Composer and conductor Jennifer Jolley, chair of the music department at Lehman College, has opened the 2026-27 academic year with a string of premieres, commissions and residencies, according to the announcement. The Florida State University Wind Ensemble recently gave the world premiere of her piece “The Space Coast,” written for wind ensemble and soprano, which previews material from her forthcoming opera “Spacewalk,” based on the story of the first all-female spacewalk.
Jolley is developing two new commissions, including a project with hornist Steven Cohen and tubist Genevieve Clarkson, and recently taught at the Composer’s Sandbox Summer Intensive at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where participants worked with members of Eighth Blackbird. Her upcoming schedule includes a residency at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute, a guest composer appearance at the University of Texas at San Antonio’s NuMu ’27 festival in March 2027, and faculty duties at the Alba Music Festival Composition Program in Italy in May 2027, followed by a premiere in Miami that June.
At Lehman College, Jolley has been named a CUNY Summer 2026 Archives & Open Knowledge Faculty Fellow and will work on digitally encoding the Deborah Pacini Hernandez Music Collection, continuing archival preservation research she began as a 2023 Fulbright Scholar in Egypt.
Based on a press release provided to Music Industry Weekly by Skylar Peterson, tempo-comms.com.