Admirers of John Schaefer's long-running and hugely influential WNYC show New Sounds are reeling in shock from the station's decision to cancel the program — or, to quote a stomach-churning locution in an internal e-mail, “sunset the New Sounds brand." Laurie Anderson's succinct reaction: "Why would they do that?"... The Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz, creator of one of the twentieth century's more formidable string-quartet cycles, is the focus of the third annual Bard Music West festival, an extension of the Bard Music Festival in upstate NY. It runs Oct. 18-19 at Noe Valley Ministry, in San Francisco. The Chronicle's Joshua Kosman has a preview.... From Oct. 23 to Oct. 26, CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College jointly present Unit Structures, a conference and mini-festival around the magnificent legacy of Cecil Taylor.... The reinvigorated Monday Evening Concerts series in LA has announced an enticing 2019-20 season: Feldman's For Philip Guston, Xenakis's Pléïades, an Éliane Radigue mini-festival, a Davóne Tines recital, an Anne Carson/Beckett evening, recent works by Trevor Bača and Caroline Shaw, and so forth.... A similarly seductive WasteLAnd Music season leads off on Nov. 8 with a Matt Barbier evening of "sludge, debris, virtuosity, and fascination," as evidenced in works of Timothy McCormack, Michelle Lou, and George Lewis.... In the New York Times, Zachary Woolfe writes about Lena Herzog's unclassifiable and singularly haunting Last Whispers, which plays at Peak Performances in Montclair, NJ, Oct. 16-20.
