The UT New Music Ensemble is a contemporary chamber music

Chamber music

Chamber music is a form of classical music, written for a small group of instruments which traditionally could be accommodated in a palace chamber. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers with one performer to a part...

 group based at the University of Texas at Austin

University of Texas at Austin

The University of Texas at Austin is a state research university located in Austin, Texas, USA, and is the flagship institution of the The University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, its campus is located approximately from the Texas State Capitol in Austin...

 Butler School of Music (College of Fine Arts). The group has been led by Professor Dan Welcher

Dan Welcher

Dan Welcher is an American composer, conductor, and music educator.- Biography :Welcher was born in Rochester, New York and earned degrees from the Eastman School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music, studying bassoon, piano, and composition...

 since 1979.

Featuring solo, chamber and large ensemble works by living composers and those of the recent past, UTNME presents six full-length concerts annually of new chamber music composed primarily within the past 20 years. This group consists of a sixteen member core ensemble made up of student instrumentalists and singers at the Butler School of Music.

Since the inception of the Visiting Composers Series in 1995, the ensemble has featured works of four to six world-class guest composers every year; recent guest composers have included Samuel Adler

Samuel Adler (composer)

Samuel Hans Adler is an American composer and conductor.-Biography:Adler was born to a Jewish family in Mannheim, Germany, the son of Hugo Chaim Adler, a cantor and composer, and Selma Adler. The family fled to the United States in 1939, where Hugo became the cantor of Temple Emanuel in...

, Claude Baker

Claude Baker

W. Claude Baker Jr. is an American composer of contemporary classical music.Claude Baker attained a B.M. degree, magna cum laude, from East Carolina University in 1970. He subsequently studied composition at the Eastman School of Music with Samuel Adler and Warren Benson, and holds M.M. and D.M.A...

, William Bolcom

William Bolcom

William Elden Bolcom is an American composer and pianist. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Medal of Arts, two Grammy Awards, the Detroit Music Award and was named 2007 Composer of the Year by Musical America. Bolcom taught composition at the University of Michigan from 1973–2008...

, Susan Botti, Evan Chambers

Evan Chambers

Evan Chambers is a composer, traditional Irish fiddler, and Professor of Composition at the University of Michigan. He received a Doctorate in music composition from the University of Michigan...

, John Corigliano

John Corigliano

John Corigliano is an American composer of classical music and a teacher of music. He is a distinguished professor of music at Lehman College in the City University of New York.-Biography:...

, Michael Daugherty

Michael Daugherty

Michael Kevin Daugherty is an American composer, pianist, and teacher. Influenced by popular culture, Romanticism, and Postmodernism, Daugherty is one of the most colorful and widely performed American concert music composers of his generation...

, David Del Tredici

David Del Tredici

David Del Tredici, born March 16, 1937 in Cloverdale, California, is an American composer. According to Del Tredici's website, Aaron Copland said David Del Tredici "is that rare find among composers — a creator with a truly original gift...

, John Harbison

John Harbison

John Harris Harbison is an American composer, best known for his operas and large choral works.-Life:...

, Stephen Hartke

Stephen Hartke

Stephen Paul Hartke is an American composer. He grew up in Manhattan, where his first piano teacher was Mary Miley, and has lived in California since the 1980s...

, Jennifer Higdon

Jennifer Higdon

Jennifer Higdon is an American composer of classical music. Higdon has received many awards, including the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her Violin Concerto and the 2010 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for her Percussion Concerto.-Biography:Higdon was born in Brooklyn,...

, Lee Hyla

Lee Hyla

Lee Hyla is an American classical music composer.Lee Hyla was born in Niagara Falls, New York, and grew up in Greencastle, Indiana...

, Lowell Liebermann

Lowell Liebermann

Lowell Liebermann is an American composer, pianist and conductor.At the age of sixteen, Liebermann performed at Carnegie Hall, playing his Piano Sonata, op. 1...

, David Maslanka

David Maslanka

David Maslanka is a U.S. composer who writes for a variety of genres, including works for choir, wind ensemble, chamber music and symphony orchestra....

, James MacMillan, Thea Musgrave

Thea Musgrave

Thea Musgrave CBE is a Scottish composer of opera and classical music.-Biography:Born in Barnton, Edinburgh, Thea Musgrave studied at the University of Edinburgh and in Paris as a pupil of Nadia Boulanger...

, Shulamit Ran

Shulamit Ran

Shulamit Ran is an Israeli-American composer. She moved from Israel to New York at 14, as a scholarship student at the Mannes College of Music. Her Symphony won her the Pulitzer Prize...

, Christopher Theofanidis, Augusta Read Thomas

Augusta Read Thomas

Augusta Read Thomas is an American composer.Augusta Read Thomas was born in Glen Cove, New York. She attended The Green Vale School and later moved on to St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, and then studied composition with Jacob Druckman at Yale University and at the Royal Academy of...

, Michael Torke

Michael Torke

Michael Torke is an American composer who writes music influenced by jazz and minimalism. Sometimes described as a post-minimalist, his most postminimal piece is Four Proverbs, in which the syllable for each pitch is fixed and variations in the melody produce streams of nonsense words. Other works...

, Joan Tower

Joan Tower

Joan Tower is a Grammy-winning contemporary American composer, concert pianist and conductor. Lauded by the New Yorker as "one of the most successful woman composers of all time", her bold and energetic compositions have been performed in concert halls around the world...

 and Chen Yi

Chen Yi (composer)

Chen Yi is a Chinese composer of contemporary classical music. She was the first Chinese woman to receive a Master of Arts in music composition from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. She is also a violinist....

. In addition, works by faculty composers Donald Grantham

Donald Grantham

Donald Grantham is an American composer and music educator.Grantham was born in Duncan, Oklahoma. After receiving a Bachelor of Music from the University of Oklahoma, he went on to receive his MM and DMA from the University of Southern California. For two summers he studied under famed French...

, Kevin Puts

Kevin Puts

Kevin Matthew Puts is an American composer.-Life:Puts studied composition and piano at the Eastman School of Music and Yale University, earning the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Eastman. Among his teachers were Samuel Adler, Jacob Druckman, David Lang, Christopher Rouse, Joseph Schwantner,...

, Russell Pinkston

Russell Pinkston

Russell Pinkston is Professor of Composition and Director of the Electronic music Studios at the University of Texas at Austin School of Music.Pinkston is both an active composer and a researcher in the field Computer Music...

, Yevgeniy Sharlat and Dan Welcher

Dan Welcher

Dan Welcher is an American composer, conductor, and music educator.- Biography :Welcher was born in Rochester, New York and earned degrees from the Eastman School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music, studying bassoon, piano, and composition...

 are performed regularly as well as music composed by local Austin

Austin, Texas

Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...

 and Texas

Texas

Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...

composers.