Boston Conservatory’s New Music Festival Puts Contemporary Composers in the Spotlight

Boston Conservatory at Berklee’s annual New Music Festival explores the breadth of contemporary classical music—spanning 20th-century modernism to the present day—and embraces the boundary-pushing spirit of the art form. With each iteration, the festival also showcases works by Boston Conservatory composers, from aspiring undergraduates to accomplished faculty like Marti Epstein and Eun Young Lee, whose compositions have earned them Guggenheim Fellowships. 

This year’s festival, running from January 31 to February 7, will feature world premieres by Epstein and Boston Conservatory composer in residence Lei Liang, himself a Guggenheim fellow and finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Festival highlights also include a “portrait concert” of works by Liang and two performances by visiting artists andPlay duo, presenting works written by composition students and by faculty member Victoria Cheah. 

Boston Conservatory’s contemporary music ensemble contraBAND will kick off the 2025 New Music Festival on January 31 with the Lei Liang Portrait Concert, featuring the world premiere of Liang’s “Inaudible Ocean” alongside earlier works including “Inkscape” for percussion quartet and piano (2014) and “Memories of Xiaoxiang” for alto saxophone and tape (2003). 

The latter recounts a story dating to the Chinese Cultural Revolution which has intrigued Liang for decades (and which he revisited in his Pulitzer Prize–nominated concerto, Xiaoxiang), concerning the murder of a villager by a local official. With no legal avenue to seek justice, the victim’s widow takes her revenge by wailing like a ghost, night after night, in the forest behind the official’s home, until they both were driven mad.

In “Inkscape,” Liang converts traditional Asian landscape painting into music, with a piano serving as the “brush” and a percussion quartet, the “ink.” And with “Inaudible Ocean,” the composer employs another eloquent metaphor, describing the piece as “a ‘sonic flashlight’ to illuminate the hidden wonders of the ocean for listeners.” The work draws inspiration from Liang’s ongoing collaboration with marine scientists at the University of San Diego’s Qualcomm Institute, merging technology and art to recreate sounds from the depths of the ocean, outside the realm of human hearing. 

Professor Marti Epstein’s new work For Jack was written for pianist and Boston Conservatory alum Jack Yarbrough (MM '21, contemporary classical music), who will perform the solo, recital-length piece on February 2. Yarbrough’s performance career to date has focused on solo piano works “as a means of temporal and perceptual expansion.” He also has performed with Ensemble intercontemporain, Yarn/Wire, and Ensemble X, and is currently completing a Doctor of Musical Arts in performance practice at Cornell University.

“Jack has performed several pieces of mine, and has demonstrated a real and deep understanding of my music. So when he asked me for a piece, I was happy to say yes,” Epstein says. “He exhibits a great deal of thought and patience in his playing. My piece has a lot of space in it, requiring Jack to be very patient at times, and to just listen to the resulting resonance.”

Visiting artists andPlay—featuring Maya Bennardo, violin, and Hannah Levinson, viola—made their concert debut in 2012, committed to working with living composers and expanding repertoire for violin/viola duos; and since then, they have commissioned more than 45 new works. andPlay’s cassette release of Assistant Professor Victoria Cheah’s “a butterfly on your shoulder into years and years to come” (2022, Dinzu Artefacts) made Bandcamp’s list of Best Experimental Music in March 2022. On February 6, they will perform Cheah’s composition along with works by Bennardo and cellist/composer Mariel Roberts. And on February 7, andPlay will present a concert of new works composed by Boston Conservatory students.

View the complete schedule of New Music Festival events and watch the YouTube videos below, for a sampling of compositions by Lei Liang, Marti Epstein, and Victoria Cheah.