How ‘Mozart in the Jungle’ Became a New-Music Showcase

At a moment when living composers — especially women — struggle to get their works performed, few would have predicted that a half-hour TV show would emerge as a key showcase for their work. But “Mozart in the Jungle,” the daffy Amazon comedy whose fourth season began streaming Friday, has become an unlikely destination to hear new music.

Here is a taste of some of the recent pieces featured on the show, which is set in a fanciful version of the New York classical music world and stars Gael García Bernal, Bernadette Peters, Malcolm McDowell and Lola Kirke. The works were performed Tuesday at National Sawdust, the striking performance space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which itself has a cameo in the season.

Caroline Shaw, a composer, violinist and singer, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, when she was 30 — and has gone on to have her work performed by some of classical music’s major artists and collaborate with Kanye West. She appears as herself in the fourth season of “Mozart”: Kirke’s character, who leads an ensemble devoted to works by women, serenades Shaw outside her apartment and gets permission to premiere the piece, “Hi,” in a conducting competition.

The composer Missy Mazzoli won wide acclaim for her opera “Breaking the Waves,” based on the dark psychosexual film by Lars von Trier, and just premiered a new opera, “Proving Up,” at the Kennedy Center in Washington. She composed the piece, “Impromptu,” for the show’s third season, where it was presented as a work by McDowell’s character, the aging but rebellious maestro Thomas Pembridge.

Nico Muhly, whose Hitchcockian opera “Marnie” will be performed at the Metropolitan Opera next season, wrote a made-for-TV aria for the third season of “Mozart,” in which he also had a cameo. On the show, García Bernal’s character, a conductor, flies to Venice to lead a diva’s comeback concert. He persuades the singer to try something new: a Muhly aria based on the “Long Island Lolita” tabloid case in which a teenager named Amy Fisher shot the wife of her lover, Joey Buttafuoco. It is sung here by soprano Susanna Phillips, currently appearing in “La Bohème” at the Met.

Paola Prestini co-founded her first production company, VisionIntoArt, while still a student at the Juilliard School, and went on to become the artistic director of National Sawdust. She is currently collaborating with Robert Wilson on an opera-theater work based on Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” Her piece “Listen, Quiet” is performed in season four of “Mozart” at a chaotic party in which García Bernal’s character, distraught, gives away his possessions. (The cellist, Jeffrey Zeigler, who used to play with the Kronos Quartet — and is married to Prestini — is part of an ensemble’s worth of musicians with cameos in the party scene.)