Music for Voices/Music for Quartets” is the title of this year’s June in Buffalo festival, which takes place June 4-10 on UB’s Amherst Campus. Founded in 1975 by the legendary composer Morton Feldman, the event provides an opportunity for aspiring composers to meet with established, well known composers for a very full week of seminars, master classes, lectures and public concerts. This year’s senior composers are John Harbison, Steve Reich, Roger Reynolds, Charles Wuorinen and David Felder, the festival’s artistic director. They’ll be joined by 20 advanced students from Europe, Asia, South America and the USA (selected from almost one hundred applicants) who will each get the rare opportunity to hear one of their works performed by world class musicians in a professional setting. David Felder, now in his 22nd year as artistic director, continues to defy the odds in what promises to be one of the most exciting events in the series.

I was born in 1974, so the magic of Steely Dan was probably never really supposed to be for me. It seemed meant for those who had an inkling of the power of street-corner doo wop, had heard the early Motown singles and knew the studio-created perfection of the albums that came out with the Atlantic Records label on them. Those people would include my parents, so through them Steely Dan seeped into my life. How could it not? As much as my youth was defined by the stylized coiffures of early MTV—from Billy Idol to Cyndi Lauper—it was also dictated by the countless hours harnessed in the back of my parents’ four-door sedan.

Perhaps Tim Rutili cuts the perfect figure of what an underground rocker ought to aspire to. The unassuming, bearded, bespectacled gent is an artist who mastered surviving and parlayed it into thriving. Rutili didn’t hit it big for a minute like contemporaries in the 1990s. He made it through deaths, the rise and fall of “alternative rock” and the winds of changing taste. He continued to focus on honing his craft, and the result is his growth as an artist. Now leading the genre-defying collective Califone, he sits at the front of American rock underground’s rank and file.