Bold new music, passionate performance

Mission

Earplay nurtures the finest new chamber music of our time, linking audiences, performers, and composers through concerts, commissions, and recordings.

Background

Earplay is dedicated to the performance and recording of new chamber music. It’s an evolving genre where composers and musicians freely experiment with musical structure, rhythm, and sounds, challenging the audience to broaden its concept of music with new emotional and auditory experiences.

Earplay concerts feature the Earplayers, a group of artists whose lyrical and ferocious style provides eloquent, vivid performances of today's finest chamber music. Earplay presents videos on Earplay's YouTube channel and openly posts audio and video recordings of many past performances on the online Media page.

Earplay sponsors two annual competitions: the Earplay Donald Aird Composers Competition, open to composers of any nationality and any age, and the Earplay Vibrant Shores competition, open to composers identifying as Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, or people of color. Earplay performs the prizewinning pieces in the next season and presents a $1000 cash prize to each winning composer.

Founded in 1985 by a consortium of composers and musicians, Earplay has performed 682 works by 377 composers in its 39-year history, including 174 world premieres and 103 new works commissioned by the ensemble. Visit the Earplay archives to learn more about Earplay's rich history.

Board of Directors

• Terrie Baune, player representative
• Bruce Bennett
• Mary Chun, conductor
• Mark Faber
• Richard Festinger, chair
• Stephen Ness, secretary/treasurer
• Benjamin Sabey

Staff

• Fred Spitz, executive director
• Terrie Baune, scheduler
• Renona Brown, accountant
• David Ogilvy, sound recordist