Three graduates of the Yale University School of Music have formed a new record label to give young performers interested in contemporary (new) classical music a place to light. The model is Bang on a Can, founded 20 years ago, but with a more loose-knit association of musical interests.

More from NPR’s All Things Considered.

A lot of us have been worrying about all those gray heads at Severance Hall, E.J. Thomas Hall and Umstaad Hall. Who will be the classical concert goers of the future? Here’s a story that looks into what orchestras are doing to grow their audience: Building the Classical Audience of the Future.

Violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter is on tour in Asia, performing Bach and Vivaldi with Norway’s Trondheim Soloists. On Sunday (25 May) she played a concert at Shanghai’s Oriental Arts Center, and she plans to donate the fee to earthquake disaster relief through the Red Cross. Worldwide, Red Cross and Red Crescent societies are supporting the Chinese Red Cross in providing aid to victims of the Sichuan earthquake. More than 35,000 Chinese Red Cross staff and volunteers have been working with rescue and medical teams to distribute tents, food, water, clothes and medicine.

Mutter’s tour has already moved on to Taiwan. From there she’ll fly to Seoul, Hong Kong, Osaka, and Tokyo, eventually landing back in Europe for a gig in London.

As a public radio listener, you’re probably well used to the idea of news about music, even if NPR has gradually drifted toward reporting less from the classical world and more from the indie and alternative landscape. But music about news?

Next week (5 June 2008), audiences at the New Generation Arts Festival in Birmingham, England will watch and listen as cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, composer Michael Wolters, and a corps of conservatory students improvise a musical accompaniment to BBC4′s live 7pm newscast.

The idea is both new and old. After all, pianists improvised accompaniment for silent newsreels nearly a century ago. For his part, Webber says it’s strictly an experiment.

More from The Independent.

A manuscript cache discovered in April at a Polish monastery may contain hitherto unknown works by Mozart.

The collection, located at the Jasna Gora monastery, includes 20 manuscripts bearing Mozart’s signature. Musicologist Remigiusz Pospiech reports that 7 of the compositions found are already known as Mozart’s, and four have been identified as other composers’. Pospiech has invited scholars from the Salzburg Mozarteum to analyze the remaining nine manuscripts to determine their authenticity.

Jasna Gora, located in the town of Czestochowa in southern Poland, houses a collection of some 3000 manuscripts acquired over the centuries for the monastery’s orchestra. One of the purported Mozart works was performed during the town’s sacred music festival, Gaude Mater (Polish language page), early in May.