Boston University Center for New Music Presents Its 2025-2026 Season
The season welcomes GRAMMY award-winning composer, violinist, and educator Jessie Montgomery for a two-part residency; Boston's Sound Icon Ensemble, New York’s Mivos String Quartet, and the Paris-based Ensemble L’Itinéraire for special performances
Boston University Center for New Music Presents Its 2025-2026 Season
The season welcomes GRAMMY® award-winning composer, violinist, and educator Jessie Montgomery to BU for a two-part residency, which includes a showcase concert with BU faculty and a performance of one of Montgomery’s works by the BU Wind Ensemble as part of BU School of Music’s annual concert at Symphony Hall; the season also brings Boston’s own Sound Icon Ensemble, New York’s acclaimed Mivos String Quartet, and the legendary Paris-based Ensemble L’Itinéraire to BU for special concerts
The Boston University Center for New Music at BU College of Fine Arts School of Music is proud to present its 2025-2026 season, which includes an extraordinary lineup of residencies, concerts, and more. For three decades, the BU Center for New Music has bridged the gap between cutting-edge artists and BU music students. Students spend two to three weeks with the season’s resident composer, learning about the artist’s works, presenting their own music to these major artists, and forming long-lasting connections.
In the 2025-2026 season, BU students will be engaging with one of the biggest stars in American Music, Jessie Montgomery. 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 worldwide.
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’s residency at BU will include two performances of her Coincident Dances by the BU Wind Ensemble as part of BU School of Music’s annual concert at Symphony Hall, taking place on April 13, 2026. A faculty showcase portrait concert earlier in the year, slated for January 30, 2026, features a stellar line-up of BU faculty artists as well as an assortment of student performers who will have been working with Montgomery in preparing their pieces. Additionally, during the April residency, New York’s Mivos String Quartet will showcase her work in a concert featuring BU student composers.
This season also features a concert from the legendary Parisian Ensemble L’Itinéraire that will be built around a tribute to the 50th anniversary of Gérard Grisey’s Prologue, from the ensemble that premiered that piece.
Finally, the season also includes a residency with BU Center for New Music’s long-time collaborators, Boston’s own Sound Icon, led by Jeffrey Means. Sound Icon’s residency will culminate on Saturday, February 14, 2026, in a concert of works in the CFA Concert Hall, written by BU student composers specially for Sound Icon and rehearsed and workshopped throughout the season.
“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,” 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 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.”
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.
MORE ON THE SEASON
JESSIE MONTGOMERY
Composer in Residence
Part 1 • January 26 – 30, 2026
Part 2 • April 7 – 11, 2026
Montgomery’s visit will include masterclasses, coaching, lessons, and forum presentations. Her work will be featured on January 30 at a faculty and student showcase concert, performed twice by the BU Wind Ensemble at BU School of Music’s annual concert at Symphony Hall on April 13, and her work will also be featured on the April 7 concert from the award-winning Mivos String Quartet.
At the heart of Montgomery’s work is a deep sense of community enrichment and a desire to create opportunities for young artists. During her tenure at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, she launched the Young Composers Initiative, which supports high school-aged youth in creating and presenting their works, including regular tutorials, reading sessions, and public performances. Her curatorial work engages a diverse community of concertgoers and aims to highlight the works of underrepresented composers in an effort to broaden audience experiences in classical music spaces.
Montgomery has been recognized with many prestigious awards and fellowships, including the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, and Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year. Since 1999, she has been affiliated with the Sphinx Organization in a variety of roles, including Composer-in-Residence for the Sphinx Virtuosi, its professional touring ensemble. Montgomery holds degrees from The Juilliard School and New York University. She serves on the Composition and Music Technology faculty at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music.
ENSEMBLE L’ITINÉRAIRE
Special Event
Saturday, April 11, 2026 • 8pm
CFA Concert Hall • 855 Commonwealth Ave.
BU Center for Music produces a concert that marks an incredibly rare chance to hear live the revolutionary Ensemble L’Itinéraire from Paris.
This concert marks what would have been the 80th birth year of French composer Gérard Grisey and what is the 50th anniversary of Grisey’s seminar work Prologue. Jean-Luc Hervé, one of Grisey’s students, and Pascale Criton will also be featured.
SOUND ICON
Ensemble Residency and Concert
Saturday, February 14, 2026 • 8pm
CFA Concert Hall • 855 Commonwealth Ave.
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.
MIVOS STRING QUARTET
Ensemble Residency and Concert
Tuesday, April 7, 2026 • 8pm
CFA Concert Hall • 855 Commonwealth Ave.
BU Center for New Music once again welcomes the Mivos String Quartet to BU. 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 String 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.
INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION
A recap of BU Center for New Music’s Fall 2025 highlights
Sites of Convergence has been a year-long partnership between BU College of Fine Arts 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 11 – 14, 2025. The student exhibition, Interstice, took place on the BU campus in dilapidated, unused spaces at 111 Cummington Mall, from October 24 – 26 and October 31 – November 2, 2025. Both exhibitions explored 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, 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 BU School of Music and School of Visual Arts.
dive into sites of convergence
In early fall, BU Center for New Music provided 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.
The Zafraan Reading of Student Works took place on Monday, September 29, in CFA’s Marshall Room. This event was made possible with the generous support of the Goethe Institut Boston.
CONCERT DATES & TIMES
learn more about BU Center for New Music
Founded in 1839, Boston University is an internationally recognized institution of higher education and research. With more than 34,000 students, it is the fourth-largest independent university in the United States. BU consists of 17 schools and colleges, along with a number of multi-disciplinary centers and institutes integral to the University’s research and teaching mission. In 2012, BU joined the Association of American Universities (AAU), a consortium of 62 leading research universities in the United States and Canada. Learn more at bu.edu.
Established in 1954, Boston University College of Fine Arts (CFA) is a community of artist-scholars and scholar-artists who are passionate about the fine and performing arts, committed to diversity and inclusion, and determined to improve the lives of others through art. With programs in Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts, CFA prepares students for a meaningful creative life by developing their intellectual capacity to create art, shift perspective, and think broadly. CFA offers a wide array of undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs, as well as a range of online degrees and certificates. Learn more at bu.edu/cfa.
Founded in 1872, Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Music combines the intimacy and intensity of traditional conservatory-style training with a broad liberal arts education at the undergraduate level, and elective coursework at the graduate level. The school offers degrees in performance, conducting, composition and theory, musicology, music education, and historical performance, as well as artist and performance diplomas and a certificate program in its Opera Institute.
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.