Music

Steve Brown and his band The Bailers make their first appearance on Mountain Stage, recorded live on the campus of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. When Mountain Stage began planning its trip to Fairbanks in late 2011, host Larry Groce set out to find some of the state's most talented musicians to feature on the show, and one of the names that popped up repeatedly was Steve Brown & The Bailers.

The words of the English poet William Blake still resonate 185 years after his death. Blake, who was also a painter and printmaker, wrote the famous lines, "Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night."

Polaris Prize-winning singer-songwriter Patrick Watson makes music the way some directors make film: in three dimensions and with lots of emotion. With the aid of guitarist Simon Angell, percussionist Robbie Kuster and bassist Mishka Stein, Watson crafts songs that are experimental in nature, blending cabaret-style pop with classical and indie-rock music.

For a group that had been dormant for a decade, Witch Mountain sure has been prolific lately, with two albums in two years (South of Salem made my 2011 year-end list, while the equally mighty Cauldron of the Wild came out in June) and now a five-week tour that will take the doom-metal band across the U.S. and back home to Portland.

(In this third and final part of a series, pianist Jonathan Biss explores the idea of musical longing in Robert Schumann's music. Click the audio link above to hear Biss play Schumann and discuss the composer with Performance Today host Fred Child.)

Last week, Joel Rose wrote about the compact disc on its 30th anniversary, but it could have been an obituary. In the last decade, CD sales in the United States have dropped by more than two thirds, fulfilling a cycle that dates back to wax cylinders and 78 rpm discs: the 20 to 30 year lifespan of a format, followed by the rise of a new technology. So we decided to look at the format that usurped the CD's place in music listener's ears and hard drives, if not always hearts.