A lament bass is a short musical pattern that moves steadily downward. It often progresses through a four-note pattern, before beginning again, but there are plenty of versions of the lament with more notes or variations in the contour. Listen beneath the voice or melody for a bass line that seems to sink one step at a time. As it loops again and again, it conveys a sense of grief, being stuck in sadness.

Musicians have used this gesture for centuries. The lament bass is a familiar sound in 17th-century vocal music. Composers such as Monteverdi and Barbara Strozzi placed expressive, plaintive melodies over bass lines that repeatedly moved downward. Bach later used a more complex, chromatic version in the “Crucifixus” of the Mass in B Minor. Similar falling shapes also appear in folk laments, blues, jazz, rock, pop, and electronic music.

In fact, it’s that spirit of transformation that makes the music on this playlist so interesting to me. The same basic downward pull can sound heartbroken in Monteverdi, restless in Willie Brown, dismissive in Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road Jack” and *NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye.” Led Zeppelin makes it sound threatening and ominous, while Portishead gives it a smoky sensual atmosphere. Gyorgi Ligeti deconstructs the lament into something fractured and modern, while Tchaikovsky expands it into the closing tragedy of an entire symphony.

No matter the genre, or how it is dressed, the lament bass is an excellent example of how musicians adapt and reimagine old, familiar material to suit new tastes and expressive needs.

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Did you know classical music could sound like this?

It can pulse like electronic music, crackle like electricity, shout, whisper, clap, and occasionally make some very silly noises. The composers on this playlist treat sound like a sandbox on a playground, a play to find joy, to experiment, to dance, to laugh.

Pianos get filled with screws and bolts as Cage rebuilds the piano as an alien drum kit. Singers become shouting comic-book heroes. Andy Akiho conjures a whole sound world from four players, while Steve Reich needs nothing more than two people and their hands. Orchestras make a glorious racket. Apparently, classical music has been getting away with quite a lot.

I put these tracks together for anyone who is curious about music from the past hundred years but isn’t sure where to begin. Start anywhere. Listen for one sound you like, then follow it down the rabbit hole. Curiosity is more useful here than expertise. Most of all, have fun!

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I love music that puts itself in conversation with the past. Every track on this playlist was borrowed, sampled, or reconstructed from an earlier work. Some tracks may immediately declare their pedigree to you. Others may give you that slower, uncanny tingle of recognition. Still others may be completely new to you.

The genres and methods vary wildly — which is half the fun! Stravinsky conjures the 18th century in Pulcinella, dressing up Giovanni Pergolesi (or what he thought was Pergolesi) in his own idiosyncratic tailoring. Luciano Berio wanders the ruins of Schubert’s unfinished 10th Symphony in Rendering, restoring the fragments and filling the gaps with a shimmering fog. Max Richter recomposes Vivaldi. Caroline Shaw’s Blueprint grows from the harmonic DNA of a Beethoven string quartet. J Dilla chops Raymond Scott and the Jackson 5 into the legendary hip-hop album Donuts. Nina Simone turns Gershwin’s “I Loves You, Porgy” into a towering statement of faith, a testimony. Jason Moran reforms the old standard “Body and Soul” into something fresh and new. Threaded throughout are Tōru Takemitsu’s loving, delightfully devotional guitar arrangements of Gershwin, Arlen, and the Beatles.

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“After the Fireworks” is a playlist for the stillness after celebration. This weekend, we observed 250 years of American independence, and the unfinished, ongoing work of becoming the country we imagine ourselves to be. After the last firework has arced across the sky, after the traces of incandescence fade, after the last boom has echoed, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be American during unsettled, divided, and uncertain times.

Aaron Copland, Florence Price, Charles Ives, and William Grant Still shaped the sound of American music. This playlist, filled with their quieter music, holds space for private reflection. It reminds me that the sound and spirit of our country is larger than any single anthem or point of view. For this playlist, I wanted music that creates room to sit and reckon with ourselves and the country we are still trying to become.

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I’ve always loved vocal music that slips between categories. The Voice in Between is a playlist for vocal music that doesn’t always behave like ordinary song. These tracks move through chant, choral minimalism, devotional jazz, experimental pop, and electronic sound. The common thread is the voice itself: floating, looping, praying, and slipping the bonds of time, place, and genre. Hildegard von Bingen, John Tavener, David Lang, and Arvo Pärt open the playlist with quiet devotion, before we head to more hybrid territory. Alice Coltrane, Arooj Aftab, Björk, SOPHIE, Laurie Anderson, Caroline Shaw, and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith carry us to a wider, more electric sense of wonder. It’s music for the threshold between here and elsewhere.

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I’m chasing the sound of California summer through its jazz festivals: Blue Note at the Hollywood Bowl, San Jose Jazz Summer Fest, Monterey Jazz Festival, and beyond. This mix brings together Robert Glasper, Samara Joy, Yussef Dayes, Kokoroko, Lakecia Benjamin, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Ambrose Akinmusire, Meshell Ndegeocello, and more — jazz and jazz-adjacent sounds for sunny afternoons and warm nights. Put it on for your summer parties, your long drives, and then go hear these artists live while they’re right here on the West Coast!

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This week, I’ve curated a playlist devoted to the pioneering composer and electronic musician, Wendy Carlos. Best known for Switched-On Bach and her groundbreaking scores for films including A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Tron, Carlos greatly expanded the expressive potential of synthesizers, and in doing so, reshaped the musical landscape of the late 20th century.

Listening across these recordings, I’m struck by how transformation emerges as the central theme. Carlos’s music transforms synthesizers into concert instruments and familiar classical repertoire into something startlingly new. The playlist traces that spirit of reinvention through a selection of recordings that sound remarkably fresh and brilliantly daring decades later.

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This week I fell down a Tchaikovsky rabbit hole and came back with two pieces deserving of a brighter spotlight: the Souvenir de Florence, aka Orchestral Suite No. 3 in G Major, Op. 55 and the String Sextet in D Minor, Op. 70.

The Third Suite (1884), written between the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies and later dedicated to conductor Max Erdmannsdörfer, is a full‑scale four‑movement orchestral work whose designation as a “suite” belies its symphonic scale. A long, singing Élégie opens things — “molto cantabile” and Romantic without falling into gooey sentimentality — followed by a gently unstable, sighing orchestral waltz and a fleet, scherzando Presto. The finale is a big theme and variations, where a simple Russian theme is pushed through a gallery of characteristic moods before exploding into a polacca (a stately Polish dance in triple meter).

Souvenir de Florence was promised to the St. Petersburg Chamber Music Society on Tchaikovsky’s induction into the Society’s ranks. Sketched in 1887 and written in 1890, it takes its title from the Italian city in which Tchaikovsky conceived of the melodic materials of the work — perhaps ironically, since the work’s musical soul is unmistakably, unapologetically Russian. The sextet moves from angular turbulence, to luminous lyricism to a buoyant folk dance to a rhythmically driven, extroverted finale with grace and joy.

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For Pride Month, I’ve curated a playlist centered on the fiercely individual composer, pianist, and vocalist Julius Eastman and the remarkable artistic community that surrounded him. The playlist explores a network of collaborators, contemporaries, and fellow travelers whose creative paths crossed Eastman’s own.

Eastman’s exuberant and uncompromising music appears alongside works by Meredith Monk, Pauline Oliveros, and Arthur Russell, figures who helped define the experimental music scene of 1970s and ’80s New York. Together, these artists built boundary-defying communities grounded in listening, personal and artistic freedom, and collaboration.

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This week I’ve curated a playlist of LA Philharmonic and SF Symphony music directors, outgoing and incoming. Gustavo Dudamel and Esa-Pekka Salonen leave vivid documents of their LA and SF eras, while incoming directors Daniel Harding and Elim Chan conduct music that hints at what they might build in the future, as they take the helms of these great orchestras.

Dudamel’s connection with the film music of John Williams and with Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz pairs with Salonen’s authoritative account of a symphony by Jean Sibelius and the exciting finale of Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird. Chan shows her chops in an album with the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, and we sample the breadth of Harding’s career to date.

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Elim Chan has been named the San Francisco Symphony’s next music director. With several recordings already to her name, her profile on disc is poised to flourish with the orchestra. This playlist places Chan’s work alongside recordings by the distinguished maestros who preceded her at SFS — Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart, Herbert Blomstedt, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Michael Tilson Thomas — placing her within the lineage she will join in this new chapter.

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Our 2026 Summer Festival Guide is out, and to mark it, I put together this playlist of open-air music. The selection brings together a range of ways composers have thought about the outdoors. There’s a long tradition of music written for outdoor performance: Handel’s Water Music was played on a royal barge on the Thames; Berlioz’s Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale was composed for a procession through Paris. But even concert-hall music has been fascinated with the world beyond it: Beethoven’s brook, Debussy’s clouds, Messiaen’s birds. As summer approaches, the playlist is a musical opportunity to listen more closely to the great outdoors.

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This week’s playlist accompanies SFCV’s conversation with esperanza spalding and Alonzo King, whose recent collaboration, LEGACY, brought spalding together with LINES Ballet in San Francisco. The selections offer a compact survey of spalding’s work as a bassist, singer, songwriter, and collaborator, tracing her range from intimate jazz and chamber-like writing to groove-driven songs, theatrical experimentation, and recent cross-generational collaborations. The playlist closes with a nod to Alice Coltrane, whose music was also featured on the LINES program.

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