Tom Huizenga
Tom Huizenga is a producer for NPR Music. He contributes a wide range of stories about classical music to NPR's news programs and is the classical music reviewer for All Things Considered. He appears regularly on NPR Music podcasts and founded NPR's classical music blog Deceptive Cadence in 2010.
Joining NPR in 1999, Huizenga produced, wrote and edited NPR's Peabody Award-winning daily classical music show Performance Today and the programs SymphonyCast and World of Opera.
He's produced live radio broadcasts from the Kennedy Center and other venues, including New York's (Le) Poisson Rouge, where he created NPR's first classical music webcast featuring the Emerson String Quartet.
As a video producer, Huizenga has created some of NPR Music's noteworthy music documentaries in New York. He brought mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato to the historic Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, placed tenor Lawrence Brownlee and pianist Jason Moran inside an active crypt at a historic church in Harlem, and invited composer Philip Glass to a Chinatown loft to discuss music with Devonté Hynes (aka Blood Orange).
He has also written and produced radio specials, such as A Choral Christmas With Stile Antico, broadcast on stations around the country.
Prior to NPR, Huizenga served as music director for NPR member station KRWG, in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and taught in the journalism department at New Mexico State University.
Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Huizenga's radio career began at the University of Michigan, where he produced and hosted a broad range of radio programs at Ann Arbor's WCBN-FM. He holds a B.A. from the University of Michigan in English literature and ethnomusicology.
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Hear the towering – and polarizing – author in conversation about his 4,000-page book, The Oxford History of Western Music. -
Georgetown University owes its survival to slavery. A new album by Carlos Simon, an assistant professor at the school, unflinchingly confronts that legacy. -
On a new album, the most accessible so far, the Grammy-winning group reaches out to an EDM wizard, a famous film score composer and Philip Glass. -
A composer, performer and installation artist from the Navajo Nation, Chacon's winning piece, Voiceless Mass, was composed for chamber orchestra and a specific Milwaukee pipe organ. -
With orchestras clamoring for her work, the rising artist feels a responsibility and opportunity to help reframe classical music and the institutions that present it. -
Gentle music from the bucolic English countryside pervades this tranquil Tiny Desk (home) concert by Roger Eno, with a special appearance by his two daughters.
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The ebullient nonagenarian's new recording features music she's been playing for nearly a century. -
Watch violinist Daniel Hope play Beethoven from the composer's own birth house in Bonn, Germany.
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On her new album, the opera star suggests Mother Nature has a lot to teach us, if we'd only listen. -
From NPR's annual list of reading recommendations, Books We Love, we hear four suggestions of history books from 2021.
