New Music

Most Renaissance-era choral recordings are sold with ancient saints on the cover. Instead, New York Polyphony presents itself on its new disc, endBeginning, with a photo of a demolished church interior. The aftermath of an earthquake? One of New York Polyphony's concerts? This urban, four-voice, all-male group isn't out to wreck anything. But its concert Monday night at Friends' Central School in Wynnewood isn't likely to be ethereal by the usual early-music standards, either, even with a program of 16th-century Renaissance masters such as Antoine Brumel and Francisco Guerrero.

Many a demographic is super-served throughout the year on the Philadelphia film festival calendar. Cineastes with particular interests are catered to by the Latin American, Jewish, Terror, Gay & Lesbian, Science, Asian American and Animation film festivals, among others, not to mention the overarching Philadelphia Film Festival, which will take place in October this year. Add another group of movie buffs to the list: music fans. Starting this week, the inaugural XPN Music Film Festival will take place in University City, with 20 movies screening, mostly at the Annenberg Center on the University of Pennsylvania campus.

Discovering new music that's to your liking is simple and fun with the help of a few well-chosen applications for your smartphone. Shazam, by Shazam Entertainment Ltd., is a free app for Apple and Android that does one fine trick. Say you are out and about, and hear a song you like. Shazam will listen to a few seconds of music, identify the song, and link to all sorts of information about it. You can "tag" a song and share it on Facebook and Twitter, or send your find by e-mail to anyone or to your "Shazam friends.

Nine music organizations have been awarded a total of $858,430 in grants through the Pew Charitable Trusts's Philadelphia Music Project, a program run by Pew's Center for Arts and Heritage, center officials announced Wednesday. The Opera Company of Philadelphia was awarded $200,000 to produce Silent Night , a new opera by composer Kevin Puts and librettist Mark Campbell, co-commissioned by the opera company and the Minnesota Opera, where it received its world premiere in November 2011.

Significant collaborations here: Network for New Music, with its connections to area composers and its long-standing interest in sung words, joined forces with Felyx M (the Mendelssohn Club's 24-member chamber choir) and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, which has an intelligent subscription base and skill at presenting inexpensive concerts in congenial places. What came out of it was the 80-minute intermissionless program "Philadelphia Voices: O My Earth" Sunday night at the Independence Seaport Museum - an all-vocal program of music by Cynthia Folio, Jennifer Higdon, Thomas Whitman, Jan Krzywicki, James Primosch, and Donald St. Pierre.

The Kimmel Center is presenting less expensive, less exotic visiting orchestras. Local ensembles are increasing collaborations, so that the same event does double or triple duty by counting as a concert in the brochures of multiple organizations. And the city's musical face to the larger world, the Philadelphia Orchestra, has been in bankruptcy more than nine months and doesn't hope to exit until sometime after the filing's first anniversary. Times are tough. Young artists from the Curtis Institute of Music are leaving the nest and heading into careers of equal parts risk and promise.

WILMINGTON - The division between ancient and current music sometimes barely exists: Those involved with speculative resurrection of centuries-old sound need not work that much differently to bring new music into being. So nobody should be surprised that the small, Wilmington-based chamber-music group Mélomanie had no audible problems mixing ultra-polite Telemann with Variations on a Theme by Steely Dan by Mark Hagerty, performed Saturday at Grace United Methodist Church here (repeated Sunday at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill)

A guitar riff echoed off the houses, past a family unloading its car after a ski trip and a man running his leaf blower. It was early Sunday afternoon, and the Philadelphia indie band Ports of Call was tuning up in the backyard of an Oaklyn duplex. The sun was shining on East Lakeview Avenue, but it was still January, and keyboardist Stephanie Forsythe rubbed her fingers and stomped her feet between songs. Eyeing some extension cords running through the mud, she yelled at the band's four other members to stop playing.

TOURS HAUNTED HOUSE PARTY Should very old acquaintance be forgot, book a 75-minute reservation for the Colonial-era Powel House's end-of-year "Toast with a Ghost" tour. Organizers guarantee you'll experience at least one of the following spirits: deceased dignitaries, dead debutantes, champagne (or sparkling cider). Ages 13 and up. Powel House, 244 S. 3rd St., $25. 8 and 9 tonight; 9 p.m., 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. tomorrow (8 p.m. tomorrow tour sold out). 215-413-1997 or 215-413-7000, www.ghosttour.net . CASINOS JUMP START Tomorrow night you won't be able to swing a swizzle stick in Atlantic City without hitting a New Year's Eve bash in a casino.

Given the hard times that have hit the music and publishing industries in recent years, it wasn't so shocking when Magnet, the national indie-rock magazine based in Philadelphia, put out what looked like its final print issue in 2008 and became a Web-only publication. "The music industry was in the toilet, and we were able to weather that," says Magnet editor Eric T. Miller, who in 1993 cofounded the magazine. (John Cusack was reading it in publicity shots for the 2000 movie adaptation of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity . "And then the magazine industry was in the toilet, and we were able to weather that - for a while.