Emmylou Harris, Shawn Colvin, Patty Griffin, and Buddy Miller begin a month-long run of their rollicking Three Girls and Their Buddy tour tonight with the first of two consecutive nights at The Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia. The tour concludes at the end of the month in Boston, where the Boston Globe says the show "brings together four shining talents and close collaborators who straddle the country-folk-pop axis ... on the road en masse to perform as a foursome, four venerated song catalogs in tow."

David Byrne, Wilco, Allen Toussaint, and Toumani Diabaté (sharing the stage with Béla Fleck) will be among the scores of incredible performers at the 2009 Bonnaroo festival. This year's incarnation of the event will be held June 11–14 in Manchester, Tennessee. In other festival news, Coachella, in Indio, California, has also announced its lineup for 2009. The Black Keys are among the headliners for the festival's opening night, April 17, as are such legendary performer/songwriters as Leonard Cohen and Paul McCartney.

Dan Auerbach's forthcoming solo debut album, Keep It Hid, is featured in the latest episode of NPR's All Songs Considered. The show's host, Bob Boilen, explains that, though it's been a while since he's been a fan of electric guitar–based blues, other than Led Zeppelin, "I may change my mind after hearing a new record by Dan Auerbach." Keep It Hid, says Boilen, has "a good variety of songs that are tinged by psychedelia, at times a bit of gospel, country, and blues."

John Adams led the Juilliard Opera Center in a concert performance of his 1991opera The Death of Klinghoffer on Saturday night, the culmination of Juilliard's FOCUS! 2009 festival. The distance of a new generation of performers "allowed this searing, mystical and ambitious work to come through without the doctrinaire baggage that has attached to it over the years," writes the New York Times's Anthony Tommasini. "What came through here, for me, was that this is one of Mr. Adams’s most intricate, entrancing and impressive scores. With these sympathetic young performers Mr. Adams was able to present it the way he envisioned it, or so it seemed as he took bows during the long ovation."

The Punch Brothers' US tour is winding through the South this week, having stopped at the Alys Robinson Stephens Performing Arts Center in Birmingham on Saturday. The Birmingham News gives the performance four stars, calling Chris Thile "extremely gifted, both as an instrumentalist and a composer," describing the band's music as "a distinctly modern sound that can be dramatic or lighthearted, solemn or joyful, rollicking or dissonant," and praising its "stellar musicianship. Thile and his bandmates can play just about anything and ace it."

The Magnetic Fields and k.d. lang have both been nominated as Outstanding Music Artist in the 20th annual GLAAD Media Awards for their 2008 Nonesuch releases, Distortion and Watershed, respectively. The GLAAD Media Awards recognize and honor media for their fair, accurate, and inclusive representations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community and the issues that affect their lives.

Punch Brothers bring their "dizzyingly fresh" (Birmingham News) music to Alabama ... John Adams conducts The Death of Klinghoffer to close Juilliard's FOCUS! festival ... The Black Keys head home to Ohio for two nights in Cleveland ... Kronos Quartet gives West Coast premieres at Berkeley ... Steve Reich continues his central role in Vassar's Modfest festival ... Allen Toussaint begins his Joe's Pub residency ... Jeff Tweedy and Glenn Kotche play separate solo dates ... Dawn Upshaw and David Byrne tour Australia ... and more ...

Gomidas Songs, Isabel Bayrakdarian's 2008 Nonesuch debut and a Grammy nominee for Best Classical Vocal Performance, rates a perfect five stars in a review in The Scotsman, which states that this collection of songs by Armenian "composer of genius" Gomidas Vardabet "is a series of his songs with classical instrumental arrangements, sung with bewitching power by the Armenian-Canadian soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian. The accompaniment—by an ensemble led by Serouj Kradjian—is perfectly apt."

Pulitzer Prize–winning composer George Perle died on Friday, January 23, 2009, at his home in Manhattan. He was 93. Perle, often considered one of the most lyrical of a new generation of atonal composers, wrote prolifically, including symphonic, chamber, vocal, and piano works. Perle often referred to his style of writing as "12-tone tonality." Richard Goode, in his liner notes to a Nonesuch recording of Perle works, wrote of the composer's music: "In its sobriety and playfulness, its rhythmic unpredictability, its delicate balance of harmonic and contrapuntal energies, it often brings Haydn to mind ... Whatever the emotional intensities expressed, one feels a language has been found that is exactly suited to its expressive requirements."

Rokia Traoré stops by the studios of WNYC, New York public radio, for today's episode of Soundcheck. She'll talk with the show's host, John Schaefer, about her recent Nonesuch release, Tchamantché, and perform some songs from the album. The show begins at 2 PM ET. New York audiences can tune in on 93.9 FM; listeners from around the world can catch the live stream on wnyc.org. Rokia begins a ten-day US tour next week.

John Adams's String Quartet will receive its world premiere tonight in a performance by the St. Lawrence String Quartet at The Juilliard School's Peter Jay Sharp Theater. The concert is part of Juilliard's annual FOCUS! festival. The new piece is Adams’s second full-length work for string quartet, after 1994's John’s Book of Alleged Dances. The composer will participate in a pre-concert talk beginning at 6 PM. He leads the Juilliard Opera Center in a semi-staged production of The Death of Klinghoffer this Saturday night.

Dawn Upshaw begins a two-week tour of Australia with the Australian Chamber Orchestra in Canberra Friday night. On the tour program are works by Mozart, Strauss, Bartók, and Upshaw's frequent collaborator, Osvaldo Golijov. The Australian lauds her "near-rapturous devotion to art" and her support of new music, in particular. "Upshaw's commitment to music goes beyond her choice of repertoire, however. It's in the texture and expressive shading of her voice, the aural evidence of her intelligent probing of text and music."