evening of Films and Discussion with Philip Glass. The event will begin with the screening of two of Glass's film collaborations—Godfrey Reggio's Anima Mundi (1992) and the short film Evidence (1995)—followed by an onstage discussion between the composer and Margaret Lawrence, the director of the school's Hopkins Center for the Arts.

Since the last Nonesuch Journal entry of 2008, which laid out scores of year-end best-of lists featuring Nonesuch albums and artists, still more critical praise has come in placing this music among the year's best.

While 2008 may go down as one of the more turbulent years in recent (or distant) memory, or, more optimistically, a time of change, there is much to celebrate in the year in music. Nonesuch artists across all genres have contributed to that and, accordingly, have made their way onto many critics' lists of the year's best. For the final Nonesuch Journal article of the year, we offer an overview of just some of that year-end critical praise.