MUSIC

Composer Liliya Ugay's experience of Puerto Rico exists only in her imagination. She had originally planned to travel there prior to the pandemic, but has only gotten as close as Florida. Her composition focuses on the idea of the "Island of Enchantment."

Zola Jesus has spent years contemplating the spiritual quandaries of what it means to be an artist. On her album Arkhon, she grapples with political and economic structures of power and disconnection.

Georgetown University owes its survival to slavery. A new album by Carlos Simon, an assistant professor at the school, unflinchingly confronts that legacy.

This Juneteenth, pianist Lara Downes remembers the freedom that has been hard fought and hard won.

At a protest centered around the death of George Floyd in 2020, composer J.J. Peña Aguayo saw bomba musicians leading the way.

NPR Music staffers convene to offer up the Kate Bush tracks we think deserve a powerful, paradigm-shifting sync in a television show or movie.

Tiyo Attallah Salah-El was also an author, scholar and activist who died in a Pennsylvania prison in June 2018, at age 85. He’d served nearly 50 years of a life sentence for a murder he always insisted he did not commit.

Musicians who perform live have had to reconsider how to make a living now that the COVID-19 pandemic has rewritten the rules of how people gather in public. Three performers based in western Massachusetts talk about what's changed and where to go from here.

For five decades, the only way to hear the Japanese band's sprawling psychedelia was through live bootlegs. With The OZ Tapes, an official chapter of Les Rallizes Dénudés begins.

A songwriter with a rural Kentucky zip code and a philosophy degree, Goodman has thoughts to spare on small-town life, bottled trauma and the ways that both are misunderstood.