Hey y’all – I hope you’ve had a good week, and a couple of updates today: one's a good one, the other's more of a status check.

First, the good stuff: last week I had the privilege of participating in an American Composers Orchestra Earshot Reading in New York City. For this reading, the orchestra rehearsed and workshopped my piece West of the Sun, culminating in a public read-through on Friday night. Over two intense and fulfilling days, I had a chance to work with three mentor composers (Valerie Coleman, Huang Ruo, and Curtis Stewart), conductor Jeffery Meyer, and five other amazing composers who I’ve come to know as dear friends. (As a bonus, it was completely electric to be in NYC the moment when the Knicks won the NBA Finals – crazy stuff!).

Some folks have expressed interest in hearing how my piece went (spoiler alert: it went beyond what I could ever imagine). If you want to check out the video from last Friday night, you can find the livestream here. My portion of the reading begins around the 1 hour 50 minute mark, but if you have time to watch the whole thing, I highly encourage you to do so. I was super impressed with everyone else’s work, and appreciate the diversity of style and aesthetic across the six pieces. I hope you enjoy it all!

Since leaving my long-time radio gig back in December, I’ve been applying to and exploring creative opportunities more fully than I feel I was able to before. The ACO Earshot Reading is one of those things, and – as I’ve mentioned here in the past – I’ve been running out to various artist residencies, which have been amazing (and I’ve got more on the horizon). But it’s been interesting seeing how the balance of everything shakes out when these things come up, and I’m constantly reminded that how to best balance everything going on in my life takes a lot of hard work and discernment.

So, onto a bit of a status check, mainly regarding the music/Maker podcast. I’m not sure if any of y’all have ever produced a podcast (let alone host, schedule, promote, etc. said podcast – all on your own), but it’s a bit of a drag sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, I love the music/Maker podcast – and it’s not going anywhere – but the last thing I want is to feel constantly burnt out over something I feel so strongly about doing.

So, I think it’s time to take a bit of a break.

I’ve done breaks before, but this feels a little bit different this time. I have a lot going on in life, and a lot going on in my creative life, too (including one big looming deadline and a number of upcoming projects – which continue to grow, it seems). So it feels like the right time to take a step back and just… recharge the batteries a little bit.

For the sake of transparency: a single podcast episode, depending on how long the conversation is, takes around 10 or so hours to produce. Of course, the recording session takes as long as it takes (these are starting to push 2.5 to 3 hours) – but then I take a lot of care in mixing (this takes about an hour per episode), and most importantly editing (which takes about twice as long as the actual length of the episode). My goal is to make the conversation sound totally unedited, so you may not realize that every episode of music/Maker has anywhere from 500-900 individual cut and splices. It’s meticulous, tedious work that I love doing… until I don’t, ha.

This is all to say: I can confidently call this a summer break. I’ll probably be back with new episodes later in August. Not to mention I still have at least one new, unreleased episode recorded and plan to record more interviews in the coming months.

In the meantime, Living Classical continues on and I’m bringing in more and more newly released music these days, and if you need your music/Maker fix, micro/Maker keeps on keeping on, with three new episodes weekly. Read on for all the new stuff, and thanks for listening and supporting all of this!

Now streaming: Living Classical Episode 25 for June 14-20, 2026

On this edition of Living Classical, Tyler Kline marks Juneteenth with music by living Black American composers. Featured this week: Ahmed Alabaca's Mere Mortals, holding to the conviction that human life is precious and deserves compassion; Alvin Singleton's Time Past, Time Future, a piece that moves between Thelonious Monk and Bach in search of balance; Valerie Coleman's Tracing Visions, which shifts between an elegy and a Zulu battle cry for unity; and a setting of a Harlem Renaissance love poem by Shawn E. Okpebholo.

View the playlist & listen: https://www.looseleaftransmissions.com/post/living-classical-with-tyler-kline-for-june-14-20-2026

Follow & stream anytime on Mixcloud.

Episode 126: Rebuilding Autonomy in Music-Making (featuring Phong Tran)

Phong Tran discusses how disillusionment with the classical commissioning system pushed him toward a more autonomous performance practice, and how writing for I Care If You Listen helped him articulate that shift.

Episode 127: Letting Go of the System (featuring C. Jacqueline Wood)

C. Jacqueline Wood reflects on stepping away from festivals, grants, and gatekeepers to create on her own terms, and why she no longer measures success by accolades.

Episode 128: Trusting Your Musical Subconscious (featuring Baljinder Sekhon)

Baljinder Sekhon explores the gap between the music he loves and the music he creates, and why loving too many kinds of music can make it harder to define a singular compositional voice.

Episodes are released every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. Subscribe now!

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On a new Living Classical (streaming starting Sunday June 21, 2026): Juhi Bansal's Land of Waking Dreams begins in the desert backcountry, under a night sky—pointillistic stars, shifting blues, wind across open plateaus. Written for solo piano, the piece moves through that murky nightscape the way the eye moves across darkness: slowly, finding shapes.

Then: Orun, in the Yoruba religion, is both an origin and a destination—the invisible dimension where ancestral wisdom accumulates and flows back into the living world. Marcos Balter's piece of the same name traces that cycle, shaped by the Yoruba concepts of family, connectivity, and the consciousness passed down through ancestral bloodlines.

Plus music by Curtis Stewart, Margaret Brouwer, Alex Dowling, Yoshi Weinberg, Meera Gudipati, Anne Drummond, Hilary Kleinig, Alice Ping Yee Ho, Noah Meites, and Bent Sørensen.

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Last week in NYC was a big time food trip, so here’s a photo of two amazing hotdogs I ate from a street cart (which is now going viral on social media).