Emmylou Harris, a longtime animal lover and advocate, has teamed up with the animal-rights group PETA to record two new and timely public service announcements. Emmylou urges listeners not to keep their dogs chained outdoors, particularly during the bitter cold of winter, and to bring them indoors, as part of the family, for the benefit of both dog and family alike. She also encourages pet owners to spay or neuter their cats and dogs to help ensure that all dogs and cats find the loving homes they deserve.

Leonard Cohen's classic "Hallelujah" has lately become resurgent in the UK pop world as the featured song on the finale of British TV singing contest X Factor. The song has been interpreted, famously, by countless performers, from Bob Dylan to Jeff Buckley to k.d. lang. k.d. recorded the tune for her 2004 Nonesuch debut, Hymns of the 49th Parallel, and it has become a highlight of her live performances, called “downright transcendent” by the Boston Herald and “mesmerizing” by The Guardian. The BBC has put together a multimedia quiz "Do You Know Your Hallelujahs?" testing readers' knowledge of the song's various incarnations.

Beginning tonight, the PBS series Independent Lens will broadcast Wonders Are Many, the 2007 documentary film that captures the making of John Adams's 2004-05 opera, Doctor Atomic. The film goes behind the scenes to examine both the creation of this monumental work, leading to its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera House, and the working relationship between the longtime collaborators Adams and Sellars.

Elliott Carter's 100th birthday was marked last Thursday at Carnegie Hall and around the world, with celebrations continuing through the weekend and beyond. Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed writes, in his review of the Carnegie event: "The world has never known such an artist, one who has reached 100 prolifically making vibrant work for which the wisdom of experience is employed to produce new sensations. History has been made before in Carnegie Hall and centenaries of great composers celebrated, but Thursday’s concert was a first." In London, the Ensemble Intercontemporain's Carter birthday program earns five stars in The Times (UK) and "must be ranked as one of the musical highs of 2008."

The Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra performs the seasonally appropriate Adams nativity oratorio, El Niño ... David Byrne brings his "spectacular show" (Charleston Post & Courier) to Florida ... Elliott Carter's 100th birthday celebration continues at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and around the world ... Emmylou Harris considers Kitty Wells on NPR's All Things Considered ... Mandy Patinkin performs Mamaloshen and Broadway's finest at New York's Public Theater ... Chris Thile and Edgar Meyer join Garrison Keillor, Yo-Yo Ma, and Renée Fleming for A Prairie Home Companion ... Wilco plays on with Neil Young then headlines in Baltimore ... and more ...

Elliott Carter celebrated his 100th birthday last night with a concert at Carnegie Hall that featured the New York premiere of Interventions, his piece for piano and orchestra, performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, led by James Levine, with Daniel Barenboim at the piano. The New York Times calls the occasion "a milestone in music history. And the 17-minute piece—though brainy and complex, like all of Mr. Carter’s scores—was somehow celebratory: lucidly textured, wonderfully inventive, even impish. This was the work of a living master in full command." The celebration continues this weekend with Making Music: Elliott Carter at Carnegie Hall, Day of Carter at Lincoln Center, and concerts in Chicago, Paris, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Vienna, Cologne, Munich, Basel, and Porto, Portugal.

The McGarrigle Christmas Hour brought more than a little holiday cheer and flair to Carnegie Hall's hallowed Stern Auditorium on Wednesday night. It was a family affair, with Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Kate's children Rufus and Martha Wainwright, their aunt Sloan Wainwright, and many other extended family members by marriage, birth, and longtime friendships, including Emmylou Harris, Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, Justin Bond, and Jimmy Fallon. The New York Times writes: "Although the program still includes the kind of pristine, ancient-sounding French carols performed by the sisters that used to dominate the show, the younger city folk have added a new flavor."

Nonesuch Records wishes Elliott Carter a very happy 100th birthday today. Birthday concerts are being held across the globe tonight, in New York, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Helsinki, Vienna, Montreal, and Washington, DC. Among the highlights are the Ensemble Intercontemporain's concert at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall at the Southbank Centre, featuring Pierre-Laurent Aimard, with Pierre Boulez conducting. In New York, the celebration is at Carnegie Hall, with pianist Daniel Barenboim and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, led by James Levine, in a program the Boston Globe called, after its recent Boston premiere, "easily the best Boston Symphony Orchestra concert of the season." An editorial in The Guardian concludes: "As we salute Carter this week, we are hailing a composer who has always been his own man, and whose music is some of the most remarkable and enduring of our time."

Revolutionary Road has been nominated for four Golden Globe awards. The Sam Mendes–directed film adaptation of the landmark novel by Richard Yates is up for Best Motion Picture, Drama; Best Director for Mendes; Best Actor, Drama, Leonardo DiCaprio; and Best Actress, Drama, Kate Winslet. Nonesuch will release the film's soundtrack on December 23, with original music by Thomas Newman, plus three songs from the film’s era by The Ravens, The Orioles, and The Ink Spots. Also nominated for a Golden Globe, for Best Motion Picture Made for Television, is A Raisin in the Sun, starring Audra McDonald, Sean Combs, and Phylicia Rashad.

With the holiday season bringing with it so many family traditions, one of the more welcome over the past few years has been The McGarrigle Christmas Hour, a concert at Carnegie Hall inspired by the repertoire of Kate and Anna McGarrigle's 2005 Nonesuch album of the same name. The album is a collection of traditional and contemporary holiday songs and a celebration of family and friends, featuring Emmylou Harris, Anna’s daughter Lilly Lanken, and Kate’s children Martha and Rufus Wainwright, all of whom will perform at tonight's show. Also included among the concert's special guests are Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, Teddy Thompson, Linda Thompson, Jimmy Fallon, and Justin Bond.

"Si Naani," the opening track to Toumani Diabaté's 2008 Grammy-nominated album, The Mandé Variations, earns a 95/100 from Jazz.com, which concludes: "This moving 10-minute track, and indeed the whole CD, will leave you anything but restless tonight. This release is an important contribution to Diabaté's oeuvre and is one of the most important recordings of traditional African music in recent memory."

The reissue of the groundbreaking Nonesuch Explorer Series titles from Japan is now complete, with the recent addition of two more titles. The Independent exclaims, "It's wonderful that Nonesuch is reissuing the 92-LP Explorer Series, which put ethnomusicology on the map in the Seventies," and says of the recently reissued Koto Classics: "[I]t's wonderful to hear once more koto master Shinichi Yuize in his prime ... and these classic pieces display [the koto's] suggestive power to the full."