Just a few of the Black voices from the Studs Terkel Radio Archive.

Studs Terkel was committed to evolving, expanding, and interrogating our conception of who made up the US.

“We’re celebrating the spirit of the city and taking a moment for some musical civic pride!”

The Recording Academy has created a social change song award and five new categories, including songwriter of the year.

On this Martin Luther King, Jr. day, we’ve compiled an assortment of multimedia tributes — music, visual arts, poetry, and dance — to the monumental Civil Rights leader.

“For centuries, millennia, we humans have looked at the stars and wondered about our place in the universe and what’s beyond. That’s what I wanted to dig into,” reflects musician-composer-producer Caroline Shaw on her latest work, The Listeners.

WFMT observes the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day with a fitting broadcast: Chicago composer Stacy Garrop’s oratorio Terra Nostra, which celebrates our planet and explores the relationship between humankind and the natural world.

Throughout his 52 years at WFMT, Studs Terkel showcased and championed poets from across the globe.

As an outsized figure in literature and poetry, Poe has inspired composers like Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Philip Glass, and composer-conductor Leonard Slatkin, who set Poe’s “The Raven” to music in 1971.

April is National Poetry Month, so there’s no better time to share, revisit, or discover wonderful poetry. Here are our picks.

“Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice.” — Billy Collins Billy Collins is a wonderfully prolific, contemporary poet whose brief, poignant, and idiosyncratic word gems earned him the prestigious title of Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. A distinguished educator, he was also named the …

From its premiere more than 75 years ago, this music and ballet continue to speak to the American soul. Dive into the score of Appalachian Spring with Bill McGlaughlin.

The festival’s artistic director Elbio Barilari, who also hosts WFMT’s Fiesta, remarked of the festival that “just the idea that a Latin American classical music festival exists in the US and has already been going on for 14 years is very exciting!”

Author and activist Maya Angelou is best for her autobiographical memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. But have you heard Angelou sing?

Soprano Kate Royal has made her name singing in some of the oldest and most beloved operas in the repertoire by Monteverdi and Mozart, but the London native is also drawn to and sought-after to perform in more modern operas.

When young Jacques finished grade school, he found a job in a movie house, playing piano for silent films.