A lot of what I see and rec­om­mend is in Man­hat­tan because that’s where some great per­form­ing orga­ni­za­tions and venues are. But too much of Man­hat­tan is stuck per­ma­nently in the 1980s, with cock-of-the-walk finan­cial and real estate types run­ning things, and run­ning them into the ground. Brook­lyn is great on its own, and by default doesn’t yet suf­fer from the same plague. Although there is the Atlantic Yards project.

Brook­lyn is increas­ingly becom­ing a great places to hear great music of all kinds, from the Baroque era through the exper­i­men­tal nexus of clas­si­cal, rock, jazz and elec­tron­ics. Most of the venues are small and have packed sched­ules, too much detail to run down com­pletely with­out the eyes glaz­ing over. So here is an anno­tated list of selected places and things:

• Issue Project Room: Sim­ply the best place in all of New York City for exper­i­men­tal and avant-garde music of all vari­eties. They have some­thing almost every night of the week, and the fall high­light is the three day Vital Vox fes­ti­val which fea­tures Jen Shyu, Corey Dargel, Joan La Bar­bara and the unclas­si­fi­able Chris Mann.
• Barge­mu­sic: Cham­ber music from the Baroque to the present, on the water and look­ing out over lower Manhattan.
• Music at First: I’ve rec­om­mended this series before, but I want to point it out again. It’s mod­est in scope but ambi­tious in terms of musi­cal inter­est and accomplishment.
• Roulette: included here because they will be mov­ing to Brook­lyn. A wide range of jazz and new music, make sure to check out Thomas Buck­ner’s Inter­pre­ta­tions series, which con­sis­tently offers the most unique, inter­est­ing and chal­leng­ing pro­grams around.
• Neigh­bor­hood Clas­sics Series: directed by Simone Din­ner­stein and this year fea­tur­ing great musi­cians like Maya Beiser, Pablo Ziegler, Richard Stoltz­man and Din­ner­stein herself.

And, although I can’t rec­om­mend BAM in gen­eral, there are the occa­sional worth­while things on the pro­gram. Try and see Evan Ziporyn’s opera A House In Bali , going up this week. Ziporyn is rapidly becom­ing one of the finest Amer­i­can com­posers writ­ing for, and about, the game­lan, and I’m antic­i­pat­ing that this work, about the com­poser Colin McPhee who brought game­lan music into West­ern Clas­si­cal, will be quite involv­ing. And if you like it, you can hear more of Ziporyn’s music at Zankel Hall on Octo­ber 30.

Most of this stuff is off the beaten path, and in the same cul­tural nooks and cran­nies, so make note of the con­certs at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Museum, where TIll Fell­ner fin­ishes his refresh­ing and won­der­ful Beethoven Piano Sonata cyle this Fri­day and the Paci­fica Quar­tet begins their Shostakovich Quar­tet cycle on the 22nd. There’s also the North River Music’s 25th Anniver­sary Sea­son, with con­certs at Green­which House fea­tur­ing La Bar­bara (obvi­ously going through a nice pur­ple patch), the great elec­tronic music com­poser Mor­ton Sub­ot­nick, Ne(x)tworks and the fab­u­lous and excit­ing Respect Sex­tet. Also going up at the end of the month Ear To The Earth 2010, a fes­ti­val of music and the envi­ron­ment. This year’s theme is water, the appear­ing will be R. Mur­ray Schafer, a com­poser who has also writ­ten the most impor­tant (and beau­ti­ful) book about sound, and music and works from Phill Niblock, Miguel Fras­coni and Annea Lock­wood. Go.