Chicago Symphony “Pauses” MusicNOW Series for Contemporary Music

The orchestra’s long-running contemporary music series has been put hold for the 2025/26 season

Inaugurated in the 1998/99 season, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s (CSO) MusicNOW chamber series has presented a minimum of four events each season since the 2000s.

According to the Chicago Classical Review, the CSO has given two MusicNOW concerts this current season, the most recent being in March. 

However, the orchestra recently informed its subscribers that the series will be “paused” for the 2025/26 season. This also comes as Jessie Montgomery’s contract as composer-in-residence ended last June.

CSO President Jeff Alexander explained in the Chicago Tribune that MusicNOW had additional music licensing fees or international guest artist expenses. He added that the CSO intends to hire a new composer-in-residence during Klaus Mäkelä’s first season as music director from the 2027/28 season.  

In the meantime, Alexander says a short-term strategy may be to program more contemporary music on the CSO’s mainstage — the 2025/26 season includes just one premiere (Matthew Aucoin’s Song of the Reappeared) and its subscription concerts feature works by 16 living composers including Camille Pépin, Carlos Simon, Thea Musgrave, Unsuk Chin, and Jörg Widmann. 

“The CSO MusicNOW series will be paused in 2025/26 to take time to imagine new possibilities for connecting Chicago audiences with new music,” said CSO Vice-President for Artistic Planning Cristina Rocca. “Conversations with the artistic planning team and Zell Music Director Designate Klaus Mäkelä are underway to guide future plans” and “subscribers … are invited to return to Symphony Center to explore concerts across the 2025/26 Season that feature works by living composers.”

“[MusicNOW] may still include some curation of some kind regarding our contemporary music offerings, and the rest will probably remain pretty much the same: writing a new piece for the orchestra each year, et cetera,” Alexander added. 

“The word we’re using is ‘pause,’ because, as we thought about it, we’re a symphonic organization first of all,” he continued. “If we put a contemporary piece on a CSO subscription program and it’s performed three times, on a good week, 6,000 people are hearing it. If we put it on a MusicNOW concert, maybe 300 people were hearing it. … Part of our thinking is, let’s beef up the contemporary offerings on the CSO main (series). Cautiously, of course. But more than normal.”