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.

2022-2023 Season

“This season is extremely special as it represents a relaunch and renewal after our COVID-induced hiatus,” says Joshua Fineberg, director of the BU Center for New Music and professor of music, composition and music theory in BU School of Music. “We are thrilled to collaborate again with the ICA/Boston and Sound Icon while also bringing in the remarkable New York based Argento Chamber Ensemble. GF Haas is one of the most gripping and intriguing composers working today. He has developed a unique musical and theatrical style that has had a massive impact on the New Music scene. We are so excited for our students to get to work with him closely and we are delighted to extend our reach beyond the concert stage into important matters of the artist’s life.”

Composer Residencies

COMPOSER IN RESIDENCE: Georg Friedrich Haas

November 2-5, 2022 • February 21-25, 2023 • March 13-17, 2023

Georg Friedrich Haas and Mollena Lee Williams-Haas

Each year, the BU Center for New Music hosts a major figure from the world of contemporary music for an extended residency. This season celebrates Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas, considered one of the major European composers of his generation. His music synthesizes in a highly original way the Austrian tradition of grand orchestral statement with forward-looking interests in harmonic color and microtonal tuning that stem from both French spectralism and a strand of American experimentalism. The result is an exploratory, uncompromising music that appeals to a diverse range of people, from avant-garde composers for its microtonal investigations to casual listeners for its spacious forms and euphonious harmony. Haas has received numerous national and international prizes, including the Kompositionspreis of the SWR Symphony Orchestra (2010) for limited approximations and the Grand Austrian State Prize for Music (2007), the country’s highest artistic honor.

Haas will be in residence and on the BU campus three times during the 2022-2023 academic year. His first visit is from November 2-5, 2022. His second visit is from February 21-25, 2023. In addition to masterclasses, lessons, and forum presentations, his second visit also includes a screening of the film The Artist and The Pervert, with a discussion following the viewing of the film. The event, taking place on Thursday, February 23, 2023, is co-hosted by BU Arts Initiative and the location will be announced later.

Also, during this visit is HYENA at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston. HYENA is a concerto for orchestra and narrator, featuring a remarkable score by Haas to accompany the autobiographical story told by his American wife, the writer and storyteller Mollena Lee Williams-Haas. She was an alcoholic for years and wrote a searing story about her long journey to sobriety. In the performance, Williams-Haas reads her story, as the music reinforces her narrative’s hallucinatory qualities. HYENA will be performed by Boston’s own Sound Icon Ensemble led by Jeffrey Means. This performance of HYENA on Friday, February 24, 2023, is a coproduction of the BU Center for New Music and the ICA/Boston.

Haas returns for his third visit from March 13-17, 2023, for a public presentation at BU Center for New Music’s Composer’s Forum on Tuesday, March 14, 2023, from 9:30-10:45am.

Public Events visit 1

November 3, 2022 Composition Masterclass 1:30-3:30 pm Room B38

GF Haas discusses his work.

November 4, 2022 8pm CFA Concert Hall.

Argento Chamber Ensemble presents a Haas portrait concert featuring: ATTHIS for soprano and 8 instruments, tria ex uno for sextet, and …fließend… for 9 instruments.

Concert is free and open to the public.

November 5, 2022 Composer’s Forum 3:00-5:00 pm Room B38

Haas discusses the works of three BU student composers.

THREE-DAY COMPOSER RESIDENCY: Missy Mazzoli (CFA’02, BUTI’98)

October 24-26, 2022   delayed until Spring 2023, exact dates tbd

Described by Time Out New York as “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart,” Missy Mazzoli is one of America’s preeminent composers. Mazzoli is the Mead Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and her music has been performed all over the world by the Kronos Quartet, eighth blackbird, pianist Emanuel Ax, Opera Philadelphia, Scottish Opera, LA Opera, Cincinnati Opera, New York City Opera, Chicago Fringe Opera, the Detroit Symphony, the LA Philharmonic, the Minnesota Orchestra, the American Composers Orchestra, JACK Quartet, cellist Maya Beiser, violinist Jennifer Koh, pianist Kathleen Supové, Dublin’s Crash Ensemble, the Sydney Symphony and many others.

Mazzoli and Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Ellen Reid started the Luna Composition Lab, in collaboration with the Kaufman Music Center in New York, to give teenage female, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming composers a head start. Mazzoli also makes it her practice to advocate for better representation for women, publicly when needed.

Public Events – delayed until Spring 2023, exact dates tbd

October 24, 2022 Composition Masterclass 5:00-7:00 pm Room B38

Missy Mazzoli discusses the works of three BU student composers.

October 25, 2022 Composer’s Forum 9:30-10:45 am Room B38

Missy Mazzoli discusses her work.

 

THREE-DAY COMPOSER RESIDENCY: Du Yun

December 5-7, 2022

Born and raised in Shanghai, China and currently based in New York City, Du Yun is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, performance artist, activist, and curator for new music, who works at the intersection of orchestral, opera, chamber music, theatre, cabaret, musical theater, oral tradition, public performances, sound installation, electronics, visual arts, and noise.

Known for her “relentless originality and unflinching social conscience” (The New Yorker), Yun’s second opera, Angel’s Bone, won a Pulitzer Prize for music in 2017. In 2018 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow; and in 2019 she was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Classical Composition category. She has been hailed by the New York Times as a groundbreaking artist, was listed by the Washington Post as one of their Top 35 female composers and selected by Rolling Stone Italia in their decade review as one of the composers who defined the 2010s.

Concerts/General Public Events

Argento Chamber Ensemble
  • Friday, November 4, 2022, 8pm
  • CFA Concert Hall at 855 Commonwealth Avenue
  • Haas portrait concert featuring: ATTHISfor soprano and 8 instruments, tria ex uno for sextet, and …fließend… for 9 instruments
  • Free, open to the BU community and public
Film screening of The Artist and the Pervert (in collaboration with BU Arts Initiative)
  • Thursday, February 23, 2023, Time and Location to be announced later
  • Discussion to follow film
  • Free, open to the BU community and public
HYENA concert at ICA Boston
  • Boston-based Sound Icon and Mollena Lee Williams-Haas perform
  • Friday, February 24, 2023, 8pm
  • $15 for members or BU students
  • $25 for general admission
  • For tickets: https://www.icaboston.org/events/hyena

Student Performance Opportunities

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 Sound Icon will be performing a public concert of BU student works.

Sound Icon Concert of Student Works
  • Saturday, February 18, 2023, 8pm

Past Seasons & Residencies