Contempo

Contempo is the premiere performance vehicle for graduate student composers in the Department of Music. Under the artistic direction of faculty composer Shulamit Ran, the group normally plays a five-concert series staged in a variety of prominent Chicago venues. Two of the group’s annual concerts are traditionally devoted entirely to providing a public forum for the performance of music by graduate students in the Music Department under the rubric of “Tomorrow’s Music Today.” The larger of these concerts takes place downtown and often consists mainly of dissertation compositions.

Students benefit greatly from performances of the possible highest level, played by the Pacifica Quartet and eighth blackbird together with guest artists (as needed) and conducted by new music expert Cliff Colnot. Performances by Contempo allow students to garner high praise from highly discerning listeners in full houses and to accrue the best possible recordings of their work to use in their dossiers for sharing and promoting their work and finding permanent positions in academia or elsewhere. 

Among downtown venues in which Contempo has played in recent years are the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Harris Theater, the Claudia Cassidy Theater at the Chicago Cultural Center, and Ganz Hall in the Auditorium Building at Roosevelt University. Among those in Hyde Park are Fulton Recital Hall, Court Theater, and Mandel Hall. To these Contempo will add the 450-seat theater that will be part of the new David and Reva Logan Center for the Creative and Performing Arts (D-LAC), scheduled to open in 2011.

Through the combination of extraordinary performances and the high level of composerly talent of our graduate students, Tomorrow’s Music Today concerts have become highly anticipated events that bring the Contempo season to an exciting climax each May.

In addition to having their music programmed bi-annually on Tomorrow’s Music Today concerts, graduate student compositions are sometimes promoted to one of the first three concerts that takes place in Contempo’s annual season. In all these ways, and because the group has given over eighty world premieres by such composers as Roger Sessions, John Harbison, Ralph Shapey, George Perle, Shulamit Ran, Marta Ptasynska, and John Eaton, Contempo is one of the most important arms of the graduate Program in Composition. Its central curricular function for Chicago’s Music Department is also one of the top reasons students come to Chicago. For more information, visit contempo.uchicago.edu.