The Mizzou New Music Ensemble will offer new music from Missouri, South America, and more in concert at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, November 17 at Whitmore Recital Hall on the University of Missouri campus in Columbia. The concert is free and open to the public.

From close to home, the Ensemble (pictured) will perform the two winning works written for the 2019 Missouri Association of Departments and Schools of Music (MADSM) Collegiate Composition Competition.

“Cadencia” was composed by Truman State University student Samuel Tillman, the 2019 winner in the undergraduate category winner, and “Hitt Street Harangue” is by Daniel Vega, a master’s student in composition at Mizzou and this year’s graduate winner. Both works were selected in a competitive judging process open to all student composers enrolled at MADSM member institutions.

The concert also will include two works from South American composers that will be featured when the Ensemble tours that continent in May, 2020. “I come from afar” was composed by Sofia Scheps, who teaches at the Escuela Universitaria de Música in Montevideo, Uruguay; and “Expansion” is by Patricia Martínez, a composer, pianist and professor of composition at the National University of Quilmes in Buenos Aires, Argentina. During the tour, both composers will host concerts by the Ensemble at their respective institutions.

In addition to those four compositions, assistant conductor Yoshi Onishi will lead the Ensemble in a performance of “Talea” by French composer Gérard Grisey. Considered a late-20th-century classic, it alternates “between ferocity and quietude,” so as to – in the composer’s words – “express two aspects or, more precisely, two auditory angles of a single phenomenon.”

Two more new pieces of music from Missouri will complete the program. “Love Is Love, The Pedro Zamora Story” was composed by Daniel Vega originally for a film soundtrack; and “Pentatonic Sonata” is by Harry Tyrer, a retired Mizzou engineering professor now studying composition with Mizzou’s Carolina Heredia.

The seven-member Mizzou New Music Ensemble is made up of University of Missouri graduate students under the direction of Stefan Freund, a cellist, composer, conductor, professor of composition, and artistic director of the Mizzou New Music Initiative.

The Ensemble’s members for the 2019-20 season are Daniel Fitzpatrick, piano; Stephen Landy, percussion; Ann Mozina, flute; Jordan Nielsen, percussion; Pedro Ramiro, violin; Cameron Tubbs, cello; and Andrew Wiele, clarinet. Mizzou New Music Initiative post-doctoral fellow Yoshiaki Onishi serves as the Ensemble’s assistant conductor.