By Joshua Kosman

The secret truth underlying the success of Eighth Blackbird, the terrific young sextet that played in Herbst Theatre on Friday night, is exhilaratingly simple: New music is fun. It's exciting, provocative, stimulating and refreshing -- all the things that we typically associate with the new, but too rarely with contemporary music.

By Anthony Tommasini

Cuisine and Radicalism Mix As Youth Has Its Evening

The six musicians who make up the impressively successful contemporary-music ensemble Eighth Blackbird are young, hip, confident and ambitious. They are also very good instrumentalists (on violin, cello, piano, clarinets, flutes and percussion). Naturally, they are drawn to music by composers who are young, hip, confident and ambitious.

By John von Rhein

Breaking sound barriers: Hip eighth blackbird unleashes its energy

Eighth blackbird may spell its name lowercase, but it is without a doubt an uppercase ensemble.  

By L. Peat O'Neil

The opening lines of the eighth stanza of Wallace Stevens's poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," from which the sextet Eighth Blackbird takes its name, states the group's aim and sums up its achievement at Tuesday night's Founders Day Concert at the Library of Congress's Coolidge Auditorium.

By Anthony Tommasini

Young Writers and Players

Bringing composers and performers together is clearly a priority at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, run by the Yale Summer School of Music in this bucolic town in northwestern Connecticut.