The New Music Series highlights musicians who are actively creating and crafting what it means when you say “21st-century music.”

This series has featured notable artists like Alarm will Sound, Yarn/Wire, Roomful of Teeth, and Bang on a Can All-Stars.

2025-2026 New Music Series

Lawrence University New Music Ensemble in performance in Harper Hall.

Spectral Canvas: Music of Donnacha Dennehy and Andy Akiho

Saturday, February 7, 2026 • 7 p.m. • Harper Hall
Free admission

The Lawrence Conservatory’s New Music Series presents Spectral Canvas, an evening of bold, boundary-crossing music by Donnacha Dennehy and Andy Akiho.

The program features Dennehy’s Limina, a riveting piano concerto performed by Lawrence faculty pianist Michael Mizrahi. In Limina, Dennehy explores thresholds between registers, textures, and energies, creating music that is at once luminous, visceral, and deeply expressive.

Paired with Dennehy’s work is Akiho’s Copper Canvas, a dazzling composition alive with intricate grooves, metallic shimmer, and the kinetic drive that has made Akiho one of today’s most in-demand composers.

Hailed by critics worldwide, Dennehy and Akiho represent two of the most distinctive voices in contemporary music. Together, their works invite listeners to step into soundscapes that shimmer, pulse, and radiate with color and intensity.

Headshot of composer Steve Reich.

Steve Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians, 50th Anniversary Celebration

Wednesday, April 15, 2026 • 8 p.m. • Lawrence Memorial Chapel
Free admission

The Lawrence New Music Ensemble performs Steve Reich’s groundbreaking and mesmerizing work 50 years after its premiere in April 1976. Scored for four pianos and a battery of percussionists, vocalists, strings, and winds, the work is rarely performed, last heard at Lawrence in 2016.

Andy Akiho and Imani Winds

Andy Akiho & Imani Winds

Friday, April 17, 2026 • 7:30 p.m. • Lawrence Memorial Chapel

Andy Akiho is a GRAMMY® nominated and Pulitzer Prize finalist composer whose bold works unravel intricate and unexpected patterns while surpassing preconceived boundaries of classical music. He is an in-demand composer who has earned international acclaim for his large-scale works that emphasize the natural theatricality of live performance.

GRAMMY® award winning Imani Winds is celebrating a quarter century of music making. The group has led a revolution and evolution of the wind quintet through their dynamic playing, adventurous programming, imaginative collaborations and outreach endeavors that have inspired audiences of all ages and backgrounds.

Following their album release in June 2024, BeLonging, Andy Akiho and Imani Winds will tour together for the first time during the 25/26 season. This unique collaboration will bring audiences a program that will include Akiho’s BeLoud, BeLoved, BeLonging*, as the centerpiece – a powerful piece commissioned by Imani Winds, inspired by the sounds and protests of immigrants held at a Brooklyn detention center, and workshopped by Akiho and incarcerated young men at Rikers Island.

* Commissioned by Imani Winds with support from the Concert Artists Guild Richard Weinert Award, the Imani Winds Foundation and the Kaufman Music Center. Premiered October 26, 2022 in New York City.

This event is part of the Performing Arts Series.

Explore Past Performances

Alarm Will Sound and Roomful of Teeth are just a few of the amazing New Music Series guests who have shared their music with the Lawrence community.