Celebrating USC Alumni, Students and Faculty

The Southern Exposure New Music Series’ 23rd season helps celebrate the USC School of Music’s 100th anniversary with a year featuring some of our most acclaimed alumni, students, and faculty. The season’s four concerts, devoted as always to adventurous, world class music-making, reverberate with energy and transformative beauty.

2024-2025 Season

Friday, October 4, 2024

BlackBox Ensemble

An acclaimed young collective of contemporary music performers, including USC  cellist Jordan Bartow, BlackBox Ensemble plays a diverse program including works by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, inti figgis-vizueta, Tristan Murail, the Beatles/Luciano Berio, and USC alumnus Baljinder Sekhon (world premiere). Also featuring USC’s superb soprano faculty Ashley Emerson in her series debut.

Friday, November 15, 2024

Exposed Wiring

Get behind the scenes and under the hood of masterworks and new classics that utilize technology, from amplification to video to electronics, in vital ways. With USC’s Orange Road string quartet, playing George Crumb’s Black Angels; dynamic professor of guitar Mak Grgic in Fang Man’s Ambush from Ten Sides; USC composer-performers David Kirkland Garner and Greg Stuart, performing Garner’s Short Stories;  The Collective, premiering a new work by DMA composer Austin Engelhardt; and featuring the world premiere of Reginald Bain’s Lift Up Your Eyes, for chorus led by Alicia W. Walker, projected images from the Webb space telescope, and electronic sound.

Friday, January 31, 2025

earspace plays Abrahamsen

The fragile, crystalline sound world of Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen's Schnee (“Snow”) must be heard in person to appreciate this work’s bewitching beauty – as pure as the driven snow. Schnee, well on its way to achieving iconic status as an early-21st-century masterpiece, will be given its Columbia premiere by the extraordinary earspace, a group of ten exemplary young artists including USC flute graduate Philip Snyder. The work will be introduced in an interactive presentation by USC professor and public music theory pioneer J. Daniel Jenkins.

Saturday, March 29, 2025

John Luther Adams’ Inuksuit

100 percussionists (or as close as we can get!) help close the School of Music’s 100th anniversary season outdoors on the USC Horseshoe. Adams’ monumental Inuksuit, intended to be performed and experienced outdoors, creates an enormous sonic landscape, both intimate and overpowering, that is unique to each performance and performance site. In Inuksuit, inspired and shaped by the stone sentinels constructed over centuries by the Inuit people as waypoints in the expanse of the Arctic, the listener is free to shape their own experience: audience members may bring a blanket, a lawn chair, or wander throughout the performance area. Co-produced by Boston-based percussionist Maria Finkelmeier, professor Scott Herring and the USC percussion studio, and Southern Exposure.

All Southern Exposure concerts are FREE.

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About the Series

Founded in 2001 by USC associate professor of composition and composer John Fitz Rogers, the nonprofit series has grown steadily and attracts standing-room-only crowds from throughout South Carolina and neighboring states.

The series has achieved a national reputation for the quality and adventurous spirit of its four yearly concerts, unparalleled in the southeast for their mix of artistic quality, audience education and cutting-edge programming.

Southern Exposure New Music Series is pleased to announce the Duncan Endowment for Student Composers. The fund supports the annual recording of new works written by USC graduate and undergraduate composition students. Each year, four to six students are selected to write pieces expressly for the series. Guest ensembles will record the selected composers’ new pieces while at USC, with the composers in attendance to help produce. 

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Award for Adventurous Programming

Southern Exposure was awarded a 2007 Chamber Music America / ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming in its 2005-2006 season.

Reserve a seat

These free concerts are often standing room only and early arrival is suggested for seating. For a donation of $150 or more, you can reserve one seat for the entire Southern Exposure season.  Donate online.

If you prefer to pay by phone, contact Brad Martin at
803-777-0704. You can also mail a check payable to "Southern Exposure New Music Series" to:
Southern Exposure New Music Series School of Music, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208

Patrons who reserve seats for the season will receive seating priority in concerts with restricted access, and receive relevant information on a concert-by-concert basis when special reservations are required.

Premiere performances

Groups and artists of international repute who have made their Columbia and South Carolina premiere performances in a Southern Exposure concert include:

• So Percussion
• Brooklyn Rider
• Karel Dohnal
• Argento Chamber Ensemble
• Tony Arnold and Jacob Greenberg
• International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE)
• Alarm Will Sound
• Imani Winds
• Los Angeles Piano Quartet
• Music from Copland House
• Calder and JACK string quartets
• Matt Haimovitz, internationally renowned cellist
• Kartik Seshadri, sitar virtuoso
• Lisa Moore, esteemed New York-based pianist
• Gamelan Galak Tika

Previous seasons

2023-2024
2022-2023
2021-2022
2020-2021
2019-2020
2018-2019
2017–2018
2016–2017
2015–2016
2014–2015
2013–2014
2012–2013
2001–2012

For more information reach out to Michael Harley, Southern Exposure New Music Series artistic director.