THE CURIOSITY SERIES
Presented as part of Constellation Chicago’s Frequency Series since 2017… ~Nois’ annual Fall concert, featuring Chicago music & artists
What might you hear at a CURIOSITY show? An hour of drone music? Electronic alien noises? A bad joke told from stage to stall while Jordan finds a replacement reed? *He broke his other one slap tonguing for five minutes straight*
Well, probably a mix of all three. Whatever it is ~Nois plays, we invite the listener to get curious as we explore groundbreaking new music coming from the city we call home.
ABOUT ~NOIS’ 10 for 10
~Nois Quartet is thrilled to embark on the cornerstone of their 10th anniversary season: the 10 for 10 Commissioning Project. In celebration of their decade milestone, the ensemble is commissioning and premiering 10 works by 10 composers - launching the quartet into a new decade of championing the music of today.
~Nois was founded in 2016 with a mission to promote the saxophone quartet as an exceptional avenue for chamber music, and to support the next generation of composers. 10 for 10 is a reflection of ten years striving to achieve this mission - a celebration of the people, places, and music that have impacted the group along the way. This project stretches from day 1 to day 3,650, with connections going back to our first days at Northwestern.
All 10 new pieces will be premiered as part of the ~Nois 2026/2027 Chicago Season, and featured on touring programs in subsequent years. Additionally, the works will be recorded for worldwide digital releases, and ~Nois will work closely with each composer to publish their music for future quartets to perform.
An Intergenerational Effort: The 10 for 10 commissions intentionally target composers at widely different stages of life, from new college graduates to GRAMMY Award-winning professionals. In addition, two commissions of the 10 for 10 are in partnership with the Luna Composition Lab, a non-profit organization that provides mentorship and performance opportunities to young composers who are female, nonbinary, or gender nonconforming. The Luna Lab offers direct mentorship between professional composers and students as they write for musicians/ensembles like ~Nois Quartet. Two of these commissions are by recent alumni of the program.
~Nois’ 10 for 10 commissions are made possible through the quartet’s New Works fund, which is supported by individual donors. Additional assistance for the commissioning effort comes from the generous support of the Zell Family Foundation.
Paul Novak’s work is supported by the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard. Clarice Assad’s work is supported through Nova Linea Musica Inc.; Christopher Cerrone & Emma O’Halloran’s works are supported by Anonymous.
Interested in supporting the 10 for 10 Commissioning Project, or future ~Nois commissioning?
10 FOR 10 PREMIERES
*All 10 for 10 compositions will be premiered in Chicago during our 2026/2027 season. Save the dates or pick up your tickets today to be there for this historic season.
CURIOSITY X
Sunday, October 4, 2026 | 8:30PM
Premieres by Alvarez, Neleson, Novak, & Smith
NOVA LINEA MUSICA
Wednesday, January 27, 2027 | 6:30PM
Premiere by Clarice Assad
DISCOVERY
Friday, April 9, 2027 | 7:30PM
Premieres by Bennett, Montgomery, & O’Halloran
JOY IS COMING
Friday, June 11, 2027 | 7:30PM
Premieres by Benavides & Cerrone
10 FOR 10 COMPOSERS
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Sam Alvarez
CURIOSITY X PREMIERE
Sam Alvarez (they/he) is a saxophonist, composer, and interdisciplinary artist.
In all their work, Sam collects sustained sounds, layered textures, and small artifacts of beauty to explore language, coherence, feelings of loss, and assorted sentimental ways to cling to meaning. Sam composes instrumental and electroacoustic music, exploring idiomatic and harmonic treatments of extended techniques…
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Peyton Nelson
CURIOSITY X PREMIERE
Peyton Nelesen (age 18) is a composer and pianist who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and currently lives in New York City and Branford, Connecticut. She has been honored by ASCAP three times in both the Herb Alpert and Morton Gould Young Composer Awards. She studies composition with John Syzygy and studied piano with both Penka Rodeva and the late Amonte Parsons….
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Paul Novak
CURIOSITY X PREMIERE
Paul Novak is a Chicago-based composer and flutist. His "spellbinding" (Washington Post) music immerses listeners in shimmering and subtly crafted worlds full of color, motion, light, and magic. His recent projects engage with dreams and memory, queer identity, climate change and the natural world, and psychosomatic illness. Novak has been commissioned by and collaborated…
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Elijah Daniel Smith
CURIOSITY X PREMIERE
Elijah Daniel Smith is an American contemporary composer whose music has been described as “gnashing and relentless” (Chicago Tribune), “Seductive” (Gramophone), and as “an ingenious study in clarity and distortion” (San Francisco Classical Voice). His music has been premiered and performed by world renowned ensembles including The Chicago Symphony Orchestra for MusicNOW, the American Composers Orchestra, the New England Philharmonic…
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Clarice Assad
NOVA LINEA MUSICA PREMIERE
A powerful communicator renowned for her musical scope and versatility, Brazilian-American Clarice Assad is a significant artistic voice in the classical, world music, pop, and jazz genres and is acclaimed for her evocative colors, rich textures, and diverse stylistic range. A prolific Grammy Award–nominated composer with more than 70 works to her credit, she has been commissioned by internationally renowned organizations, festivals, and artists and is published in France (Editions Lemoine)…
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Olivia Bennett
DISCOVERY PREMIERE
Olivia Bennett (age 24) is a composer and gardener from Southwest Missouri. Olivia received her bachelor’s degree in music composition from Rice University, where she studied with Pierre Jalbert, Richard Lavenda, Kurt Stallmann, and Karim Al-Zand. Olivia has been an active composer for 14 years, attending festivals such as the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland and hearing her music performed by ensembles around the world…
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Jessie Montgomery
DISCOVERY PREMIERE
Jessie Montgomery is a GRAMMY® Award-winning composer, violinist, and educator whose work interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st-century American sound and experience. Named Performance Today’s 2025 Classical Woman of the Year, her profound works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful, and exploding with life” (The Washington Post)…
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Emma O'Halloran
DISCOVERY PREMIERE
Emma O’Halloran is a GRAMMY-nominated Irish composer whose music is driven by a fascination with joy, wonder, hope, and human connection. Freely intertwining acoustic and electronic music, her work seeks to capture moments of intimacy and magic, and has been described as “intensely beautiful” (Washington Post) and “unencumbered, authentic, and joyful” (I Care If You Listen). Emma’s work spans collaborations with folk musicians, chamber ensembles, turntables…
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Nicolás Lell Benavides
JOY IS COMING PREMIERE
Nicolás Lell Benavides’ music has been praised for being “resourceful and wonderfully eclectic” (Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle) and “dramatically tight and musically transporting” (SF Chronicle). He was a 2024-25 Guggenheim Fellow and has received commissions from groups like The New York Philharmonic/The Juilliard School, the LA Philharmonic with Gustavo Dudamel, The San Francisco Girls Chorus, Eighth Blackbird, New Century Chamber Orchestra with Daniel Hope…
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Christopher Cerrone
JOY IS COMING PREMIERE
Christopher Cerrone (b. 1984, New York) is internationally acclaimed for his compositions. His work is characterized by a subtle handling of timbre and resonance, a deep literary fluency, and a flair for multimedia collaborations. Cerrone’s music balances lushness and austerity, immersive textures and telling details, dramatic impact and interiority. His GRAMMY-winning compositions are utterly compelling and uniquely his own…