Pulitzer Prize-winning classical music critic Justin Davidson called NYFOS "the oldest permanent floating song party in New York".

In place of the formality of the traditional recital, the festival offers groups of good young singers in smart, offbeat programs, each organized around a theme.

Instead, you’re enacting a coded, ritualized version of that moment, and somehow everyone in the hall is dreaming along with you.”[16] Blier is a major proponent of contemporary art song and has programmed many new works including those by John Musto,[17][18] Ned Rorem,[19] Roberto Sierra, and Clarice Assad,[20] among many others.

Art songs here are celebrated for the sensual pleasures they bring but also for the improbably numerous ways in which they open out onto larger worlds of history, poetry, and biography, distant geographic landscapes and the veiled interior regions within...[I]t was Blier whose printed essay and spoken commentary, marbled with playful lines of wit, erudition and anecdote, gave the program its distinctive personal touch.

Russell is the author of the book, The Agile City: Building Well-being and Wealth in an Era of Climate Change[27] Blier lives with facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy and supports fundraisers for the FSHD Society.

"[37] Washington Post critic Ronald Broun wrote: "A few words of high praise are utterly inadequate to describe what Steven Blier accomplished Saturday night at the Barns of Wolf Trap.