Photo Credits: Zosha di Castri (PC: David Adamcyk)
International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and percussionist and conductor Steven Schick present the world premiere of TOUCH : TRACE, a new work by Zosha Di Castri. TOUCH : TRACE explores the importance of intimacy and human contact in an increasingly isolated world. In musical terms, touch exists in the space between a conductor’s gesture and the sounds the ensemble procures; in the physical contact between the artist and the materiality of their instrument; in the communication between performers; and in the connection between performers and the audience. In this new work, Di Castri investigates the organic and theatrical space of tactile engagement that is at the core of the creation of music.
The remainder of the program has been curated by members of the International Contemporary Ensemble.
PROGRAM
Nyokabi Kariūki: The Colour of Home (2021)
for solo percussion and fixed media
Liza Lim: Inguz (1996)
for clarinet and cello
Nicole Mitchell: Inner Secrets for Cello (2023)
for solo cello
Ellen Reid: Ground to Steel Dust - Uneaten (2018)
for percussion and cello
Michele Abondano: No Construction is Whole (2022)
for bass clarinet, cello, piano, and electronics
Zosha Di Castri: TOUCH : TRACE (2024, World Premiere)
for percussion soloist, clarinet, percussion, keyboard, cello, and electronics
PERFORMERS
Steven Schick, conductor, percussion soloist
Joshua Rubin, clarinet
Katinka Kleijn, cello
Erika Dohi, piano
Nathan Davis, percussion
Zosha Di Castri, a Canadian “composer of riotously inventive works” (The New Yorker), currently lives in New York. Her music has been performed across Canada, the United States, South America, Asia, and Europe and extends beyond purely concert music, including projects with electronics, sound arts, and collaborations with video and dance that encourage audiences to feel “compelled to return for repeated doses” (The Arts Desk). She is currently the Francis Goelet Associate Professor of Music at Columbia University and a 2023 American Academy of Arts and Letters Goddard Lieberson fellow. Di Castri is a recipient of the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship and was an inaugural fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris in 2018-19.
Percussionist, conductor, and author Steven Schick was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family. For the past thirty years he has championed contemporary percussion music as a performer and teacher, by commissioning and premiering more than one hundred new works for percussion. He was the percussionist of the Bang on a Can All-Stars of New York City from 1992-2002, and from 2000 to 2004 served as Artistic Director of the Centre International de Percussion de Genève in Geneva, Switzerland. Schick is founder and Artistic Director of the percussion group, red fish blue fish. In 2007 he was named Music Director and conductor of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus. Schick founded and is currently artistic director of “Roots and Rhizomes,” an annual summer course on contemporary percussion music held at the Banff Centre for the Arts. In 2011 he was named the Artistic Director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Recent publications include a book on solo percussion music, “The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams, a 3 CD set of the complete percussion music of Iannis Xenakis (Mode) and a 2012 DVD release of the early percussion music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Steven Schick is Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego. In 2012 he became the first ever Artist in Residence with the International Contemporary Ensemble.
INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY ENSEMBLE
Now in its third decade, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) 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. 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. Co-founded in 2001 by flutist and MacArthur “genius” Fellow Claire Chase, the Ensemble has premiered over 1,000 works. The Ensemble has given performances at Warsaw Autumn, TIME:SPANS, Berliner Festspiele, HEAR NOW Los Angeles, Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, Ojai Music Festival, and Big Ears Festival as well as in venues such as the Dutch National Opera, Cité de la Musique (Paris), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, Japan Society, Merkin Hall at the Kaufman Music Center, Fridman Gallery, Chelsea Factory, NYU Skirball and Walt Disney Concert Hall.
CREDITS
The International Contemporary Ensemble’s performances and commissioning activities during the 2024-25 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, Robert D. Bielecki Foundation, Aaron Copland Fund for Music Inc., Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, The Arlene and Larry Dunn Fund for Afrodiasporic Music, Fromm Music Foundation, Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, Amphion Foundation, 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.