Mizzou International Composers Festival 2026
Distinguished Guest Composers: Karola Obermüller and Jlin
The 2025 Mizzou International Composers Festival (MICF) brings together an adventurous group of artists for a week devoted to collaboration, experimentation, and the creation of new music. This year’s festival features two distinguished guest composers—Karola Obermüller and Jlin—alongside eight resident composers selected from an international pool to write new works for Alarm Will Sound.
Distinguished Guest Composers
Karola Obermüller is a German composer whose work explores sound as a physical and perceptual phenomenon. Her music often focuses on fragile textures, micro-gestures, and the subtle transformation of timbre over time, inviting listeners into heightened states of attention. Obermüller’s compositions have been performed by leading contemporary ensembles and festivals across Europe and the United States, and her work is frequently described as immersive, precise, and quietly radical in its restraint.
Jlin is a groundbreaking electronic composer and producer whose work has redefined the expressive possibilities of rhythm, texture, and form. Emerging from the Chicago footwork scene, Jlin’s music resists genre boundaries, blending percussive complexity with stark emotional clarity. Her work has been presented by major institutions and ensembles worldwide, and her collaborations across contemporary classical, dance, and experimental music have opened new pathways between electronic production and concert music practice.
Introduction
For more than a decade, Alarm Will Sound has been at the forefront of contemporary music, continually reimagining how new work is created, rehearsed, and shared. Central to this mission is the ensemble’s long-standing collaboration with the Mizzou International Composers Festival. Since the festival’s founding in 2010, this partnership has fostered the creation of more than a hundred new works and cultivated a vibrant, international community of composers and performers.
The Mizzou International Composers Festival
MICF was founded in 2010 as an initiative of the Mizzou New Music Initiative at the University of Missouri. Conceived as a platform to support emerging composers at a pivotal moment in their careers, the festival quickly established itself as a model for intensive, performer-composer collaboration. Alarm Will Sound has served as ensemble-in-residence since the beginning, shaping the festival’s identity through its commitment to experimentation, precision, and openness.
Each year, eight resident composers are selected through a competitive application process to write new works for Alarm Will Sound. During the festival, these composers work side-by-side with the ensemble in rehearsals, workshops, and public concerts. Two distinguished guest composers further enrich the experience through masterclasses, discussions, and performances of their own music.
Scope and Experience
Held annually in Columbia, Missouri—typically in late July—the Mizzou International Composers Festival has grown into a major event on the contemporary music calendar. The festival includes public concerts, open rehearsals, workshops, panel discussions, and informal conversations that invite audiences into the creative process.
Participants and attendees come from around the world, creating an atmosphere that is both rigorous and deeply collegial. MICF is known not only for the quality of its premieres, but for the generosity of exchange between composers, performers, faculty, and audiences.
Accomplishments and Impact
Since its inception, Alarm Will Sound has premiered over 120 new works at MICF—many of which have gone on to receive additional performances, recordings, and international attention. For resident composers, the festival often represents a formative professional experience: an opportunity to hear ambitious new music realized at the highest level and to engage directly with performers who specialize in contemporary repertoire.
Festival alumni include composers such as Amy Beth Kirsten, Chris Dietz, Oswald Huỳnh, and Texu Kim, whose music is now performed by leading ensembles worldwide. Over the years, MICF has also welcomed distinguished guest composers including Tania León, George Lewis, and Meredith Monk, each leaving a lasting imprint on the festival’s artistic culture.
Distinguished Guest Composers by Year
- 2025: Hilda Paredes and Judd Greenstein
- 2024: Mary Kouyoumdjian and George Lewis
- 2023: Marcos Balter and Tania León
- 2022: Meredith Monk and Angélica Negrón
- 2020 & 2021: David T. Little and Chen Yi
- 2019: Donnacha Dennehy and Amy Beth Kirsten
- 2018: Alex Mincek and Robert Morris
- 2017: Georg Friedrich Haas and Dan Visconti
- 2016: Oscar Bettison and Erin Gee
- 2015: Hans Abrahamsen and Andrew Norman
- 2014: Zhou Long and Nico Muhly
- 2013: Daniel Kellogg and Augusta Read Thomas
- 2012: Donnacha Dennehy and Steven Stucky
- 2011: Anna Clyne and Roger Reynolds
- 2010: Derek Bermel and Martin Bresnick
Continuing Legacy
The partnership between Alarm Will Sound and the Mizzou International Composers Festival remains a cornerstone of the contemporary music ecosystem. Rooted in collaboration, experimentation, and mutual respect, MICF continues to shape how new music is made and shared. As the festival evolves, it remains committed to supporting composers at critical moments in their artistic development—and to ensuring that the future of new music remains as adventurous, inclusive, and imaginative as its past.