The 2024 Living Music Summit: Sound Image Gesture will be taking place on May 24 and 25 in Boston! There will be two concerts, Friday 8pm at the Record Co and Saturday 8pm at the Church of the Covenant, as well as two workshops on Saturday morning/early afternoon at the Record Co followed by a lunch at Dorchester Brewing at 2pm. Check out the Living Music Summit page for details or our ticket page to register.

Call for Videos

The call for videos is closing on April 30. Click here for details and to submit.

1st Annual Historically Excluded Composer Competition

We are very excited to announce the winners for our first ever Historically Excluded Competition!

Historically Excluded Gender

Winner:
Lydia Brindamour for Empty Room (iii)
Honorable Mentions:
Cara Haxo for A Few Figs from Thistles
Carter Crosby for Enacting Travesty

Historically Excluded Race/Ethnicity

Winner:
Kyle Rivera for Invocation of Eternal Voices
Honorable Mentions:
Daixuan Ai for Childhood Memories
Bijan Olia for Streicher, Tasti et Bizarreries
Oswald Huynh for Aubade with Ashen Clouds, Scarlet Sky

Historically Excluded Circumstances

Winner:
Vera Ivanova for Children's Games
Honorable Mentions:
Ryne Siesky for /ˈɪnbluːm/

12th Annual Commissioning Competition

The Boston New Music Initiative Commissioning Competition is now closed! Judging is underway and will be announced this summer.

Salon Series

The next installment will be with Leah Reid on May 1, 2024 at 5:30pm ET. Click here to register.

11th Annual Commissioning Competition

The Boston New Music Initiative is very excited to announce the winner of our 11th Annual Commissioning Competition! Our judging panel was extremely impressed with the quality of the works submitted. Yangfan Xu's piece "Ecstatic Burial" was selected by an outside panel of industry professionals from an anonymous pool of around 80 very wonderful compositions. Xu will be writing a new work for BNMI's core ensemble to be premiered in May 2024.

Yangfan Xu (b. 1998) holds a deep passion and love for cats. Whenever she hears a string player glissando in the upper registers, she can’t help but think of a cat's meow. In addition to her feline obsession, Xu is a Chinese-born US-based composer who comes from a musical family in Lanzhou, Gansu province, with a spoiled cat who eats better than everyone else. Xu was awarded the 1st Prize of the 2020 Hausmann Quartet Quarantine Composition Competition. She is the winner of the Society for New Music's 2021 Israel/Pellman Award. She won the 2021 New Juilliard Ensemble (NJE) Composition Competition, and her commissioned work Fantastic Creatures of the Mountains and Seas premiered at the Lincoln Center in a concert by NJE in 2022. Her music has been enjoyed by audiences in cities such as New York, San Francisco, San Diego, and Paris. Her compositions have been performed by professional groups such as Friction Quartet, Choral Chameleon, Keyed Kontraptions and Ravel Virtual Studios. Her music will be performed by the Sydney Contemporary Orchestra in Australia in 2023. Xu has worked with composers including Phillip Lasser, Xiaofu Zhang, Ping Jin, and Michel Merlet. Xu studied musicology at the high school affiliated with the Central Conservatory of Music in China. She began her compositional study with Changyuan Liu in 2014. She received a bachelor’s degree in composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music studying with Mason Bates. Xu earned her master’s degree in composition at the Juilliard School, studying under Robert Beaser. She is a current DMA student at the New England Conservatory of Music with studio teacher Kati Agócs.

BNMI would also like to recognize two honorable mentions: Pascal Le Boeuf, and Joao Pedro Oliveira!

Call for Scores: Sound, Image, Gesture

We are very excited to announce the winners for the Call for Scores: Sound Image, Gesture.

Winners:
 Michael Blazek for The Fallout
Oliver Caplan for Illuminated by the Light of Two Ships Passing in the Night
Jason Gomez for Dance
Jia Yi Lee for Pull
Motoki Ohkubo for Kitchen Steam
Heather Savage for Hope Rising
Ingrid Stölzel for Leonardo Saw the Spring

Composer Interview Series

The next installment of the Composer Interview Series with Yangfan Xu will be released on our youtube channel on May 3!

8th Annual Young Composers' Competition

We are excited to announce the winner of the 8th Annual Young Composers' Competition! Yan Ee Toh has won for her work "iridescent shadows."

A Singapor based composer, Yan Ee's music deals with dichotomies within nature - both the phenomena of our physical world, as well as the nature of things. Her work explores gestures through the amalgamation and morphing of timbres and harmonies.

We would also like to congratulate Holden Mui for receiving an Honorable Mention for his work, "Trio for violin, cello and piano."

JOIN THE BNMI TEAM IN 2024

E-mail jobs@bostonnewmusic.org if you are interested! You can also check our jobs page.