The members of JACK Quartet lead a chamber music master class with Duke student ensembles in Baldwin Auditorium at 7 PM on Tuesday, December 5. Tuesday, December 5, 7 PM ...

Moderated by former New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff, MONK@100 artists reflect on the substantial musical legacies of the late Geri Allen (who was slated to appear in MONK@100) and ...

In this wide-ranging talk, acclaimed Queens-based hip-hop artist Pharoahe Monch discusses his career, musical influences, and struggle with depression — a theme whose broader social and political implications he explored on ...

Moderated by former New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff, MONK@100 artists reflect on the substantial musical legacies of the late Geri Allen (who was slated to appear in MONK@100) and ...

Simone Dinnerstein leads a piano master class in Baldwin Auditorium with Duke student musicians at 4 PM on Tuesday, October 3. Tuesday, October 3, 4-5:30 PM Baldwin Auditorium, Duke East ...

Classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein and choreographer Pam Tanowitz discuss their careers and collaboration in the week leading up to the world premiere of New Work for Goldberg Variations in Duke’s Reynolds Industries ...

Nationally renowned educational policy experts Helen “Sunny” Ladd and Thomas Nechyba (both of Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy and Department of Economics) discuss the school choice debate in North ...

A free public conversation with Louis Michot (Lost Bayou Ramblers) and Ronen Givony (Wordless Music) about the Oscar-nominated 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild, moderated by filmmaker and Duke ...

As part of Duke Performances’ 10-day celebration of the music and legacy of Thelonious Monk, pianist and co-curator Ethan Iverson will host a pair of late-night jam sessions at Durham ...

The Ciompi Quartet conclude their celebration of fifty years in residence at Duke University by welcoming former students back to campus — and to the stage — for a Duke ...

Durham Cajun dance instructors Elvis Latiolais and Dianne Freund lead a free Cajun dance class for ticketholders an hour prior to Louisiana-based Lost Bayou Ramblers’ performance at the Pinhook in ...

When pianist Simone Dinnerstein and choreographer Pam Tanowitz began discussing an evening-length dance collaboration in 2015, they faced an obvious question: What would they perform? Bach was a clear choice for Dinnerstein, who became a sudden classical star in 2007 with her self-financed interpretation of the “Goldberg” Variations.

Beasts of the Southern Wild — unequal parts fairy tale and adventure drama — is a Cinderella story of the film world.

The Civilians, Duke Performances Artists-in-Residence and practitioners of investigative theater, approach their work as researchers of the national consciousness.

In this dream collaboration, two of American music’s brightest and most adventurous modern minds, Tyshawn Sorey and Jason Moran, collaborate to pay tribute to their clear musical and intellectual predecessor, Thelonious Monk.

Though pianist Gerald Clayton and saxophonist Ben Wendel are bandmates and compelling musical collaborators.

Bill Callahan took his time in becoming one of American music’s most distinctive songwriters and most readily identifiable singers.

The trumpeter Dave Douglas didn’t always “get” Thelonious Monk. The melodies seemed too simple, less flashy than the licks one could learn from Coltrane.

Acclaimed pianist and composer Kris Davis substitutes for the recently deceased jazz great Geri Allen on Monk@100.

Remarkably little is known about the years that Thelonious Monk spent on the road as a teenager, playing organ behind an evangelist and faith healer possibly called The Texas Warhorse.

The JACK Quartet has become one of the most enterprising and energized new music powerhouses in the world in just a decade.

On Saturday night, Henry steps onto the stage of Baldwin Auditorium for a fifty-seventh birthday concert, playing every song from his new album, Thrum, as well as other tunes from his expansive songbook.

On Friday evening, Henry gives a talk about the alchemical process of making records, “Is It Rolling, Bob?,” at Durham’s Sound Pure Studios.

Henry begins with a free Thursday evening talk at the Nasher Museum of Art, called “Take Me to The River,” about the ephemeral, mystical nature of artistic predecessors.

Since its launch in 2007, Boston’s A Far Cry has taken an unusual approach to the making of orchestral music. Seventeen musicians opted to start a communal, self-conducted string symphony, where leadership was shared and feedback was offered ground-up, not top-down.

Saxophonist Ravi Coltrane was born into jazz royalty, as the son of musicians John (who died before Ravi was two) and Alice.

“Is Joshua Redman a new archetype?” The New York Times asked more than two decades ago, when the saxophonist and recent transplant to the city was just twenty-five.

Nearly four decades separate the exuberant Chris Potter and the sage Houston Person, but in Durham they share the same supporting trio.

Thelonious Monk contributed countless standards to the jazz canon.

In February 2016, a quarter-century after his debut with the pivotal hip-hop duo Organized Konfusion, Queens emcee Pharoahe Monch took a chance, stepping onstage at New York’s Ecstatic Music Festival with Brooklyn’s uproarious PitchBlak Brass Band.

At the dawn of the 1970s, British guitarist John McLaughlin, fresh from recording Miles Davis’ seminal Bitches Brew, reinvented the possibilities of his electrified instrument.

Modern flamenco master Vicente Amigo began playing guitar as a young child after he saw Paco de Lucía — that dashing flamenco legend who rose to fame in the 1970s — performing on television.

Gregory Porter has played to sold-out houses at Duke Performances twice in recent years, moving into ever-grander venues as his fame grows.

Benjamin Grosvenor became a classical music star before he became a teenager. In 2004, he won the BBC’s Young Musician Competition at the age of eleven, a victory that catapulted him to the most prestigious halls in the world and won him substantial critical acclaim.

The Thomanerchor — otherwise known as the St. Thomas Choir of Leipzig, whose most famous cantor was Johann Sebastian Bach — is one of the world’s most enduring musical institutions.

Named for Amedeo Modigliani, the Italian portraitist and sculptor who came into his own following a mid-life move to France, the rapturous Modigliani Quartet embraces a wide range of repertoire.

For two decades, the Jerusalem Quartet garnered consistent accolades for its definitive interpretations of landmark quartets.

In many ways, it seems unfair to call Quatuor Mosaïques a period instrument quartet, though it is perhaps the preeminent period instrument quartet in the world.

Famously dubbed “the high priests of brass” by Newsweek, the American Brass Quintet has built a world of its own during the last sixty years, sculpting new repertoire and setting artistic standards for modern classical brass ensemble.

Since 1974, Fred Raimi has worked as the cellist of the Ciompi Quartet, making him the longest-serving member of the venerable Duke institution. This concert marks Raimi’s final performance as ...

For its fall concert the Ciompi recruits two acclaimed area musicians for a pair of string quintets. They begin with Mozart’s emotionally dynamic String Quintet No. 3, which ricochets from ...

Merely programming the four violin sonatas of American original Charles Ives would not have been enough for Jeremy Denk, the inquisitive and exploratory pianist, writer, and musical collaborator. But that is what he and beguiling, intuitive violinist Stefan Jackiw do in the simply titled program Ives Violin Sonatas.

Drummer Brian Blade has an astounding résumé. He played on Bob Dylan’s Time out of Mind, Norah Jones’ Come Away with Me, and Emmylou Harris’ Wrecking Ball.

Half a century ago, six choral scholars at King’s College Cambridge formed their own choir.

The rapper Murs and the producer 9th Wonder were raised on different coasts: Murs is a product of South Central Los Angeles, a background that’s informed every aspect of his lyrics, from streetwise storytelling to the bits of Spanish he’s long woven into his lines

Shared Madness began with immense debt. For eight years, the violinist Jennifer Koh — “a prodigious builder of musical bridges,” according to the Los Angeles Times — struggled to pay off the loan she’d taken for her instrument.

During the last decade, the brilliant Israel-born, New York-based pianist Shai Wosner has earned spots as a soloist with the world’s top orchestras, a coveted Avery Fisher Career Grant, laurels from The New York Times and the BBC, and collaborations with some of the world’s brightest young composers.

During the last decade, New York’s Escher String Quartet has risen through the ranks of a crowded field to become one of music’s most engaging string ensembles.

Alsarah’s circuitous journey toward stardom began as a double refugee — first from conflict in her native Sudan, then from civil war in neighboring Yemen. After arriving in New York in the mid-1990s, Alsarah turned to music as a living link to her homeland, both as an ethnomusicologist and a singer with a velvety voice and socially conscious lyrics.

s technology making or breaking our world? That question is central to THE_OPER&, a bold new opera to be developed and premiered at Duke University that uses the high drama framework of opera and advanced technology to explore ideas of apocalypse, renewal, and survival in the modern age. During each performance, a computer system preloaded with video, sound, and poetic text fragments generates an original world, specific to the room and audience.

Stephen Hough is a renaissance man.

Since 2005, when Rafał Blechacz became the first Polish musician in three decades to win Warsaw’s International Chopin Piano Competition, he has become an established star, winning the prestigious Gilmore Artist Award, Echo Klassik Awards, and several gold records and appearing with the world’s major orchestras.

Over the last four decades, London’s Tallis Scholars have become unquestioned authorities of renaissance polyphony — “ethereal and yet full-blooded, uplifting and yet grounded,” declares The Guardian.

Hailed as “a model for any aspiring string quartet” by Gramophone, the France-bred, Belgium-based Quatuor Danel has emerged as a premier risk-taking ensemble during the last quarter century. Quatuor Danel matches its instrumental acumen with enthusiasm and audacity.

The members of the JACK Quartet have been called “superheroes of the new music world” (The Boston Globe) and the “next-generation counterpart” to the benchmark Arditti (The Guardian).

Jordi Savall is one of the most revered figures of the early music revival. For half a century, Savall, the world’s foremost champion of the majestic and haunting viola da gamba, has tirelessly explored early music from around the globe.

The playing of British pianist Paul Lewis CBE, a protegé of Alfred Brendel, depends on a studied emotional reverence: he is the master of the sinking feeling, the ecstatic stir.

The Emerson String Quartet is the most celebrated American string quartet in existence.

Malian virtuoso and two-time GRAMMY winner Toumani Diabaté marked the thirtieth year of his recording career in 2017, a benchmark for one of the world’s most remarkable musicians.

Memphis musicians William Bell, Bobby Rush, and Don Bryant are three of this country’s great elder statesmen of soul music.

As a composer and bandleader, five-time GRAMMY winner Maria Schneider deploys her peerless seventeen-piece Maria Schneider Orchestra to test the boundaries between classical music and jazz.

The Jerusalem-born Yasmin Levy has spent her career bringing youth and vitality to Ladino, the language Spanish Jews took with them when they were banished from Spain more than five centuries ago

When New York actors Eric Tucker and Andrus Nichols chose the name “Bedlam” for their upstart theater company in 2012, they intended it, no doubt, to convey the energy and audacity of their mission.

On a bare stage, sixty-four tiny robots — small rectangular machines holding sharpened pencils that they tap against the floor — encircle two dancers, clad simply in black and gray.

Though she’s not yet reached her thirtieth birthday, Melissa Aldana has already broken several jazz boundaries.

The guitarist Bill Frisell has earned great acclaim, especially during the last decade, for highly conceptual projects, many of which he’s presented at Duke Performances.

It may be impossible to be any more ingrained in the proud Czech musical lineage than the Smetana Trio.

In the late 1990s, Diego El Cigala emerged as a modern flamenco icon.

The Garifuna people, language, and culture transcend geographical borders.

Mali’s griot heritage is one of the world’s true musical marvels.

At long last, Afro-Venezuelan sounds have started to find their way to stages around the world thanks to the virtuoso singer Betsayda Machado and her backing band La Parranda El Clavo, a drum-and-voice ensemble with airtight, emphatic harmonies and undeniably ecstatic rhythms.

For twenty years, the singer, songwriter, bandleader, and humanitarian Emeline Michel has delivered a singular distillation of Haiti’s musical variety, with songs that draw upon hard funk and soft folk, crackling blues and distinctly Haitian rhythms.

During the last half-century, the intoxicating sounds of bachata have emerged as one of Latin America’s most popular musical strains, a spellbinding distillation of disparate African and Latin influences

In the new dance piece The Principles of Uncertainty, two award-winning artists plying complementary ideas in dance and fine arts connect to explore the strange wonder, humor, and sadness of life.

Don DeLillo’s 2001 novella, The Body Artist, is at once a ghost story and a love story.

The Lost Bayou Ramblers begin Duke Performances’ 2017/18 season with an exclamation mark.

Winston-Salem singer, songwriter, and bandleader Caleb Caudle spent years shaping and sharpening his approach to country music before arriving, last year, at a triumph called Carolina Ghost.

Asheville’s River Whyless has emerged from the mountain city’s bustling scene as one of the state’s most instantly likable bands.

Kelsey Waldon sings it like she means it. The western Kentucky native doles out tough realizations about heartbreak and cheating, hard luck and lying (and battling back against it all) in a delightful monotone that says she’s seen and lived it all one too many times.

You’ve been warned: Birds of Chicago have been known to inspire romantic jealousy.

Loamlands’ leader Kym Register runs The Pinhook, the spiritual center of Durham’s music scene.

Even the stylistically broad label “alt-country” has been too slim to contain Robbie Fulks, “a wordier, more musically elastic, American Nick Lowe,” according to The New York Times. A graduate ...

Robert Finley is a legend waiting to be shared. At the age of eleven, in Louisiana, he used his shoe-buying allowance to snag his first guitar, and it, in turn, ensnared him in a lifelong love affair.

"If You See Me, Say Yes" is Jenn Wasner's her solo debut as Flock of Dimes and her first full-length since relocating to Durham.

“Cappella Pratensis sing with an organic appreciation of line and text that enfolds the ear in every phrase,” marveled Classical Music Magazine. This Dutch ensemble summons the atmosphere of choral ...

Geimaru-za is an ensemble dedicated to nihon buyo, or traditional Japanese dance, an ancient offshoot of kabuki dance drama. Like kabuki, nihon buyo incorporates vivid narrative, colorfully costumed performers, and ...

The Hagen Quartet sound like they’ve been playing together their whole lives — because they have. The otherworldly closeness of their sound, built on the collaboration of the three Hagen ...

In Conversation: Eric Whitacre Verena Mösenbichler-Bryant, Assistant Professor of Music at Duke and Director of the Duke University Wind Symphony, speaks with internationally celebrated choral composer and conductor Eric Whitacre about his ...

LUNCH CONVERSATION WITH MALPASO DANCE COMPANY Jocelyn Olcott, Associate Professor of History at Duke University, speaks with Havana-based Malpaso Dance Company founders Osnel Delgado, Dailedys Carrazana, and Fernando Sáez and dancers about the company’s work and ...

Thanks to thawing relations between the U.S. and Cuba, the prodigiously talented Malpaso Dance Company of Havana has started to appear more frequently on American stages. Central to Malpaso’s rising ...

**TWO PUBLIC CONVERSATIONS WITH GROUNDBREAKING HIP-HOP ARTIST TALIB KWELI** TALKING MUSIC: TALIB KWELI & 9TH WONDER GRAMMY-winning producer, DJ, and Duke professor 9th Wonder leads this discussion with groundbreaking Brooklyn-based hip-hop artist ...

The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir comes from a country where musical virtuosity is prized, part-singing has been an essential ingredient of education for centuries, and the choral tradition is closely ...

The third concert of the season finds the Ciompi Quartet exploring works inspired by folk music. They play the bright, childlike melodies of Britten’s Three Divertimenti, the young composer’s sketch ...

The Civilians return to Duke Performances to workshop a new play by Ethan Lipton looking at the charter school movement in America. A playwright, performer, and songwriter, Lipton is best ...

Each player in this dream ensemble is a star in their own right: Cellist Alisa Weilerstein is a MacArthur Fellow, praised as “a passionate player of intense musicality” (The New ...

Jazz titan Branford Marsalis is a famous son of New Orleans, and scion of that city’s first family of music. For the last fifteen years this definitive American saxophonist, who ...

A Conversation with Branford Marsalis & Wayne Winborne The evening prior to the start of a two-night stand at Baldwin Auditorium with pianist Joey Calderazzo, jazz saxophonist and educator Branford ...

Invocation is Pakistani-born jazz guitarist Rez Abbasi’s quintet featuring pianist Vijay Iyer and saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa. In this performance at Baldwin Auditorium (replacing a concert cancelled last season due to ...

Jeremy Denk’s accolades include a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and a Musical America Instrumentalist of the Year award, and this Durham-born artist more than lives up to the acclaim. The New ...

Exploring Ives’ Sonata: A Conversation With Jeremy Denk The evening before his performance, renowned pianist Jeremy Denk will speak with Philip Rupprecht, Chair of the Music Department at Duke University, ...

Hailed by The Washington Post as “fearless musicians whose spontaneity stretches past conventional interpretation and probes the music’s imaginative limits,” the St. Lawrence String Quartet return to Duke Performances with ...

**Learn more about Piedmont Blues on the project’s website HERE.** Gerald Clayton “has proved himself one of the standout jazz pianists of his generation, possessed of silvery technique and an intent but relaxed ...

Charles Lloyd was named an NEA Jazz Master in 2015, and for good reason: BBC Radio 3 called him “one of the greatest saxophonists on the planet, never afraid of ...

**TWO PUBLIC CONVERSATIONS EXPLORING GERALD CLAYTON’S PIEDMONT BLUES** GERALD CLAYTON’S PIEDMONT BLUES: HONORING A DURHAM TRADITION Celebrated jazz musician Gerald Clayton, award-winning theater director Christopher McElroen, and acclaimed vocalist and Piedmont native René Marie discuss the ...

The twelve singers of Chanticleer have been acclaimed as “the world’s reigning male chorus” (The New Yorker), and are renowned for a signature sound “breathtaking in its accuracy of intonation, ...

My Brightest Diamond is the brainchild of captivating singer and guitarist Shara Worden, who “moves effortlessly between the worlds of indie rock and contemporary classical music” (The New York Times). ...

Singer and guitarist Shara Nova (formerly Shara Worden) is the protean powerhouse behind My Brightest Diamond. For this performance, she joins the innovative quartet So Percussion, who play with “an exhilarating ...

A CONVERSATION WITH SHARA NOVA at Beyù Caffè Shara Nova (formerly Shara Worden), Detroit-based composer and guitarist, is the protean powerhouse behind the band My Brightest Diamond, “moving effortlessly between the worlds of indie rock ...

Piano Master Class The day following his Piano Recital Series performance, Sergei Babayan will lead a piano master class with Duke student musicians in Bone Hall on the lower level ...

Sergei Babayan was one of the first Soviet pianists to emerge after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and his arrival in the West was a sensation. Twenty-five years after ...