As we approach the concluding months of our final season together, we welcome back three of our earliest collaborators – composer Eliza Brown and Scrag Mountain Music co-founders Mary Bonhag (soprano) and Evan Premo (composer, bass) – for a presentation of three enchanting works that trace the cyclic nature of existence…and the stories we tell in an attempt to find our bearing.

IN-PERSON TICKETS ARE SOLD-OUT
But you can REGISTER for the free livestream!

The Chicago Composers Consortium returns to the Floating Lounge this February for a sneak peak at two new pieces written for us by composers Kathleen Cecilia Ginther and Timothy Dwight Edwards.

RSVP HERE (required)

***PLEASE NOTE THIS DATE HAS BEEN CHANGED***

Ever dreamed of playing Carnegie Hall? Holy smokes do we have the Help Desk special guest for you!

Tapped as Carnegie Hall’s Director of Artistic Planning in 2020, one of our favorite things about Ab Sengupta – besides the fact that he is a violist (WOOT!) – is that he inhabits a performer’s perspective in his role as a top-level music administrator. Join us for this can’t-miss Help Desk exclusive!

RSVP required

The Chicago Composers Consortium returns to the Floating Lounge this May for a sneak peak at two new pieces written for us by composers Kyong Mee Choi and Timothy Ernest Johnson.

We are chuffed to welcome Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang to the Help Desk this November! He is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music collective Bang on a Can and his work has been recorded on the Sony Classical, Harmonia Mundi, Teldec, BMG, Point, Chandos, Argo/Decca, and Cantaloupe labels, among others. And it would probably be more efficient to list the major performers and ensembles that haven’t played his work, rather than the staggering number of those that have.

RSVP here

Spektral Quartet invites you to reconnect to nature with a meditative sound walk featuring an sumptuous new manuscript written and read by Braiding Sweetgrass author Robin Wall Kimmerer.

What if a 30-minute walk could revitalize your relationship to the environment, reversing the dis-connection often provoked by the workaday grind? With music inspired by the Chicago lakeshore, performed by a multi-Grammy-nominated quartet and embroidered with poetic reflections by Dr. Kimmerer, your favorite forest preserve, hiking trail, or neighborhood garden is transformed into a wondrous amphitheater.

At 4pm CT on November 2nd, simply choose your destination and tune in to Chicago’s own Lumpen Radio (105.5fm or streaming online) to experience this restorative convergence of music, language, and landscape.

Listen online or tune in to 105.5fm (Chicago)

After receiving a prompt from us, seven Indiana University Jacobs School of Music composition students will scramble to each write us a brand-new piece for string quartet…IN ONLY 48 HOURS! We will then perform these still-warm-from-the-printer scores for a live audience at IU and for you at home via livestream.

This event is FREE and open to the public
Please note that this performance begins at 6pm Central / 7pm Eastern
Stream it live here

Our new commission from composer/performer Tarek Yamani is here, and you are invited to the world premiere performance!

Berytus Suite is a high-voltage collision between western classical music and Tarek’s unique concoction of jazz and Arab musics. One of the bright lights during the pandemic, this collaboration took place entirely in the digital realm. And for the world premiere, UMS expands its already sizable reach by broadcasting the concert footage virtually.

How to watch
Please note: This broadcast takes place at 6:30pm Central / 7:30pm Eastern

Our new commission from composer/performer Tarek Yamani is here, and you are invited to the world premiere performance!

Berytus Suite is a high-voltage collision between western classical music and Tarek’s unique concoction of jazz and Arab musics. One of the bright lights during the pandemic, this collaboration took place entirely in the digital realm. And for the world premiere, UMS expands its already sizable reach by broadcasting the concert footage virtually.

How to watch
Please note: This broadcast takes place at 6:30pm Central / 7:30pm Eastern

With our appearance at Chicago Humanities Festival just around the corner, we wanted to give you the opportunity to spend more time with our one-of-a-kind composer, Tonia Ko, whose Plain, Air comprises the music for this event.

So what music moves a multi-dimensional creator like Tonia? You’ll have to RSVP to find out, but we’ll also be soliciting your questions and reactions as we progress through her playlist. It’s all streaming, so you are invited to engage as directly (you chat room ninja) or indirectly (sous vide-ing a Hot Pocket) as you like.

We are very fortunate to welcome Northwestern University associate professor of composition and music technology Alex Mincek to the Help Desk this October! A co-founder of – and performer with – the eminent Wet Ink Ensemble, Alex is uniquely positioned to answer questions from composers and players alike. A brief hangout – a chance to vent, encourage, and check in – will immediately follow the presentation.

This event is FREE with an RSVP

CURED – the devastating documentary for which we recorded the soundtrack – is slated to air on PBS this October 11th, which is, not coincidentally, National Coming Out Day!

For those that missed our private screening of the film this spring, we strongly encourage you to add it to your queue as soon as it goes live. We are honored to have played a small role in the retelling of this pivotal moment in our country’s history by way of composer Ian Honeyman’s stirring score.

We are very happy to be visiting our friends from the north at Lawrence University for an evening of two French stunners: Claude Debussy and Henri Dutilleux.

PROGRAM
Claude Debussy – String Quartet in G minor (1893)

***PLEASE NOTE: All are welcome to watch this live performance virtually. Only Lawrence University faculty, students, and staff are allowed to attend on-campus/in-person.
Henri Duttileux. – Ainsi la nuit (1976)

Our University Musical Society Digital Residency continues with a behind-the-scenes Open Rehearsal this September!

We’ll be piping composer Tarek Yamani in from Berlin to take you inside this stylistically captivating, Afro-Tarab commission – his first-ever string quartet. Be a fly on the wall as we fine-tune this rhythmically ebullient and harmonically adventurous music in which you’ll experience the magnetism of microtonal scales and the spirited hocketing (alternating notes between multiple voices) of four voices.

This isn’t some sanded-down-for-prime-time stream. You are going to see us in true rehearsal mode, assembling not only the mechanics but the spirit of the music with Tarek providing real-time feedback. If you enjoy the backstage tour after a Broadway play or being invited into the kitchen at your favorite restaurant, this is for you.

RSVP to receive the link here

After eight long years, one of our favorite bands on the planet – Paper Mice – has a new album out! And they’re our special guests at the Floating Lounge! And we’re on the album!

Can you tell we’re just a little bit jazzed?

You know composer Dave Reminick from his brutal and hilarious Spektral commission, The Ancestral Mousetrap, but did you know he fronts one of the great post-everything, math-y, twitchy bands in the solar system? Together with incomparable drummer John Carroll and stupefying bassist Taylor Hales, these handsome ne’er-do-wells write some of the slappiest, killingest, and most sardonic tunes anyone has ever heard. If there was such a thing as something being devastatingly nerdy and piercingly cool…Paper Mice is that thing.

It’s Spektral on (or more accurately behind) the big screen for the first time!

Your ticket will include a live screening and Q&A session featuring the co-directors of CURED, Patrick Sammon and Bennett Singer; composer of the score for CURED, Ian Honeyman; activist and film interviewee, Rev. Magora Kennedy; and all of us in Spektral!

While CURED highlights a little-known story from the past, its lessons are profoundly relevant today. Ultimately, the documentary celebrates the pathbreaking contributions of LGBTQ pioneers while demonstrating that even in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, determined individuals can work together to create lasting social change. We hope you’ll be able to join us to watch and discuss this inspiring new film!

BUY TICKETS

Watch the CURED trailer

For this Help Desk, we welcome one of our dearest friends and collaborators, Samuel Adams, who Chicagoans will know from his tenure as Mead Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony. Not only did Sam write us a stunner of a quartet recently, he is also one of those artists who immediately brightens a room a few lumens with his disarming personality and thoughtful dialogue. He has much to share about The Business, but even more to give when it comes to talking about The Music. It is basically impossible to have anything other than an outstanding time when hanging with Sam, so do yourself a favor and get to this Help Desk!

REGISTER HERE

The Chicago Composers Consortium returns to the Floating Lounge this May for a sneak peak at two new pieces written for us by composers Elizabeth Start and Lawrence Axelrod.

You may recall that our concert featuring the premiere of Bernard Rands’ new string quartet – and the Consortium member’s miniatures that were written in response to it – was an early casualty of the pandemic. So it is with great pleasure that we offer you these interactive listening parties during which we’ll perform excerpts of each of these new works in pairs and get a chance to look inside them with the composers.

Our cavalcade of collegiate New Music Help Desks continues with a program very close to our collective heart. Ensemble 20+ is an adventurous new music endeavor headed up by our friend, and DePaul University faculty member and Dal Niente conductor, Michael Lewanski.

Register Here

We were particularly dispirited to lose our Celebrity Series of Boston debut to COVID, so it is with great pleasure that we announce our virtual performance on this esteemed series on April 23rd.

Please note: this event starts at 7pm (Central) / 8pm (Eastern)

Sign up for Stave Sessions and name the price of your ticket!

Something to Write Home About invites you to create right alongside the multi-GRAMMY-nominated Spektral Quartet, penning postcards as they perform an elastic program spanning the 16th century up through today. Through recorded interviews, historic letters, and nimble storytelling, Spektral connects the composers, their music, and you the listener in an animated evening of shared creativity.

Custom-designed postcards featuring evocative visual art will be your canvas on which to write personal messages to family and friends, inspired by the music in the moment. Something to Write Home Abouttransforms a one-night event into a creative collaboration, the effects of which will ripple out for weeks to come. Just imagine the look on the face of a loved one, opening their mailbox and finding an unexpected, hand-written message from you.

Stream live here

What if there was a new-music customer service hotline, available to answer your extended technique, notation, score preparation, or where-in-the-world-does-this-harmonic-live questions? We created the New Music Help Desk during quarantine to answer that need for young performers and composers and the popular online series lands at the DePauw campus for an exclusive event on April 21st.

Register Here

Sponsored by the Kansas University Cello Club and the KU School of Music composition department, our next New Music Help Desk is positioned to address topics far beyond notation and technique. We are honored to be part of KU’s mini-festival titled "Behind the Music: an Exploration of Social Issues in Music,” so we’ve invited one of our dearest friends and longest-running collaborators, composer Eliza Brown, to join us on the panel.

Register Here

We miss playing live on stage, but in particular, we miss performing for the rabid new-music fanatics of Bowling Green State University. Spektral returns to campus virtually on April 12th sporting a keyed-up program of many of our most notable commissions.

The New Music Help Desk is a unique opportunity for composers and performers to get face time with Spektral – to ask pointed questions about notation, feasibility, tuning systems, harmonics, or simply how to stay motivated in the midst of a quarantine.

For this event we will answer questions from BGSU musicians exclusively and will be joined by BGSU alumn and Quince Ensemble co-founder, soprano Amanda DeBoer Bartlett! Career advice, score preparation, harmonics, notation, movie recommendations…it’s all fair game. We can’t wait to hear what’s on your mind!

We’re returning to the Harris Theater – this time on their Virtual Stage – with one of our most interactive and inventive programs to date. Something to Write Home About invites you to join the creative process by writing five postcards across an evening of performances with stimulating visuals and provocative writing prompts from us.

A celebration of Chicago’s world-class contemporary music scene, the program orbits five of the city’s most imaginative composers, with each piece vibrantly contextualized by us through interviews, video, and nimble storytelling.

For each number, we will draw you closer to the composer and their composition, using the music as the leaping-off point for you to pen a short message to someone special in your own life. Writing on custom-made postcards featuring the alluring work of Chicago visual artists, you will become creators right alongside us…and reconnect with your loved ones in unexpected ways.

This concert is FREE but you must sign up for a free Virtual Stage account

RSVP and get your postcards today!

For this event we are bringing you Pulitzer Prize-winning composer/performer Caroline Shaw, an artist who wears her considerable fame lightly and seems to approach creativity from a place of continuous discovery. Performers and composers alike will have in Caroline an incredible resource in the realms of creation, programming, and career and if there’s one thing we know about her it’s that Caroline is unsparing in sharing her experience and expertise.

One of the great pleasures of the Floating Lounge series is inviting our über-talented colleagues to come share an evening of fantastic music with you, and on March 10th, Clara’s friend – and newest member of the storied St. Lawrence String Quartet – Owen Dalby is our special guest.

Learn more and register here

For this event we are bringing you Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun, an absolute force of nature in the contemporary music world and a lovely human being, to boot. We’ve had her album Dinosaur Scar on rotation since it dropped, and to call her a “diva,” as many do, when in the performer role doesn’t even remotely do her justice.

We are stoked to have Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Associate Conductor Jerry Hou for this Help Desk. We had the opportunity to work with him in the Grossman Ensemble last season and were inspired by his balance of rigor and humor. On faculty at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, Jerry is a top-level pedagogue, and he is equally skilled in traditional and new musics. He is also one of the friendliest, wicked-smart artists we know. You are in for a real treat here, friends.

Register here