AMHERST, Mass. — The ninth biennial Five College New Music Festival (5CNMF) will take place September 11–13, 2026, at Bezanson Recital Hall on the UMass Amherst campus. This year's festival, themed "Music Without Royalties," features four programs of new and recent works by eighteen composers, including several from the Five Colleges, performed by thirty-eight musicians drawn largely from faculty at the Five Colleges. Admission to all performances is free.
The festival showcases the range of contemporary classical music being written today, in the region and around the world, while also working to reclaim overlooked figures and currents from the broader classical tradition. Festival programs include nine premieres.
A thread of kingship and its undoing runs through this year's programming. Berio's O King, a memorial to Martin Luther King Jr., opens the Sunday program. Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King, a portrait of George III's psychological collapse, anchors Saturday's evening concert. Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon, his 1942 denunciation of tyranny, closes the festival. Taken together, the three works trace a throughline from monarchy to madness to moral reckoning with power.
"Composers, like all creative people, whether they identify as political or not, have always reacted to the nature of the time and place that they find themselves living in,” expressed Macchia. “Four of the pieces on this year’s festival program, including my own, are in direct response to political/ societal events which the composers experienced during their lifetimes. Three of the pieces were particularly stimulated by the specter of tyranny, while the fourth, Berio’s O King, was composed as a direct response to the assassination of Martin Luther King. The reason or motivational events that serve as catalysts to creative acts do not give artistic value or merit to a piece of art. But understanding the creative instincts and impulses of certain pieces, this would certainly be true of the both the Davies, inspired by the chaos of the late 60s and based on texts of the insanity of King George III, and Schoenberg’s Ode To Napoleon Buonaparte, which is based on Byron’s poem and inspired by the fascists of World War II, certainly may serve as an aid to entering and absorbing the compositional materials at hand and as a reminder that music, musicians, and their audiences do not live in a vacuum.”
Festival Schedule:
Friday, September 11, 7:30 PM — Moment of Clarity
Works by Eric Sawyer, Kate Soper, Dan Langa, David Sanford, Judd Greenstein, and Salvatore Macchia (The King’s Evil).
Saturday, September 12, 2:00 PM — An Afternoon of Premieres
Newly composed works premiered by students. Works by Geoffrey Hudson, Gregory Brown, Hayden Byrne, Hsueh-Yung Shen, Lydia Winsor Brindamour, Baize Liu, and Salvatore Macchia.
Saturday, September 12, 7:30 PM — Wild and Tame
Works by György Kurtág, Morton Feldman, Elliott Carter, George Walker, and Peter Maxwell Davies (Eight Songs for a Mad King).
Sunday, September 13, 3:00 PM — O King
Works by Luciano Berio (O King), Sarah Hennies, Jan Swafford, Ursula Mamlok, Henri Dutilleux, and Arnold Schoenberg (Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte)
The festival is coordinated by Elizabeth Chang, Salvatore Macchia, Eric Sawyer, Jiayan Sun, and Steven Beck, and draws performers and composers from UMass Amherst, Amherst College, Smith College, Hampshire College, and Mount Holyoke College.
Event Details: Dates: September 11–13, 2026
Venue: Bezanson Recital Hall, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Admission: Free
For full program details, visit www.5cnmf.org.