EDUCATION AND ENGAGEMENT
Collage New Music has developed educational initiatives and partnerships with local partners to further its mission of inspiring the next generation and enriching the wider cultural community of Boston and by bringing contemporary music to a broad audience.
Learn more about Collage’s initiatives and partnerships below:
Julie I. Rohwein Collage Fellows Program
Since 2014, Collage New Music has hosted an annual Collage Fellows program aimed at providing an emerging composer in the Boston region the opportunities to hone their craft of composition, develop skills in community engagement and receive behind-the-scenes administrative experience with how a contemporary music ensemble is run. Each Collage Fellow receives a commission for a new work for Collage and assists the General Manager throughout the season in promoting the activities of Collage, including but not limited to interviewing composers who are being performed, creating articles on a subject of interest, and assisting during concerts.
Collage Composers Colloquium
Collage hosts this annual event that brings together composers in the greater Boston region for workshops and talks, providing opportunities for composers to meet and share ideas with each other, and benefit from observations on their own music by renowned guest composers. In 2025-26, the mentor composers are Yu-Hui Chang and Longy faculty member Niloufar Nourbakhsh. In previous years they have included Juri Seo, Wang Lu, Alexandra du Bois, John Harbison, Peter Child and Eric Nathan.
Longy School of Music
Collage is in its second year with a creative and educational residency at the Longy School of Music where Collage performs concerts, provides guest composer and performer masterclasses, student composition reading sessions, and side-by-side performances with students and faculty.
Project STEP
We are proud to launch a new educational partnership with Project STEP, where Eric Nathan and guest Collage composers will lead composition masterclasses for high school students from historically underrepresented communities in Project STEP’s program.
Shelter Music Boston
Collage will offer a special performance of its Mosaics of Home concert program in partnership with Shelter Music Boston in April 2026, featuring a pre-premiere of the newly commissioned suite What is Home? at a Boston homeless shelter. Audience members at that event will be invited to share reflections and reactions to these works, which will be shared with the audience at the world premiere performance.
Goethe-Institut Boston
Collage enters its second season co-presenting a concert in parntership with Goethe-Institut Boston that focuses on the influence of the German language in music. In March 2025, Collage presented “Between Words and Worlds” with Anna Handler conducting featuring music by Jörg Widmann and Olga Neuwirth, and in March 2026, Handler presents the world premiere of Eric Nathan’s Missing Words, inspired by the newly invented German words in Ben Schott’s book, Schottenfreude: New German Words for the Human Condition
Korean Cultural Society of Boston
Collage has collaborated with the Korean Cultural Society of Boston in commissioning new works from Texu Kim and Juri Seo as well as sponsoring Juri Seo’s participation in the Collage Composers Colloquium. Collage values the KCSB’s support in bringing Korean-American contemporary music to our audiences.