Luna Composition Lab Will Celebrate 10th Anniversary With NYC Performances

Luna Composition Lab – currently celebrating its tenth anniversary through Luna Lab@10, a multi-year celebration of world premiere commissions – has announced three New York City performances this spring, culminating in New Moons 2026: An Evening of World Premieres by the International Contemporary Ensemble at Carnegie Hall on June 4, 2026 at 7:00pm. Spanning the 2025-26 and 2026-27 seasons, Luna Lab@10 will feature nearly 75 world premieres by 50 Luna Lab alumni, commissioned and performed by leading ensembles and presenters across the United States and abroad, including the Kronos Quartet, Imani Winds, Sandbox Percussion, The Metropolitan Opera, Louisville Orchestra, Music Academy of the West, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Norway's Arctic Chamber Music Festival, and many more.

Ensemble Ipse and Hypercube join forces to premiere several new works on Saturday, May 2, 2026 at 7:30 PM at The DiMenna Center, including the world premiere of Luna Lab alumni Aliya Salmanova's (2018) Fairies and Abby Harris's (2019) Mudskip. Salmanova has performed in numerous concerts and venues across Baku, Azerbaijan, and is currently pursuing a Master's in Computer Science at Northeastern University, expanding her expertise in software development as she often combines music and technology in her work. Harris currently studies with Robert Cuckson at Mannes School of Music as a composition major, and has studied with Timo Andres, Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, Tamar Muskal, and Kevin James, with work earning recognition from MATA, Jr., NFMC, Robert Avalon, and others. This program also includes world premiere work by Todd Tarantino, Erin Rogers, and Max Giteck Duykers, as well as the U.S. premiere of Ellen Lindquist's Earth.

On Monday, June 1, 2026 at 7:00pm, New York Festival of Song presents a meditation on possibility and impossibility in The Same River Twice, featuring the world premieres of three new songs by Luna Composition Lab alumni Alicia Erlandson (2022), who was recently commissioned by Composers Now for their Second Stage Initiative (2024) and is currently pursuing a B.M. in Composition at Mannes School of Music with Kamala Sankaram; Elisa Johnson (2022), whose compositions have been performed by both professional and student musicians, including the Seattle Symphony, the Thomas More University Chorale, and the ensemble loadbang; and Devon Lee (2022), a 2025 Morton Gould Young Composer Award finalist who had their music premiered by organizations like the New York Philharmonic, The Juilliard School, The Knights, ChamberQUEER, WQXR, Ensemble For TheseTimes, Cincinnati May Festival, and New World Symphony. Soprano Jennifer Zetlan and mezzo-soprano Heather Johnson will work closely with these young composers on works written for their voices, and the program will be filled out by selections from Luna Lab's roster of superstar mentors, chosen by NYFOS Next series curator and pianist Nathaniel LaNasa.

Finally, on Thursday, June 4, 2026 at 7:00 PM, International Contemporary Ensemble co-presents, with Luna Lab, New Moons 2026: An Evening of World Premieres at Carnegie Hall. New Moons 2026 is the culmination of the Luna Lab Fellowship for this year's cohort of six composers, following a week of workshops, rehearsals, and events in New York. The International Contemporary Ensemble joins in celebrating Luna Lab@10 by presenting a concert featuring six world premieres by the 2025-26 fellows: Chloe Kirk, Christabelle Kirkham, Anchi Wang-Hall, Andromeda Wen, Faith Wesley, and Madeline Yang. The program also features works by mentor composers: Vivian Fung's Down and Dirty, Brittany J. Green's Living is the journey of answering, and Angélica Negrón's A Través del Manto Luminoso. Luna Lab is proud to immerse Fellows in professional artistic life in New York City, and this year Luna is taking composers to concerts and tours including the Met, a hands-on workshop at Figure 8 Studio, and seminars from composers such as Jeff Beal, Gabriela Lena Frank, and the Luna Lab mentors.

Founded in 2016 by composers Missy Mazzoli and Ellen Reid, Luna Composition Lab began as a bold and necessary intervention: a commitment to support young composers who are female, nonbinary, or gender-nonconforming from the very beginning of their artistic lives – not as exceptions, but as the future of the field. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania and Tennessee, Mazzoli and Reid did not encounter a single professional female composer until their twenties – an absence that shaped Luna Lab's founding vision. A decade later, under the leadership of Executive Director Alyssa Kayser-Hirsh, that vision has grown into an internationally recognized organization with a proven model for equity, artistic excellence, and long-term impact.

Luna Composition Lab's mission is to close the gender gap in music composition through mentorship, performance opportunities, and sustained professional community. By empowering young composers ages 13 to 18 at a formative moment – while actively working to dismantle structural barriers to participation – Luna Lab provides a model of inclusivity that reshapes individual artistic lives and expands the future of the field itself.