In its first two seasons, the Ecstatic Music Festival has helped transform Merkin Concert Hall from a relatively staid chamber music hall in the shadow of Lincoln Center into a lively home for the experimental, genre-crossing music of the indie classical world. The third installment of the festival includes 10 programs â€" most of them double or triple bills, with collaborations between the ensembles and soloists â€" and runs from Jan. 25 through March 21.
The festival is directed and programmed by the composer Judd Greenstein, who also assembled the first two festivals, as well as a spin-off series last summer at the World Financial Center. This year's festival opens with a collaboration between Shara Worden, the singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist best known for her work with My Brightest Diamond, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, for which Ms. Worden has written two new works. That performance will be at the Greene Space, the concert hall of WNYC and WQXR, and will be streamed live as a video webcast on WNYC's Q2 Web site. The rest of the festival will be at Merkin Concert Hall.
Also among the festival's highlights are programs featuring the composer and violinist Carla Kihlstedt and her band, Causing a Tiger; the new-music ensemble ICE and Face the Music; the Kaufman Center's teenage new-music orchestra, on Jan. 26; another appearance by Ms. Worden with the composer Sarah Kirkland Snider and the chamber-rock band Clogs, on Feb 6; the composer and visual artist Arnold Dreyblatt and the folk-jazz-ambient band Megafaun, on Feb. 27; the Bang on a Can All-Stars annual People's Commissioning Fund concert, on March 14; the New York premiere of Steve Mackey's “String Theory,†by the JACK Quartet and Big Farm, a band that includes Mr. Mackey on guitar and Rinde Eckert,  the singer-accordionist, on March 20; and a folk-rock-classical crossover program with the pianist Simone Dinnerstein and the singer-songwriter Tift Merritt, on March 21
