“Music is always renewing itself,” says Augusta Read Thomas, University Professor of Composition in Music and the founder and director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition. Launched in 2017, the center serves as an interdisciplinary hub for the study, creation, and performance of new music.

Thomas envisioned the center as a way to create opportunities for musicians and other artists.

As a celebrated composer with decades of experience building institutional support for the arts, Thomas understands the need for spaces that produce and present new works. The center prizes classical music not as a museum—or necropolis—of great canonical composers but as a living art form.

Although the center is Thomas’s brainchild, it is decidedly a group effort. For instance, Thomas codirects the newly formed Grossman Ensemble, a key fixture of the center, along with two of her composer colleagues in the Department of Music, assistant professors Sam Pluta and Anthony Cheung. “We’re all really good friends,” she says, “and it’s good to have three opinions on everything.”

The Grossman Ensemble, composed of 13 of the nation’s leading contemporary music specialists, is prominently featured in the center’s inaugural 2018–19 concert series. The ensemble enjoys a generous schedule of rehearsals: eight leading up to each of three performances, including one open rehearsal. This structure allows for sustained collaboration between composers and performers while granting audiences special access to the creative process. Joining the Grossman Ensemble in the center’s inaugural concert series are percussion and piano quartet Yarn/Wire, Chicago-based saxophone quartet ~Nois, the experimentalist Tyshawn Sorey Trio, and string ensemble Spektral Quartet.

With a total of 40 world premieres in the upcoming concert series, the center is promoting not just new music but new new music. A spirit of openness and innovation is also reflected in the center’s partnership with the Chicago Integrated Media Experimental (CHIME) Studio, a creative space on campus for the teaching, production, and recording of electronic music that is set to co-present multiple events with the center in the coming year.

In addition to its resident and visiting ensembles, the center hosts distinguished guest composers, faculty research, recording sessions, interactive workshops, graduate student projects, and the only postdoctoral fellowship dedicated to contemporary classical music composition in the United States.

The Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition celebrates and produces music by composers of today, breaking down the walls between performers and audience members so that after concerts they could get together for a glass of wine. This is the ongoing renewal required, says Thomas, “to keep music growing.”—Lucas McGranahan