For two weeks every June, young composers and musicians gather on the shores of Lake Dunmore in Leicester. It’s not quite summer camp, but not far off, either. Within the grassy borders of the New Music on the Point Festival’s modest campus, attendees find a small utopia.
The homey grounds, lake access and communal meals all help inspire and support participants and faculty as they nurture new music — an arena of creativity that takes for its raw material practically all available sources of sound, from teacups and toy pianos to electronics. This broad tolerance engenders an utterly unique atmosphere of curiosity, experimentation and camaraderie.
Seven Days visited on the third day of the festival, known as NMOP (“n-mop”) and now in its 16th year, to experience dinner and a concert. These public events — the next is on Thursday, June 11 — are held in the Rec Hall, where everyone eats at long tables before filling benches in the adjacent performance space. The public can also attend concerts of festival premieres on Wednesday, June 10, and Saturday, June 13, at the Salisbury Meetinghouse; and “Songbooks,” a public singing workshop followed by a festival performance of John Cage’s wildly inventive Song Books, from 1970, on Friday, June 12, at Burlington’s Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center.
I was met by festival owner and executive director Jenny Beck, a former entrepreneur and music enthusiast, and Amy Williams, a composition professor at the University of Pittsburgh who has served as artistic director for the past 11 years. Williams and her team whittled this year’s 160 applicants down to 51 participants; they range in age from 19 to 32 and traveled from the U.S., Canada, Mexico and the UK. The group has nearly even numbers of performers, composers and performer-composers. The faculty of 12 includes the well-regarded Bergamot Quartet, three of whom are former participants.
“Don’t say the M-word,” Beck joked with Williams as the appearance of mosquitoes jolted us into a quick tour. Beck took me first across a large lakeside lawn toward disparate sounds of music making. They were coming from miniature barn sheds — the kind you get at Lowe’s, with one small window — hand-labeled with composers’ names such as “B. Britten” and “Monk” (more likely Meredith than Thelonious). These are among the camp’s 29 practice rooms, and they contain some of its nine pianos.
Other participants were playing Ping-Pong or shooting a basketball from the grass into a hoop nailed to a tree. One had just emerged from a swim and was chatting at the end of a dock with another floating in a kayak; more watercraft were piled up nearby on the grass. Some participants may have been resting in the “dorms” — long wood cabins with bunk beds.
Participants do a lot of work before arrival. Each composer has only the preceding eight weeks to write a piece for the instrumentation Williams assigns them. Their pieces are workshopped and performed during the festival. Williams accepts some established ensembles and creates others; some combinations might take a composer by surprise, as with the baritone-accordion-double bass trio on the program that night.
Beck bought the camp in 2008. (She lives on-site half the year and in Brandon the other half.) Over the following three years, she revived Point CounterPoint, the children’s summer music camp for which the property was mostly created in 1963. In 2011, she teamed up with Yale University composition professor Kathryn Alexander to create New Music on the Point. Last year Beck added a September retreat for more established contemporary-music composers. The “point” in question is a triangular deck jutting between trees to the water’s edge.
Beck introduced another “point,” in the sense of an objective: to eat well. A foodie, she makes sure every meal is gourmet-quality. This year’s chefs are three former participants: an Iranian, a Colombian and a Japanese Hawaiian, the latter of whom drives up from New York City in a car packed with hard-to-find Japanese ingredients. The Colombian dinner this reporter happily consumed included tamales de pipián and papas chorreadas (potatoes) with a spicy-pickle condiment called aji criollo. Beck said there is a waiting list of former participants who want to return as chefs.
Artistic director Williams took over from Alexander in 2015. The composer and pianist of the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., with a pioneering percussionist father and violist mother; their houseguests included composers Morton Feldman and Cage. She later earned two graduate degrees at the University of Buffalo. Williams attributed the close bonding that develops every year at New Music on the Point to the “slumber party” living quarters and community-style dining arrangement.
“If we had square tables of four, the festival would fail,” she joked.
The evening’s concert opened with the performance space’s lights off. A chorus of six women that included Tony Arnold, an associate professor of voice at Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute who leads the festival’s vocal program, stood behind the audience. As dusk fell, they performed “Mouthpiece Topology,” an eerie and meditative 2006 work by faculty member Erin Gee that consisted of seemingly randomly timed nonlinguistic utterances, only some of which carried a musical note. Most were chitterings, consonant sounds, whistles and clicks, evoking but not imitating nature’s rustlings outside.
Two more of Gee’s “Mouthpieces” were performed. A Rome Prize and Guggenheim fellowship winner, the composer began the series in 2000; her 44th installment will premiere this summer at Philharmonie Luxembourg. Participant Garrick Neuner performed Gee’s “Mouthpiece IV,” which is notated using the International Phonetic Alphabet, with focused intensity. Neuner’s “ch” sound, delivered with fists clenched, could have felled a tree.
Fully spoken language accompanied “h.o.p.e.,” a work for amplified piano, toy piano and voice by faculty member Amy Beth Kirsten, who teaches composition at Juilliard and Curtis Institute of Music. Participant Veerle Winkelmolen performed the piece with her left hand on the piano and her right on a 2-foot-long miniature grand. Opening with a simple melody played in unison, the tune gradually devolved into two increasingly disjointed tempos before resolving again. In the midst of this knotty feat, Winkelmolen enunciated the title’s acronym into a mic: “Hang on; pain ends.”
All uses of voice will be on display at Friday’s performance of Cage’s Song Books in Burlington. The site-specific “musical happening,” as Arnold described it, will engage 30 festival participants in Main Street Landing’s Film House, adjacent lobby and outdoor balcony. Arnold said it will likely involve both stationary and wandering performers among whom audience members can thread their own paths. Cage left much of the work open to interpretation, Arnold said, adding, “One of the scores is a map of Concord, Mass. That’s the score. Somebody has to sing that.”
If anyone has the inspiration to pull that off, it’s someone at New Music on the Point. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Setting the Tone | At New Music on the Point, a festival along Lake Dunmore nurtures music making”
This article appears in June 10 • 2026.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.sevendaysvt.com ’
