Cenk Ergün and Jason Treuting have a history of musical familiarity that goes back to their days studying at the Eastman School of Music. Now, after a decade of collaboration, they put each other on the spot.

Imagine if American music history in the 1970s had taken a slightly different course and the iconic Synchronisms of Mario Davidovsky—works which combined acoustic instruments with pre-recorded electronics—were the foundation for the future direction composers took, rather than being sonic curiosities from a past zeitgeist. For Steven Ricks, a Davidovsky protege who directs the Electronic Music Studio at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, works merging acoustic and electronic realms into a seamless whole serve as a sonic metaphor for uniting the corporeal and the spiritual.

The list of guest artists on Gabriel Kahane's new self-titled album reads like a Who's Who of great indie/classical/pop/chamber wherever-you-want-to-file-it performers. Sam Amidon, Rob Moose, CJ Camerieri, Chris Thile, Sam Sadigursky, Sufjan Stephens. The inquiring mind just has to know: Did Kahane post a "desperately seeking" ad on the right bulletin boards, or do these guys all just happen to drink at the same Brooklyn bar?

Ned McGowan is a sponge. Although born and raised in the United States, he has now lived in Amsterdam for a third of his life. Once in Amsterdam, McGowan says that "I found myself saying, 'What am I going to do?' We live in this age of specialization it seems like, but I'm just getting broader, not more specific." But this broadness has been his boon, turning him into a musical polymath whose diversity of interests is perhaps his greatest asset.

"Though now it sounds a bit absurd, I didn't even know you could write new music," admits composer Angélica Negrón. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1981, she grew up studying a range of instruments—piano, violin, cello, harp, accordion—but even once she reached the conservatory level, music still seemed to stop chronologically at Debussy. Almost done with her bachelor's degree in violin performance but beginning to write music for a band she was in, a friend encouraged her to try her hand at formal composition study. It was as if a musical curtain had suddenly been pulled back for her, revealing a host of possibilities. "Immediately from that moment, everything made sense," she says.

Keeril Makan contains multitudes. This was obvious enough back in 1998 when he wrote his duo for violin and percussion, 2. Contained within this Frankensteinian piece are the seeds of what he has explored throughout his career as a composer: pulsating rhythmic gestures, noise and abstraction, beauteous slow-moving harmonies, and long-breathed modal melodies. In the years that followed, these ideas would be dispersed, growing each of their own accord when Makan chose to explore them.

Ken Ueno is a man comfortable with a gear shift —a composer of music that thrills with its interior complexity in one case and probes the ear deeply with a simple overtone vocal line in the next. He is also as likely to pick up the inspiration for his work inside a candy store and a childhood memory as in the text of Calvino, Beckett, or Joyce. "I think about the influence of the internet and cable television and globalization," says Ueno, a Brooklyn-born Japanese-American. "I am a multiplicity of identities, maybe unresolved. And maybe one possible contemporary proposition is that it doesn't have to be a resolved linearity. I think that's part of the liberation of being a musicmaker today; we can engage with all of these things."

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