Artists studio: George Lewis
Credit: Maurice Weiss
This evening, part of the AACM’s year-long Artists Studio residency at the Park Avenue Armory, will feature the music of George Lewis and Amina Claudine Myers. MacArthur “genius” fellow Lewis is a composer, musicologist, computer-installation artist, trombonist, and Columbia University professor who also serves as Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble. On the first half of the program, the Ensemble will present the US premiere of Lewis’s Blombos Workshop (2020) for piano, which engages an overarching concern of Jamaican critical theorist Sylvia Wynter—the promise and potential of the human. This is followed by his Assemblage (2013) for nonet, which presents the sounds of contingency, heterogeneity, nonlinearity, emergence, and bricolage. The second half of the program features a performance by pianist, organist, vocalist, composer, improvisationist, actress and educator Amina Claudine Myers, who will be joined by her trio and actress, vocalist, and playwright Richarda Abrams to perform Stay in the Light, a composition that highlights Myers’s spiritual connection to the universe and reinforces positivity, faith, and love for all living things.
PERFORMERS
Rebekah Heller, conductor
Cory Smythe, piano
Isabel Lepanto Gleicher, flute
Joshua Rubin, clarinet
Erin Rogers, saxophone
Ben Melsky, harp
Erika Dohi, piano
Josh Modney, violin
Wendy Richman, viola
Sterling Elliott, cello
Kyle Flens, percussion
INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY ENSEMBLE
Now in its third decade, the International Contemporary Ensemble is a multidisciplinary collective of musicians, digital media artists, producers, and educators committed to building and innovating collaborative environments in order to inspire audiences to reimagine how they experience contemporary music and sound. Under the leadership of composer and Artistic Director George Lewis, the Ensemble creates a mosaic musical ecosystem as “America’s foremost new-music group” (The New Yorker), honoring the diversity of human experience and expression by commissioning, developing, recording, and performing the works of living artists in “a mission worth following” (I Care If You Listen).
CREDITS
The International Contemporary Ensemble’s performances and commissioning activities during the 2023-24 concert season are made possible by the generous support of our board of directors, many individuals, as well as the Mellon Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Aaron Copland Fund for Music Inc., Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, Amphion Foundation, The Cheswatyr Foundation, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Siemens Musikstiftung, New Music USA, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, BMI Foundation, as well as public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, 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 Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, the Illinois Arts Council Agency, and the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) from the U.S. Small Business Administration. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the International Contemporary Ensemble.