For over a decade, the BU Center for New Music (CNM) at Boston University College of Fine Arts (CFA) School of Music has been a potent force for new music. BU CNM brings dynamic figures from the contemporary music world to work with BU students and engage with the city of Boston’s groundbreaking arts venues for residencies that include performances, collaborations, and events that merge the realms of composition, improv, electronic music, and visual arts.

2025-2026 Season

Joshua Fineberg
Professor Joshua Fineberg, Director of BU Center for New Music

We are honored this season to welcome one of the most engaged and relevant artists of our time, Jessie Montgomery. We are especially excited to have a composer/violinist who will be able to engage on a deep level with both performance and composition students. Moreover Jessie really represents a model for composition and advocacy in these very challenging times and we are so excited to be able to welcome her to the Boston area and showcase her work. We are also thrilled to be able to bring a truly legendary new music group L’Itinéraire to Boston and showcase a tribute to the groundbreaking work of Gérard Grisey on what would have been his 80th year and what is the 50th anniversary of his work Prologue. In these challenging times we strive to continue our mission of bringing thrilling new art to the Boston scene and deep engagement with leading artists to our students,” says Joshua Fineberg.

COMPOSER IN RESIDENCE:
Jessie Montgomery

Part One: January 26-30, 2026
Part Two: April 7-11, 2026

Composer/violinist, Jessie Montgomery

Each year, the BU Center for New Music hosts a major figure from the world of contemporary music for an extended residency. In 2026, the Center for New Music invites one of the biggest stars in American Music, Jessie Montgomery for an on-campus residency. Montgomery is a composer whose work interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st-century American sound and experience. Her profound works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful, and exploding with life,” (The Washington Post) and are performed regularly by leading orchestras, ensembles, and soloists around the world. In June 2024, Montgomery concluded a three-year appointment as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence. She was named Performance Today’s 2025 Classical Woman of the Year. Montgomery’s music contains a breadth of musical depictions of the human experience—from statements on social justice themes, to the Black diasporic experience and its foundation in American music, to wistful adorations and playful spontaneity—reflective of her deeply rooted experience as a classical violinist and child of the radical New York City cultural scene of the 1980s and 90s. In response to Montgomery’s GRAMMY®-winning work, Rounds (2021), San Francisco’s NPR station KQED stated: “this is what classical music needs in 2024.”

Montgomery will be in residence and on the BU campus from January 26-30, 2025 and from April 7-11, 2026. Her visit will include masterclasses, coaching, lessons, and forum presentations. Her work will be featured on January 30 in a faculty and student Showcase concert, performed twice by the BU Wind Ensemble (including on the April 13, 2026 Symphony Hall Concert). Her work will also be featured on the April 7 concert from the award-winning Mivos String Quartet.

Composer/violinist, Jessie Montgomery
EVENTS

Tuesday, January 27, 2026 • 9:30-10:45am
Jessie Montgomery at the BU Composer’s Forum
Room 154, 855 Commonwealth Ave.

Friday, January 30, 2026 • 8pm
Jessie Montgomery Showcase concert featuring faculty and student performers
BU College of Fine Arts Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Ave. • free & open to the public

Tuesday, April 7, 2026 • 8pm
Mivos String Quartet @ BUCNM featuring music of Jessie Montgomery
Mivos plays a program of world premieres by BU student composers alongside the work of guest-artist Jessie Mongomery
BU College of Fine Arts Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Ave. • free & open to the public

 

Ensemble L’Itinéraire

SPECIAL EVENT: Ensemble L’Itinéraire

Saturday, April 11, 2026 • 8pm • BU College of Fine Arts Concert Hall

Gérard Grisey

 

We are producing a concert that marks an incredibly rare chance to hear live the revolutionary Ensemble L’Itinéraire from Paris. This concert will mark what would have been the 80th birth year of Gérard Grisey and what is the 50th anniversary of Grisy’s seminar work Prologue. Jean-Luc Hervé, one of Grisey’s students and Pascale Criton will also be featured. Free & open to the public.

ENSEMBLE RESIDENCY:
Sound Icon

February 14, 2026

Sound Icon

Boston’s own Sound Icon Ensemble will work with BU student composers throughout the season, leading to a concert on February 14, 2026. Sound Icon is a sinfonietta committed to performing the most significant progressive works of the past few decades. As a sinfonietta, Sound Icon offers the color palette of a full orchestra with the precision and flexibility of a chamber ensemble. The technical and logistical challenges of contemporary repertoire for sinfonietta often discourage live performance in the United States, however, Sound Icon embraces this music and aims to bring this repertoire to Boston and beyond. Through ambitious programming performed to the highest standards, Sound Icon engages audiences in dialogues about what progressive music is and can be: music that redefines rules, experiences, and expectations.

EVENTS

Saturday, February 14, 2026 • 8pm
Sound Icon

Boston-based Sound Icon, conducted by Jeffrey Means performs works of specially written for them by BU composers
BU College of Fine Arts Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Ave. • free & open to the public

ENSEMBLE RESIDENCY:
Mivos String Quartet

April 7, 2026

Mivos String Quartet

We are thrilled to once again welcome the amazing Mivos string quartet to the BU CNM. Mivos will be in residence from April 5-7, where it will work with students and then present a concert of works written specially for them by BU students along with the work of our resident artist Jessie Montgomery. Since its founding in 2008, the Mivos quartet has performed and closely collaborated with established and emerging composers representing a broad range of demographics and compositional aesthetics. Mivos commissions and premieres new music for string quartet, while also sustainably nurturing the repertoire by offering repeat performances of new works in their regular touring season.

Mivos has performed to critical acclaim at Aldeburgh Music (UK), Carnegie Hall (USA), Lincoln Center (USA), Elbphilharmonie (Germany), Shanghai New Music Week (China), Música de Agora na Bahia (Brazil), Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), Lo Spirito della musica di Venezia (Italy), Skaņu Mežs (Latvia), Festival Internacional Chihuahua (México), Wien Moderne (Austria), Hong Kong Arts Center, and the Library of Congress (USA). In recognition of their work in championing new music, the quartet has received the Interpretation Prize at the Darmstadt Summer Courses, as well as the 2019 Dwight and Ursula Mamlok Prize for Interpreters of Contemporary Music.

EVENTS

Tuesday April 7, 2026 • 8pm
Mivos String Quartet featuring music of Jessie Montgomery

Mivos plays a program of world premieres by BU student composers alongside the work of guest-artist Jessie Montgomery.
BU College of Fine Arts Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Ave. • free & open to the public

 

INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION:
Sites of Convergence

Sites of Convergence, has been a year-long partnership between BU CFA School of Music, School of Visual Arts and the Berlin-based arts collective House for the End of the World (HEW). This collaboration culminated in two exhibits that were featured as part of the Boston Public Art Triennial. HEW’s exhibit, The Other One took place at the Goethe-Institut Boston from October 10-14, 2025. The student exhibition, Interstice, took place on the BU campus in unused spaces October 22 – November 2, 2025. Both exhibitions explore themes of technological reliance, urban development, and identity through experimental installation, sound, and performance, highlighting the potential of site-specific work to spark dialogue and exchange. This project was made possible through the generous support of the BU Institute for Excellence in Teaching & Learning, the BU Office for the Arts, the International koproduction Fond of the Goethe-Institut, HEW (House for the End of the World), KWADRAT Galerie Berlin and Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Music and School of Visual Arts.

STUDENT WORKS READING

BU Center for New Music provides music students with opportunities to work on music with contemporary music groups based in or out of Boston, allowing them to learn different contemporary techniques beyond the classroom. This season the Zafraan Ensemble from Berlin, Germany read student works. This event was made possible with the generous support of the Goethe Institut Boston.

Zafraan Reading of Student Works
Monday, September 29, 2025 • 2-4 pm • Marshall Room, 855 Commonwealth Ave.


Past Seasons & Residencies