New Music Festival
"Believe it or not, a little town in northwest Ohio is one of the liveliest spots for new music in the whole United States. For 25 years, MACCM has pursued the latest musical ideas and the highest musical standards with fearless vision. Bowling Green students are lucky to have this amazing resource — but so are we all."
—Steven Stucky, 2012
The 44th Annual Bowling Green New Music Festival
OCTOBER 19-21, 2023
Featuring guest composer MARCOS BALTER
Guest Ensemble DAL NIENTE
special performances by andPlay
and T.H.E. Modern Dance Company
2023 FESTIVAL SCHEDULE
Click on each link to view a PDF program.
COMPOSER TALK: Marcos Balter
1:30 p.m., Thursday, October 19 - Bryan Recital Hall
CONCERT #1
3:30 p.m., Thursday, October 19 - Bryan Recital Hall
Chamber music by Marcos Balter, Missy Mazzoli, Ned Rorem, Steven Mark Kohn,
and Martin Rokeach.
CONCERT #2
8 p.m., Thursday, October 19- Kobacker Hall
Wind ensemble and New Music Ensemble performances of works by
Marcos Balter, Piyawat Louilarpprasert, Viet Cuong, Jim Stephenson,
Catherine Likhuta, Cynthia Wong, and Stephen Downing.
CONCERT #3
10:30 a.m., Friday, October 20 - Bryan Recital Hall
Music by Terri Sanchez, Marcos Balter, James Johnston, Tristan Murail
and Piyawat Louilarpprasert.
CONCERT #4
2:30 p.m., Friday, October 20 - Bryan Recital Hall
Music by Anthony R. Green, Leah Asher, Marcos Balter, Jeffrey Mumford, Christopher Dietz, and Tristan Murail. Featuring performances by andPlay.
CONCERT #5
8 p.m., Friday, October 20 - Kobacker Hall
DAL NIENTE
Music by Marcos Balter, Michelle Lou, and Carola Bauckholt.
CONCERT #6
2:30 p.m., Saturday, October 21 - Bryan Recital Hall
Music by Miguel del Aguila, Marilyn Shrude, Marcos Balter, James Romig, and Brian Mark.
CONCERT #7
8 p.m., Saturday, October 21 - Kobacker Hall
Orchestral and choral music by Marcos Balter, Samuel Adler, Missy Mazzolli, Ned Rorem, Jake Runestad, Jeffrey Derus, Saunder Choi, Sydney Guillaume, and Katerina Dimon. Featuring performances by T.H.E. Modern Dance Co. and tuba soloist David Saltzman.
Some concerts will be streamed live at youtube.com/bgsumusic
Check the Arts Calendar for updated streaming listings
Featured Artists
Marcos Balter
Praised by The Chicago Tribune as “minutely crafted” and “utterly lovely,” The New York Times as “whimsical” and “surreal,” and The Washington Post as “dark and deeply poetic,” the music of composer Marcos Balter (b.1974, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is at once emotionally visceral and intellectually complex, primarily rooted in experimental manipulations of timbre and hyper-dramatization of live performance.
Past honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award, fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Tanglewood Music Center (Leonard Bernstein Fellow), two Chamber Music America awards, as well as commissions from the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New World Symphony, Chicago Symphony Music Now, The Crossing, Meet the Composer, Fromm Foundation at Harvard, The Holland/America Music Society, The MacArthur Foundation, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Recent performances include those at Carnegie Hall, Köln Philharmonie, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Wigmore Hall, ArtLab at Harvard University, Lincoln Center, Walt Disney Hall, Teatro Amazonas, Sala São Paulo, Park Avenue Armory, Miller Theater, Villa Medici, Teatro de Madrid, Bâtiment de Forces Motrices de Genève, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago. Recent festival appearances include those at Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival, Ecstatic Music Festival, Acht Brücken, Aldeburgh Music Festival, Aspen, Frankfurter Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, and Banff Music Festival. Past collaborators include the rock band Deerhoof, dj King Britt and Alarm Will Sound, yMusic and Paul Simon, Claire Chase and the San Francisco Symphony, the International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Orquestra Experimental da Amazonas Filarmonica, American Contemporary Music Ensemble, American Composers Orchestra, and conductors Karina Canellakis, Susanna Malkki, Matthias Pintscher, and Steven Schick.
His works are published by PSNY (Schott), and commercial recordings of his music are available through New Amsterdam Records, New Focus Recording, Parlour Tapes+, Oxingale Records, and Navona Records.
He is the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University, having previously held professorships at the University of California San Diego, Montclair State University, and Columbia College Chicago, visiting professorships at the University of Pittsburgh, Northwestern University, and the University of Pennsylvania, and a pre-doctoral fellowship at Lawrence University. He currently lives in Manhattan, New York.
Dal Niente
Ensemble Dal Niente performs new and experimental chamber music with dedication, virtuosity, and an exploratory spirit. Flexible and adaptable, Dal Niente’s roster of 26 musicians presents an uncommonly broad range of contemporary music, guiding listeners towards music that transforms existing ideas and subverts convention. Audiences coming to Dal Niente shows can expect distinctive productions—from fully staged operas to multimedia spectacles to intimate solo performances—that are curated to pique curiosity and connect art, culture, and people.
Now in its second decade, Ensemble Dal Niente has performed concerts across Europe and the Americas, including appearances at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC; The Foro Internacional de Música Nueva in Mexico City; Radialsystem Berlin, MusicArte Festival in Panama City; The Library of Congress and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.; the Art Institute of Chicago and the Hyde Park Jazz Festival; Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; The Americas Society; and the Darmstadt Summer Courses in Germany. Dal Niente is the recipient of the 2019 Fromm Music Foundation prize, and was the first-ever ensemble to win the Kranichstein prize for interpretation in 2012. The group has recordings available on the New World, New Amsterdam, New Focus, Navona, Parlour Tapes+, and Carrier labels; has held residencies at The University of Chicago, Harvard University, Stanford University, Brown University, Brandeis University, and Northwestern University, among others; and collaborated with a wide range of composers, from Enno Poppe to George Lewis to Hilda Paredes to Roscoe Mitchell.
The ensemble's name, Dal Niente ("from nothing" in Italian), is a tribute to Helmut Lachenmann's Dal niente (Interieur III), a work that upended traditional conceptions of instrumental technique; and also a reference to the group’s humble beginnings. This is Dal Niente's second guest appearance at the New Music Festival, previously featured in 2013.
About the Festival
At the heart of the Center’s activities is the renowned New Music Festival. This annual event celebrates the contemporary arts through concerts, panels, art exhibitions, seminars, master classes and papers. Begun in 1980, the festival has hosted John Adams, John Luther Adams, Samuel Adler, Milton Babbitt, William Bolcom, Anthony Braxton, John Cage, Chen Yi, John Corigliano, George Crumb, Mario Davidovsky, Anthony Davis, Dai Fujikura, Philip Glass, John Harbison, Lou Harrison, Jennifer Higdon, Karel Husa, Aaron Jay Kernis, Joan La Barbara, David Lang, Paul Lansky, George Lewis, Steven Mackey, Robert Morris, Pauline Oliveros, Shulamit Ran, Bernard Rands, Terry Riley, Christopher Rouse, Frederic Rzewski, Gunther Schuller, Joseph Schwantner, Bright Sheng, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Steven Stucky, Morton Subotnick, Joan Tower, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Evan Ziporyn and more than 400 other guest composers and musicians.
See our Media page for archived performances from 2020 and 2021.
NMF Production Team:
Festival Director: Kurt Doles
MACCM Assistant: Pedro Reis Amaral
Manager of Recording Services: Michael Laurello
Technical Director: Keith Hofacker
Assistant Manager of Recording Services: Marco Mendoza
Coordinator of Public Events: Theresa Clickner
Dean, College of Musical Arts: William Mathis
Special Thanks to:
The MACCM Advisory Committee
Dan Piccolo & the BGSU Percussion Studio
All our volunteers
Updated: 09/26/2023 10:04AM