The New Music Festival at NIU, a staple of the fall performance season since 2008 will be held Wednesday, November 5 through Friday, November 7 in the NIU Music Building.
Each fall, the multi-concert festival featuring prominent guest composers, performers, and thematically connected compositions to expose students and the NIU community to excellence and diversity in contemporary classical music making.
Tickets are available online for each night, NIU students are admitted free of charge with a reserved ticket.
Concerts are held each night at 7 p.m. November 5 and 6 will be held in Boutell Memorial Concert Hall and November 7 in the NIU Recital Hall.
The festival’s featured guest artists are composer Joseph Klein, Calliope Duo and Beyond This Point.
The festival kicks off Wednesday night with an evening of Canetti-menagerie. Begun in 1997, Canetti-menagerie is an ongoing project that includes nearly two dozen solo works and an open-form, semi-improvisational chamber work based upon characters in Earwitness: Fifty Characters (Der Ohrenzeuge: Fünfzig Charaktere), written in 1974 by the Bulgarian-born British-Austrian writer Elias Canetti (1905-1994). Canetti’s distinctive studies incorporate poetic imagery, singular insights, and unabashed wordplay to create fifty ironic paradigms of human behavior.
Night two is an evening of collaborations between NIU student composers and the featured guest artists. Also performing will be the NIU Chamber Choir.
The festival’s final night includes a featured performance by Beyond This Point.
The festival director is Dr. Gregory Beyer, NIU professor of music and director of percussion studies.
About the featured guest artists
Born in Los Angeles in 1962, Joseph Klein is a composer of solo, chamber, and large ensemble works, including instrumental, vocal, electroacoustic, and intermedia compositions. His music—which has been described as “a dizzying euphoria… like a sonic tickling with counterpoint gone awry” (NewMusicBox) and exhibiting a “confident polyvalence [that] heightens its very real excitement” (The Wire)—reflects an ongoing interest in processes drawn from such sources as fractal geometry, chaos, and systems theory, often inspired by natural phenomena. His works frequently incorporate theatrical elements, either as an extension of the extra-musical references or as an organic expression of the musical narrative itself. Literature is another important influence on his work, including compositions based on the writings of Elias Canetti, Alice Fulton, Franz Kafka, W.S. Merwin, and Milan Kundera. Klein holds degrees in composition from Indiana University (DM, 1991), University of California, San Diego (MA, 1986), and California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (BA, 1984), where his composition teachers included Harvey Sollberger, Claude Baker, Robert Erickson, and Roger Reynolds. He is currently Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of North Texas College of Music, where he has served as Chair of Composition Studies since 1999.
Elizabeth McNutt and Shannon Wettstein formed the Calliope Duo decades ago. Over the years the duo has survived ice storms, tornadoes, and cross-country moves. In their collaborations as the Calliope Duo and in their highly acclaimed solo performances, Dr. McNutt and Dr. Wettstein present the most original, innovative, and excellent newly composed music. The Calliope Duo’s programs focus on works from the last fifty years but occasionally incorporate innovative older repertoire for contrast and a fresh perspective. Through collaborations with composers and outreach to audiences, the Calliope Duo works to build the concert repertoire and audiences of the future. The name “Calliope” refers to an innovative American hybrid of flute and piano, a keyboard instrument that plays a rank of steam-driven pipes. “Calliope” is also the name of the Greek muse of eloquence and epic poetry, an embodiment of the duo’s mission to convey ideas of heroic intensity with beauty and grace. The Calliope Duo has presented guest artist residencies at the Festival for New American Music, the Walden School, the China-ASEAN music festival (Nanning, China), the Nirmita Composers Workshop (Bangkok, Thailand), and universities including CU Boulder, California State University, and Rice University, among others. Their projects have been supported by grants from the American Composers Forum, US Artists International, and the Brannen-Cooper Fund. The members of Calliope are also dedicated teachers. Dr. Wettstein has been a professor of piano at Michigan State University, St. Cloud State University, Augsburg University, and Bemidji State University; Dr. McNutt is on faculty at the University of North Texas.
Beyond this Point (John Corkill, Adam Rosenblatt, Rebecca McDaniel) is a Chicago-based collaborative music ensemble dedicated to the advancement of experimental and contemporary culture. This multifaceted collective of musicians, performers, and arts practitioners builds experimental projects that engage with written music, sound art, lighting, installation, improvisation and live electronics. From the intimate to the monumental, BTP is known for producing unique performances that offer captivating and exhilarating experiences. Most recently, BTP has presented its community-oriented multimedia production Reclaimed Timber; immersive intermedia program Verify You Are Human; and thought-provoking theatrical performance Musician Minus Instrument. Highlights of their 2025-2026 season include the opening concert of the 2025 Time:Spans Festival in New York performing intermedia works by Danish composer Simon Steen-Andersen in collaboration with Ensemble Dal Niente; the launching of a new afterschool program for Chicago Public School students focused on programming LEDs to respond to sound; and performances at the Universities of Notre Dame, Kansas, Missouri, Chicago, and Northern Illinois, and at the Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn, among others.
