Stefan Klaverdal is one of his generation’s most active and performed composers in Sweden and his music has been performed countless times in Europe and elsewhere. In recent years, his focus has been on purely vocal pieces and vocal and instrumental pieces in combination with live electronics. An early and frequently performed work is Fragment av en mässa (Fragment of a mass) (1999) for vocal sextet, while the much talked about scenic oratorio Judas (2003) for vocal soloists, mixed choir, organ and electronics, stands as one of his seminal creations. A prominent and long-standing feature of Klaverdal’s work is cross-genre collaboration, especially his music for dance performances and for dance and art films. His scores to the dance films Manskligt monster (Human pattern) and Insyn (Insight) earned him top honours in the multimedia category at the Bourges International Festival of Electroacoustic Music and Sonic Art in 2006 and 2008. Klavedal was originally a singer, and strives to reproduce these lyrical and human qualities in his compositions. With live electronics as an active extension of his own voice, he paints electroacoustic landscapes from a palette of passion, drama and beauty. Watch a performance of Stefan Klaverdal's  eyes like a flame of fire (2009) with soprano recorder player Susanna Borsch . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

Choreographer Jiri Kylian’s Memoires d’Oubliettes (2009) was a fitting inclusion in Nederlands Dans Theater’s 50th Anniversary Tour, concluding Kylian reign as resident choreographer, with pieces that offer echoes of nostalgia yet retains all the freshness and relevance of the magnificent Nederlands Dans Theater company. In Memoires d’Oubliettes the dancers explore a shadowy, empty terrain, at times moving as though pushing through inky waters - with a silky slowness and a spellbinding serenity - at others, shifting with an itchy, percussive desperation, their bodies scribbling urgent messages in the darkness. Kees Tjebbes interrupts the black space with pale pools of blue, evoking ocean depths with an effective lighting design, while whispering voices creep through the music (by Dirk Haubrich), adding to the edgy atmosphere. Watch an excerpt from Memoires d’Oubliettes performed by members of the Nederlands Dans Theater . . . it's our DANSES PYTHEUSES for the week.

Delvyn Case is Boston-based musician who is active as a composer, orchestral and choral conductor, and college educator. He also maintains an active career as a writer and lecturer on a variety of musical topics, from sacred music to hip-hop, and pursues numerous musical outreach projects in his home city of Quincy, Massachusetts, and beyond. He is currently Assistant Professor of Music at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, where he serves as Music Director of the Great Woods Chamber Orchestra. Formerly he served as Visiting Professor of Theory and Composition at the Longy School of Music and as an adjunct faculty member at Boston College and Northeastern University. He currently serves as Music Director of the Eastern Nazarene College Choral Union, the Quincy Bay Chamber Orchestra (a professional orchestra he founded to provide outreach and educational concerts), the Quincy Summer Singers (a community choir he founded in 2009), as pianist in the avant-garde improvisation ensemble "The Meltdown Incentive", and as composer-in-residence for Cambridge’s "Dance Currents, Inc." Listen to a performance of Delvyn Case's Tenebrae factae sunt (2000) sung by the New York Virtuoso Singers . . . it's one of our PYTHEAS EARFUL for the week.

Pianist Eve Egoyan talks about the music of Canadian composer Ann Southam in an interview with Musicworks magazine, "... there is a close connection between composing for or playing the piano and other forms of work done by hand, such as weaving, that reflect the nature of traditional women's work - repetitive, life-sustaining, requiring time and patience. But through it all, runs a thread of questioning." Musically, Ann Southam's questioning takes the form of ever-repeating musical motifs that, over time and small changes, coalesce into answers. Hear this in Southam's piano work In Retrospect (2004) . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.