Our Mission: A Concise Overview

Nova Linea Musica serves as a catalyst for the creation and promotion of new music through commissions, live performances, and exceptional audio and video recordings featuring dynamic emerging and established artists.

In-Depth: Who We Are

At the heart of every Nova Linea Musica concert is a relationship. Each season, NLM's performing artists select a composer they believe in, someone whose voice they want to bring into the world, and NLM ensures that it happens. The result is a world premiere at every concert: new works that exist because two artists chose each other, and because someone made it possible.

That is what Nova Linea Musica is: a presenter whose every decision, from programming to reception, serves one purpose. Closing the distance between artists and audiences.

"Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.” - Charles Eames

CLOSING THE DISTANCE

...between artists and audiences

The tagline is not a slogan. It describes exactly what happens across the arc of every NLM evening.

It begins before the performance. Artists and composers sit down with the audience at 5:45, a genuine conversation, not a curtain speech, that opens up the music before a note is played. Concertgoers arrive in the hall already inside the work, already invested in what they are about to hear.

The performance itself takes place in intimate spaces where proximity to the musicians is inescapable. You are not in a concert hall watching from a distance. You are in the room where the music is happening, close enough to feel the weight of it.

And then the evening extends further still. A chef-curated reception follows every concert, not as an amenity, but as a continuation. It is where audiences meet the artists they just heard, ask the questions the music raised, and find themselves in conversation with composers and performers of genuine consequence. Pulitzer Prize winners. Grammy Award recipients. Artists at the height of their careers, accessible in a way that simply does not happen anywhere else.

That arc, from conversation to performance to reception, is the NLM experience. Closing the distance is the design.

Beyond the Concert Hall

A world premiere is a singular moment. Nova Linea Musica treats it like one. Every commission and performance is captured in professional high-definition audio and video, and each artist records in a professional studio setting, ensuring that the work endures as a definitive record of the music and the performers who brought it to life.

These recordings do not stay on a hard drive. They travel. They reach listeners who were not in the room. They open doors for composers seeking future performances and for artists building careers on the strength of work they were first to champion. The premiere is the beginning, not the end.

Investing in the Field

Nova Linea Musica's commitment to new music runs deeper than any single concert. The NLM Artists-in-Residence program places exceptional artists at the center of multiple concerts across a season, deepening the relationship between performers, composers, and audiences over time. The NLM Score Call invites emerging composers to submit new works for consideration, with winning pieces performed by NLM artists in a dedicated concert. And the First Annual NLM Chamber Music Competition opens the door for the next generation of Chicago-area chamber musicians, offering prizes, mentorship, and the opportunity to perform alongside some of the field's most distinguished voices.

Chicago and the World

Chicago has produced world-class composers, performers, and ensembles for generations. They have built one of new music's most vital communities, inventive, collaborative, and largely self-sustaining, in a city that has never fully matched their ambition with institutional support.

Nova Linea Musica is here to move that needle, reclaiming time and resources for the musicians doing the work and making the case, concert by concert, that Chicago is not a stop on the way to somewhere else. It is the destination.

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NLM Values

• We believe that new music is an essential element of a thriving world.
• We believe that the most vital new music reflects the full range of human experience, in the composers who write it, the performers who bring it to life, and the communities it speaks to.
• We believe that the most powerful artistic relationships are forged across generations.
• We believe that new music deserves exceptional performances documented on audio and video to the highest possible standards.