David Longstreth’s Song of the Earth, a song cycle for orchestra and voices, is due April 4. Performed by Longstreth with his band Dirty Projectors—Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman, Olga Bell—and the Berlin-based chamber orchestra s t a r g a z e, conducted by André de Ridder, the album also features Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie), Steve Lacy, Patrick Shiroishi, Anastasia Coope, Tim Bernardes, Ayoni, Portraits of Tracy, and the author David Wallace-Wells. Longstreth says that while Song of the Earth—his biggest-yet foray into the field of concert music—"is not a ‘climate change opera,’” he wanted to “find something beyond sadness: beauty spiked with damage. Acknowledgement flecked with hope, irony, humor, rage.”

Composer Steve Reich talks about creating his 1970–71 piece Drumming—which the Village Voice hailed as “the most important work of the whole minimalist music movement"—in a new video from his publisher Boosey & Hawkes. Steve Reich and Musicians gave the world premiere performance of Drumming at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC in December 1971. Their 1987 Nonesuch recording is included in the forthcoming Steve Reich Collected Works, a twenty-seven disc box set, due March 14.