International Contemporary Ensemble Presents Two World Premieres By Courtney Bryan And Adegoke Steve Colson

International Contemporary Ensemble presents “Composing While Black: Volume One,” featuring world premieres of new works by Courtney Bryan and Adegoke Steve Colson on Wednesday, November 1, 2023 at 7:30 p.m. at Merkin Hall, along with works by Wendell Logan and Brittany J. Green. Conducted by Vimbayi Kaziboni, this program reveals Afrodiasporic new music as an intercultural, multigenerational space of innovation. 

Rome Prize-winning composer Courtney Bryan's Dreaming (Freedom Sounds), for nine musicians and two voices, is composed in honor of the 50th wedding anniversary of Arlene and Larry Dunn, who also commissioned the piece. MIRRORS, for tenor and octet, is written by Adegoke Steve Colson, a longtime member of the famed Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Colson's piece, commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation, 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. Additional works include Runagate, Runagate, Wendell Logan's classic 1989 work for tenor and chamber ensemble, with text by Robert Hayden, and Thread and Pull by the intermedia composer Brittany J. Green.

Next, International Contemporary Ensemble performs the second concert of their series at the Japan Society on Thursday, November 16, 2023 at 7:30 p.m., in which performer/composer/poet/visual artist Tomomi Adachi brings John Cage's unrealized project, Noh-opera: Or the Complete Musical Works of Marcel Duchamp, to life in a world premiere performance. 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.” 

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Concert Information
Composing While Black, Volume One: Two World Premieres by Courtney Bryan and Adegoke Steve Colson
International Contemporary Ensemble
Wednesday, November 1, 2023 at 7:30 pm
Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center | 129 W 67th St. | New York, NY 10023
Tickets: $30
Link: https://iceorg.org/events/2023/11/1-two-world-premieres 

Program:
Brittany J. Green - Thread and Pull (2022), for ensemble 
Adegoke Steve Colson - MIRRORS, for instrumental ensemble and tenor  (World Premiere)*
Wendell Logan - Runagate, Runagate (1990), version for tenor and chamber ensemble
Courtney Bryan -  Dreaming (Freedom Sounds), for ensemble with voices(World Premiere)**

*Commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation. Performance is made possible, in part, due to support from the Fromm Music Foundation.

**Commissioned by Arlene and Larry Dunn 

Artists:
International Contemporary Ensemble
          Vimbayi Kaziboni, conductor
          Alice Teyssier, voice
          Fay Victor, voice 
          Tariq Al-Sabir, tenor
          Peter Tantsits, tenor
          Laura Cocks, flute/piccolo
          Kemp Jernigan, oboe
          Rebekah Heller, bassoon 
          Joshua Rubin, clarinets 
          Jonathan Finlayson, trumpet
          Jacob Greenberg, piano
          Clara Warnaar, percussion
          Gabriela Díaz, violin
          Marina Kifferstein, violin 
          Wendy Richman, viola 
          Clare Monfredo, cello
          Randall Zigler, double bass 

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About Courtney Bryan
Courtney Bryan, a native of New Orleans, Louisiana, is “a pianist and composer of panoramic interests” (The New York Times). She is currently the composer-in-residence with Opera Philadelphia.  Bryan's compositions have been performed by the New York Philharmonic, LA Phil, London Sinfonietta, Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra (Creative Partner, 2020-2023), Jacksonville Symphony (Mary Carr Patton Composer-In-Residence, 2018-2020), Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke's, and Chicago Sinfonietta, and 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

About Adegoke Steve Colson
Adegoke Steve Colson - decorated pianist, composer, historian, educator - has written over 200 pieces for small ensemble, and received several commissions for large works. Select innovators on his projects include musicians Reggie Workman, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Davis, Andrew Cyrille, and Tyshawn Sorey; poets/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 NJPAC 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 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 of Montclair State University's Creative Arts and Technology Dept which he helped found 35 years ago and is currently completing a book, “Thoughts for a New Discussion of History”.

About Brittany J. Green
Brittany J. Green is a North Carolina-based composer, creative, and educator. Her music facilitates intimate musical spaces that ignite visceral responses at the intersection of sound, video, movement, and text. Recent works engage sonification and black feminist theory as tools for sonic world-building, exploring the construction, displacement, and rupture of systems. Her artistic practice includes spoken and electronic performance, interdisciplinary collaboration, experiential projects, and acoustic and electroacoustic chamber and large ensemble works. Her music has been featured at NYC Electronic Music Festival, WoCo Fest, and Experimental Sound Studio. Her collaborators include the International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Transient Canvas, Castle of our Skins, Emory University Symphony Orchestra, and Wachovia Winds. Brittany holds awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP Foundation, and New Music USA. She is a doctoral candidate at Duke University, pursuing a PhD in music composition as a Dean's Graduate Fellow.

About Wendell Logan
Wendell Logan (1940-2010) graduated from the University of Iowa in 1968 with a Ph.D. in music theory and composition.  A recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Cleveland Arts Prize, the Lakond Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a dozen ASCAP Awards, Logan's compositions are performed worldwide, including Proportions for Nine Players and Conductor (1969), Music for Brasses (1973), Variations on a Motive by John Coltrane (1975), Song of the Witchdoktor (1976), 1981's Requiem for Charles Christopher “Bird” Parker (1920-1955) for orchestra, and Doxology Opera: The Doxy Canticles (2001). Logan drew particular inspiration from African American literature. Songs of Our Time (1969) was inspired by the words of LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Gwendolyn Brooks and W. E. B. Du Bois, while Ice and Fire (1975) engaged poems by Mari Evans.  Langston Hughes provided the texts for Hughes Set for three male voices (1978) and Ask Your Mama (2002). 

Chicago Tribune music critic Howard Reich described Logan's Runagate, Runagate as an “eerie evocation of a slave's race for freedom." The text for the work comes from African-American poet Robert Hayden's poem of the same name; “runagate, runagate" was a cry of warning that a slave had escaped.  Written in the first person, Hayden's poem, according to Reich, “overflows with horrifying images, such as the hungry bloodhounds who pursue the runaway slave.”  Reich described Logan's music as “a nightmarish blend of dissonant chord-clusters and chilling drum rolls [that] underscores the frenzied atmosphere.” The work was written for tenor William Brown (1938-2004). Logan's work has been recorded on Orion, Golden Crest, University of Michigan Press, CRI, Morehouse College Press and RPM labels, among others. Logan developed the program in African American music at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he went on to found the Jazz Studies Department, eventually serving as Chair of Jazz Studies and professor of African American music until his passing.

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.

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.

Photo Credits: Courtney Bryan (pc: Taylor Hunter), Adegoke Steve Colson (pc: Sharon Sullivan), Brittany Green (pc: Shanita Dixon), Wendell Logan (pc: Kevin G. Reeves)