Below is a list of summer festivals our students have attended. We encourage you to research these options to find the best fit for you as a composer. Pricing and financial assistance vary by festival.
Founded in 1949, the Aspen Music Festival and School is regarded as one of the top classical music festivals in the United States, noted both for its concert programming and its musical training of mostly young-adult music students. The eight-week summer season includes hundreds of classical music events: concerts by four orchestras, recitals, chamber music, operas, classes, lectures, and family programs. In the winter, the AMFS presents recitals and robust music education programs for local youth and families.
The Atlantic Music Festival, held at Maine’s Colby College, offers a comprehensive program for aspiring musicians. Its summer institute provides opportunities for performers, composers, and conductors to work closely with distinguished faculty and showcase their talents in numerous concerts and recitals.
The Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) is a 3-week musical utopia for innovative composers and performers in the beautiful Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts dedicated entirely to adventurous contemporary music. Composers will have their new works performed. Players will perform in ensembles alongside our faculty. The program includes daily performances in the museum galleries, and concludes with a three-day blow-out festival performed by fellows, faculty, and special guests.
Blackbird Creative Lab, founded by the ensemble Eighth Blackbird, is an intensive summer workshop for composers and performers. The Lab offers an immersive experience and ongoing community of practice for contemporary classical musicians with expansive artistic vision who are seeking collaboration, mentorship, and a viable life as an artist.
Bowdoin International Music Festival
The Bowdoin International Music Festival in Brunswick, Maine, is a six-week summer program that fosters the growth musicians through the study of solo and chamber music repertoire. With about 250 students on campus each summer (typically 175 per session), it cultivates personal attention, encouragement, and nurturing in a setting that includes a broad range of collaborative and supportive relationships and hundreds of opportunities to learn, rehearse, and perform.
Situated on a lovely wooded 180-acre campus in western North Carolina, Brevard Music Center stands as one of this country’s premier summer training programs and festivals. Under the artistic direction of acclaimed conductor Keith Lockhart, Conductor of the Boston Pops and formerly Chief Conductor of the BBC Concert Orchestra in London, over 700 gifted students and participants come to the Music Center each summer to study with distinguished faculty and renowned guest artists. From June through August, students participate in a rigorous program of instruction and performance including orchestral ensembles, private lessons, chamber music, opera, classical guitar, bluegrass, and jazz.
Cortona Sessions for New Music
One of the world’s premiere educational programs dedicated to the creation and performance of contemporary music, the Cortona Sessions is a destination for emerging composers and performers seeking to collaborate, learn, grow, and create. The Sessions provide participants with an inspiring and supportive environment in which new music is explored in all its possible forms.
Founded in 2010 and set every summer in historical Pavia (Northern Italy), highSCORE Festival is an invaluable venue for emerging composers wanting to produce and promote their work, inspire audiences with their music, secure future commissions and job opportunities and join other musicians to create a vibrant artistic community. Musicians work closely with a renowned faculty, talented visiting artists and special guests from around the world for two intense weeks of masterclasses, lectures, workshops and concerts. In addition to the vital opportunity of space and time to create, highSCORE residency program offers a substantial range of professional development opportunities while providing lodging, meals, and studio at the exclusive Italian-style Villa Penicina in the charming hills of Pavia.
Mizzou International Composers Festival
The Mizzou International Composers Festival — taking place each July in Columbia, Missouri — features public concerts, presentations, workshops, and more. Featuring ensemble-in-residence Alarm Will Sound as well as two distinguished guest composers, the festival selects eight resident composers each year through an application process to compose new works that will be premiered by Alarm Will Sound at the festival. During the week, resident composers will rehearse closely with the ensemble, give public presentations on their work, and receive private lessons with the guest composers.
New Music On The Point brings together composers, performers, and musical experimenters for two weeks each June. In addition to chamber music concerts by NMOP’s outstanding performers, we engage directly with Vermont’s glorious natural environment through outdoor and site-specific performances. Point CounterPoint (NMOP’s home) is situated on Lake Dunmore beneath the Green Mountains of Vermont and under a nighttime sky filled with stars. There are rehearsal studios and practice cabins that dot the woods and rustic bunkbed cabins, most with lake views.
The Nief-Norf Summer Festival is a multidisciplinary new music festival that brings together performers, composers, improvisers, scholars, and music technologists for collaboration and exploration of contemporary music within an immersive environment. Hosted at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the festival provides opportunities for masterclasses, workshops, and performances with world-renowned faculty at the state-of-the-art Natalie L. Haslam Music Center. Nief-Norf fosters an incredible community of contemporary musicians who create, collaborate, experiment, and problem solve in exploration of what it means to be contemporary musicians and perform for a modern audience.
Norfolk Chamber Music Festival
Join other up-and-coming chamber musicians at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival Yale Summer School of Music. The Festival begins each summer with a week-long New Music Workshop followed by a six-week Chamber Music Session for instrumentalists and ensembles. Participants receive a fellowship covering the full cost of tuition, housing, and meals. Fellows receive daily coachings from Festival artists and perform weekly in Emerging Artist Series concerts and alongside internationally acclaimed artists in the Festival Artist Series. All performances are presented in the acoustically supurb Music Shed and are professionally recorded and livestreamed.
So Percussion Summer Institute
The Sō Percussion Summer Institute (SōSI) brings together ambitious composers and performers for two weeks on the campus of Princeton University in Princeton, NJ, to learn and perform in a hands-on environment with Sō Percussion and their collaborators. This unique two-week program allows participants to experience Sō Percussion’s processes for creating and premiering new work firsthand. SōSI features mentorship from the members of Sō Percussion, our composition faculty, a diverse array of guest artists, our artist-in-residence, Princeton faculty, and other special guests.
SPLICE (Summer Institute for Performance, Listening, Interpretation, and Creation of Electroacoustic music) is a weeklong, intensive program for performers and composers to experience, explore, interpret, and create music for instruments and electronics.
Tanglewood Music Center (TMC) Fellows experience music making at the highest level, enjoying close mentorship from members of a world-class orchestra, intensive and inspiring coaching from resident faculty, thought-provoking classes with distinguished visiting musicians, and myriad performances from the BSO and a diverse array of guest artists. Immersed together in music, collaboration, and the splendor of the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts, TMC Fellows forge professional bonds and friendships that last throughout their entire careers.
Yarn/Wire International Institute is an incubator for sonic collaborations between performers, ensembles, composers, and creators, serving as an ecosystem for emerging and world-class artists to collectively push the boundaries of music, performance and sound. Over the duration of the program, participants from around the world, including both instrumentalists and composers, collaborate on new and existing works, participating in performances, collaborations, talks, and workshops.