Larry Ryan: Caught In The Net

Late in September, an imposing box landed in music shops. It contained 10 CDs, a 191-page booklet and art by Chuck Close, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annie Leibovitz, Robert Wilson and Francesco Clemente, all dedicated to the 40-year career of Philip Glass. This is Glass Box: A Nonesuch Retrospective encompasses the American composer's chamber music, symphonies, operas, concerti, film scores and music for dance. At nearly £90 it is a fairly expensive outlay. In the meantime, Nonesuch is streaming large swathes of the set at www.nonesuch.com/albums/a-nonesuch-retrospective.

The American label Nonesuch has a range stretching from Wilco to Amadou & Miriam to The Wire soundtrack to Glass and everything else in between. You can negotiate it all with "Nonesuch Radio" – www.nonesuch.com/radio. Here you can listen to the random "Nonesuch Mix" or break it down into the myriad of genres it caters for.

Glass may be filed under "contemporary classical", "modern composition", "avant-garde" or that most nebulous moniker, "new music". These interlinked genres are so broad it is difficult to know where to start – Google "new music" and you're offered Radio 1, MTV and the NME. Perhaps a good way to dip one's toes in it is with radio: Hear and Now on Radio 3 is a natural place to start – www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/hearandnow. Lyric FM, a radio station on Ireland's state broadcaster RTE, runs a weekly two-hour show called Nova. It delves into new music, contemporary classical, electronic and experimental, www.rte.ie/lyricfm/nova.

The blog of the New Yorker magazine's music critic Alex Ross – www.therestisnoise.com – looks at these genres and more broadly at classical music as a whole. He posts on various aspects of music that pique his interest and helpfully – for the less initiated, like me – regularly adds MP3s and videos to illustrate his points. The blog shares its name with Ross's first book The Rest is Noise, chronicling adventures in 20th-century music "from The Rite of Spring to The Velvet Underground". Earlier this year the book was nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction.

For anyone considering reading the tome, Ross provides a video introduction – tinyurl.com/5w8pqz – and an audio guide with excerpts of many works discussed – tinyurl.com/ypbuex.

YouTube is a rich musical archive. See "Geometry of Circles", animations scored by Glass and made for Sesame Street in the late Seventies at http://tinyurl.com/3gtuzp.

There is also a lot of footage relating to Glass's contemporary Steve Reich. Notable is a strange dance interpretation of Reich's "Come Out" by a Texan choreographer in 1977 – tinyurl.com/49cyo7. The performer starts out smoking and fully clad in denim; several minutes later, he winds up in his boxers with a far-off look on his face. Closer to home, is an excellent 2006 South Bank Show with Reich – tinyurl.com/42zojm. On Pitchfork.tv, meanwhile, there is an interview with Reich by Sonic Youth front-man Thurston Moore – see tinyurl.com/5rfg7z.

In 2006, Nonesuch released Phases, a five-CD retrospective of Reich's music, with an essay by Alex Ross. In the video with Ross's book, he explains that he was a classical music buff since childhood and didn't purchase his first rock album until his twenties, when he acquired Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation. In grand six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon style, perhaps a path can be furrowed between both artists, from avant-garde and classical to rock.

Moore, however, might not always have agreed with such joined-up thinking. Back on YouTube you can find a 1989 documentary of a more fresh-faced Sonic Youth – tinyurl.com/3l43yp. At one point, the band chat with John Cale, formerly of The Velvet Underground. Cale says you could argue Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring was the first piece of rock and roll, but Moore merely shrugs, replying, "Eh... we wouldn't."

PICK OF THE WEEK

RadiOM.org

It may not seem accessible to the casual music listener, but RadiOM.org is a good source for anyone looking to expand their musical horizons. The San Francisco-based site carries an extensive archive of performances, concerts, interviews and documentaries about classical music, jazz, experimental music and more.

radiom.org