Photo by Molly Miles
In the first concert curated by Artistic Director George Lewis as part of his visionary polyaspora theme, the International Contemporary Ensemble presents Songs and Stories of Hopes, Dreams and Visions—a concert of the music and artworks of composer and interdisciplinary artist Douglas R. Ewart.
The program will feature two world premiere performances from Ewart, commissioned by the Ensemble, and other works by Ewart. As audiences enter the lobby, they will begin to encounter Ewart’s artistry with the displays of his sculptures, including Sonic Stroller (2006), Eye of Horus (2017-18), and Eric Dolphy Sonic Dread (2017). In addition, five of his scroll paintings, Rasta in Sun Ra (2002), Supernova (2002), Other Being (2000), A Thought of Japan (2000), and Angles (2001), will accompany the performances as the backdrop to the evening. Ewart will also join the Ensemble to play an instrument he made to honor George Floyd’s legacy, called “The George Floyd Bunt Staff.”
Join us on opening night for a conversation between Douglas R. Ewart and our Artistic Director, George Lewis.
All artworks Courtesy of Zürcher Gallery, New York.
ABOUT THE PROGRAM
It is a delight to be collaborating with the International Contemporary Ensemble in rendering a number of my old and new compositions. The works include music, prose and poetry, visual works and improvisations.
Among the works are:
Truth is Power dedicated to Fannie Lou Hamer, Ida B. Wells and Dolores Huerta and others.
Marcus Mosiah Garvey is dedicated to the political visionary, entrepreneur, journalist, orator, publisher, philosopher and international Black human rights activist and leader.
Homage to George Floyd and others that have experienced a similar fate.
Ascending Auditory Communications Migrating, dedicated to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a work in progress and more.
Written by Douglas R. Ewart
Program Order (all works by Douglas R. Ewart)
Songs and Stories of Hopes, Dreams and Visions (World Premiere, commissioned by the Ensemble)
Homage to George Floyd
Red Hills
Ascending Auditory Communications Migrating
Marcus Mosiah Garvey (World Premiere, commissioned by the Ensemble)
Truth is Power
Performers
Rebekah Heller, bassoon
Nathan Davis, percussion
Clara Warnaar, percussion
Wendy Richman, viola
Aliya Ultan, cello
Douglas R. Ewart, sopranino saxophone, and Ewart designed and constructed instruments: George Floyd Bunt Staff, Didjeridu, Ewartophone and Bone Flute
Nick Houfek, Lighting Designer
SCULPTURES BY DOUGLAS R. EWART
Sonic Stroller, 2006
orthopedic crutch, deer skin, nylon cord, bells, hamster cage, wheels, cheese cutter, pot cover, metal speaker holder and battery operated movement initiated lights in hamster cage
60 x 12 x 10 inches
Courtesy of Zürcher Gallery, New York
George Floyd Bunt Staff, 2020
Bundt Pans, Walnut Staff, woodburning, plywood, leather, nylon cord, rubber, rubber cane tip and cement, coral, beads and screws.
72 x 11 x 11 inches
Courtesy of Zürcher Gallery, New York
Eye of Horus, 2017-18
Wooden ski, piano wire, pen, paint, electric bass tuning machines and metal ski binding.
36 x 48 inches
Courtesy of Zürcher Gallery, New York
Eric Dolphy Sonic Dread, 2017
Obsolete wooden bass clarinet, bamboo roots and rhizomes, Ostrich egg, fabric, buttons, clarinet reeds, coral, stones, beads, wood glue, nylon cord, screws, and pyrographics.
58 x 15.5 x 12 inches
Courtesy of Zürcher Gallery, New York
FIVE SCROLL PAINTINGS BY DOUGLAS R. EWART
Rasta in Sun Ra
Date: 2002
Dimensions: 82” X 60”
Mixed Medium: Canvas, acrylic paint, and Bambooa
Courtesy of Zürcher Gallery, New York
Supernova
Subtitle: Brighter than hat
Medium: Acrylic paint on canvas
Dimensions: Length 83” X 47”
Year: 2002
Courtesy of Zürcher Gallery, New York
Other Being
Medium: Acrylic paint on silk
Dimensions: Length 81” X 43”
Year: 2000
Courtesy of Zürcher Gallery, New York
A Thought of Japan
Medium: Acrylic paint on silk
Dimensions: Length 77” X 48”
Year: 2000
Courtesy of Zürcher Gallery, New York
Angles
Medium: Acrylic paint on silk
Dimensions: Length 95” X 45”
Year: 2001
Courtesy of Zürcher Gallery, New York
Douglas R. Ewart
Douglas R. Ewart, Professor Emeritus at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1946. His life and his wide-ranging work have always been inextricably associated with Jamaican culture, history, politics, and the land itself. His father, Tom Ewart, was one of cricket’s most internationally celebrated professional umpires, eventually earning induction into the Cricket Hall of Fame. His aunt, Iris King, was a leading member of Norman Manley’s People’s National Party, and later, the first woman mayor in Jamaica.
Professor Ewart immigrated to Chicago in 1963, where he studied music theory at VanderCook College of Music, electronic music at Governors State University, and composition at the School of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. The AACM is renowned for its wide-ranging experimental approaches to music; its leading lights include Muhal Richard Abrams, Joseph Jarman, Fred Anderson, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Lester Bowie, Kalaparusha Ara Difda, George Lewis, Malachi Maghostut Favors, Roscoe Mitchell, Amina Claudine Myers, Henry Threadgill, and many others, including Professor Ewart himself, who served as the organization's president between 1979 and 1987.
Professor Ewart’s extremely varied and highly interdisciplinary work encompasses music composition (including graphic and conceptual scores as well as conventionally notated works), painting and kinetic sound sculpture, and multi-instrumental performance on virtually the full range of saxophones, flutes, and woodwinds, including the flutes, pan-pipes, rainsticks and percussion instruments of his own design and construction for which he is known worldwide. Professor Ewart’s work as composer, instrument maker and visual artist has long reflected his understanding of the importance of sustainable and natural materials, particularly bamboo, which serves not only as primary physical materials for many of his sculptures and instruments, but also crucial conceptual elements of some of his most important recordings, such as the widely influential Bamboo Meditations At Banff 1993 and Bamboo Forest 1990. His visual art and kinetic works have has been shown at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Ojai Festival, Art Institute of Chicago, Institute for Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, and many others. Recently, he was included in The Art of Counterpoint, 8 Musicians make Art, Zürcher gallery, NY ( November 2022- January 2023) and by Zürcher gallery at the Outsider art fair, NY (March 2023)
His graphic/conceptual instrumental work Red Hills (1979), an homage to his native Jamaica, is very widely performed, and his work as performing instrumentalist has been presented in the Caribbean (Jamaica, Cuba, and Haiti), Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Holland, UK), Japan, Bali, South America, Scandinavia, and Australia, as well as the United States and Puerto Rico, and recorded on numerous labels, including his own Aarawak recording company. Professor Ewart is the leader of such important musical ensembles as the Nyahbingi Drum Choir, Quasar, Orbit, Quasar, StringNets, and the Clarinet Choir, and in addition to his AACM colleagues, Professor Ewart has performed with Cedric Im Brooks, Ernest Ranglin, Cecil Taylor, James Newton, Anthony Davis, Robert Dick, Jin Hi Kim, Alvin Curran, Von Freeman, Yusef Lateef, Richard Teitelbaum, Mankwe Ndosi, Edward Kidd Jordan, Wadada Leo Smith, Steve Lacy, George Lewis, Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, and others.
Professor Ewart’s highly communitarian work as a conceptual artist is best represented by Crepuscule (1993-present), a massive participation performance coordinated by his ensemble, Douglas R. Ewart and Inventions. Strongly informed by the Jamaican Jonkunnu tradition, Crepuscule is an all-day event that is collectively created by scores of musicians, dancers, visual artists, poets, capoeira, puppeteers, martial artists, activists, elders, children and more, in streets and parks in Chicago, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Paris, France, and more. Moreover, this communitarian orientation has long included educational work in underserved communities, such as his work since 1992 in Minneapolis’s ArtStart, summer interdisciplinary arts program since its inception in 1992 and his work since 1980 at Chicago’s Urban Gateways Center for Arts Education, which was documented in the 1992 British telefilm On the Edge: Improvisation in Music.
Among his many honors, Professor Ewart was personally presented with the Outstanding Artist Award by Chicago's first African American mayor, Harold Washington. He is the recipient of the silver Musgrave Award 2019, one of Jamaica’s highest awards for the arts sciences and literature. He has received two Bush Artists Fellowship (1997, 2007), three McKnight Fellowships (1992, 1994 and 2001), among others, as well as the U.S.–Japan Creative Artist Fellowship (1987), a year-long residency in Yokohama where he studied Japanese techniques of instrument building. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and others.
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 35 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.
Described 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.
CREDITS
All artworks Courtesy of Zürcher Gallery, New York
The International Contemporary Ensemble’s performances and commissioning activities during the 2022-23 concert season are made possible by the generous support of 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., MAP Fund, Mid Atlantic Arts, Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, Amphion Foundation, The Cheswatyr Foundation, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, New Music USA’s New Music 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. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the International Contemporary Ensemble.