About | New Music Everywhere (NEW MUSE)

New Music Everywhere (NEW MUSE) is Madison’s only professional music ensemble specializing in the performance of new works in unconventional venues. We formed this ensemble in August 2010 through generous support from the College Music Society Yamaha In-Residence Fellowship and the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission.

Founders and Co-Directors: Jerry Hui, Jonathan Kuuskoski and Paola Savvidou

Our projects thus far have taken us to such diverse venues as museums, public spaces, and night-clubs. Each of these performances have presented a wide range of musical selections as well as interdisciplinary collaborations with dancers, spoken-word artists, and actors.

The primary goal for our initial 2010-11 season was to bring contemporary music out of it’s cultural and aesthetic confines to engage new audiences while creating a model for fresh, interactive, and artistically-innovative musical experiences. We are happy to say that we have exceeded these goals. In our first season, NEW MUSE created a one-of-a-kind musical installation within the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in coordination with Shinique Smith’s customized exhibition Menagerie that was noted for liberating “classical music from it’s Muzak barracks” (The A.V. Club). Next, we staged a retelling of Francis Poulenc’s The Story of Babar the Little Elephant at the Madison Children’s Museum where our audience “acted out” the story through choreographed movement exercises. We closed our season by hosting a show-stopping, vaudeville-inspired night at Plan B that combined chamber music, dance, a little slap-stick, and DJ Illy Holiday’s spinning that was lauded for “…some of the best music and dance I’ve seen in Madison.” (The Isthmus)

Our eclectic musical selections have included works ranging from 20th century masters Barber, Poulenc, Lutoslawski, Roussakis, and Bolcom to emerging composers Gabriel Prokofiev, Matthew Orlovich, Brenton Broadstock, and UW-Madison alumni Scott Gendel, Becky Lipsitz, and our very own Jerry Hui. We were also honored to give Wisconsin, North American, and world premieres of works by established voices like Jenny McCleod, Guillermo Lago, and Laura Schwendinger.

NEW MUSE was the only contemporary chamber ensemble selected to perform at the 2011 Art Fair on the Square, and also played a major role in the breakthrough “Les Miz” flash mob during the seminal 2011 protests. On February 27th 2011 hundreds of citizens broke into “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les Miserables under the baton of our own Jerry Hui; the subsequent videos went viral on YouTube, garnering more than 150,000 views and online notices at CBS News and Comedy Central. In sum, our first season earned widespread media coverage in the Isthmus, A.V. Club, WKOW-ABC 27, and Square 77.

The success of our events and the energy built around our innovative approach is also largely due to the support we’ve found through collaboration with other Madison-based performing groups like Ephemeral Art, MadTown Ballroom, and UW-Madison’s First Wave Hip Hop Learning Arts Community.

In April 2011, we were thrilled to win the latest UW-Madison New Arts Venture Challenge competition for our most audacious project yet — Madison Muse Fest — which will transform four State Street businesses into multi-arts performance venues on May 5th 2012. But you don’t have to wait that long to catch NEW MUSE in action — our second season begins in January 2012 with the world premiere of Jerry Hui’s comic opera “Wired for Love.” You can read more about that here. For now, thanks for visiting our site, all the best for the New Year, and we hope to see you at our next performance!

- Paola, Jerry, & Jonathan

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