An Update from ICE

The International Contemporary Ensemble announced today that at the end of March, after serving for five years as its Executive Director, Jennifer Kessler will leave the Ensemble for a new position in arts philanthropy.

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 us all to to reimagine how we experience contemporary music and sound.

“Working with ICE has been the privilege of my professional life, and it is with great emotion that I’m moving on from this role,” said Ms. Kessler. “The International Contemporary Ensemble will continue to be the gold standard for nonprofit excellence. There are very few places that not only welcome change and innovation but demand it.”

ICE’s Artistic Director, the renowned composer, trombonist, musicologist, and Columbia Professor of Music George Lewis, said: “Jennifer Kessler is a figure of leadership, vision, and tenacity with whom I developed an extraordinary synergy.  Her commitment to the evolving, complex, creolized landscape of new music has had few peers. I will miss her, and we all wish her the very best in her new endeavor.”

George Lewis, Arlene Dunn, Larry Dunn, Courtney Bryan, and Jennifer Kessler after the Composing While Black performance, 2023, photo by Digitice

During Ms. Kessler’s tenure, ICE produced groundbreaking commissions and performances from an extraordinary roster of composers and artists, including Du Yun, Tyshawn Sorey, Julia Bullock, Marcos Balter, Felipe Lara, Courtney Bryan, Nicole Mitchell, Matana Roberts, Henry Threadgill, the Iranian Female Composer’s Association, Adegoke Steve Colson, and many others. She also oversaw improvements to ICE’s programs for early career composers, including doubling the applicant pool for the Call For____ sound creator commissioning program, bringing ICE’s weeklong intensive Ensemble Evolution for emerging sound artists in person to the New School’s College of Performing Arts, and deepening a partnership with the BMI Foundation to premiere commissions from recipients of their Composer’s Awards. 

Ms. Kessler oversaw ICE’s Artistic Director transition from instrumentalists Ross Karre and Rebekah Heller to George Lewis, and fully supported his vision for ICE as an essential agent to amplify the presence of Afrodiasporic composers on the world’s stages. She spearheaded transformational initiatives during the COVID-19 pandemic, forming a change-minded Curation Task Force of artists, convening an influential series of New Music Town Halls, and securing a $1 million grant, over five years, from the Mellon Foundation for “A Strategy for Post-Pandemic Recovery: to support ICEensemble collaborations and mentorship of creators and artists.”

Ensemble Member and former Co-Artistic Director Rebekah Heller added: “For the last half decade Jennifer Kessler has led the International Contemporary Ensemble not only with brilliant ideas, but with her heart—knitting together our community of artists, listeners, and change-makers with kindness, curiosity, and extraordinary faith in the work that we do.”

The International Contemporary Ensemble wishes Ms. Kessler the very best in her new position. The Ensemble expects to announce the appointment of a new Executive Director during Spring 2025.

Further questions may be directed to:

icicle@iceorg.org

On the Power of Cultural Exchanges

Last night, in a performance hall off a small street in Paris, we witnessed magic. To access the hall, guests eagerly waited outside the large blue stable-like door of a nondescript building. Once inside, we walked into a stunning courtyard full of trees and flowers, surrounded by old buildings with tall windows reflecting the night sky. This perfect, quiet oasis nestled in the middle of the bustling city is Reid Hall, home to the Columbia Global Paris Center and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

The hall was to the left of the courtyard, and in entering its beautiful chambers, guests were seated like passengers on a plane for a journey through the many sounds and ideas of Afrodiasporic contemporary music. This event was dreamt up by composer and scholar George Lewis, who is also the Artistic Director International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). As a Fellow this year at Columbia’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination, he suggested to the directors that ICE come perform a program of “Composing While Black,” inspired by his recent book of the same name and co-written with Harald Kisiedu. The directors thankfully said yes.

George Lewis, photo by Anthony Valette

Alyssa Regent, Harald Kisiedu, Corie Rose Soumah, photo by Anthony Valette

The event is of historic significance. As George explained from the stage, there hadn’t previously been concerts in Paris programmed with an all-Black lineup of composers, and to date he hadn’t heard of many in France featuring even one Afrodiasporic composer. Before the concert, composers Alyssa Regent and Corie Rose Soumah spoke on a panel moderated by Harald Kisiedu about their compositional process, and answered a question from the audience about how their Blackness shows up in their work. Alyssa answered that as a Black woman from Guadalupe, her identities will always show up in her work. Corie, Alyssa, and George all acknowledged throughout the evening that just like there are a myriad of different types of Black life, so too are there countless different types of Black music. Corie pointed out that many people in her life -- when learning that she’s a composer -- assumes she’s a hip hop or jazz artist and seem perplexed to learn that she’s an experimental composer who uses electronics in her work. The music community has pigeonholed Afrodiasporic composers, but last night’s concert was testament to the great diversity of sound that Afroadiasporic composers are creating, something ICE too has celebrated through their programming over the past several years.

Following the panel, we were invited into many of those sound worlds, including Alyssa’s “Émergence,” inspired by the film “Woman in the Dunes,” expertly conducted by Rebekah Heller. In it, we heard the struggle of the man at the bottom of the dune trying to climb out of the sand through the high pitched, muted trombone lines performed by Weston Olencki, alongside a superb ensemble including Yua Souverbie (flute), Joshua Rubin (bass clarinet), and Mathilde Lauridon (violin, with a special braided bow to represent the importance of hair braiding from Regent’s roots in Guadalupe).

Mathilde Lauridon, Yua Souverbie, Joshua Rubin, Weston Olencki, Rebekah Heller, photo by Anthony Valette

Corie’s “Limpidités IV” for solo violin and electronics took us through multiplicitous soundscapes including violinist Mathilde Lauridon’s articulated whispers popping up to accompany her violin and electronics. Pianist Jacob Greenberg took us on a virtuosic and colorful journey through South African composer Andile Khumalo’s piece “Schau-fe[r]n-ster II.” We were beckoned into the spellbinding layers of harmony created by harmonicas, music boxes, and the yearning to speak with hands pressed to mouth in Hannah Kendall’s “when flesh is pressed against the dark,” performed by vocalist Damian Norfleet, bass clarinetist Joshua Rubin, trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, and trombonist Weston Olencki; and we heard the screams of a larger ensemble performing Swiss composer Jessie Cox’s “(Noisy) Black/blackness (Unbounded),” including a vigorous bowed percussion by ICE percussionist/electronics wizard Levy Lorenzo.

Fay Victor, Damian Norfleet, Joshua Rubin, Jonathan Finlayson, Mathilde Lauridon, Levy Lorenzo, photo by Anthony Valette

Jacob Greenberg, photo by Anthony Valette

All of the pieces were completely distinct from one another, with the final performance of the evening being no exception. The concert concluded with a powerful electronic and vocal duo called “Modified” with Levy and vocalist Fay Victor. Levy improvised on AI systems, a joystick, and other electronics to create multiple versions of Fay while she sang/spoke a text that came to her late one night about protests and liberation. The intricate conversation between Levy and Fay through electronics and live performance was a poignant reflection of the tension, uncertainty, and promise we find at the juncture of our digital and analog worlds.

 Fay Victor and Levy Lorenzo, photo by Anthony Valette

Traveling to a new place and performing live music there can lead to great change. When we step out of our comfort zones, sit with new people over a meal and travel, we learn about other ways we can curate, collaborate, and listen. When ICE brings the music we’ve been working to advance, we’re sharing the sounds of living Afrodiasporic composers to an audience that has never heard of these composers before. We hope that the fact that we were in Paris (and also in Berlin the week prior for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt festival), performing an all-Black program, will reach far beyond those walls. Already, one music director told me she’d never heard of these composers and wants to program them more on her series. At lunch with Brune Biebuyck, Columbia Global Paris Center Director, Marie d’Origny, Director of the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, and Marie Volkea Doezema, Paris Global Center Senior Special Projects Manager, I learned about extraordinary programs for journalists and other visiting scholars. The directors were interested in bringing our musicians – who are also educators – back to Paris to lead workshops on improvisation and deep listening as models for collaboration and leadership. The interdisciplinary possibilities are endless, and when we leave our comfort zones, we can imagine new ways to collaborate that could have an even greater impact on the world than we ever thought possible. 

At a post concert reception, as we shared what our favorite moments were from the concert, I was struck by the idea that probably nowhere else in France had these conversations ever happened before: over 150 people listening to and discussing not just one piece by a Black composer, but reflecting on an entire program featuring the sounds of some of our leading Afrodiasporic composers today. At another meal, all of us administrators enthusiastically agreed that we want to continue this partnership to make Reid Hall ICE’s Paris home. We could label this as cultural diplomacy, but I’d also like to think of this kind of partnership as a radical systems-changing act: the more we forge ongoing partnerships like these, the more concerts featuring historically underrepresented composers will become part of the future fabric of the concertizing world, and the more our musicians can continue to open doors through their workshops for other leaders to consider the many ways that listening and connecting through music can make our world a better place. At a moment in our history that is increasingly hostile and divided, it feels urgent that we create more spaces for stretching our imaginations through the arts. As Fay Victor wrote in her piece with Levy Lorenzo:

“What if we lived in a space where everyone would/could
Figure out in liberation who they wanted to be
And create pathways to become that thing.
(No intrusions).
There wouldn’t be all these intrusions, distractions
And roadblocks in the way
And one certainly wouldn’t have to dedicate
Their time and effort to protesting or being an activist 

About anything/or demanding anything

Because anyone could at least pursue
What they want and need without any encumbrance
THAT would be an amazing world.
What an amazing world that would be.”

Indeed, it certainly can be an amazing world when we collaborate to elevate boundary-pushing music.

—Jennifer Kessler, Executive Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble

From left: Alyssa Regent, Corie Rose Soumah, Rebekah Heller, Jacob Greenberg, Yua Souverbie, Fay Victor, Joshua Rubin, Jonathan Finlayson, Damian Norfleet, Mathilde Lauridon, Levy Lorenzo, Weston Olencki, photo by Anthony Valette

Announcing the new members of the International Contemporary Ensemble!

We're thrilled to announce the six incredible musicians who have officially joined the International Contemporary Ensemble! Congratulations to Alexander Davis, Erika Dohi, Darius Jones, Jonathan Finlayson, Erin Rogers, and Emmalie Tello. We look forward to highlighting these six unique artists in our upcoming programming! Read more about our new members below!

Credit: Sophie Sahara

Alexander Davis (he/him) is a New York City-based bassoonist who has been known for his ability to play “with poise and élan”- Cleveland Classical. He is a musician whose artistic intentions center on space-making, connection, and community-building within classical music. Read more

Credit: Ebru Yildiz

Darius Jones has created a recognizable voice as a critically acclaimed saxophonist and composer by embracing individuality and innovation in the tradition of Black music. Jones has been awarded the Van Lier Fellowship, Jerome Foundation Artist-in-Residence and commission, Western Front residency and commission, French-American Jazz Exchange Award, Robert D. Bielecki Foundation Award, and Fromm Music Foundation commission from Harvard University. Read more

Credit: Aleksandr Karjaka

Erin Rogers is a Canadian-American saxophonist, composer, and improviser dedicated to new and experimental music. Her “decidedly future-oriented” music has been described as “whimsical, theatrical” (Brooklyn Vegan), “radical and refreshing” (Vital Weekly) and “a richly expressive display of stentorian brilliance” (The Wire Magazine). Read more

Credit: Shervin Lainez

Described as "virtuosic" (NY Times) and "barrier-defying artist" (Mix Magazine), Osaka-born and New York-based pianist Erika Dohi is a multi-faceted artist with an eclectic musical background. From highly polished traditional classical to bold improvisation, she is a dynamic performer whose timeless style and unidiomatic technique set her apart in contemporary NYC avant-garde circles. Read more

Credit: John Rogers

Trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Jonathan Finlayson was born and raised in Oakland, California. As a unique voice in the New York Creative Music Community, Finalyson went on to perform and record in a variety of ensembles led by Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill, Craig Harris, Ravi Coltrane, Mary Halvorson, Steve Lehman, Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn among others.  Read more

Credit: Boris Brenman

Clarinetist Emmalie Tello is committed to creating art that integrates storytelling into sound and explores the emotional narratives inherent in music. She has a passion for collaborative projects and has been heard as a chamber musician and soloist at Carnegie Hall, MATA festival, Long Play Festival, Hear Now Festival, the Banff Centre, and the Bulgarian Consulate, among others. Read more

Announcing our 2024-25 Season!

As the summer comes to a close, we're celebrating the start of our 22nd season with exciting world premiere performances and national and international residencies! 

“Diverse perspectives promise unlimited possibilities: this is the core idea behind our new season. ICE will present a humanistic model of the ‘yet unheard’ that is collaborative, creolized, and connected, even extending to the ever-expanding world of artificial intelligence.  With works by composers from all over the world, this season is more intercultural, intermedial and interdisciplinary than ever. Audiences will discover that our new season enthusiastically affirms the ideal of our Polyaspora.” — George Lewis, Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble

International Contemporary Ensemble & Earl Howard
Pioneer Works
September 5, 2024

Courtney Bryan Composer Portrait
Miller Theatre
September 12, 2024

Polyaspora Festival hosted by the Peabody Institute
curated by Dr. Felipe Lara and George Lewis
      September 24: The Future is Now I: Solo Works
      September 25: The Future is Now II: Ensemble Works     
      September 26: Composing While Black  
      September 27: Antropofagia

Composing While Black, Volume II
presented by NY Philharmonic
MoMA: Titus Theater 1
October 25, 2024

Always, Already There: An Incubator for Afrodiasporic New Music
Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin)
November 4-10, 2024

ICE at Institute for Ideas and Imagination (Paris)
November 13, 2024

ICE and Steven Schick premiere TOUCH TRACE by Zosha Di Castri
Roulette Intermedium
November 21, 2024

ICE & Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra feature Douglas R. Ewart
November 28- 30, 2024

International Contemporary Ensemble: Boulez Rebooted
Carnegie Hall
January 30, 2025

Miya Masaoka Composer Portrait
Miller Theatre
March 6, 2025

ICE in Residence at Oberlin Conservatory of Music
March 10-14, 2025

ICE at Northwestern University New Music Conference
April 25-27, 2025

ICE at UC Irvine & UC Riverside: Composing While Black
May 7-8, 2025

Announcing our Call For ____ Composers!

The International Contemporary Ensemble's Call For__ initiative commissions two individual or collective practitioners of performed sound to create a new work for the International Contemporary Ensemble. In addition to a world premiere of their piece, artists also receive mentorship, workshop time, audiovisual documentation and a commissioning honorarium. This wonderful opportunity is made possible in part by the Jerome Foundation's generous support.

We're thrilled to announce the two selected composers: Lester St. Louis and Camila Agosto. Read more about these amazing artists below!

Lester St. Louis (b.1993) is a New York born and based Composer and Cellist. His artistic work crosses disciplinary boundaries and develops formats in which improvisation is articulated as a basic prerequisite and mode of creative sociality. This work is particularly focused on performance, installation, curation, and recording; and rooted in ecstatic sound worlds, interaction and flow. 

An Avid collaborator, Camila Agosto is an electroacoustic composer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator based in New York. Her work is inspired by memory, perception, psychoacoustics, and somatic experiences. She partners with musicians, visual artists, instrument builders, and choreographers to discover the intersections of her work with additional artistic fields.

The New York Times: International Contemporary Ensemble at Carnegie Hall

Thanks to The New York Times this announcement! Read the article here.

Shout out in The New Yorker!

Thanks to The New Yorker for highlighting the Carola Bauckholt Composer Portrait on Thursday, February 8th at Miller Theatre!

WQXR Feature!

Thanks to wqxr for featuring our upcoming event!

Join us this Friday, January 19th for the world premiere of Yvette Janine Jackson’s T-Minus.

Congratulations to George Lewis on this feature!

The New yorker: The sonic revoolutions of george lewis

“George Lewis is one of the most formidable figures in modern music: a composer of interational renown, a legendary improvising trombonist, a computer-music pioneer, a professor at Columbia, a stalwart of the Black avant-garde collective known as the Assosiaction for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.” — Alex Ross (The New Yorker)

Afterword in the New York Times!

CONGRATULATIONS to George Lewis on this New York Times feature!

“George Lewis’s recent chamber and orchestral scores have been action-packed thrill rides, full of lovingly crafted dissonances and exciting collisions of rhythmic contour. But his foray into opera, “Afterword: An Opera in Two Acts,” is less traditionally dramatic. That’s intentional.

In the liner notes for this finely produced live recording, Lewis — a scholar, computer music specialist and trombonist — talks about the conceptual influence of Anthony Braxton’s operas. In those works, singers are not bound to representations of a single character from one act to the next. And so it is in “Afterword,” in which three singers rotate roles to depict the formation and development of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a pathbreaking experimental music community.” — New York Times

You can read the article here, and purchase and listen to Afterword, An Opera at the link below.

Afterword: An Opera in Two Acts by George Lewis

✨Afterword: An Opera in Two Acts✨ by George Lewis was released October 6th on New Focus Recordings/TUNDRA! Afterword is an opera by composer George Lewis, developed with directors Sean Griffin & Catherine Sullivan, and performed by Joelle Lamarre (soprano), Gwendolyn Brown (contralto), Julian Terrell Otis (tenor), Otis Harris, Zachary Nicol, Ninah Snipes, Ann E. Ward, Douglas R. Ewart, Discopoet Khari B., Coco Elysses, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. The work derives from Lewis’s book about the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), “A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music.”

Lewis describes Afterword as “an opera of ideas, positionality, and testament…exploring history to reaffirm fundamentally human perspectives that mark not only the AACM, but also any social formation.” The opera presents the AACM not as a set of fixed characters and plot lines, but as an avatar for experimental Blackness itself. As the action unfolds, we witness young Black experimentalists interrogating issues of power, authority, identity, representation, culture, economics, politics, and aesthetics; self-fashioning and self-determination; personal, professional, and collective aspiration; and tradition, innovation, change, spiritual growth, death, and rebirth.

Welcoming our new board members, Fay Victor and Nuiko Wadden!

We’re thrilled to announce that Fay Victor and Nuiko Wadden have joined our board! Read more about these incredible artists below!

"Fay and Nuiko bring a critical artists' perspective to our board, and along with their vast experiences and leadership throughout the music field, I'm so excited that they're joining the Ensemble's board of directors to set the stage for an even more vibrant future."
— Jennifer Kessler, Executive Director

Brooklyn, NY based sound artist/composer Fay Victor hones a unique vision for the vocal role in jazz and improvised music regarding repertoire, improvisation and composition. Victor’s work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Rolling Stone Magazine & The Huffington Post; Victor’s performed with luminaries such as Dr. Randy Weston, Nicole Mitchell, Misha Mengelberg, Myra Melford, Marc Ribot & Tyshawn Sorey to name but a few.

As a composer, Victor was awarded with the 2017 Herb Albert/Yaddo Fellow in Music Composition, a 2018 AIR in Composition for the Headlands Center for the Arts in California and a 2020 recipient of a Jazz Coalition Commission to create during the pandemic. Victor is on the faculty of the College of Performing Arts at the New School and at the ROC Nation School for Sports, Music and Entertainment at Long Island University. Victor is a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, and chairs the Advisory Board for the Jazz Leaders Fellowship, a Brooklyn Conservatory initiative. Learn more at https://www.fayvictor.com/

Nuiko Wadden is the principal harpist of the Pittsburgh Opera and Ballet orchestras and the principal of the Des Moines Metro Opera. Wadden has been a prizewinner in numerous competitions including the Minnesota Orchestra Competition. As a soloist, Wadden has appeared with the Minnesota Orchestra and the Skokie Valley Symphony. She performs regularly with the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Talea Ensemble, and the Kassia Ensemble. In Pittsburgh, she is half of TinyBeast, dedicated to performing new works for violin and harp. Over the span of her career, she has performed world premieres of works by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Suzanne Farrin, Pierre Jalbert, Hilda Paredes, Karim Al-Zand, John Luther Adams, and others.

NYT: Courtney Bryan's Music Brings It All Together

Congratulations to Courtney Bryan on this New York Times feature!

By Seth Colter Walls

Oct. 31, 2023
Updated 1:28 p.m. ET

“The name Courtney Bryan is not one that you’ll currently find on many recordings. Aside from two independently released, jazz-tilting albums from 2007 and 2010, precious little of this pianist and composer’s finely woven, adventurous music is available to hear widely.

But you can expect that to change, beyond live performances including the premiere of Bryan’s chamber work “DREAMING (Freedom Sounds),” presented by the International Contemporary Ensemble at Merkin Hall on Wednesday.”

NYC Jazz Record / George Lewis: Weathering and Perseverance

Congratulations to our Artistic Director George Lewis on this feature!

On Curating / A Multi-Layered Approach to Equity in the New Music Field by Jennifer Kessler

Check out our Executive Director Jennifer Kessler’s essay, published in On Curating!

“For the past ten of my eighteen years as an arts professional, I have sat through a myriad of meetings devoted to the topic of diversity, equity, and inclusion in Western classical music. Until recently, I would see an initial investment in diversity initiatives, but nothing that would fundamentally empower people who have not historically had leadership agency to play a lasting role in deciding what gets performed on our world’s stages. What was lacking was a comprehensive approach to equity by addressing all entry points to an organization. Very few organizations asked: What are all of the ways we uphold the status quo? And what are all of the changes we should consider making if we want to create a truly equitable and diverse future?

“Equity” is often understood in different ways. The Annie E. Casey Foundation defines equity as “giving people what they need to enjoy full, healthy lives, regardless of race.”[1] I once heard philanthropist Ayo Roach say that equity is not just giving a person a seat at the table for decision making, but making the table bigger so that more people can participate and benefit from whatever is being offered. As an extension of his article “A Small Act of Curation,” George Lewis gave a keynote at a Chamber Music America conference, discussing his concept of equity as “investment.” He said:

Decades of curatorial, commissioning, and academic employment decisions proceeding from what bell hooks has called white supremacist capitalist patriarchy amounts to an investment in a certain sector of the society, and a complementary disinvestment in others […].  The complementary disinvestment in other segments of the population expresses itself in the very low number of women and people of color that I find in applications for graduate school, grants, academic employment as a composer, and more.  Despite decades of effort, the system does not allow these people to build up equity, and the myth of absence dovetails with ersatz meritocracy to support the spurious claim that these people, in fact, do not exist. Yes, they do exist—but fixing the problem will take more than just opening the doors and proclaiming, “Y’all come.”[2]

I understand equity as a combination of these things: a commitment to making the proverbial table bigger and fairer to effectively investing in more people who have decision-making agency. It is also a commitment to interrogating and changing the practices around the table that have historically prevented certain people from living their full lives, and making specific choices beyond “just opening the doors.” “

Read the entire article HERE

Post-Genre / Hearing Voices: A Conversation with George Lewis

by Rob Shepherd / Published October 1, 2023

While many organizations present contemporary classical music, the International Contemporary Ensemble has stood out since its founding twenty-two years ago. The Ensemble’s success has come largely due to its stated goal of cultivating a musical ecosystem that honors diversity while focusing on equity, belonging, and cultural responsiveness. The organization’s openness and consideration of all musical ideas starkly contrast a status quo that often marginalizes or outright ignores the compositional thoughts of anyone other than a white man. Emphasizing increased inclusiveness and diversity allows the Ensemble to present more compelling pieces than most. This ethos also partly explains the group’s April 2022 selection of George Lewis as its most recent Artistic Director. Although all previous holders of the designation came from artists within the Ensemble’s ranks, Lewis – a composer at the front lines of musical decolonization and representation of Afrodiasporic voices – was a natural choice for the role despite his outsider status. Indeed, the Ensemble’s performance at Roulette Intermedium on October 5, 2023, George Lewis: Hearing Voices, is built upon the composer’s continued explorations of how decolonized music may sound. 

Read the entire article HERE

New Book: Composing While Black by George Lewis

Congratulations to George Lewis & Harald Kisiedu for their book release!

Wolke Verlag has released Composing While Black, a new scholarly publication edited by Harald Kisiedu and George E. Lewis.

Composing While Black presents unique new perspectives on Afrodiasporic contemporary composers active between 1960 and the present, a period that academic inquiry, concert programming, and journalistic accounts have largely ignored up to now, particularly in Europe. This interdisciplinary essay collection engages with opera, orchestral, chamber, instrumental, and electroacoustic music, as well as sound art, conceptual art, and digital intermedia, revealing Afrodiasporic new music as an intercultural, multigenerational space of innovation that offers new subjects, histories, and identities.

I Care If You Listen Review: TIME:SPANS 2023

International Contemporary Ensemble Introduces Vision for a Musical Polyaspora at TIME:SPANS 2023

JENNIFER JOLLEY

on August 31, 2023 at 6:00 am

As the new artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble, George Lewis aspires for the ensemble to be “nothing less than a new consciousness for new music” that embraces the concept of “polyaspora” through “gender, ethnicity, race, musical directions, aesthetics, and geography.” Lewis succeeds co-artistic directors Rebekah Heller, Ross Karre, and Joshua Rubin, who led the ensemble following the departure of Claire Chase, the ensemble’s co-founder and flutist of more than two decades. He was unable to attend the ensemble’s Aug. 25 performance at the 2023 TIME:SPANS festival, but his remarks were read from the stage at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music by the ensemble’s executive director, Jennifer Kessler. During his tenure with the ensemble, Lewis is proposing an intercultural and multigenerational approach to new music, regenerated by “new subjects, histories, and identities.”

Read the entire article here

Musical America Review: TIME:SPANS 2023

Read the full review here

Announcing our 2023-2024 Season!

New York, NY (July 13, 2023) — International Contemporary Ensemble kicks off its 2023-24 season with a performance at the TIME:SPANS Festival on Friday, August 25, 2023 at 7:30 p.m. at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, with the US premiere of a work by Andile Khumalo, as well as works by Wadada Leo Smith, Younghi Pagh-Paan, and Aida Shirazi. The Ensemble performs two concerts at Roulette - a George Lewis Portrait Concert on Thursday, October 5, 2023 at 8:00 p.m. and the world premiere of Yvette Janine Jackson’s new radio opera for large ensemble and electronics on Friday, January 19, 2024 at 8:00 p.m. The Ensemble also collaborates with Japanese performer/composer/poet/visual artist Tomomi Adachi for three performances exploring the music of John Cage at the Japan Society this season: Saturday, October 21, 2023 at 8:30 p.m., Thursday, November 16, 2023 at 7:30 p.m. and Thursday, December 7, 2023 at 7:30 p.m. International Contemporary Ensemble presents an Afromodernism program featuring two world premieres by Rome Prize-winning composer Courtney Bryan and Adegoke Steve Colson on Wednesday, November 1, 2023 at 7:30 p.m. at Merkin Hall, and gives the US premiere of George Lewis’s Blombos Workshop (2020) on Monday, December 18, 2023 at 7:00 p.m. at the Park Avenue Armory. The Ensemble returns for the Composer Portraits series for works by pioneering German composer Carola Bauckholt on Thursday, February 8, 2024 at 8:00 p.m. at Miller Theatre. In an additional highlight, the Ensemble reunites with composer, visual artist, and multi-instrumentalist Douglas R. Ewart for a new collaboration with Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra for GIOfest in Glasgow, Scotland.

Artistic Director George Lewis calls this season “Polyaspora, Year One.” He said, “As our Ensemble enters its 21st year, finding the sound of the polyaspora assumes a planetary perspective. Leaving fixed genre labels behind, our polyaspora is intercultural, intermedial, and interdisciplinary, our polyaspora is conscious, collaborative, creolized, and connected. ‘International’ situates us in a cosmopolitan musical space; "contemporary” leads us to embody a mosaic identity; and “Ensemble” means that we work to build new transnational communities through sound.”

On Friday, August 25, 2023 at 7:30 p.m. at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music the TIME:SPANS Festival presents International Contemporary Ensemble in an evening that exemplifies its concept of Polyaspora, including two premieres: the US premiere of Invisible Self by Andile Khumalo, who has been named one of the top five South African composers by BBC Music Magazine and one of the top 23 composers and performers to watch in 2023 by The Washington Post; and the NY premiere of Gondwana: Earth, a Blue Sanctuary, Oceans, Seas, Lakes, Rivers, Springs and Lagoons; Paradise Gardens and Skies by American composer Wadada Leo Smith, “one of the most celebrated new music composers of this young century” (Down Beat). Also on this exciting and diversely creative program are works by internationally renowned contemporary Korean-German composer Younghi Pagh-Paan and emerging Iranian composer Aida Shirazi, whose work has been described as “affecting” by The New Yorker.

On Thursday, October 5, 2023 at 8:00 p.m. the Ensemble gives its first performance at Roulette of the season with a George Lewis Portrait Concert that includes the US premiere of H. narrans (2020) for voice and chamber ensemble, with text drawn from the writings of postcolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter. The next Roulette concert on Friday, January 19, 2024 at 8:00 p.m. features the world premiere of Yvette Janine Jackson’s new radio opera for large ensemble and electronics, commissioned by the Ensemble and funded by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. Jackson’s radio operas combine music, dialogue and effects to stimulate audience imagination and initiate conversations. This radio opera, inspired by Augusto Boal's book “Theatre of the Oppressed,” addresses the environmental and socioeconomic impact of space travel and space tourism on people living near rocket launch sites and test ranges. Jackson’s music physically places the audience in the middle of the narrative through the use of multi-channel surround sound, while the libretto is constructed using found text from myriad sources–news articles, anecdotes, live streams, or corporate websites. The spoken words themselves may be digitally edited or covered by other instruments, and sounds that are sung may have no particular semantic meaning. Rather than prescribing fixed meanings, this work invites the audience to draw upon personal experience and knowledge to co-construct its narrative.

The Ensemble also collaborates with performer/composer/poet/visual artist Tomomi Adachi on three events celebrating John Cage’s relationship with Japanese culture, presented by the Japan Society this season. On the first concert, on Saturday, October 21, 2023 at 8:30 p.m., John Cage’s Ryoanji will be performed telematically, as members of the Ensemble (Michael Lormand, trombone; Lizzie Burns, double bass; Clara Warnaar, percussion) perform alongside musicians playing live in Japan - Hitomi Nakamura on the hichiriki, the ancient double-reed woodwind, and Maki Ota on vocals - streamed into the theater from a tea house in Kanazawa City, Japan. The performance will be accompanied by a captivating backdrop of hypnotic 3D visuals depicting the raked sand of the Zen garden created by Dr. Tsutomu Fujinami, a researcher at the prestigious Japan Advanced Institute for Science and Technology. A lecture on the origins of Cage's fascination with Japanese culture and how those interests manifest in Ryoanji, led by John Cage scholar James Pritchett, precedes the performance.

In the second concert on Thursday, November 16, 2023 at 7:30 p.m., Adachi brings John Cage’s unrealized project, Noh-opera: Or the Complete Musical Works of Marcel Duchamp, to life in a world premiere performance. Cage envisioned a premiere in Japan, but not enough of the work was ever finished to be staged. In response to this dream project, Adachi freshly imagines the work into existence by seamlessly integrating captivating aspects of western opera and noh. Adachi's artificial intelligence-written music and lyrics for the work are based on the confounding paradoxes found in Zen Buddhist koans, succinct but open-ended riddles on the human condition. The performance features the distinctly unique voice of Gelsey Bell (recognized as the “future of experimental vocalism” by The New York Times), renowned Japanese noh actor Wakako Matsuda, and five wind instrumentalists from the International Contemporary Ensemble.

The final concert presented by the Japan Society on Thursday, December 7, 2023 at 7:30 p.m. presents a

collaboration with experimental sound artists Tania Caroline Chen and Victoria Shen and featured artist Tomomi Adachi that recreates the essential works performed at John Cage's historic visit to Japan in 1962, often referred to as the "Cage Shock." The evening includes a string quartet of Josh Modney (violin), Kyle Armbrust (viola), Wendy Richman (viola), and Michael Nicolas (cello), all musicians from the International Contemporary Ensemble, performing Sapporo (1962) by Toshi Ichiyanagi (1933-2022), the esteemed Japanese composer and first husband of Yoko Ono. A pre-concert lecture will be delivered one hour prior to the start of the show by musician and Cage scholar James Pritchett.

On Wednesday, November 1, 2023 at 7:30 p.m. at Merkin Hall, International Contemporary Ensemble presents an Afromodernism program featuring two world premieres – the first, a new work by Rome Prize-winning composer Courtney Bryan in honor of the 50th wedding anniversary of Arlene and Larry Dunn (who also commissioned the piece), inspired by Sounds of Freedom, and the second by Adegoke Steve Colson (commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation), a longtime member of the famed Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Colson’s piece, MIRRORS, presents thoughts concerning the human condition in the hopes of stimulating listeners to reflect on the current state of American society and the divisions and turmoil that we witness on a daily basis. Conducted by Vimbayi Kaziboni, the program reveals the new Afromodernism as an intercultural, multigenerational space of innovation. Additional works include Runagate, Runagate, Wendell Logan’s classic 1989 work for tenor and chamber ensemble, and Thread and Pull by the intermedia composer Brittany J. Green.

Later in November, International Contemporary Ensemble members Rebekah Heller (bassoon), Wendy Richman (viola), Nathan Davis (percussion), and Clara Warnaar (percussion) reunite with composer, visual artist, and multi-instrumentalist Douglas R. Ewart in collaboration with the internationally acclaimed Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra (GIO) for the 2023 edition of the annual international GIOFest, which takes place from November 23-25, 2023 at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, Scotland. Like the Ensemble, GIO emphasizes “community and diversity - both our local community and the wider global community of experimental music that we’re proudly part of.”

International Contemporary Ensemble joins Artistic Director George Lewis on Monday, December 18, 2023 at 7:00 p.m. at the Park Avenue Armory for the US premiere of his Blombos Workshop (2020) for piano, which engages postcolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter’s celebration of the human, and Assemblage (2013) for nonet, which explores in musical form the practice of assemblage—artmaking that recombines and recontextualizes collections of natural and human-made objects. Performed as part of the AACM’s year-long Artists Studio residency, these Lewis works are performed by members of the Ensemble on a special double bill with the music of Amina Claudine Myers.

Returning for the Miller Theatre’s annual Composer Portraits series, the Ensemble performs a program of works by pioneering German composer Carola Bauckholt on Thursday, February 8, 2024 at 8:00 p.m. The selection of works spans 20 years, anchored by Oh, I See, written for clarinet, violin, cello, video, and two balloons. Bauckholt’s work focuses on the phenomena of perception and understanding, and her music blurs boundaries between visual arts, musical theater, and concert music.

ABOUT OUR 2023-2024 COMMISSIONED ARTISTS

ADEGOKE STEVE COLSON

Photo by Sharon Sullivan

Adegoke Steve Colson - decorated pianist, composer, historian, educator - has written over 200 pieces for small ensemble, several of which are performed and have been recorded by other artists, He has also received several commissions for large works. His work can be heard on labels such as ECM, Columbia/Sony,Black Saint and Silver Sphinx - a label co-owned with his wife Iqua. Select innovators on his projects include musicians Reggie Workman, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Davis, Andrew Cyrille, and Tyshawn Sorey; poet/activists Amiri and Amina Baraka, dancer Carmen de Lavallade, and playwright/screenwriter Richard Wesley. Commissions include scoring and conducting the music of piano stride master Willie “The Lion” Smith for the National Lost Jazz Shrines project, and a tribute premiered at New Jersey Performing Arts Center for two pianos, septet and choir celebrating the 350th Anniversary of Newark, NJ. – the third oldest city in the U.S. Recent premieres; Incandescence ( 2021) commissioned by American Composers Forum, and Suite Harlem (2022), part of a South Arts Initiative supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

A New Jersey native, Colson spent time in Chicago joining the influential Association for Advancement of Creative Musicians in 1971 before graduating from the Northwestern University School of Music. He was inducted into the East Orange Hall of Fame in 2018, joining fellow hometown musicians Dionne Warwick, Naughty by Nature and Whitney Houston. Colson continues to teach in Bloomfield College’s Creative Arts Technology Department - an initiative he helped launch 35 years ago - and is currently completing a book, “Thoughts for a New Discussion of History”.

COURTNEY BRYAN

Photo by Taylor Hunter

Courtney Bryan, a native of New Orleans, Louisiana, is “a pianist and composer of panoramic interests” (New York Times). She is currently the composer-in-residence with Opera Philadelphia.

Byran’s compositions have been performed by the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra (Creative Partner, 2020-2023), Jacksonville Symphony (Mary Carr Patton Composer-In-Presidence, 2018-2020), New York Philharmonic, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, LA Phil, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Chicago Sinfonietta, and London Sinfonietta in a wide range of renowned venues, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walt Disney Concert Hall, and Blue Note Jazz Club.

Recent accolades include the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2018), Samuel Barber Rome Prize in Music Composition (2019-2020), United States Artists Fellowship (2020), and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship (2020-2021). She is the Albert and Linda Mitz Professor of Music at Newcomb College in the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University.

YVETTE JANINE JACKSON

Photo by Catherine Koch

Yvette Janine Jackson is a composer and installation artist who brings attention to historical events and social issues through her radio operas and narrative soundscape compositions. Her album Freedom, produced by the Fridman Gallery, debuted as Contemporary Album of the Month in The Guardian and its track “Destination Freedom” won the ZKM Giga-Hertz Production Award 2021. She was commissioned to compose an interactive radio opera for bass clarinet, cello, and game engine for the 2023 Giga-Hertz Festival. Recent projects include Underground (Codes), a permanent installation at Wave Farm in Acra, New York; Hello, Tomorrow! for orchestra and electronics co-commissioned by American Composers Orchestra and Carnegie Hall; and a sound and light composition, RETURN, for the James Turrell, "Twilight Epiphany" Skyspace at Rice University. Yvette is an assistant professor in Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry in the Department of Music and teaches for the Theater, Dance & Media program at Harvard University.

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About International Contemporary Ensemble

With a commitment to cultivating a more curious and engaged society through music, the International Contemporary Ensemble – as a commissioner and performer at the highest level – amplifies creators whose work propels and challenges how music is made and experienced. The Ensemble’s 39 members are featured as soloists, chamber musicians, commissioners, and collaborators with the foremost musical artists of our time. Works by emerging composers have anchored the Ensemble’s programming since its founding in 2001, and the group’s recordings and digital platforms highlight the many voices that weave music’s present.

Acclaimed as “America’s foremost new-music group” (The New Yorker), the Ensemble has become a leading force in new music throughout the last 20 years, having premiered over 1,000 works and having been a vehicle for the workshop and performance of thousands of works by student composers across the U.S. The Ensemble’s composer-collaborators—many who were unknown at the time of their first Ensemble collaboration—have fundamentally shaped its creative ethos and have continued to highly visible and influential careers, including MacArthur Fellow Tyshawn Sorey; long-time Ensemble collaborator, founding member, and 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winner Du Yun; and the Ensemble’s founder, 2012 MacArthur Fellow, and first-ever flutist to win Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Prize, Claire Chase.

A recipient of the American Music Center’s Trailblazer Award and the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, the International Contemporary Ensemble was also named Musical America’s Ensemble of the Year in 2014. The group has served as artists-in-residence at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival (2008-2020), Ojai Music Festival (2015-17), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2010-2015). In addition, the Ensemble has presented and performed at festivals in the U.S. such as Big Ears Festival and Opera Omaha’s ONE Festival, as well as abroad, including GMEM-Centre National de Création Musicale (CNCM) de Marseille, Vértice at Cultura UNAM, Warsaw Autumn, International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, and Cité de la Musique in Paris. Other performance stages have included the Park Avenue Armory, ice floes at Greenland’s Diskotek Sessions, Brooklyn warehouses, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and boats on the Amazon River.

The International Contemporary Ensemble advances music technology and digital communications as an empowering tool for artists from all backgrounds. Digitice provides high-quality video documentation for artist-collaborators and provides access to an in-depth archive of composers’ workshops and performances. The Ensemble regularly engages new listeners through free concerts and interactive, educational programming with lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Curricular activities include a partnership at The New School’s College of Performing Arts (CoPA), along with a summer intensive program, called Ensemble Evolution, where topics of equity, diversity, and inclusion build new bridges and pathways for the future of creative sound practices. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the Ensemble. Read more at www.iceorg.org and watch over 350 videos of live performances and documentaries at www.digitice.org.

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CREDITS

The International Contemporary Ensemble’s performances and commissioning activities during the 2023-24 concert season are made possible by the generous support of the Ensemble’s board, 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, The Cheswatyr Foundation, Amphion Foundation, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, New Music USA’s Organizational Development Fund, 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. The International Contemporary Ensemble was the Ensemble in Residence of the Nokia Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology from 2018-2021. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the International Contemporary Ensemble.