From Emusic's review of Ferndorf:
New York City's highly regarded Wordless Music series, in its exploration of the middle ground between indie and contemporary classical, has trained the spotlight an emerging new subgenre: call it Wordless Music classical. Many of the composers and musicians the series has featured — Nico Muhly, Caleb Burnhans (of itsnotyouitsme and Alarm Will Sound), and German-born pianist Hauschka — emphasize ambient textures and fleeting, Impressionist sketches in their music, foregoing the rigorous complexity of the academic avant-garde or the anarchic spirit of the contemporary classical underground. Instead, they tap the same vein of wistful, pensive melancholia that has found expression in American indie as long as relatively well-off men and women have found themselves sad for no particular reason.
