MISE-EN Festival 2025 will be held in Manhattan from June 23 to June 27.

After a dynamic and memorable 2024 festival, we’re excited to bring people together again from all over the world for several days of performances, demos, and discussions on new music across genres here in New York City.

Below you will find categories for submissions and a form to apply for the festival. We deeply appreciate your decision to share music with us.

We kindly ask that you take a careful look at the festival and the requirements before you submit your work, and that you do so only if you are serious about collaborating with us.

In recent years we received increasingly large numbers of submissions. After consideration, we have decided to retain our no-fee model rather than implement a submission fee as a means of reducing submissions.

We hope this disclaimer will encourage engaged and dedicated submissions which will help us maintain the quality and integrity of the selection process.

Submission Deadline: February 1, 2025

(The results are expected to be announced by March 1, 2025)

No submission fees

*Open to all, with no restrictions based on age, race, gender, or nationality.

Categories (Multiple submissions are allowed, but each submission must be submitted separately):

  1. Chamber/Solo Works (Any instrumentation from solo to chamber ensemble, without a conductor), with or without electronics*.
  2. Larger Works (Up to 15 orchestral instruments), with or without electronics*.
  3. Electroacoustic/Multimedia works
  4. Open Proposals for new compositions, performances, programs, workshops, or other creative activities.
  5. AI-Related Music in any medium (Including works that incorporate or are influenced by Artificial Intelligence).

*Electronics can be understood as both electronically or computer-generated sounds and audio, as well as any type of multimedia technology, including but not limited to speakers, projectors, lighting systems, and other related equipment.

Duration: Works may be of any length, however, pieces with a typical length of 7–15 minutes are programmed more frequently than those that are very short or extremely long.

All submissions must include a link to the required materials (e.g., Google Drive, Dropbox, or any other cloud storage service). The link should be easily accessible, and we ask that you double-check its availability before submitting.

Unless you are providing special instruments and musicians, our available instruments are standard orchestral ones such as flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, saxophone, horn, trumpet, trombone, percussion (up to 2 players), piano (up to 2 players), harp, violin (up to 2 players), viola, cello, contrabass, and guitar. Solo vocalists are acceptable, and standard doublings for woodwinds are allowed. We also accept small variations in instrumentation (e.g., two clarinets or tuba solo) but not extended ones (e.g., 4 contrabasses or 10 timpani). We aim to be open to all possibilities, but if your piece requires a lot of resources, it will be challenging to program (e.g., a piece for double orchestras or triple choirs).

*IMPORTANT NOTES

Full Participation during the festival is required. Please note that this is not optional. If your works are selected, you must be present at all events during the festival. While we understand that there may be occasional conflicts, the core value of our festival lies in developing an interesting community experience. If your primary concern is simply to have a performance of your work in New York, we encourage you to apply to other festivals that may more expediently serve that purpose. The MISE-EN festival will require travel and engagement is a key priority.

Travel Support: Limited travel assistance will be available, depending on the success of our fundraising efforts and the support we receive via grants from the city and various cultural institutions. We may not know what is available for some time. At the end of this form, you will have the opportunity to indicate if you need financial assistance, and we encourage you to provide specific details about your needs. If your local or national government offers a grant program that we can apply for on your behalf, please let us know, and we would be happy to assist with that as well. We acknowledge that limited travel funding, combined with our in-person participation requirement, means that the mise-en festival cannot be fully equitable. Over time, we’re steadily building more resources, and getting there.

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For general inquiries, please send an email to manager@mise-en.org with the subject line beginning with “[FESTIVAL 2025]”.