“What is Home?” Commissioning Project

Collage New Music and Artistic Director Eric Nathan have launched a major new commissioning initiative in partnership with leading contemporary music ensembles Eighth Blackbird (Lisa Kaplan and Matthew Duvall, Artistic Co-Directors) and Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (Matilda Hofman, Artistic Director).

Titled What is Home?, the project invites six composers from across the United States—JaRon Brown, Erin Gee, April Dawn Guthrie, Eric Nathan, Angélica Negrón, and Juri Seo—to each respond to the question: What does home mean to you?

Each composer contributes a 6–8 minute movement to a larger suite of six works, forming a mosaic of perspectives on this theme.

Collage will give the world premiere on April 26, 2026, under Nathan’s direction at Longy School of Music. The suite will subsequently be presented in premieres by Eighth Blackbird in Chicago and Left Coast Chamber Ensemble in San Francisco through 2027.

In addition to the world premiere, Collage will offer a special performance at a Boston homeless shelter in partnership with Shelter Music Boston, bringing this project directly to those for whom the question of “home” holds particular urgency.

The commissions were sponsored, in part, by support from the Korean Cultural Society of Boston and the Frank B. Epstein Commissioning Fund.