Carnegie Hall has announced its 2020–21 concert season, and featured among the performers taking the esteemed hall's stages are a number of artists familiar to readers of the Nonesuch Journal, including Rhiannon Giddens, who is a Perspectives artist for the season, John Adams, Chris Thile, Caroline Shaw, and Kronos Quartet.

Rhiannon Giddens and Emmylou Harris will receive honorary degrees from the University of North Carolina Greensboro during the Commencement ceremony in May. Both artists attended UNCG. "We are so proud to honor Rhiannon Giddens and Emmylou Harris not only for their amazing accomplishments and the indelible impact they have had on music, but for the way they have embodied UNC Greensboro’s motto of service,” said Chancellor Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr. “I hope that all of our students at UNCG will follow their example as they begin their own journeys and chase their own dreams.”

Rhiannon Giddens is the latest guest on Come Hear North Carolina's In the Water series. She visits Wilmington, NC, to discuss the massacre that occurred there in 1898, in which a democratically elected, biracial government was overthrown by a mob of white citizens. She also performs three songs—"Pretty Saro," "At the Purchaser's Option," and "He Will See You Through"—and discusses the importance of storytelling in her own music. You can watch it here.

Paste magazine has made a list of The 40 Best Folk Albums of the 2010s, and among them are four albums familiar to readers of the Nonesuch Journal: Punch Brothers' The Phosphorescent Blues, Rhiannon Giddens' there is no Other, the Inside Llewyn Davis film soundtrack, and Fleet Foxes' Crack-Up.

Rhiannon Giddens and Yola, both nominated for Grammy Awards last week, were featured on the Austin City Limits special of performance highlights from the Americana Honors & Awards. Giddens and Francesco Turrisi performed "Wayfaring Stranger," from their album, there is no Other. Yola sang "Faraway Look" from her album, Walk Through Fire. The special aired on PBS stations over the weekend and can now be seen here.

Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi begin the UK and European leg of their tour with two sold-out concerts for the EFG London Jazz Festival: at the HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs tonight and Royal Festival Hall on Friday. The tour continues in the UK into December, then heads to the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Italy. They return to the States in February and head to New Zealand and Australia in March. Uncut and Mojo named their album, there is no Other, among the Albums of the Year.

Congratulations to all of the Nonesuch nominees for the 62nd Grammy Awards: Yola with four nominations, including Best New Artist and her album Walk Through Fire; Dan Auerbach for Producer of the Year; Rhiannon Giddens for "I'm on My Way" from her album with Francesco Turrisi, there is no Other; Brad Mehldau's Finding Gabriel, Joshua Redman Quartet's Come What May, Caroline Shaw and Attacca Quartet's Orange; and Kronos Quartet for Terry Riley's Sun Rings.

Aria Code, the Rhiannon Giddens–hosted podcast from The Metropolitan Opera and WQXR, returns for its second season today. This time around, Giddens leads the conversation as opera singers and experts examine ten arias centered on the theme of desire. "I've been thinking about what makes great arias so powerful," Giddens says, "and I think a big part of it is that they tap into our strongest emotions. One of the emotions that come up over and over again in opera, and in life, is desire." You can hear the first episode of the new season, on Verdi's Lady Macbeth, here.

Rhiannon Giddens is a guest on Dolly Parton's America, the new WNYC podcast that explores why Parton and her music bring people together in a divided world. In the episode, which you can hear here, host Jad Abumrad looks to Giddens's performance of the Appalachian ballad "Little Margaret," on her new album, there is no Other, with Francesco Turrisi on the Iranian frame drum, the daf, to find connections across cultures. "There are these moments that remind us that we all come from the same source," Giddens says. "The human story is about migration, it is about movement, it is about one group moves from A to B and in that, they affect and are themselves affected."

Rhiannon Giddens is the guest on a special bonus episode of Following Harriet, a podcast series that takes a look at the life of Harriet Tubman and the broader context of the nineteenth-century experience of African Americans. She discusses Tubman's life and legacy, and Giddens's song "At the Purchaser's Option," from her album Freedom Highway. She was inspired to write the song by an 1830s advertisement for a young enslaved woman whose nine-month-old baby was "at the purchaser's option." You can listen to the conversation here.

Rhiannon Giddens was on Amanpour & Co. on PBS. "The award-winning musical polymath," says host Christiane Amanpour is "on a mission to re-frame the history of African Americans and their contributions to the musical landscape." Historian Walter Isaacson talks with Giddens about that history and how it influenced her "amazing" new album, there is no Other. You can watch it here.

Rhiannon Giddens performed as part of NPR Music's multi-artist Turning the Tables concert at Lincoln Center Out of Doors in July, a celebration of "eight women who invented American popular music": Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Maybelle Carter, Marion Anderson, Ella Fitzgerald, Mary Lou Williams, Celia Cruz, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Giddens opens the concert, performing A.P. Carter's "You Are My Flower" with Courtney Marie Andrews, the spiritual "Deep River" with Lizz Wright, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe's "Up Above My Head." You can watch it here.