Present Music is one of the nation’s leading ensembles specializing in commissioning and performing new music. Its mission is to engage artists and audience members in imaginative and provocative experiences with new music through ensemble performance and education. Founded and based in Milwaukee since 1982, Present Music has worked closely with many of the nation's most exciting and important composers and has firmly established one of the largest audiences for new music in the country.
This week, on Nov. 16 at the Milwaukee Art Museum, is one of Present Music’s most ambitious programs to date: a performance of music by composer Philip Miller with animations by fellow South African artist William Kentridge. The concert will feature two guest singers from South Africa—Ann Masina and Tshegofatso Moeng—as well as PM’s long-time collaborator, The Bucks Native American Singing and Drumming Group.
Present Music innovates new concert formats, embraces a broad diversity of repertoire, and makes the music of our time accessible to audiences with deep expression and serious fun. The ensemble ranges from a core group of seven musicians to an ensemble of twenty or more, expanding and contracting to perform the broadest possible range of music, often in unusual spaces.
Present Music was founded by conductor and musical community builder Kevin Stalheim, whose 37 years of service as Artistic Director made a significant and long-lasting contribution to culture in Milwaukee and the artform of classical music broadly.
In 41 years, Present Music has commissioned and premiered over 70 significant new works from established and emerging composers around the world and recorded many of them for well-known labels. Raven Chacon’s Voiceless Mass, commissioned and premiered by Present Music at the ensemble’s 2021 Thanksgiving Concert, won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
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Present Music shows the world that Milwaukee is a center for creativity, having toured extensively throughout the United States and participated in major international music festivals in Japan, New York City, Turkey, and China. Present Music is also the unprecedented, six-time winner of ASCAP/Chamber Music America’s Adventurous Programming Award.
The ensemble nurtures the next generation of composers through its education program, the Creation Project, in which students in Milwaukee public schools learn how to compose and to hear their works performed by professional musicians.
Visit: Present Music
Photo Credit: Erol Reyal
