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Santa Fe New Music has spent its first ten years becoming a nationally renowned new music organization. Led by internationally renowned founding Artistic Director John Kennedy, SFNM presents rarely performed classics by 20th and 21st century composers, along with new and recent music by living composers spanning a broad and diverse stylistic range. Over SFNM’s first ten seasons, SFNM presented over 330 different works by 179 composers. This included 9 commissions, 39 World Premieres, and 5 American Premieres.

In its 11th year, SFNM is excited to announce its programs under a festival format. In June, 2012, SFNM2, The Southwest Festival of New Music, will present three-days of cutting edge and provocative new music at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, NM. 

The 3-day event examines the theme of “Music as Environmental Consciousness,” conceived in homage to the 2012 centenary of John Cage. Highlights of the festival’s concerts include commissions from Christian Wolff (the last surviving member of the “New York School” of composition that included Cage and Morton Feldman), as well as the young composers Lisa Coons, Nathan Davis, and Christopher Marianetti. The festival will also present a special conception of a new work by composer and acoustic ecologist David Dunn, which will be presented as an evolving work over the three evenings of the festival.

Says SFNM’s Artistic Director John Kennedy, “Cage opened our ears and minds to the possibility of hearing all the world as music, and our festival will focus on the younger generation of composers and practitioners who have carried the spirit of his work forward into today. 

"SFNM's curatorial approach to our subject will not be to present works which imprint an extra-musical ‘nature’ theme on work which is already stylistically coded, but rather to feature works which derive from – and assert – the notion that music is an element of the ecosystem.”

SFNM2 is going to be an ear-opening experience! Help us make it happen!