photo: Michael Magat
Experimentation is around every bend and corner of Walt Disney Concert Hall at Noon to Midnight. The International Contemporary Ensemble joins many other top new-music ensembles from around the country at this day-long festival of pop-up performances. The Ensemble will bring works by George Lewis, Ann Cleare, and works from the National Composers Intensive.
Program:
George Lewis: Soundlines: A Dreaming Track (world premiere, LA Phil co-commission)
Ann Cleare: teeth of light, tongue of waves (West Coast premiere)
Performers:
Soundlines
Steven Schick, percussion and orator
Joshua Rubin, clarinet
Ryan Muncy, saxophone
Rebekah Heller, bassoon
David Byrd-Marrow, horn
Ross Karre, percussion
Jennifer Curtis, violin
Katinka Kleijn, cello
Nicholas Deyoe, conductor
Levy Lorenzo, electronics
teeth of light, tongue of waves
Alice Teyssier, voice
Rebekah Heller, bassoon
Daniel Lippel, guitar
Wendy Richman, viola
Katinka Kleijn, cello
Lizzie Burns, double bass
Steve Schick, conductor
Soundlines
Steven Schick’s seven hundred mile walk from the US-Mexico border to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006 was a personal epic and askesis that cost him the better part of several months and several pairs of shoes. The extended introspective narrative he wrote about his trek recalls the travels of Alexis de Tocqueville, Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, and the American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. The text describes his inner moods, doubts, meditations, aesthetics, his personal musical practice, and social commentary in a dramatic, thick description that allows the reader a sense of empathy with the author.
Composer George Lewis responds to Schick’s journey in Soundlines: a 35-minute staged monodrama scored for Steve Schick (solo percussionist/orator) and accompanied by eight musicians from the International Contemporary Ensemble.
George E. Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Lewis’s other honors include a MacArthur Fellowship (2002), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), a United States Artists Walker Fellowship (2011), an Alpert Award in the Arts (1999), and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Soundlines was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association; the International Contemporary Ensemble, with the support of the Ernst Von Siemens Music Foundation; and in honor of the Taylor Family through ICE's First Page, with lead support from Billie and Tim Taylor.
The International Contemporary Ensemble is grateful for generous ongoing support from the Martin and Florence Hafter Family Foundation.
teeth of light, tongue of waves
Addressing themes that range from darkness and isolation to perception and discovery, Ann Cleare has an uncanny ability to translate our innermost experiences and emotions through music. The piece is for solo voice, solo bassoon, guitar, viola, cello, and double bass.
“The sonic architecture and thinking within this work [teeth of light, tongue of waves] grew out of my interest in paleoceanography, the study of the history of oceans in the geologic past. For centuries, the ocean has evoked a sense of wonderment and fear as a vast unknown space loaded with notions of the sublime and the exotic. However, in more recent times, global technological and economic shifts have brought about new concerns and understandings of the oceans. Today's oceans reveal more about the consequences of human actions than ever before. Early Irish Bardic poetry texts become woven sonic objects, evoking a hybrid form of nature being brought into being, the ancient and the modern forming a mouth with which to speak of the ocean after nature has been banished from it.”
- Ann Cleare
teeth of light tongue of waves' LA premiere is supported by Oscar Gerardo, through ICE's First Page initiative.
Performances and commissioning activities during the 2018-19 concert season are made possible by the generous support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, Booth Ferris Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Jerome Foundation, A.N. and Pearl G. Barnett Family Foundation, Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Paul M. Angell Family Foundation, Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, Amphion Foundation, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Pacific Harmony Foundation, Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, The Casement Fund, BMI Foundation, as well as public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council for the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for ICE.