Our Mission

Nova Linea Musica is 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.

Who We Are

At the heart of every Nova Linea Musica concert is a relationship. Each season, our performing artists choose a composer they believe in, someone whose voice they want to bring into the world, and Nova Linea Musica makes it happen. The result is a world premiere on every mainstage program: new works that exist because two artists chose each other, and because someone made it possible.

In Season 3 alone, that means ten world premieres across two concert series, bringing our total to 28 commissioned works in three years.

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

Our tagline is not a slogan. It describes exactly what happens over the course of every Nova Linea Musica evening, built around three points of connection.

It begins with the music. Our concerts take place in intimate settings where proximity to the musicians is unavoidable. You are not watching from the back of a concert hall. You are in the room where the music is happening, close enough to feel its weight.

When the final note sounds, the conversation begins. The commissioned composer and the performing artists talk with the audience about the work they have just heard: a real exchange, not a curtain speech, while the music is still fresh in the room.

And then the evening extends further. A chef-curated reception follows every mainstage 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 real consequence: Pulitzer Prize winners, Grammy Award recipients, artists at the height of their careers, accessible in a way that rarely happens anywhere else.

That arc, from performance to conversation to reception, is the Nova Linea Musica experience. Closing the distance is the design.

Beyond the Concert Hall

A world premiere is a singular moment, and Nova Linea Musica treats it like one. Every commission and performance is captured in professional high-definition audio and video, and our visiting artists record the works in a dedicated studio session, so each piece endures as a definitive record of the music and the musicians who brought it to life.

These recordings do not sit on a hard drive. They travel. They reach listeners who were not in the room, and they open doors for composers seeking future performances and for artists building careers on work they were first to champion. This season, that commitment extends to film, with Nova Linea Musica's first documentary short, centered on a new work for solo violin by Chen Yi. 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 Artists-in-Residence series at The CheckOut gives exceptional artists a home across a full season, deepening the relationship between performers, composers, and audiences over time. The Nova Linea Musica Score Call, now open to composers nationwide, invites new works for piano trio, with the winning pieces premiered by the Nova Linea Musica Piano Trio in a dedicated evening of premieres. And the second annual Nova Linea Musica Chamber Music Competition opens the door for Chicago-area chamber musicians under 25, offering prizes and the chance to perform in a public final round.

Chicago and the World

Chicago has produced world-class composers, performers, and ensembles for generations. Together 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 change that: 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.

‍

Nova Linea Musica Team

Michele Mohammadi        President and Executive Director

Desirée Ruhstrat                 Artistic Director

SnoStudios                          Photography and Video

Chris Willis                            Audio Engineer

Stacy Garrop                         Composer-in-Residence

Mike Grittani                        Graphic Designer

Ramzan Dhanji                    Treasurer

‍