A meditation on quietude amidst unceasing movement, a thick-walled cell of solitary contentment in the churn of daily life: That's the premise of this new video featuring the gifted pianist Michael Mizrahi.

The music Mizrahi is playing is the first movement of Mark Dancigers' The Bright Motion. The piece lends its title to Mizrahi's new album, which the New York indie label New Amsterdam is releasing next month. Co-founded by composers Sarah Kirkland Snider, William Brittelle and Judd Greenstein — who is becoming something of New York's next big new music impresario, between the label and the Ecstatic Music Festival he founded and curates — New Amsterdam highlights the work of a tight and often brilliant circle of younger composers, several of whose works are featured on this album: Patrick Burke, Ryan Brown, John Mayrose, Dancigers, Brittelle and Greenstein. Much of the music on this album was written specifically for Mizrahi, and he plays with both tenderness and fierce beauty.

(Jeremy Denk joins us all week to explore the Goldberg Variations. Read his posts on Tuesday and Thursday.)

The best reason to hate Bach's Goldberg Variations—aside from the obvious reason that everyone asks you all the time which of the two Glenn Gould recordings you prefer—is that everybody loves them. Not a moment goes by when someone doesn't release a new recording, accompanied by breathless press. They're like a trendy bar that (infuriatingly) keeps staying trendy. Yes, I'm suspicious of the Goldbergs' popularity. Classical Music is not really supposed to be that popular. I worried for years that I would be seduced into playing them, and would become like all the others—besotted, cultish—and that is exactly what happened. I have been assimilated into the Goldberg Borg.

When NPR asked me to do these Goldberg blog posts, I cleverly used the denial portion of my brain to forget my dread. Words seem to bounce off the notes of the Goldbergs, like they're impregnable. If there's anything more terrifying than adding another recording to the existing legacy, it's the idea of adding even one more word to the quivering mass of adulatory Goldberg verbiage.

Then something came over me: an urge to be terrible. I'd like to really let loose on the Goldbergs, to make the case against them, to discuss why they're not worth discussing.

An amazing new documentary film is a must-see not just for music lovers, but for anyone who needs to see the nourishing power of the arts and human connections.

Kinshasa Symphony takes us into the everyday lives of the members of a most unlikely ensemble: the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste, located in the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a place ravaged by war, endemic poverty and corruption.

The constant hassles and logistical problems these amateur musicians face should give serious pause to those of us leading far more privileged lives in music. They tackle big pieces — like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Orff's Carmina Burana — out of sheer love, learning their instruments and craft as they go.

Conductor Armand Diangienda founded the orchestra in 1994 after losing his job as an airline pilot. Never conservatory trained, he calls himself "just inquisitive by nature." He named the ensemble after his grandfather, Simon Kimbangu, a political icon in Congolese history, who also founded a Christian sect that went on to become Africa's largest independent African church.

When Diangienda first gathered 12 young people who wanted to learn to play the violin, he had only five instruments: "One of them would play for 20 minutes, and then pass the violin on to the next one." When violin strings broke, they replaced them with brake cables from old bicycles. When they needed a C trumpet, they cut up another instrument. And when they needed a bell for another trumpet, they transformed the wheel rim from an old minibus.

Albert Nlandu Matubanza, the orchestra's manager, also makes many of the orchestra's instruments himself. Years ago, there were many more instruments available in Kinshasa, but as Matubanza ruefully notes, a lot of them were stolen. Out of necessity, Matubanza has become a self-taught luthier; he took apart his own bass to figure out how it was made, then started making stringed instruments to equip the orchestra.

The group's open-air rehearsals are frequently punctuated by the noise and noxious clouds of dust and diesel spewed by cars and trucks passing along Kinshasa's unpaved streets. Electrical outages are frequent — so much so that the orchestra has a routine to deal with the annoyance. One of the group's violists, Joseph Masunda Lutete, knows to step in immediately: "When there's a power cut," he says, "I just drop my instrument and go start the generator."

The film's narrative arc takes us to their performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in an empty, dirt-filled public square. But what is most revealing, and most gripping, is to see how these musicians deal with the impossible reality of Kinshasa, made possible every day by its hardworking, creative and tenacious people. One of the most wrenching segments follows Nathalie Bahati, a flutist and single mother, as she struggles to find a $40 per month apartment to keep little more than a roof over the head of the young son who accompanies her everywhere, including to her rehearsals.

The joy they take in their music-making is what gets them through. As the orchestra's concertmaster, Héritier Mayimbi Mbuangi says, "When we're working on the music, there are no limits. It's like a staircase: You go up, and up."

A few weeks ago, I happened to catch a charming half-hour documentary on the New York PBS station Thirteen/WNET. We Are The Knights is the sweetly told story of two phenomenally talented brothers, Colin and Eric Jacobsen, and the really exciting orchestra they founded called The Knights. The group's story — like its music — is so lovely and heartfelt that we wanted to share it.

Eagle-eyed music lovers will catch a whole bunch of familiar friends in this, from Yo-Yo Ma, the Jacobsens' mentor and frequent collaborator, to Performance Today's Fred Child. But if the brothers themselves seem familiar to NPR Music fans, that's because they also comprise half of one of our favorite string quartets, Brooklyn Rider. Colin is the group's first violinist, while Eric, who conducts the orchestra, is the quartet's cellist. (Their other Brooklyn Rider friends play in The Knights as well.)

And if all that weren't quite enough, Colin is also a talented composer and the brothers are in the core group for the multicultural Silk Road Project founded by Ma.

As Ma says about The Knights, "It's a really beautiful thing, and they've created it using the values of their generation." Check the documentary out and see if you agree. Please leave your thoughts about the film in the comments section — and be sure to tell us about emerging musicians we need to hear.

Premiered last year at Zankel Hall by So Percussion, Steve Mackey's It Is Time is at once deeply meditative and abundantly playful, rooted in the feelings Mackey has as the 55-year-old father of a toddler-aged son. "As an older father (now 664 months old)," he writes, "I felt, for the first time in my life, saddened by the immutability of time and the finite limits to how much of It" – emphasis his – "I will be able to spend with my young family." Divided into four parts, there are solo turns for each of So Percussion's amazing musicians: Eric Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski and Jason Treuting. It's not all bittersweet and gloom, though, as you can see in the complete, 37-minute piece, here on NPR Music in its video premiere.

It Is Time could hardly be dark-spirited with this quartet in action, surrounded by a pump organ, bells, cymbals, steel drums, marimba, drum kit, and a variety of other mudane and whimsical items, from cooking timers to wind-up toys. The video's director, Mark DeChiazza, is also a choreographer – and he understands the inherent kineticism of musical performance. Moreover, there are elements to the piece that you don't understand until you see the four members of So in action. At the beginning of the piece, for example, they're not hitting a wood block – in a clever and utterly deadpan joke, they're hitting the ultimate arbiter of musical time, the metronome.