On his left, Mr. Young had erected a cardboard display case of his CDs with titles like Celestial Winds and The Inner Child. There was also a rack of gift cards bearing hopeful messages like: “Today I thought of you, as I always do, and the things we never could say …” If one were to open the card, one would read the conclusion of the message “We can start over today,” just as a recording of Mr. Young’s relaxing recorder music begins to play through a tiny speaker in the card.

Without quite knowing how or why, you hear Mr. Young’s music everywhere. It’s playing in elevators and malls; in the airplane as you taxi across the tarmac; at the massage parlor and the nail salon—its very mundanity belying its spirituality. “My music is just a channel for love,” Mr. Young said. “I just try to make my music as heavenly as it can be.”

He was sitting in his mother’s apartment in Edgewater, N.J., looking out across the Hudson River, wearing a light blue linen shirt unbuttoned halfway, white linen pants and laceless boat shoes.

Mr. Young, 48, grew up in Canarsie, Brooklyn, where during grade school he excelled at the recorder. However, upon hearing Jethro Tull’s classic “Aqualung,” he took up guitar. For the next 20 years, Mr. Young tried to make it as a heavy-metal guitarist, encountering near success and total failure. There was the band Medusa, formed with the future drummer and lead singer of Anthrax, Joey Belladonna. Then came Outakontrol. After that a popular AC/DC cover band known as Q.T. Hush. Along the way he married a groupie. She inspired a song called “Match Made in Hell.” They are no longer together.

“Basically, once I left Q.T. Hush, I couldn’t do anything right,” Mr. Young said. “I was a lost person.” He hitchhiked aimlessly across the country, winding up broke on Venice Beach.

There, he befriended Lisa Franco, a New Age harpist who had found a niche among middle-aged women and tourists. They started playing together: she on harp, he on his recorders. They played soothing, light music, wore all white and called themselves Celestial Winds. It was odd, but it worked.

“I realized the entertainment value of doing something that’s different,” Mr. Young said. “Playing two flutes at one time is different. The Beatles had a different haircut. Jimi Hendrix had a different haircut. Sorry to compare myself to these people, but if you want to stand out in this world, you have to have some musical entertainment value that’s different.”

The duo recorded a few albums and toured the country, playing art fairs, where their unobtrusive music was highly prized. They had a brief romantic relationship. “What can I say,” he said. “We make very romantic music.” Alas, it didn’t last.

Mr. Young became a solo act and hasn’t looked back. He’s been nominated for a Grammy, written a musical and recorded a collection of Bread covers. Even now, after more than 20 albums of serene New Age music, such as Butterfly Kisses and Oceans of Love, Mr. Young is loath to be pigeonholed.

“If you have an ability, you have an ability,” he said. “If you have a chef who makes hamburgers and then he learns how to make sushi, it doesn’t mean he loses his ability to make hamburgers. I’m a rocker. I’ll always be a rocker.”

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It’s a question that the forty-something Mr. Brubaker, chair of the piano department at the New England Conservatory in Boston since 2005, has lately dedicated much of his time to answering. In one recent experiment, Mr. Brubaker joined composer Nico Muhly at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art to create a piece called Haydnseek, in which Mr. Muhly added an overlay of electronic sound to Mr. Brubaker’s live performance of works by Haydn.

The idea, Mr. Brubaker explained, was to revive our experience of canonical composers by making them seem less familiar. “Because of the nature of old classical-music culture, certain pieces are just repeated so often that they become difficult to hear; your recognition mechanism kicks in and says, ‘That’s the Fifth Symphony,’ or, ‘That’s a certain piece by Mozart,’ and you don’t really hear it anymore,” Mr. Brubaker said. “It’s almost like putting graffiti on something. Some people have said, ‘Isn’t that kind of disrespectful or offensive to Haydn?’ My sense is, it’s actually a provocation to people to really listen. You have to scrutinize it much more.”

On the topic of music’s future, Mr. Brubaker is, in the manner of all visionaries, vague but inspiring. He is especially intrigued by the way the Web makes collaboration possible on a seemingly unlimited scale. At any rate, Mr. Brubaker said, the kind of unconventional programming that combines pop music with standard repertory is unlikely to revive the economically stagnant classical-music establishment.

“I get the feeling that people from the classical side have done this as some kind of last-ditch effort to hang on to the way they viewed the old classical-music establishment,” he said. “It’s as if to say, ‘I’ll play this pop music and you’ll still get to hear me play Liszt.’

“It comes back to the idea that I’m still a real pianist because I can play these really hard virtuoso pieces, or that I have some kind of legitimacy because I spent 20,000 hours practicing—that I have this legitimacy just because I can subdue you by the force of my Liszt!”

Mr. Brubaker’s demeanor was calm, cheerful, optimistic—as though the idea of classical music vanishing into a virtual cloud of perpetual recombination didn’t bother him one bit. And it doesn’t: Mr. Brubaker sees the modern focus on virtuosity and concert performance as a historical anomaly. “Take Beethoven’s Hammerklavier as an example,” he said. “I think pianists took that home, looked at it and said, ‘Wow.’ I don’t think they mastered it.”

He has made a point of championing the work of living composers like William Duckworth, whose Time Curve Preludes Mr. Brubaker has revived on his newest piano recording, Time Curve (Arabesque), set for a summer release. “The old idea that you’re going to … just have the linear work that’s going to be bounded and contained—it’s going to be really hard to hold on to it,” he said. “And I’m not so sure that we should lament that.”

ddacosta@observer.com

Ms. Zwilich, who will turn 70 on April 30, occupies a unique place in the pantheon of contemporary classical music. In 1975, she became the first woman to earn a doctorate in composition from Juilliard, and eight years later became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for composition. The popularity of her music, often described using terms like “romantic,” “accessible” and “audience-friendly,” has lifted her name into the firmament of Americana: “Zwilich” has been the answer to a New York Times crossword clue and a Jeopardy! question, and appeared in Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip.

Of course, Ms. Zwilich knows very well that in the world of contemporary music, “accessible” isn’t always a compliment. “I think people will look back 50 years from now and think: What on earth were people talking about in the latter part of the 20th century?” she said. “For some people the word ‘accessible’ means the music is not quite good enough. It’s ridiculous. I mean, the whole history of music, of all different kinds of music, shows that music is meant to be heard, it’s meant to touch people. It’s not some kind of phenomenon that’s evolved and had historical necessity, and all of that BS.

“I think that, first, people have never understood the history of their own time, never understood the significance of it,” she continued. “And second, it’s a particular point of view—it’s an attitude—that music progresses. It probably started with Wagner as champion of the idea that this is the new music, this is the way we go, and everything else is irrelevant.”

Ms. Zwilich went on to list composers she admires that are still typically excluded from standard accounts of important 20th century music. (Alan Hovhaness and the Neo-Classicist David Diamond are two examples.) As the first occupant of Carnegie Hall’s composer’s chair, from 1995 to 1999, she organized a series called Making Music that brought together musicians and composers from across the range of sensibility, ignoring what she viewed as needless divisions between tonal and atonal, standard repertory and contemporary. “Things that are silly in real life are silly in artistic life, too,” she said. “Kids standing on different sides of the street sticking their tongues out at each other. That’s all it is.”

Warming to the topic, Ms. Zwilich waved her hands slowly in front of her, tracing the shape of her thought. She compared writing down a score, which she often does with the help of a violin, to writing stage directions in a play. “[A playwright] isn’t just writing sentences in the abstract,” she said. “Take, for example, the stage direction ‘John comes into the room and puts his head on the table.’ … I think a good playwright knows how John will come in and put his head on the table. In other words, a play has to be thought of in performance; in my opinion, music has to be thought of in performance.”

ddacosta@observer.com

Mr. Kline was talking about his recently released recording, a mass for string quartet called John the Revelator (Cantaloupe), and The Long Winter, a piano sonata performed by Berkeley-based pianist Sarah Cahill at the Merkin last month.

Revelator closely follows the form of a Catholic mass; The Long Winter offers irresistibly beautiful harmonies. To most listeners, both works will sound, by contemporary standards, quite traditional.

Then again, most listeners don’t know Mr. Kline.

The composer, 53, is best known to aficionados of experimental music for compositions consisting of repeating loops of a single sample, played simultaneously on several different cassette players. The samples start in unison, but drift slowly out of phase due to minute differences in speed among the devices. The result is a complex and shifting brocade of sound.

How did Mr. Kline get from downtown avant-gardism to the straightforwardly melodic, practically medieval harmonies of Revelator? “I think in a lot of ways I was trying to argue and reason with my parents,” he said. “They were very devout Christians. It’s a kind of religious argument, with me as the young agnostic.”

Mr. Kline, who grew up in Akron, Ohio, became infatuated with New York’s music scene while a student at Columbia in the mid-1970s, loitering outside Philip Glass’ downtown loft hoping to catch stray inspiration from the master. Mr. Kline also hosted a college radio show, on which he featured the work of a then-little-known musician named Steve Reich.

After a post-college year playing guitar in a cover band on the somewhat less progressive Cleveland bar circuit (“It was a really bitter pill to swallow,” he says of the Eagles songs he had to learn), he rushed back to Manhattan, getting a Soho apartment for $125 a month two blocks away from his childhood friend, the director Jim Jarmusch. “Everybody we knew lived within a half a mile or less,” Mr. Kline said. “I always wondered, just within that square mile, how many artists there were.”

For a while, it was paradise: Everybody was creating. Recalling the era, Mr. Kline lapsed into the peculiar trance induced by the recitation of rock-band genealogy: “The very first band I was in downtown was a DNA spin-off. The original DNA keyboard player, Robin Crutchfield—DNA is classically known as the trio of Arto, Tim and Ikue—I think Robin was the third guy on keyboard, and he left DNA and started a band called Dark Day, and I played with Dark Day, I don’t know, a year or so. And toured briefly with Tuxedo Moon. … Then I guess we started the Del-Byzanteens in ’80, ’81 …”

If Mr. Kline speaks with some pride of his connections, it’s because his rock genealogy is also in large part the story of No Wave, the downtown music scene that followed in the wake of punk. Along with Mr. Kline on guitar, the Del-Byzanteens featured Jim Jarmusch on bass, and their friend, the writer Luc Sante, occasionally contributed lyrics. Plus, as YouTube will confirm, their songs were actually good.

Fans of Mr. Kline’s experimentalist tape loops shouldn’t fear that the composer, now married and the father of an 18-month-old daughter, is buckling to convention. Asked about future projects, Mr. Kline sketched out his idea for an opera based on Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamable. Of course, this opera would have no singers. Or characters.

“Maybe it’s one of those things that’s better thought of and undone,” he said.

ddacosta@observer.com

If you haven’t heard of this opera, then you haven’t heard of its composer, either. Zimmermann—who was born in 1918 and who died, by his own hand, in 1970—was an enormously learned and diligent composer who worked in many genres during his career. But his reputation rests solely on Die Soldaten.

Traumatized by his experience of the Second World War and its aftermath, Zimmermann fashioned his libretto from Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz’s 1776 play, a renowned example of the Sturm und Drang movement in German literature. Marie, the teenage daughter of a fancy goods merchant in the city of Lille, is tempted into having an affair with Desportes, a French soldier and nobleman, spurning the good-hearted young merchant Stolzius, who’s madly in love with her. Desportes is but one of a group of soldiers who seem more interested in carousing than fighting, and who toy with Marie until, raped by Desportes’ huntsman, she ends up destitute, unrecognized by her father; Stolzius gets his revenge by killing Desportes before taking his own life. At the end, the drama is engulfed in the sounds of screams and marching. We have reached the abyss.

Die Soldaten is an odd thing—a great opera that doesn’t have a lot of great music. Once favorably compared to the expressionist operas of Alban Berg, it now seems to come up short. The classical structures that underlie its often unsettling scenes, as in Wozzeck, are intellectual poses rather than expressive tools, and Zimmermann’s characters are two-dimensional compared to the fully rounded, lyrically effusive beings that populate Lulu. Only in two scenes—the tour de force finale of Act II, in which Marie’s downfall is depicted from three perspectives at once, and the Rosenkavalier-like trio that ends Act III—does the music truly rise to the occasion.

ZIMMERMANN WAS BOTH a man of his time and a man ahead of it. The foundation of his style was the kind of 12-tone music—gray, grim, forbidding—that dominated the 1960s, but it’s the collagelike way in which other kinds of music—jazz, Gregorian chant, folk songs, Bach chorales—are mixed in that gives the piece a manic, back-and-forth bounce that suits the obsessive zeal with which Zimmermann attacked his subject. Somehow, Die Soldaten works.

The Cologne Opera rejected the wildly impractical original version, designed to be performed on twelve acting areas, embellished by three cinema screens, and with part of the huge orchestra sequestered off-stage. The successful 1965 premiere was mounted on a conventional proscenium stage—as was New York City Opera’s 1991 production at the State Theater, which some cognoscenti still rhapsodize about.

I may only need to see Die Soldaten once in my life, but I feel lucky to have experienced David Pountney’s production, which was first offered by the RuhrTriennale festival in 2006. Some critics have not been kind; the venerable John Simon (writing for Bloomberg.com) hoisted the cry of “Regietheater”—that very German affliction which causes directors to take wild liberties with a composer’s stage directions in order to make some kind of aesthetic or political point.

But with one ridiculous exception (rapists wearing Santa Claus suits? really?), Mr. Pountney’s liberties seemed necessary to make sense out of an almost unstageable piece. Costumes ranged widely to evoke the Edwardian era, Weimar Germany and the frozen fields of Stalingrad—a whole arena of social and military conflict that stretched across decades.

By now you’ve heard of the two massive, movable sets of steel bleachers (conceived by Robert Innes Hopkins) that transferred approximately 1,000 listeners back and forth on railroad tracks along a narrow strip of stage that stretched from one end of the hall to the other. The immediate effect, as one sat down and gazed into the distance, was chilling: The transition between Acts I and II, in which stark white lights lit up the steel cage above us that held the whole structure together, was breathtaking in its wonder.

Amid all this expensive architectonic grandeur, a living, breathing performance (backed up by the excellent Bochum Symphony and its conductor, Steven Sloane) took place. Claudia Barainsky’s full physique may not have suggested destitution, but her Marie was both emotionally responsive and vocally disciplined; Peter Hoare’s agile high tenor lent an almost sympathetic elegance to the unsympathetic role of Desportes. (The two share an astonishing scene involving a dance, a quill pen and a cascade of daunting coloratura.)

Claudio Otelli’s utterly committed portrayal of Stolzius as a pathetic melancholic was so effective that you almost understood why Marie was tempted to leave him. Claudia Mahnke sang the role of Marie’s sister Charlotte with an unfailingly warm tone, and Kay Stiefermann was a dashing and distinctive Major Mary, another of Marie’s suitors. Two distinguished veterans—Hanna Schwarz and Helen Field—lent genuine grandeur and profound expression to their motherly roles.

Russell Platt is a composer and a music editor at The New Yorker.

rplatt@observer.com.

Four days later, the venerable Minetta Tavern went out of business. VOX, however, is stronger than ever in its ninth year. What began as a kind of operatic quilting bee, with New York City Opera acting as an umbrella for a collection of small, intrepid New York ensembles, has become a streamlined two-day festival firmly under the company’s control, drawing a substantial audience and a cloud of friendly buzz.

George Manahan, the company’s music director, led two of the Saturday session’s five pieces with his typically unflappable command. Throughout the day, the City Opera Orchestra and a collection of young singers performed with an abundance of professionalism and aplomb.

The selection of excerpts from new works was wonderfully varied, though the quality varied, too. Cary Ratcliff’s Eleni, with a libretto by Robert Koch based on Nicholas Gage’s book about his family’s brutal experiences during the Greek Civil War, boasted City Opera diva Emily Pulley in its title role. But it was hobbled by inept word setting and a risibly overblown Hollywood-style score.

Another star soprano, Lauren Flanigan, was similarly wasted in Veronika Krausas’ trivial and disorganized The Mortal Thoughts of Lady Macbeth. Steve Potter’s The Officers was a noble try at experimental opera, a critique of the creepily homogenized language used in advertising, airport signage and political discourse—but the intellectual invention could not hide the lack of musical nourishment.

Yet the day opened well and ended even better. Our Giraffe, by the composer Sorrel Hays and the librettist Charles Flowers, was a deft and humorous study of a little-known historical episode: the gift of a giraffe from Ottoman Egypt to King Charles X of France in 1826. As the French—being French—argue decorously over the political, commercial and sexual ramifications of the giraffe’s arrival, Ms. Hays gives them music of a simplicity and charm happily reminiscent of Virgil Thomson.

John King’s Dice Thrown, a fantasia on a grand and intoxicating late poem by Mallarmé, was more like a revelation. Mr. King is an esteemed downtown veteran who has composed two scores for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; like Mr. Cunningham’s partner, John Cage, he composes using chance operations, creating music that eschews any resemblance to traditional tonality or syntax.

And yet, in a performance by the stunningly accurate soprano Melissa Fogarty, the piece became a dazzling coloratura solo of compelling dramatic urgency. The soprano and the orchestral players (conducted ably by Marc Lowenstein) have considerable freedom in interpreting the “materials” of Mr. King’s fragmentary score: Each performance makes for a unique, unrepeatable composition.

Nothing’s easier than to write bad music this way—and as the second of two 15-minute versions began its run, I was not hopeful.

But about five minutes in, wonderful things started happening. The English horn player intoned his phrases with an ear-catching lyrical arc; the strings responded in kind, and Ms. Fogarty starting creating a character, not just a “part.” A musical country you could call Mallarmé Land cohered into being: We could picture its mountains, its cities, its fretting housewives, its squabbling politicians.

Perhaps it’s the listener, ultimately, who breathes life into Mr. King’s piece, or pieces. But it’s the composer’s invention that makes that possible, and Mr. King’s is of a rare kind.

TO THE DISTINGUISHED Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink I owe one of the most powerful musical experiences of my life: his Carnegie Hall performance of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in 2003, a magnificent collaborative effort that featured not only the Boston Symphony Orchestra but also such singers as Lorriane Hunt Lieberson and Simon Keenlyside. And to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra I owe my first experience of Shostakovich’s titanic Fourth Symphony, from their thrilling recording of the work under André Previn.

But when Mr. Haitink, the Chicago Symphony’s principal conductor, and the Fourth Symphony came together at Carnegie Hall last Friday night (in the second program of a two-concert CSO residency), the performance, while admirable and secure, was far less than I’d hoped for.

It was announced early this month that Riccardo Muti, having twice spurned the New York Philharmonic, will take up the music directorship of the CSO in 2010. Mr. Muti will inherit from Mr. Haitink an ensemble that, in its carefully blended sound and seamless unity of purpose, can perform at the exalted level of the Cleveland Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic.

Mr. Haitink’s great gift as a conductor is to make musicians know, in his firm but collegial style, that only their best efforts will do; his weakness is that he sometimes does so little with what he elicits.

From his rendering of Haydn’s Symphony No. 101 (“The Clock”), which began the program, you would have detected the composer’s genius as a master craftsman, but not the magical mixture of wit, poetry, humor and melancholy that makes his music live.

Go to the recordings. In the hands of a Pierre Monteux, a Haydn symphony is an opera buffa; under Leonard Bernstein, it’s a jazz improvisation; under Antal Dorati, it’s Romantic poetry read with the detachment of a gentleman scholar. The gold-plated competence offered by a man like Bernard Haitink is a great thing—indeed, the world can’t get along without it. But it lacks the touch of the divine.

Russell Platt is a composer and a music editor at The New Yorker. He can be reached at rplatt@observer.com.

“Could an opera make us stand up for the truth?” asked one poster. “Could an opera make us warriors for peace?” asked another. (The outdoor campaign was underwritten by Met patron Agnes Varis, a devoted political activist and philanthropist.) If Giuseppe Verdi were around, he would have asked, “Can this opera make money?”—a philosophy that brought forth such trivial entertainments as La Traviata, Aida and Otello, not to mention a piece of fluff called Tristan und Isolde.

I don’t doubt for a moment Mr. Glass’ commitment to the ideals that his opera promotes—it’s an heroic portrait of Mahatma Gandhi in his first years as a defender of the Indian people—but he’s just as much a man of the theater as old Verdi.

Satyagraha (which means “Truth Force” in Sanskrit) has been making money for the same reasons those other operas have: It has something to say, and mostly says it well. Mr. Glass’ brand of minimalism can be maddeningly plain, yet it’s the product of a transformative genius. The operatic creations of John Adams, which the Met will present in future seasons, may be more subtle and dramatically varied, but they’re built on Mr. Glass’ template.

The composer and his librettist, Constance DeJong, adapted a sequence of texts from the Bhagavad Gita into a series of tableaux that depict Gandhi’s struggle to organize oppressed Indian workers in South Africa in the years before the First World War. The action is often static, but then so was Gandhi’s method: his philosophy of nonviolent resistance, which inspired Martin Luther King Jr.

A sumptuous staging would have gone against everything Gandhi stood for. The production team of Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch—who first crafted their version for English National Opera—therefore made their simple sets out of corrugated metal, with reams of newsprint used as props and bits of décor. (Corrugated metal was used by the colonial powers to build fences and basic structures; Gandhi’s newspaper Indian Opinion helped build support for his cause.) The contributions of a “Skills Ensemble” of aerialists and puppeteers maximized the mythic wonder inherent in the story.

If economy and invention went hand in hand, it was often to the benefit of Mr. Glass, whose music was sometimes too spacious for its own good. (Let’s just say that Act II could use a hefty 10-minute cut.) Perhaps Act III—a tragic tone poem built largely on the alternation of two chords—was the most effective. Dr. King motioned silently from on high; blocks of newsprint, affixed like funeral plaques to a massive wall, were stripped off to reveal television screens showing footage from Bloody Sunday and the March on Washington.

Act III is also largely a duet for tenor and conductor, and it profited from the solid musicality and poignant phrasing of Richard Croft (singing the role of Gandhi) and Dante Anzolini (in his podium debut). In the roles of Miss Schlesen and Mr. Kallenbach, two of Gandhi’s European followers, Rachelle Durkin and Earle Patriarco provided sterling support. The Met Orchestra, used to the subtleties and complexities of Mozart and Wagner, cranked out Mr. Glass’ endless arpeggios with professional dispatch.

ONE OF MR. Glass’ biggest fans is the pianist Bruce Levingston, who gathered a glittering audience for his solo recital at Zankel Hall on April 14. Among the crowd, one could spot the distinguished composers Charles Wuorinen and Sebastian Currier, there to hear their music world-premiered; the pianist’s pianists Ursula Oppens and Jerome Lowenthal; the actor Andrew McCarthy; the writer Dana Vachon; and Michael Stipe and David Rockefeller, who need no introduction.

Not everyone had a Platinum card, of course. But what all these boldface names have in common (like the composers Mr. Levingston has championed over the years, a list that includes David Del Tredici, Milton Babbitt, William Bolcom, Lisa Bielawa and Mr. Glass) is that they’re among the best at what they do. It would be a mistake to see Mr. Levingston’s nearly decade-long series of Premiere Commission concerts as fancy social occasions: They’re serious events in which both new and familiar works are presented with a singular combination of challenge and delight.

Mr. Levingston picked pieces that speak to his strengths, which are considerable, and performed on the same carefully voiced Steinway that Alfred Brendel used for his farewell New York recital. The columnar chords of Arvo Pärt’s Für Alina, a seminal work of Baltic minimalism, came through with a remarkable radiance and calm, as did the liquid sequences of a Debussy étude. Mr. Levingston’s New York-premiere performance of the prominent German composer Wolfgang Rihm’s Brahmsliebewalzer, a surreal though loving tribute to the master, allowed his rendition of Brahms’ late Intermezzo in E Major, which immediately followed, to strike our ears with refreshment and wonder.

Both Liszt’s daunting Vallée d’Obermann and Mr. Currier’s absorbing and exquisitely crafted Departures and Arrivals seemed not only played but lived through, musical diaries that seamlessly mixed the composers’ thoughts with those of their interpreter. Composers cherish these kinds of concerts; the Premiere Commission series should go on forever.

Russell Platt is a composer and a music editor at The New Yorker. He can be reached at rplatt@observer.com.

Like the era of "irrational exuberance" that produced it, that album is likely to be the achievement for which Moby is best remembered, though he recently remarked that “in hindsight, it wasn't fun being the crucified poster child for selling out.”

It’s unlikely too that he’ll want to be remembered as Eminem’s nemesis (he spoke out on Em’s misogyny! Em called him a “bald!” “fag!” There was a scuffle at the V.M.A.'s!), an episode in which it’s fair to say we all lost some dignity just by living through it.

Yet whether he likes it or not, Moby was in many ways the perfect personification of the late 90's Zeitgeist, a nerdy guy who won a tremendous windfall with all of that thinking outside the box.

Either way, that legacy stuff has a lot to do with the nostalgic turn Moby has taken on his latest, “Last Night,” a valentine of sorts to the salad days of New York’s club scene (or at least Moby’s experience of said scene, from roughly 1981-1991).

Born Richard Melville Hall on Sept. 11, 1965, Moby grew up just outside New York, mainly in Darien, Conn., discovered punk rock as a teen, went vegan, found Jesus, played in some hardcore bands, got into the nascent techno scene and, through that, the subsequent rave boom. By 1989 he was living full time in the big city, D.J.ing around town and producing his first singles. The roommates at that first pad on 14th street and Third avenue? Painter Damian Loeb and fellow DJ Stretch Armstrong. Just like a real-life version of Party Girl.

Moby became a fixture in the city’s clubs and at its raves, at long-gone spaces like the Palladium, Mars, and MK, as well as illegal warehouses in frontier neighborhoods, like Williamsburg. He remained in New York through his rise to fame and the comedown that followed, letting MTV’s cameras into his Feng-Shui-tastic Chinatown flat for Cribs, opening tea shop and eatery TeaNY in 2002 (he’s since bowed out, but the place endures). So with all that it’s no surprise that this city figures centrally in his life and work.

Perhaps also spurred on by the failure of his recent, forgettable indiscrections: 2002's Play-lite, 18 and 2005's pastoral guitar bore, Hotel, Moby is seeking to remind people that he was the man who brought electronic music out of its shell, and laid the groundwork for the effortlessness of today’s electro-crossovers, like LCD Soundsystem, Simian Mobile Disco, or Justice.

And of course, 42 is a great age to start having that midlife crisis. In the past few years Moby has returned to the club scene, D.J.'ing regularly, staying out late, becoming romantically linked to the likes of Natalie Portman (it’s hard to say whether that’s a cry for help or just confusing). “Last Night” purports, in Moby’s words, to document an “8 hour night out in New York City and condense it into a 65 minute-long album.” In a lot of ways a more accurate appraisal would be that the music of the 80's and early 90's were condensed into these 65 minutes.

The album opens with “Ooh Yeah,” built on a plodding piano melody overlaid with sappy synth strings, wah-wah guitars and moaning vocals drowning in echo. It feels claustrophobic and more like a pantomime of old material than a meditation upon influences. “I Love to Move in Here” shows a little more spirit, its droning, repeated piano trills a dead-on homage to soulful late 80's house music. Grandmaster Caz, one of the original Cold Crush MCs, turns in a vague but solid verse. “257.zero,” offers more of the same, with its acid squelches and vague, robotic vocal samples ranting off random numbers summoning the groundless pathos of so much rave music. It sounds an awful lot like a Moby song, just one you can’t quite place. Finally, “Everyday It’s 1989,” in addition to boasting the most apt title on the album, delivers the promise of Moby’s nostalgia trip, its diva vocal, pumping piano, metronomic strings, and the inevitable breakdown-buildup-freakout celebrating why there was so much fuss about club music back then in the first place.

The rest of the album meanders, from “Live For Tomorrow” and its mildly irritating inspira-trance to “Alice” and its borrowing of industrial hip-hop, featuring featuring U.K.-based rapper Aynzil, as well as U.K.-based Nigerian singers Smokey and S.O. Simple from 419 Squad. The rhyming is pretty cool, but this feels a lot like a song you might hear in a video game. And that’s just it. Much of this music feels too familiar to really mean much, and despite a few genuinely special moments, on the whole “Last Night” feels less like homage and more like an inoffensive mimicry. It's background music waiting to happen.

“Hyenas” pulls out a smoky female vocal in French, and recalls David Holmes’ suave soundtrack work, while “I’m in love,” (another dusky female vocal) goes minimal (save for some trancey strings), but while these are meant to relay the romantic moments of the evening, they feel like marketing gimmicks.

“Disco Lies” is more diva melodrama, this time without that sweet pumping piano, which returns for one last triumphant tune, “The Stars,” perhaps the best of these piano-driven energy-boosts. And you’ll need that energy to make it through the soporific latter half of the album (presumably the last four hours of the night are spent dozing on the couch).

“Degenerates” yields slow industrial bangs echoing among lilting string and piano swells. This music is tender and thoughtful enough, but it’s never clear about what. They also don’t sound like they were made twenty years ago. They sound like they could have been made by Brian Eno at any point in his career.

Moby has a gig lined up April 3 at Hiro Ballroom in New York with a couple of of-the-moment deckmates: French house purveyor (and Justice cohort) D.J. Mehdi and electro vet Tommy Sunshine.

He’s been getting major accolades for his return to the decks, and his love for dance music cannot be doubted (though a recent set at a Playboy party at SXSW (edgy!) was reported to have climaxed with “Paradise City,” which sounds a little cheap).

Perhaps the dance music scene has allowed Moby to be a bit easy on himself. After all the dance scene seems endlessly inclusive of every wastrel of a sub-genre that ever reared its head. Everyone is welcome to the party.

That Moby helped usher in a decade of fascinating and diverse dance music that hasn’t had to compromise or “cross over,” but has simply entered easily into the public perception of pop, makes him both the guest of honor and the guy who should have sent his regrets. This could have been an opportunity for Moby to expand his musical pallette as well as bring some of his former glories back into the rotation. Instead what he created was an album heavy on the worst sort of retro-futurist fluff. In that time-warp, Moby's music hasn't aged a day.

And there's no way Mr. Green could have known the film would become such a runaway success, or that a tune by his old band, the Moldy Peaches, featured prominently therein would become one of iTunes' hottest downloads, or that the soundtrack would rocket to the top of the Billboard 200, or that he'd end up reuniting with ex-band mate Kimya Dawson after a four-year hiatus to perform their old songs in front of the ladies on The View, or that thousands of teens across the country would record their own cover versions of Juno's unofficial theme "Anyone Else But You," and then load them up on YouTube.

But the timing's got to feel pretty sweet, right? Just as the mania surrounding the movie and its music is starting to wane, Mr. Green has a chance to step in and offer all those fans another deep swig right from the source.

Well, judging from the character of Green's latest album, "Sixes & Sevens," the after-the-fact popularity the Moldy Peaches are enjoying may in fact be kind of a mixed blessing. See, Mr. Green has moved on. He's left behind the beat-up guitar strum and stream-of-sappiness ramblings that defined the Moldy Peaches and along with them New York's Anti-Folk scene, a loose gathering of D.I.Y. poet-singers that packed them in at the Sidewalk Cafe on Avenue A in the late ‘90s. Mr. Green's new album is packed with strutting blue-eyed soul, gospel-backed crooning, and full-on country-fried rock. Perhaps not the aching preciousness Juno fans would clamor for. But how did Green get from A to B, and is it all a big gag?

After all, Mr. Green still manages to pack an awful lot of wordiness, nerdiness, and (yes Michael Hirschorn) quirkiness into his songs, yet beyond his lyrics, he shows an intense interest in refining the musical underpinnings. He's still got the up-for-a-few-days sunken eyes and aloof stare, the grease-slicked wavy locks and the pudgy weariness of a young Harmony Korine (or indeed a bizarre version of his friend Julian Casablancas), but it's matched with a killer horn section. The video for his latest single has Mr. Green shuffling in a dance number with costumed extras, yet his frumpy frug sticks out like a sore thumb, and it's meant to.

On earlier efforts such clashes seemed tongue-in-cheek or worse, condescending, as on the snide cabaret of 2005's "Gemstones." Even 2006's "Jacket Full of Danger," which expanded the musical pallete further with scumbag-rock a la Jim Morrison on songs like the irritating "Drugs," and the roadhousey "White Women," felt like a big joke. The orchestral sweeps and sweet hooks sounded disingenuous, purposefully cheesy.

On Sixes & Sevens it's nearly impossible to tell whether he's joking, and that may even, finally, be beside the point. Perhaps the more rounded musical backing doesn't have to be disingenuous just because Mr. Green still crafts his lyrics from the odd-ends cultural detritus that floats through his brain, pinballing between the profound and the banal, and usually ending up with the latter. Yet at its best moments, it seems Mr. Green achieves a snug fit between his admittedly left-field verbal sense and a more sophisticated musical backing. Even the album art has attained a high gloss, a patina of professionalism art-directed to achieve something like the image of an inner struggle to grow up without growing old.

Apparently this all started last year when Mr. Green visited Nashville, and during his travels got to talking with producers, songwriters, and session dudes, as one will in a city so littered with musicians. It's fair to say Mr. Green is obsessed with Nashville. He can't stop nodding to the town on this album, and has even composed songs for country artists (Kelly Willis). To do justice to the sounds he was seeking, Mr. Green brought in Old-school arranger David Campbell (who has, like, 50 Grammy awards) to perfect that sonic patina. A clutch of gospel singers on the album hails from closer to home, Brooklyn.

While there are plenty of styles on display over the album's 20 tracks (a plentitude tempered by a running time of 48 minutes), most tunes circle around Nashville's great contributions to the realms of country, blues and gospel, all in a laid-back, classic vernacular that wouldn't be out of place on the Leon Redbone or Bonnie Raitt album. If that sounds like a tall order for the gawky, scrappy poet of the streets, it is, but then again why not? In a way the cadences of Mr. Green's lyrics are no less rollicking than these more staid precursors, and if at times they seem out of place, his presence somehow does not.

His smooth baritone takes him a long way, in this sense, evidenced on the opener, "Festival Song," in which Mr. Green bursts in with an epic rocker reminiscent of Badfinger or 10cc, only to straighten out on follow-up "Tropical Island" which drops him in the middle of what could be a Jonathan Richman tune, if Mr. Richman's narratives were a bit more disjointed and a bit scuzzier. Mr. Green deals in shifting, word-packed verses, reveling in the shallower thrills of clever turns-of-phrase, and only rarely offers something more lastingly evocative, as on the politically minded "Getting Led," "I was a nation / bound to my station … you saw beyond me / pounding down on me / Getting led, getting led, getting led." On that one he's at his best, channeling Leonard Cohen and New Morning-era Dylan, making the gospel backing actually make some sense.

the shuffling, horn-laden single "Morning After Midnight" shows Mr. Green at perhaps his most unaffected and yet seemingly at the top of his oddness, a bit of E Street Band and a scruffy croon alongside fractured, pat lyricisms, ending with a "cha, cha, cha." Follow-up "Twee Twee Dee," is a sweet-as-pie come-on, with strings, a nice organ backing, and shambling drumbeat. If you didn't listen too close you might miss the stuff about "matching underwear" or the self-conscious referentiality of the title (as well as its reference to Michael Hurley's classic SweeDeeDee).

Of course with 20 tracks they're not all winners, but at least the real clunkers are as short as the killer stuff. On a lot of songs Green seems lost in the mix, as though hesitant to step forward and own every single track. Then there are a few moments where messy piles of instrumentation prove too much, as on "You Get So Lucky" where pan flutes and electric sitar and more, apparently influenced by Don Cherry's irreverent instrumentations, effectively spoil the Leonard Cohen intensity that Mr. Green's voice achieves on the track. "That Sounds Like a Pony" simply irritates with a rapid-fire, slightly-bored-sounding Mr. Green rattling off a bunch of rhymes over snare rolls, like an exercise in keeping the album sufficiently weird.

There's plenty more to choose from, be it the orchestral folk of "It's a Fine," the twang of "Homelife," or the Lou Reed channeling of "Be My Man" (if Lou talked about the L train rather than heroin). "Drowning Head First" is the most song reminiscent of Mr. Green's earlier work, his scratchy, plaintive vocals answered by girlfriend Loribeth Capella as that beat-up guitar strums away between them. It ain't much if Juno fans come looking for twenty Moldy Peaches tunes, but it will have to do, and hopefully those who do snap up this album for Green's pedigree will find the expansion of his musical palette a pleasant surprise.

Darnielle made his name in that most 90's (and least ambitious) of genres, lo-fi bedroom folk-pop. He released hundreds of songs on dozens of tapes, 7” singles, LPs, and even those newfangled CDs. He played in basements and rec halls from coast to coast for tiny crowds of self-selected connoisseurs in love with his literate narratives and nasal balladry. When he signed to mini-major 4AD in 2002, some fans worried that he’d lose his charm and end up sounding, well, average. Yet the full-band-backed and studio recorded Tallahassee was a revelation, and Darnielle’s dense lyricism, his complex character sketches of clerks, junkies, and lonelyhearts in tales of suburban dread, literary obsession, and baseball (among so much more), seemed to gain even greater life alongside the richer instrumentation.

Since then, each Mountain Goats release has outsold its predecessor, and Darnielle has gained tens of thousands of fans. And his work since Tallahassee, to allay the fears of the diehards, has been anything but average, from his 2005 concept album The Sunset Tree, a chronicle of his youth in an abusive home, to 2006’s quiet, intense exploration of the short end of romance, Get Lonely. At their best moments, the narratives in these albums are touching, or awful, or funny, but Darnielle’s writing never lapses into cliché. He proves that pop songwriting has more facets than heart-on-sleeve weepiness or caveman banality. He once wrote: “I have spent … years waging war against such facile, reductive, post-romantic descriptions of what it is that songwriters do, but since the war has proven futile, to hell with it: these songs are all pages ripped from my diary, which drips blood.” He may have given up the war, but of all those 90's tapers, he’s still standing, and that says something.

With rhetoric like that bloody diary bit, it’s unlikely Darnielle’s wordy thickets or breathless, often snarling high-pitched vocals will seriously threaten Starbucks-approved crooners, yet the lustrous backing instrumentation and colorful, sprawling stories on his latest, Heretic Pride, in stores today, provide the best introduction possible to his world of music. His lyrics remain, at times, cryptic and fragmentary, but the words are still the point, as is the honesty of his approach. Musical wallpaper this is not, but listening doesn’t feel like drudgery either, which, respectively, often feel like the only speeds of trendy pop on the one hand and arty pop on the other.

Heretic Pride is balanced with a gentle pop sensibility, Darnielle’s acoustic backed by Peter Hughes on bass and John Wurster on drums, with just a few additional touches provided by like-minded indie stalwarts like Franklin Bruno and St.Vincent’s Annie Clark. Producers Scott Solter and John Vanderslice (a famed home-taper himself) maintain a clean yet weighty sound throughout, with the vocals always squarely on top. The places Darnielle goes with his songs require little embellishment, but what extra flare there is is always measured and employed to help the words along rather than obfuscate them in pelting rhythm or virtuosity.

A good example is album opener “Sax Rohmer #1,” which spins a romance out of a spy-filled foreign port with a prodding, low-end drum thump alongside gliding acoustic chording (Rohmer was a pulp spy novelist and the creator of Fu Manchu). Gently mourning strings frame the outpouring road-trip narrative “San Bernardino,” where the youthful narrator recalls the gorgeous countryside the day his girlfriend gives birth in a motel room. The album, already forceful and quick, catches fire on the title track, with a languorous, pretty piano line threading through an epic folk-rock storm, while a would-be martyr marches toward his death, noting the scents of flowers on the air. “New Zion,” with a whining organ and gently groovy, almost reggae instrumentation, sounds like a Crowded House slow-burner, only it’s about cult indoctrination.

Yet, as ever, Darnielle manages to make such an outlandish conceit sound humane and only a little bit funny. “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” sounds twitchy, paranoid and rageful as it uses the sci-fi writer’s xenophobic experience moving to Brooklyn as the basis for scenes of alienation. “Tianchi Lake” tells of a Chinese lake haunted by a dragon in a tender, impressionistic, and pretty tale. On “Sept 15, 1983,” Darnielle sings alongside more gentle reggae-ish melody about Dub Reggae producer and singer Prince Far I, the date being that of his death. Final track “Michael Myers Resplendent” is a valentine of sorts to slasher movies, a tender yet epic homage to horror.

The comic-book-style liner notes for Heretic Pride open with the statement “I have always had a sort of religious awe of geography.” Anyone familiar with his work knows this to be true, since his songs have traveled the globe many times over, and Darnielle himself has been somewhat of a rolling stone, reflecting time spent in many parts of the country and the world. It’s there too on his crucial, brilliantly written weblog (once a printed zine), titled appropriately “Last Plane to Jakarta,” home to probably the best music writing happening anywhere on or off the web (just another feather in Darnielle’s cap). Yet while his narratives pick up exoticism or drama or gravitas from locations far and wide, his songs remain defiantly human-scale, which is a welcome thing in an age where every “smart” band seems either lost in mask-wearing self-mythologies and whale song or awash in post-modern vagueness and Talking Heads worship.

A New York record executive recently said to me of Darnielle: “Contrast him with say, Kimya Dawson [formerly of the Moldy Peaches, whose songs were featured in the Oscar-bait indie movie Juno], who is eating up the fame right now. John isn't like that. He's cool just plodding along with his idiosyncrasies and writing 33 1/3 books on the band Masters of Reality. It's really a one fan at a time approach that he's had since putting out albums on cassette and playing fucking weird places like Lodi, Texas. But in many ways, that's why he'll have a career that outlasts that dude in the Decemberists.” Which is to say, Darnielle’s work opens a space that listeners must step across to embrace it.