New Focus Recordings

Avant-garde music is an umbrella term for boundary-pushing practices that challenge prevailing norms of harmony, rhythm, timbre, form, and performance. It privileges experimentation, conceptual rigor, and a willingness to reframe what counts as music at all. Historically tied to early 20th‑century artistic modernism, avant-garde music introduced atonality, the emancipation of noise, and new forms of notation and process. It embraces indeterminacy, extended techniques, electronics, spatialization, and multimedia performance, treating sound as material to be sculpted, questioned, and reinvented.

Classical music is the notated art-music tradition of Europe and its global descendants, characterized by durable forms, carefully codified harmony and counterpoint, and a literate score-based practice. The term “classical” can refer broadly to the entire Western art-music lineage from the Medieval era to today, not just the Classical period (c. 1750s–1820s). It privileges long-form structures (such as symphonies, sonatas, concertos, masses, and operas), functional or modal harmony, thematic development, and timbral nuance across ensembles ranging from solo instruments to full orchestras and choirs. Across centuries, the style evolved from chant and modal polyphony to tonal harmony, and later to post-tonal idioms, while maintaining a shared emphasis on written notation, performance practice, and craft.

Contemporary classical is the broad field of Western art music created after World War II. It embraces an array of aesthetics—from serialism and indeterminacy to minimalism, spectralism, electroacoustic practices, and post‑tonal lyricism—while retaining a concern for notated composition and timbral innovation. Unlike the unified styles of earlier eras, contemporary classical is pluralistic. Composers freely mix acoustic and electronic sound, expand instrumental techniques, adopt non‑Western tuning and rhythm, and explore new forms, from process-based structures to open and graphic scores. The result is a music that can be rigorously complex or radically simple, technologically experimental or intimately acoustic, yet consistently focused on extending how musical time, timbre, and form can be shaped.

Electroacoustic music is a broad art-music tradition that integrates recorded acoustic sound and electronically generated or processed sound into coherent musical works. It privileges timbre, gesture, texture, and spatialization over conventional melody-and-harmony song forms, often employing tape manipulation, synthesis, live electronics, and computer-based signal processing. Works are frequently composed for fixed media (stereo or multichannel loudspeakers) and may also involve live performers who are transformed in real time. Concert presentation typically emphasizes spatial diffusion and immersive listening, and the repertoire spans concert works, radio pieces, installations, and soundscape compositions.

Experimental music is an umbrella term for practices that prioritize exploration, process, and discovery over adherence to established genre norms. It embraces new sound sources, nonstandard tuning systems, indeterminacy and chance operations, graphic and open-form scores, extended techniques, and technology-led sound design (tape, electronics, computers, and live processing). Rather than a single style, it is a methodology and ethos: testing hypotheses about sound, structure, and performance, often blurring boundaries between composition, improvisation, sound art, and performance art. Listeners can expect unfamiliar timbres, unusual forms, and an emphasis on how music is made as much as the resulting sound.

Experimental electronic is an umbrella term for electronic music that foregrounds exploration and innovation over convention. It treats the studio, computer, and synthesizer as laboratories, using techniques such as tape manipulation, modular and software synthesis, feedback systems, granular and spectral processing, algorithmic/generative composition, circuit-bending, and field recording. Rather than regular song forms or dancefloor functionality, it prioritizes timbre, texture, space, and process. Structures may be nonlinear or open-form; harmony is often non-functional or drone-based; rhythm can be free, irregular, or machine-deconstructed. The style overlaps with electroacoustic music, sound art, industrial, ambient, and noise while continually interfacing with club culture and contemporary art contexts.

Free improvisation is a practice of spontaneous music-making that avoids fixed idioms, stylistic templates, and pre-agreed structures. Musicians prioritize listening, interaction, and the exploration of sound itself—timbre, texture, dynamics, and silence—over conventional melody, harmony, or pulse. Guitarist Derek Bailey popularized the notion of "non-idiomatic improvisation," describing a music that deliberately resists falling into recognizable genre habits. While often overlapping with free jazz and contemporary classical experimentalism, free improvisation is not confined to either. It welcomes any instrument or sound source—acoustic, electronic, or everyday objects—and frequently uses extended techniques, feedback, and unconventional performance gestures. Performances can range from whisper-quiet, pointillistic interplay to ferocious, high-energy noise, with the ensemble shaping form in real time through attention and constraint.

Indie pop is a melodic, DIY-rooted branch of alternative music that blends the immediacy of pop songwriting with the independence and aesthetics of underground scenes. It typically features jangly, clean-toned guitars, tuneful bass lines, compact song structures, and intimate, literate lyrics that balance sweetness with subtle melancholy. The sound often leans toward bright chord progressions, earworm choruses, and understated production, favoring charm and personality over gloss. Culturally, indie pop is tied to small labels, fanzines, and community radio, with influential scenes and imprints such as Postcard, Sarah, and Creation laying the groundwork for its global diffusion.

Jazz is an improvisation-centered music tradition that emerged from African American communities in the early 20th century. It blends blues feeling, ragtime syncopation, European harmonic practice, and brass band instrumentation into a flexible, conversational art. Defining features include swing rhythm (a triplet-based pulse), call-and-response phrasing, blue notes, and extended harmonies built on 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths. Jazz is as much a way of making music—spontaneous interaction, variation, and personal sound—as it is a set of forms and tunes. Across its history, jazz has continually hybridized, from New Orleans ensembles and big-band swing to bebop, cool and hard bop, modal and free jazz, fusion, and contemporary cross-genre experiments. Its influence permeates global popular and art music.

Punk is a fast, abrasive, and minimalist form of rock music built around short songs, stripped-down instrumentation, and confrontational, anti-establishment lyrics. It emphasizes DIY ethics, raw energy, and immediacy over virtuosity, often featuring distorted guitars, shouted or sneered vocals, and simple, catchy melodies. Typical songs run 1–3 minutes, sit around 140–200 BPM, use power chords and basic progressions (often I–IV–V), and favor live, unpolished production. Beyond sound, punk is a cultural movement encompassing zines, independent labels, political activism, and a fashion vocabulary of ripped clothes, leather, and safety pins.

Romantic classical is the 19th‑century phase of Western art music that prioritizes individual expression, expanded harmony, poetic narrative, and coloristic orchestration. Compared with the balance and restraint of the Classical period, Romantic music embraces chromaticism, adventurous modulation, extreme dynamics, and richer timbres. It elevates subjectivity and imagination, often through programmatic works that depict stories, landscapes, or emotions, and through intimate forms such as the Lied and character piece. The orchestra grows dramatically (trombones, tuba, expanded winds, harp, larger percussion), the piano becomes a virtuoso vehicle, and new concepts like thematic transformation and leitmotif link music to literary and dramatic ideas.

Theme and variations is a classical musical form in which a clearly stated theme is followed by a sequence of self-contained variations that transform the theme’s melody, harmony, rhythm, texture, register, mode, meter, or orchestration. Although used across many eras, the form crystallized during the late Renaissance and Baroque periods through keyboard and lute traditions, then became a structural mainstay in the Classical and Romantic eras. In performance, the listener recognizes the original idea through its continuities—often the harmonic plan or characteristic contour—while enjoying the inventive contrasts that each variation brings.

The string quartet is a cornerstone chamber-music genre scored for two violins, viola, and cello. It typically features a conversational texture where four independent voices share thematic material, balancing melody, harmony, and counterpoint. The classic four‑movement plan (fast sonata‑form, slow movement, minuet/scherzo, and a lively finale) became a hallmark in the Classical era, while later composers expanded and transformed the form, harmony, rhythm, and timbre. From Haydn and Mozart through Beethoven and Schubert to Bartók and Shostakovich, the quartet has served as a laboratory for compositional craft and expressive depth, ranging from intimate lyricism to rigorous structure and avant‑garde experimentation.

Chamber music is a tradition of composed music for small ensembles—typically one player per part—intended for intimate spaces such as courts, salons, and private rooms rather than large public halls. Its aesthetic emphasizes clarity of texture, conversational interplay among parts, and balance without a conductor. Hallmark formations include the string quartet, piano trio, wind quintet, string quintet, and various mixed ensembles. Multi‑movement cycles (often in sonata form) and finely wrought counterpoint are common, ranging from Baroque trio sonatas to Classical string quartets and modern works with expanded timbres and techniques. Because of its scale and transparency, chamber music has long been a proving ground for compositional craft and ensemble musicianship, shaping the core of Western art music from the Baroque through the present.

An orchestra is a large, mixed instrumental ensemble centered on strings (violins, violas, cellos, double basses) with woodwinds, brass, and percussion, typically led by a conductor. It serves as the core performing body for symphonies, concertos, overtures, ballet and opera pits, and modern film/television scoring. Orchestras are designed for dynamic range, coloristic variety, and large-scale architectural form. Their sound world is shaped by section blend (e.g., string choirs), solo and soli passages, and timbral combinations (doublings) that create distinct colors. While rooted in the Western classical tradition, the orchestral ensemble has become a global medium that adapts to contemporary idioms, technologies, and cross-cultural collaborations.

Romanticism in music is a 19th‑century movement that prioritizes individual expression, emotional intensity, and evocative storytelling over the balanced clarity of the Classical era. It expands harmony with richer chromaticism and distant modulations, stretches forms (longer developments, cyclic structures), and favors flexible tempo (rubato) and extreme dynamics. Orchestras grow in size and color (tuba, piccolo, contrabassoon, harp, expanded brass and percussion), while the piano becomes a primary vehicle for intimate expression and virtuoso display. Key genres include the art song (Lied), character piece, symphony and symphonic poem, and grand opera with leitmotifs. Program music—works that narrate scenes, poems, or ideas—stands alongside absolute music, both suffused with heightened subjectivity, nature imagery, nationalism, and the sublime.

Modern classical is a contemporary strand of instrumental music that applies classical composition techniques to intimate, cinematic settings. It typically foregrounds piano and strings, is sparsely orchestrated, and embraces ambience, repetition, and timbral detail. Rather than the academic modernism of the early 20th century, modern classical as used today refers to accessible, mood-driven works that sit between classical, ambient, and film music. Felt pianos, close‑miked string quartets, tape hiss, drones, soft electronics, and minimal harmonic movement are common, producing a contemplative, emotionally direct sound that translates well to headphones, streaming playlists, and screen media.

Experimental vocal is a boundary‑pushing approach to voice that treats the human vocal tract as a full-spectrum instrument. It privileges timbre, texture, and technique over conventional melody and lyric, foregrounding breath, phonemes, and raw sound just as much as sung notes. Artists employ extended vocal techniques such as overtone singing, multiphonics, shrieks, growls, glottal stops, ululation, whistle register, inhaled phonation, tongue clicks, and non-lexical glossolalia. These are often combined with live electronics, tape and granular processing, looping, and spatialization to expand the voice beyond its natural limits. While it overlaps with avant‑garde classical, sound art, and performance art, experimental vocal is not bound to any single tradition. It can be stark and ritualistic, viscerally intense, or meditative and textural, ranging from solo explorations to choral sound masses and multimedia works.

World music is a broad, industry-coined umbrella for traditional, folk, and contemporary popular styles from around the globe that fall outside the Anglo-American pop mainstream. The label emerged in the 1980s as a retail and marketing category to group diverse regional musics for international distribution. Musically, it spans acoustic and electric instrumentation; modal, pentatonic, and microtonal pitch systems; and rhythms ranging from cyclical grooves and polyrhythms to asymmetrical meters. While the term can obscure local specificity, it also facilitated cross-cultural collaboration, festivals, and recordings that brought regional genres to wider audiences.