Christmas starts earlier every year, and perhaps the wreaths and peppermint mochas have you rolling your eyes. If so, too bad! It’ll be over soon enough, so light a pine-scented candle, set your Pandora to "Jingle Bells," and dig in to the Studio 360 Christmas archive. ...

Computers have taken over an astonishing array of tasks humans used to do. They fly our planes, give us directions, recommend books, set us up on dates.  But can they tell us a good story? Meet Brutus, a computer programmed to write fiction.  Through a series of mathematical equations, its ...

Bonus Track: “Self-Betrayal,” written by Brutus

Elliott Carter might be the hardest working man in classical music today. Having turned 103 over the weekend, he’s certainly the oldest. The composer is celebrating his latest birthday by premiering several new pieces, five of which were performed last week. The festivities continue tonight when Julliard's AXIOM ensemble performs ...

The singer Lalah Hathaway’s first recording was in 1969. She couldn't talk yet — she wasn’t even a year old — but you can hear her wailing on her father's single “The Ghetto." Lalah’s father was the R&B songwriter and performer Donny Hathaway. He was best known for soulful duets ...

Bonus Track: “You Were Meant For Me"  

A few hundred years ago, classical pianists would impress audiences by original cadenzas in the middle of a concerto — riffing, we would say now. Now improvisation is firmly in the realm of jazz. But a new record called Marvelous Fantasy explores the connection between jazz and classical ...

Video: O'Neal performs "Marvelous Fantasy," "The Lovers," and breakdances in the studio

Tim Minchin closes the show with a Christmas song he wrote for his daughter. And although he’s got a bone to pick with the holiday (and the socio-religious-economic-political issues surrounding it), his carol is equal parts satire and heart ...

Video: “White Wine in the Sun”

He's a punky, eyeliner-wearing redhead who sings about racists and elitists. Breaking taboos is pretty much Tim Minchin's specialty. The comedian-singer-songwriter is already big in his native Australia and in the UK — his first US concert DVD, Ready for This, is just out. Minchin admits to Kurt Andersen ...

Videos: "Prejudice" and "F**k The Poor"

Larry Rosenblum is a professor of psychology with a focus on perception — he’s written a book about the senses called See What I’m Saying. Rosenblum credits a musical revelation with leading him down that path. Growing up with 1970s prog-rock, he thought that virtuosity and spectacular showmanship were the hallmarks ...

Why does a country music megastar and all-American guy like Ronnie Dunn — half of what was Nashville’s biggest act, Brooks and Dunn — have a house full of paintings from the Soviet Union? It’s a long story. Twenty years ago, in the fall of 1991, the Soviet Union was being dismantled, and its highly managed art world vanished ...

Slideshow: Soviet Art in the USA

Inní by Sigur Rós is both a trippy documentation of the band's 2008 tour and the band's first-ever live album.  The DVD/CD set is out today and the New York Times calls it a concert film that "leaves most of its genre in ...

This weekend, the Brooklyn Academy of Music presented a new work of originality, power, and beauty that left an audience slack-jawed. Brooklyn Babylon is a collaboration between the graphic novelist Danijel Zezelj and composer Darcy James Argue, and it is destined to be considered a classic of the ...

Thirty years ago, hardly anyone knew what a music video was. On the night MTV was launched, its founders — a ragtag bunch of music fans and rookie television execs — had to take a bus from Manhattan to New Jersey to watch the broadcast, because no New York cable company carried the fledgling channel ...

Last night, New York City’s famed Webster Hall played host to the second-to-last stop on St. Vincent's sold-out North American tour.  Her 80-minute set was dominated by songs off her critically acclaimed new record Strange Mercy ...

It was forty-odd years ago that William Shatner played Captain Kirk on Star Trek. But it was the show’s afterlife, in reruns during the seventies and on, that turned Shatner into a cult figure and a representative of America’s love of science fiction. Today a new cohort of fans who never knew him as Kirk adores Shatner as Denny Crane ...

Abigail Washburn thought she had her goals set. She was on her way to a career in international law based in China when a bluegrass musician stopped her in her tracks. At a party, she heard a recording of Doc Watson singing “Shady Grove” and she fell in love with the banjo. “I was struck by it as something ...

Bonus Track: “Burn Through” from City of Refuge

We all know the Thomas Edison line: genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. But there are those who don't seem to perspire at all. Their extraordinary gifts seem to come from no where. We often call those people savants. And some neuroscientists are trying to understand where their talents come from ...

Slideshow: Art by Joel Gilb, Age 12

For the last two decades, Björk has pushed every boundary she could find, making just about the weirdest pop music that can still be considered pop music. She’s made beautiful, soulful songs out of electronics, musique concrete, an Inuit choir from Greenland, and her inimitable Icelandic accent that makes English unfamiliar ...

Video: Inside Biophilia's Apps

Before I left Los Angeles for New York City, one of the cultural experiences I was encouraged — no actually commanded — to experience by the culturally elite of my friends, was a Jon Brion show at the Largo.  (He had an ongoing residency at ...

Saul Perlmutter, 2011 Nobel Laureate in Physics, teaches "Physics and Music" at UC Berkeley. From his course description: "The mysteries of music have long inspired scientists to invent new tools of thought, and some of the earliest scientific concepts were invented to understand music. ... Questions as simple as "Why do different instruments ...

In the 1930s, Ina Ray Hutton conducted, tapped, and sang as the “blonde bombshell bandleader,” strutting her stuff in front of her all–female swing band, the Melodears. (You can’t make this stuff up.) She led bands through the 1950s — in clubs, in movies, on TV, on the USO circuit — and was the first female bandleader ...

Video: Ina Ray Hutton and her Melodears perform “Truckin’”