Now streaming: Living Classical Episode 13 for March 22-28, 2026

On this edition of Living Classical with Tyler Kline: Sophia Jani wanted to break convention in her Woodwind Quintet No. 1: Music as Mirror—distributing the same musical elements equally across all five instruments instead of assigning each a specific role. The piece is built as a pulsating process that changes almost unnoticeably, slowly arriving somewhere completely different from where it began.

Then: Unsuk Chin's double concerto for piano, percussion, and ensemble fuses soloists and ensemble into a single new sonorous body. The piano is prepared with small metal wedges—muted and metallic in the middle register, percussive in the bass. The result: the nineteen-piece ensemble acts as a shadow of the soloists, receiving impulses that develop musical germs or incite each instrument to tell its own story.

Music by Sophia Jani, Unsuk Chin, Chihchun Chi-Sun Lee, Reena Esmail, Bosba Panh, Adeliia Faizullina, Judy A. Rose, Johanny Navarro, Clarice Jensen, Tessa Brinckman, Ania Vu, and Tania León.

View the playlist & listen: https://www.looseleaftransmissions.com/post/living-classical-with-tyler-kline-for-march-22-28-2026

Follow & stream anytime on Mixcloud.

Now streaming: Unlearning Restriction and Expanding into Creative Freedom with Shuying Li

On the latest episode of music/Maker with Tyler Kline, Tyler is joined by composer Shuying Li.

In this conversation, Shuying and Tyler trace her unlikely path to composition — from a medical family in China, to a spontaneous cross-country audition tour, to the culture shock of arriving at the Hartt School and hearing for the first time that she could simply write whatever she wanted. They talk about the long, slow process of unlearning the need to impress and finding music as a means of connection instead, the universal stories that anchor her work, and how founding the Four Corners Ensemble reshaped her understanding of collaboration. They also get into her compositional process, her recent push to fold jazz, blues, minimalism, and EDM into her concert music, and her belief that a finished score is only about half the piece — the rest belonging equally to performers and audiences.

Listen to the episode here, and learn more about Shuying at https://www.shuyingli.com/

New episodes every other Thursday. Subscribe now!

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Episode 091: Writing Music That Speaks Without Words (featuring Ania Vu)

Ania Vu shares how a piece about aliens attempting to communicate with humans explores the limitations of language and how music, tone, and embodied expression convey what words cannot.

Episode 092: Demystifying Death Through Music (featuring Han Hitchen)

Han Hitchen reflects on how identity in his music goes beyond queerness to confront universal but unspoken experiences like death and family tension, using music to demystify what we fear and open space for honesty and connection.

Episode 093: Treating Computer Tools as Compositional Instruments (featuring Gabriel Bolaños)

Gabriel Bolaños discusses how algorithmic tools like Open Music have become so embedded in his process that he now imagines sound through their logic, using them to exceed acoustic intuition rather than simply automate tedious calculations.

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

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Coming up on Living Classical (streaming Sunday, March 29): Aftab Darvishi's Likoo draws on a traditional Iranian song form about grief, reflecting a deep longing for those lost since the Women, Life, Freedom movement began in Iran in 2022—exploring loss in its various dimensions: mothers, lovers, homeland.

Then, Bára Gísladóttir's VAPE compresses ninety minutes of Haruki Murakami's interviews with survivors of the 1995 Tokyo sarin attacks into ten, structuring the orchestra into five groups that trace attack timelines—exploring how fear and anxiety never abate, and how effects spread and disperse.

Featuring compositions by Eydís Evensen, Lilith Guegamian, Eleanor Alberga, Anna Weesner, Jessie Montgomery and Eleanore Oppenheim, Angela Elizabeth Slater, Hannah Selin, Pauchi Sasaki, Anahita Abbasi, and Ha-Yang Kim.

Listen on Mixcloud or at livingclassicalradio.com!

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Phew – it’s been a long, intense week on my end. Hope y’all are doing well, and see you back here next Friday!