22nd Annual
Southern Illinois Music Festival
Edward Benyas, Artistic Director
CELEBRATING AMERICA AT 250
June 18-July 4, 2026
Mark your calendars for next season! The 2026 Southern Illinois Music Festival commemorates our great nation’s semi-quincentennial anniversary, as part of “America at 250,” with multiple performances of classical music by three centuries of American composers.
SIFest 2026 will include five major orchestral programs and five Patriotic Pops concerts. Since our audience especially loves the music of John Williams, rather than planning an entire John Williams concert, we will intersperse his works within each of the five orchestral programs. SIFest 2026 will include music written by living American composers John Adams, Peter Boyer, Richard Danielpour, Phillip Glass, Lin Manuel Miranda, Jesse Montgomery, James Stephenson, Joan Tower, Mary Watkins and John Williams; iconic American composers from the 19th century like Amy Beach, Edward MacDowell and George Whitefield,Chadwick, and both famous and lesser known 20th century composers like Samuel Barber, Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Chick Corea, Aaron Copland, Irving Fine, George Gershwin, Charles Ives, Florence Price, and William Grant Still. We will also celebrate America’s great musical theater tradition with a cross section of excerpts. Narrators will propel the stories in Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait and Jim Stephenson’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and dancers in excerpts from Copland’s Rodeo.
Our chamber music concerts will include music written by men and women from the 18th to the 21 st centuries, including that of World War II Battle of Normandy veteran, Lionel Semiatin. In addition to our usual chamber music venues of First United Methodist Church and Artspace 304, our musicians will branch out to perform at some local “watering holes,” where you can down a libation while enjoying the music.
Saturday nights are reserved for “Patriotic Pops,” concerts, at Alto Vineyards and a local concert venue. The Festival ends with a bang with three outdoor “Patriotic Pops” concerts with fireworks on July 2, 3 and 4.
You won’t want to miss a second of our “America at 250” celebration!