Present Music is one of the leading ensembles specializing in new music in the United States. Its mission is to "engage artists and the audience in imaginative and provocative experiences with new music through ensemble performance, commissioning, and education." Founded and based in Milwaukee since 1982, Present Music has worked closely with many of the nation's most exciting and important composers, and has firmly established a large audience for new music in Milwaukee.

Present Music has toured extensively throughout the United States and has participated in several major international music festivals including the 1992 Interlink Festival of New American Music in Japan, the Bang on a Can Festival in New York City, with the Istanbul Symphony at the 1999 Istanbul International Music Festival and in Beijing and Shanghai, China. Present Music has also toured across the United States, most recently in New York City for the Composer Portraits Series at the Columbia University’s Miller Theatre.

Present Music performs at a number of unique concert locations that include the new addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum designed by the Spanish Architect Santiago Calatrava, Helen Bader Hall at the Zelazo Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the recently renovated St. John's Cathedral, and many other traditional and non-traditional venues. A listing of programming from past seasons can be found in the Archive.

Present Music has received numerous important national grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Reader's Digest / Meet the Composer Commissioning Program, the Aaron Copland Fund for American Music, the Rockefeller Multi-Arts Production Program, as well as winning the ASCAP/CMA Adventuresome Programming Award an unprecedented five times in the past ten years. The ensemble has been broadcast on National Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Radio