For Immediate Release: June in Buffalo 2026 is the Year of the Composer/Conductor

 

June in Buffalo 2026 will run from June 1-7, 2026.

 

 

 

With more than 50 years of history, June in Buffalo is a landmark festival and conference dedicated to emerging and established voices in contemporary music. Hosted annually at the University at Buffalo, it’s widely known as a place composers come to grow, connect and have their work brought to life by top-tier performers and ensembles.

June in Buffalo 2026 is the year of the composer/conductor. Each participant composer will conduct her/his own composition in multiple rehearsals and a performance with the Festival’s resident ensemble, the Slee Sinfonietta. Participants will be mentored in this process by an outstanding and dynamic group of senior figures including Christian Baldini, Jason Thorpe Buchanan, David Dzubay and David Fulmer, each a celebrated leader as both composer and conductor. The number of composers who can be accommodated in such an undertaking is smaller than in a typical year at the Festival, and we are expecting that the application process will be highly competitive.

 

 

As always, participant composers will benefit from the full range of June in Buffalo’s programmatic activities, including masterclasses with senior composers, composer talks, and additional workshops. More recent additions to the JiB curriculum include opportunities to perform an original solo work in an uncurated program and to take part in our “late night” improvisation ensemble.

 

Whether you’re an emerging composer or an established voice, June in Buffalo is your chance to grow, create and connect in a supportive environment. Below you’ll find all the information you need to apply and take part in this transformative experience. June in Buffalo 2026 offers a unique opportunity for composer/conductors to prepare for the important artistic and professional leadership roles which await these most essential figures in the landscape of new music. 

 

How to Apply

Application Deadline:

All application materials and the processing fee must be submitted by February 15. 

Full details will be made available on the June in Buffalo website in early January, and all materials and payments will be accepted through the portals to be found on that website.

Application materials will include:

1. Resume or Curriculum Vitae

2. Performance Proposals and Scores

• Submit one or two proposals for works to be performed by the Slee Sinfonietta.
• Proposed works may include electronic elements.
• Proposals should briefly describe the work, including length, full instrumentation and any technical requirements.
• Proposals of works in progress will be considered.

3. Scores

• Submit scores/drafts of your proposed works for JiB and one or two additional scores showcasing your recent compositional activity.
• For works in progress, please send whatever partial scores or sketch materials you feel will be represent the current state of your work by the Feb.15 application deadline. The deadline for completed scores is April 1. All performance materials including any required score revisions, corrected parts and electronic elements must be received by April 22.
• Audio recordings of works submitted are requested, but not required.

Ensemble Instrumentation:

A maximum of 16 players of the Slee Sinfonietta drawn from the following:

·      Flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, French horn, 2 violins, viola, cello, double bass, piano/keyboards, harp and 2 percussion. Proposals for works of this scoring (or smaller) are highly encouraged.

·      Proposals may include saxophone, trumpet, trombone, and/or guitar (electric or acoustic), but the availability of these instruments will be limited.

·      Proposals may also include soprano voice.

·      Standard doublings are available for flute, clarinet, oboe and saxophone.

 

It is possible to apply for Auditor status. Auditors have access to the following:

• Senior composer lectures.
• All rehearsals, workshops and concerts.
• Masterclasses (as observers without presenting their own work).

Fees

·       $25 non-refundable processing fee

·      Participant Tuition: $800

·      Auditor Tuition: $400

Housing Costs

On-campus housing is available for non-UB students. The festival offers up to eight nights of accommodations in University dormitories; the cost for 2026 is currently estimated at $650.00 per participant.

 

 

Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart to come to UB in Spring

 

The Center is proud to announce that Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart will be coming April 1st and 2nd for performances at Lippes Concert Hall which will feature works by Ming Tsao and UB student composers. Neue Vocalsolisten is a renowned vocal ensemble which is dedicated to exploring new frontiers of vocal expression. Their collaborations with composers and artists produce works which map out unheard landscapes of digital media, performance, and theater. This ensemble has worked with some of the most prominent composers of our time including Georges Aperghis, Luciano Berio, Chaya Czernowin, Sara Glojnarić, Sarah Nemtsov, Katharina Rosenberger, Claude Vivier, and Jennifer Walshe.

 

Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart

 

Neue Vocalsolisten will be working with UB’s PhD student composers including Will Brobston, Francisco Corthey, Chi-Yen Huang, Jackson Roush, and  Lihuen Sirvent. They will also be performing Das wassergewordene Kanonbuch by UB's Birge Cary Professor of Music, Ming Tsao and Salvatore Sciarrino’s 12 Madrigali.

Neue Vocalsolisten has been widely recorded by such record labels as col legno, Cypres Records, Edition RZ, Kairos, and WERGO. The ensemble has been the recipient of many prominent awards including the Silver Lion of the Venice Biennale 2021 and the Italian critic’s prize Premio Abbiati 2022. The jury of the Venice Biennale stated Neue Vocalsolisten are an ensemble whose “creative collaboration with some of the greatest living composers has decisively advanced the development of the contemporary a cappella repertoire.”

Below is an example of Neue Vocalsolisten performing Evis Sammoutis's Sculpting Air. 

UB Student Composers at Hallwalls

 

The UB Music Department will be hosted by Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (341 Delaware Ave) this coming Monday, December 8th at 7:30 PM for a concert of student composer works performed by UB faculty and Buffalo-area musicians. Pianist Eric Huebner, violinists Melissa White and Shannon Reilly, and cellist Jonathan Golove will be playing pieces by Jackson Roush, Andres Bonilla Garcia, Trinity Prater, Lihuen Sirvent, and Thomas Little. In addition, composers Roush and Prater will follow their notated works with improvisations. New to the music department this year is Trinity Prater, who has written about their piece Crisálidas:

 

I wrote Crisálidas earlier in the summer of 2025 in Iowa City, where I had returned for some recuperation after 2.5 years study in Leipzig, Germany. During the study in Leipzig, I had become very close with a classmate of mine, Paula Rocosa Gañez, who was a student in the masters program in piano performance. Paula performed, and still performs, an aesthetically eclectic palette of 20th century composers, such as Hindemith, Debussy, Prokofiev, among several lesser-known 20th and 21^st century Spanish composers. I was always impressed with the distinct approaches she took to each composer, which made any recital of hers an exciting experience of multiplicity: you never knew which Paula you were going to get.  

 

I spent several concerts meditating on the mechanism behind this diversity, and every thought came back to articulation. Paula has, and pianists generally have, an acute, embodied awareness not only of the precise differences between all notated articulations, but also an intuition for which articulations a score was expressively implied to require. This realisation merged with conversations Paula and I had throughout our studies together about our experience of the masters studies as one of becoming, giving rise to feelings of being in a transitory state. The metaphor of the chrysalis (from which the piece takes its title) formed. 

 

The articulatory character of each section of this piece is drawn from imagining an insect's interactions with the walls on the inside of its chrysalis. At the beginning of the metamorphosis, these interactions are more of a variety of tappings, and as the body liquidates, a pressing, or a flowing. The harmonic choices are exclusively intervallic, beginning on a G, and, taking distances in semitones from that G from the distances between "Trues" in a Boolean sieve process. Distances between rhythmic events, including durations, note flurries, and lengths of scrapings on the wire-wrapped strings inside the piano, emerge from the same process as the harmony. 

 

This short piece marks the beginning of my interest in a music which is emergent from a space-in-between. There is so much that happens within a transformation beyond the arbitrary poles of its beginnings and endings.

 

 The concert is free, and a donation to Hallwalls is recommended. Thanks very much to Hallwalls for their continued support of our activities!

Thanks to Jan Jezioro for his excellent preview of June in Buffalo's 50th anniversary season in Buffalo Spree magazine! You can read it here. 

Just 4 more days until June in Buffalo opens with a concert in which a number of our emerging composers perform their own original works. This opportunity for today's performer/composer is a new feature of JiB 2025. It will be held in Baird Recital Hall (250 Baird Hall) on Sunday, June 1 at 6:30pm, and like all the events of this year's festival, it is free and open to the public.

2025 Festival Schedule!

 The 2025 Festival schedule is here! Only 11 days until the festival begins! 

Sunday, June 1

 

Opening concert: Baird Recital Hall, 6:30pm

Participant composers perform their original solo works

Monday, June 2

 

Composer lecture: George Lewis, BRH, 10am-12pm

 

Afternoon workshop/concert: Kyle Hutchins, BRH, 4pm

Sax workshop for composers

 

Evening concert: Lippes Concert Hall (LCH), 7:30pm

Solo works performed by pianist Eric Huebner (JiB composers George Lewis, David Sanford, and Andrew Nixon, along with those of Roger Reynolds, Leah Muir, and György Ligeti)

Tuesday, June 3

 

Composer lecture: Karola Obermüller, BRH 10am-12pm

 

Afternoon Concert: Meridian Arts Ensemble, BRH 4pm

Works by senior and participant composers for brass quintet, including the world premiere of Peter Gilbert’s A Rift Becomes a River and George Lewis’s Tightrope (2023)

Evening concert: Slee Sinfonietta, LCH, 7:30pm

Conducted by James Baker

Large ensemble works by JiB senior and participant composers, including David Sanford’s Chamber Concerto No. 5

Wednesday, June 4

 

Composer lecture: Jonathan Golove, June in Buffalo artistic director, BRH 10am-12pm

 

Afternoon concert: Members of the Slee Sinfonietta, BRH, 4pm

Solos and chamber works by JiB composers

 

Evening concert: [Switch~ Ensemble], Lippes Concert Hall, 7:30pm

Conducted by Wei-Han Wu, with soprano Tiffany Du Mouchelle

Ensemble works by JiB composers, including George Lewis’s Anthem, David Sanford’s Grace Canticles, and Peter Gilbert’s Meditation upon the Awakening

 

Thursday, June 5

 

Composer lecture: Ming Tsao, BRH 10am-12pm

Afternoon concert: [Switch~ Ensemble], BRH, 4pm

Conducted by Wei-Han Wu

Ensemble works by JiB composers, featuring Ming Tsao’s Canon (2001) and Dritte Stimme zu Bachs zweistimmigen Rätselkanons (2023, US premiere)

 

Evening concert: Baird B1, 7:30pm

Composer’s Cabaret Improvisation Ensemble

 

 

Friday, June 6

 

Composer lecture: David Sanford, BRH, 10am-12pm

 

Afternoon concert: BRH, 2-5:30 pm [Note: unusual start time]

A special concert of the music of Morton Feldman

For Christian Wolff, performed by flutist Lihuen Sirvent and pianist James Falzone

 

Evening concert: Meridian Arts Ensemble, LCH, 7:30pm

Works by JiB composers, including David Sanford’s Credo (2021)

 

 

Saturday, June 7

Composer lecture: Peter Gilbert, BRH, 10am-12pm

Closing concert: Slee Sinfonietta, LCH, 2:30pm

Conducted by James Baker, with soprano Tiffany Du Mouchelle

Works by JiB senior composers Ming Tsao, George Lewis, and Karola Obermüller's Bridges to Ruth (2024), along with works by JiB participant composers

 

Reception to follow Slee Sinfonietta concert

 

BONUS CONCERT: Metropolis Ensemble, Silo City, 6pm

New works by UB composers

June in Buffalo in the Press!

June in Buffalo was proud to have the Buffalo Philharmonic join us at recent festivals, most recently conducted by Fernanda Lastra in the Festival's first program comprised entirely of works by female composers. On the occasion of her BPO swan song, Ms. Lastra was interviewed by a local culture magazine. From the magazine:

Lastra also supports contemporary classical music composers through continued involvement with the internationally acclaimed University at Buffalo's June in Buffalo Festival, where she has made some of the most challenging music accessible to concert-goers: "It has been a unique experience working alongside remarkable living composers at the June in Buffalo Music Festival. Collaborating directly with composers is not only fascinating but also enriching. It provides conductors real-time interactions with composers and insights that deepen our understanding of the music-making process. Moreover, the pieces highlighted in this festival often push the boundaries of music and creativity, challenging both musicians, myself as a conductor, and the audience to explore new sounds and artistic expressions that are at the forefront of contemporary classical music."

Read more at the Buffalo Spree. 

 

 

June in Buffalo 2025: Peter Gilbert

 Peter Gilbert will be joining us for June in Buffalo 2025!

“Filled with the ghosts of sounds. He captures a dark, yet hopeful wonder through variation in color, mood, and the semblance of melodies. ...Ethereal, ambient, and benignly haunting like a morning fog on the ocean. There is always something hidden, just beyond what is happening, that seems to slowly reveal itself but never quite does.” 

– Kraig Lamper, American Record Guide, 2011

Peter Gilbert writes: “I love the feeling of being enveloped in a musical experience, of disappearing into sound. I search for musical moments that can conjure up secret passageways to transcendence—that we performers, collaborators, listeners can conjure together.”

Peter Gilbert's work combines traditional instrumental writing with elements of improvisation, live-performed electronics, and other media in works for the concert hall as well as for multi-media theater, film, and installation. In his words, he attempts to “become enveloped in a musical experience, disappearing into sound.”

Gilbert has held artist residencies with numerous institutions in Europe and the US including ZKM | Institut für Akustik und Musik, Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany), and the Aaron Copland House and festivals such as the Tage Aktueller Musik, Nürnberg (Germany) and the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival. Accolades and commissions have come from the Barlow Foundation, New Music USA, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, Kennedy Center Education, NRW Fonds Neues Musiktheater, the Russolo Foundation, the Look & Listen Festival, the Third Practice Festival, the Washington International Composers Competition, Stadtstheater Darmstadt, the Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges, and Theater Russelsheim.

Gilbert taught at Harvard University, Wellesley College, and the Cleveland Institute of Music, and was co-founder of the Young Composers Program at CIM and its Co-Directer from 2003-2010. Since 2010 he has taught composition at the University of New Mexico.  Gilbert's second portrait album for New Focus Recordings was named a Best of 2021 by Sequenza21. His work as a composer, performer and producer can also be heard on Innova Recordings, GM Recordings, Sono Luminus, Affeto, Centaur, and at http://petergilbert.net.

June in Buffalo 2025: Karola Obermüller

We are thrilled to that Karola Obermüller will be joining us for a second consecutive year at June in Buffalo.

Karola Obermüller composes in search of the unknown, with layers upon layers of obscured material buried deep beneath a surface that is sometimes sumptuous, sometimes bristling with rhythmic energy. Her unique voice began forming in collages of sound made with tape recorders as a child and evolved later with composition degrees from the Meistersinger-Konservatorium Nürnberg, the Hochschule für Musik Saar, and the University Mozarteum Salzburg. Her sense of rhythm and form was forever changed by studying Carnatic and Hindustani classical music in Chennai and Delhi, India. 

 A Ph.D. at Harvard University brought her to the US where she taught at Wellesley College and at the University of New Mexico, co-directing the composition area and the annual John Donald Robb Composers’ Symposium music festival, before joining the Department of Music at UC San Diego. She also lives and works part of the year in Europe and has been a visiting artist at ZKM, Deutsche Akademie Rom, Centro Tedesco di studi Veneziani, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Leipzig Gewandhaus and Hanns Eisler House, and IRCAM as well as serving as a resident composer for new music festivals at Hochschule für Musik Nürnberg, Conservatorio Piccinni di Bari (Italy), University Mozarteum Salzburg, Festival Virtuosi Century XXI, Recife (Brazil), Samobor Music Festival Croatia, and others. Obermüller frequently serves as an adjudicator for competitions such as the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Hochschulwettbewerb, the Femfestival, and the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse.  

reflejos distantes - Recorded at June in Buffalo 2024

Center for 21st Century Music · reflejos distantes

Her music, often political, always dramatic, includes operas for Staatstheater Nürnberg, Theater Bielefeld, Theater Bonn, Theater Heidelberg, and Stuttgart’s Musik der Jahrhunderte. The emotional juxtapositions of story suspended in a tableau architecture that one finds in her operas can be heard in her concert works as well which include commissions from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fromm Music Foundation, New Music USA, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Saarländischer Rundfunk, and numerous renowned soloists and ensembles.

Obermüller works with lauded contemporary music ensembles such as Ensemble Modern, ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble), Arditti Quartet, Neue Vocalsolisten, Ekmeles, MusikFabrik, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, E-MEX Ensemble, Iridium Quartet, New Thread Quartet, Soli fan tutti, Pegnitzschäfer Klangkonzepte, Ensemble Adapter, New Mexico Contemporary Ensemble, ensemble phorminx, sonic.art saxophone quartet, Splinter Reeds, Gewandhaus-Ensemble Avantgarde, and AsianArt Ensemble. She has received numerous awards including the Heidelberger Künstlerinnenpreis, Darmstädter Musikpreis, the New York Musicians Club Prize, the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer’s Award, the Bavarian Youth Prize for Composition (awarded by Zubin Mehta), the John Green Prize for Excellence in Music Composition, and the 1st Prize of the “New Note” International Composers Competition Croatia.

Recordings of several of Obermüller’s works have been released on CD including Jacqueline Leclair’s solo CD (New Focus Recordings, Music for English Horn Alone, FCR272), a record by harpsichordist Luca Quintavalle (Brilliant Classics 96476: Mousikē—the art of the muses), a CD with the Voices of the Pearl project (Volume 3), and a disk by Duo Harmonium d’art et Pianoforte (forthcoming on dreyer-gaido). Having been selected by the German Music Council to be a part of the Contemporary Music Edition, the first portrait CD of her music was released by WERGO in 2018 and a second CD is forthcoming on New Focus Recordings.

June in Buffalo 2025: Ming Tsao

We are happy to announce Ming Tsao as a senior faculty member at June in Buffalo 2025.

Dr. Tsao is the newly appointed Birge-Cary Chair in Music Composition in the Department of Music at the University at Buffalo, and we are glad that he has agreed to join us as a senior faculty member.

For Ming Tsao, composition is an act of deep interrogation. His music dissects sound and syntax, pulling apart traditional musical structures to expose something raw, intricate, and startlingly new. Tsao brings this rigorously exploratory approach to both the concert hall and the classroom, offering composers an opportunity to engage with one of contemporary music’s most precise and philosophical minds.

Tsao’s work often reimagines the very foundations of musical expression—his compositions unfold with a microscopic attention to detail, where texture, articulation, and phrasing become the building blocks of a radical new syntax. Yet beneath this structural intensity lies a profound sensitivity to beauty, albeit one that resists easy sentimentality. He says:

Mine is a materialist music whose sound world lies outside of consciousness rather than a sound world fully endowed with consciousness, with the hopes of placing the listener in a space where one is required to rethink their personhood within a larger domain of life. Noise and the violence enacted upon my music through rhythm and meter produce a music whose very integrity is damaged and violated, signaling the opposition and resistance that certain lyrical procedures meet or defy. This opposition and resistance can open our listening to a different sense of musical expression, an expression that comprises sounds before they are fully recruited into the action of human agency.

Poetry and text are recurring touchstones in Tsao’s work, not just as sources of inspiration but as integral components of his compositional language. His upcoming large-scale opera, Mudan ting (The Peony Pavilion), is a re-working of the Chinese Ming dynasty Kunqu opera of the same name, which will have its world premiere at the National Theatre Mannheim in 2026. Tsao’s through-lines of poetry, text, temporal displacement of poetic materials, and history (musical or otherwise) combine in this two-hour work.

June in Buffalo 2025: David Sanford

David Sanford will be joining us for June in Buffalo 2025!

Few composers move as effortlessly between musical worlds as David Sanford. His work draws as much from jazz and big band traditions as it does from contemporary classical and experimental music, creating a sound that is bold, high-energy, and unapologetically genre-fluid. Whether writing for large ensembles, orchestras, or his powerhouse David Sanford Big Band (formerly the Pittsburgh Collective), Sanford thrives in spaces where stylistic boundaries blur.

Much of Sanford’s music pulses with rhythmic drive and a deep-rooted sense of groove, who embrace complexity with fire. Works like Black Noise and Seven Kings showcase his ability to fuse intricate orchestration with visceral, improvisation-inflected energy. His collaborations with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, JACK Quartet, and the Meridian Arts Ensemble reflect a composer equally at home in the concert hall and the jazz club.

V-Reel, with the Pittsburgh Collective

Sanford has received commissions from the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Speculum Musicae, the Meridian Arts Ensemble, the Fromm and Koussevitzky Foundations, and the Barlow Endowment; his works have been performed by the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra under Kent Nagano, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra under Marin Alsop, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and the Chicago Symphony Chamber Players among others.

His honors include the Rome Prize, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Radcliffe Institute, and he was the arranger for cellist Matt Haimovitz’s Grammy Award-nominated album Meeting of the Spirits. The title track of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s recording of the composer’s works, Black Noise, was named one of “The 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2019” by the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/12/arts/music/best-classical-music.html).

He received degrees in theory and composition from the University of Northern Colorado, New England Conservatory, and Princeton University, and is currently Elizabeth T. Kennan Professor of Music at Mount Holyoke College and the director of the David Sanford Big Band.

At June in Buffalo 2025, Sanford brings his singular voice as both a composer and mentor. His presence at the festival is an invitation to engage with a musical language that is electrifying, deeply considered, and always evolving. We look forward to his input at this year’s festival!

Sampler of Sanford's Recordings