Rhiannon Giddens has teamed with composer Michael Abels (Get Out) and members of the Met Opera Chorus and Nashville Ballet for a new interpretation of her song "Cry No More," which she first wrote and released in the wake of the 2015 Charleston church shooting. Following the murder of Breonna Taylor, Giddens re-recorded the track to emphasize its timeliness with added fervor, as she makes a plea for unity against injustice. You can watch the new video here.

Dave Malloy's Octet, directed by Annie Tippe, is due to get its West Coast premiere in Berkeley Repertory Theatre's spring 2021 season, a co-production with NYC's Signature Theatre, which premiered Octet in 2019. "I'm so thrilled to be returning to Berkeley with Octet, and have this show continue to evolve under the care of two of my favorite theatres," says Malloy. "It's a wonderful extension of my Signature residency, bringing this work to another coast, in a theatre that will hopefully by then be filled with smiling, healthy, socially close theatregoers.” The original cast recording is available on Nonesuch.

Congratulations to Gaby Moreno and Van Dyke Parks, whose 2019 Nonesuch album, ¡Spangled!, has been nominated for a Latin Grammy Award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. ¡Spangled! celebrates the migration of song across the Americas, spanning more than a century, including a bolero from Panama, a bossa nova from Brazil, a song by Moreno, Trinidadian songwriter David Rudder's "The Immigrants," and an elegiac ballad from the Southwest US: Ry Cooder, John Hiatt, and Jim Dickinson’s “Across the Borderline." Winners will be announced on November 19.

Mountain Man has released Mountain Man Sings Simple Gifts, the latest in its series of cover singles, featuring its version of the Shaker hymn. "'Simple Gifts' is one of those incredible songs that transforms you while you sing it,” says the trio. "It's like an incantation, and it was a joy to record."

Sarah Kirkland Snider "asserts her own musical personality as a composer who knows instinctively how to write for the human voice," says Tom Huizenga in his review of her Mass for the Endangered on NPR's All Things Considered, which you can hear here. "Both the choir [Gallicantus] and the 12-member orchestra, conducted by Gabriel Crouch, respond to Snider's music with richly tailored performances ... Through her smart and resplendent exploration of age-old musical formulas, Snider's eco-inspired Mass for the Endangered is a blast from the past that resonates profoundly in the present."

Joachim Cooder, whose Nonesuch debut album, Over That Road I'm Bound, is out this Friday, will perform a series of virtual in-store performances via Instagram Live of several US independent record stores this week. The sets begin on the Instagram of Music Millennium Records in Portland, OR, tonight, followed by Salzer's Records in Ventura, Grimey's in Nashville, Boo Boo Records in San Luis Obispo, and Electric Fetus in Minneapolis on release day. Details here.

The soundtrack to the Tim Burton–directed film of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, first released on Nonesuch in 2007, will receive its first-ever vinyl edition on November 13, 2020, in a two-LP set, available to pre-order now. The film, which won the Golden Globe for Best Picture, is an adaptation by John Logan of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s musical, starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and the late Alan Rickman. "Something close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme—I am tempted to say evil—genius," exclaimed the New York Times' A.O. Scott. "This Sweeney is a bloody wonder," raved Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, "intimate and epic, horrific and heart-rending as it flies on the wings of Sondheim's most thunderously exciting score."

Composer Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Mass for the Endangered, is out now on New Amsterdam and Nonesuch Records. A video for “Alleluia” from the Mass, the third video for the project made by Deborah Johnson / CandyStations, can be seen here. Snider’s Mass, with a libretto by poet/writer Nathaniel Bellows, is a celebration of, and an elegy for, the natural world—animals, plants, insects, the planet itself—an appeal for greater awareness, urgency, and action. Originally commissioned by Trinity Church Wall Street, this recording features the English vocal ensemble Gallicantus conducted by Gabriel Crouch.

Tristan Perich’s Drift Multiply, for 50 violins and 50-channel 1-bit electronics, will be released November 13, 2020, on New Amsterdam and Nonesuch Records, and is available to preorder now. The piece, Perich’s largest work to date, is conducted by Douglas Perkins. Scored as one hundred individual lines of music, the piece blends violins and speakers into a cascading tapestry of tone, harmony, and noise. The violins perform from sheet music, while the speakers are each connected to custom-built circuit boards programmed to output 1-bit audio, the most basic digital waveforms made of just ones and zeroes.

k.d. lang's 2008 Nonesuch album, Watershed, declared "a masterpiece" by the Times, will be released on vinyl for the first time on November 20, and is available to pre-order now. As the title suggests, Watershed represented a milestone in lang’s career. For the first time, she assumed the role of producer, as well as writer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist. “Watershed is like a culmination of everything I’ve done," lang said; "there’s a little bit of jazz, a little country, a little of the Ingénue sound, a little Brazilian touch ... I didn’t feel the need to be genre-specific because this experience felt so wide open."

HBO has released the official trailer for David Byrne’s American Utopia, which will debut October 17 at 8pm ET/PT on HBO and HBO Max. You can watch it here. The special event, directed by Spike Lee, presents a one-of-a-kind, dynamic film that gives audiences access to Byrne’s critically-acclaimed Broadway show that played to sold-out, record-breaking audiences. The filmed version was recorded during its late 2019 to early 2020 run at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre in New York City.

Multidisciplinary abstractivist and auteur Rob Mazurek will release a new album with Exploding Star Orchestra, Dimensional Stardust, via International Anthem / Nonesuch Records on November 20, 2020. The album track "A Wrinkle in Time Sets Concentric Circles Reeling" is available today; the video by Mikel Patrick Avery can be seen here. Mazurek arranged his pieces for eleven musicians and commissioned his long-time lyrics collaborator Damon Locks to draft original texts for the songs. The album recalls an array of Mazurek’s symphonic­ influences, from Béla Bartók to Morton Feldman to Gil Evans to Sun Ra to Pedro Santos to Bill Dixon to The Art Ensemble of Chicago. Opting to focus on tight ensemble orchestration over passages of open improvisation, he distills an orchestra of explosive improvisers into a graceful group exercise in melodic minimalism.