International Contemporary Ensemble Returns To Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival For Eleventh Consecutive Year

The pioneering International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) returns to Lincoln Center's 2018 Mostly Mozart Festival for its eleventh consecutive season with four unique programs August 2-9, 2018. Having performed annually at the Mostly Mozart Festival since 2008, ICE was named Artist-in-Residence for the festival in 2011.

On Thursday, August 2, 2018 at 6pm in Bruno Walter Auditorium, composers Courtney Bryan, Ashley Fure, George Lewis, and Michael Pisaro, whose works will be performed during the Mostly Mozart Festival, join members of ICE for a free discussion hosted by WNYC's John Schaefer on their works, the creative process, and the future of classical music. Seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Later on Thursday, August 2, 2018 at 7:30 pm, ICE performs Grand Pianola Music at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College. John Adams's groundbreaking work Grand Pianola Music is the centerpiece of this spirited celebration of the piano and technology. Dating from 1982, Adams's work for two pianos, voices, and chamber ensemble uses live performers to recreate tape-delayed loops to astonishing effect. The program begins with Courtney Bryan's Songs of Laughing, Smiling, and Crying featuring a conversation between piano and recordings plucked from YouTube. In a newly revised version of George Lewis's epic chamber piece Voyager, AI technology allows the piano to take up the conversation on its own, a sentient automaton among human wind players. The ensemble of Cory Smythe and Jacob Greenberg (pianos), Peter Evans (trumpet), Joshua Rubin (clarinet), and Ryan Muncy (saxophone) will be led by conductor Christian Reif in his Mostly Mozart Festival debut. Phyllis Chen and Rob Dietz's Phantom Fingerings for piano lodeon and video is featured as a lobby installation.

From August 6-8, 2018 at the Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center in Brooklyn, ICE performs the New York premiere performances of Ashley and Adam Fure's The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects. The Force of Things asks the question: How do we bear witness to a thing our bodies seem built to ignore? In Ashley Fure's immersive music-theater piece, created with her architect brother Adam Fure and ICE, 24 subwoofer speakers emit sound too low for humans to hear, creating a subsonic sense of ecological anxiety that ripples around the audience. Under a dense canopy of sculpted matter, tones are "made tactile, objects made audible, noise made beautiful" (The New York Times). Drama is steered away from the human, time is stretched to a geologic scale, and seven live performers act as wordless harbingers of a consciousness not limited to the living.

On Thursday, August 9, 2018 at 7:30pm and 9:30pm, Mostly Mozart presents ICE at the David Rubenstein Atrium in two free performances of Michael Pisaro's A wave and waves. Echoing the environmental themes and communal experience of John Luther Adams's In the Name of the Earth, Pisaro's 75-minute piece embeds audience members in a grid of 100 performers, where they are slowly submerged in an ocean of sound. Isolated, imperceptibly soft noises-sandpaper on stone, seeds falling on glass, bowed bells-are layered into powerful waves of sound adding to the immersive nature of the experience. ICE will be joined by additional performers from the Walden School Young Musicians Program and Usdan Summer Camp for the Arts.

Program Information

Composers' Forum Hosted by WNYC's John Schaefer
Thursday, August 2, 2018 at 6pm
Bruno Walter Auditorium | 111 Amsterdam Ave. | New York, NY
Tickets: Free. Seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Link: http://www.lincolncenter.org/mostly-mozart-festival/show/composers-forum

Grand Pianola Music
Thursday, August 2, 2018 at 7:30pm
Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College | 524 W 59th St. | New York, NY
Tickets: $30
Link: http://www.lincolncenter.org/mostly-mozart-festival/show/grand-pianola-music

Performers:
International Contemporary Ensemble
Christian Reif, conductor (Mostly Mozart Festival debut)
Cory Smythe and Jacob Greenberg, pianos
Peter Evans, trumpet
Joshua Rubin, clarinet
Ryan Muncy, saxophone

Program:
Courtney Bryan: Songs of Laughing, Smiling, and Crying (2012)
George Lewis: Voyager (1987/2018)
John Adams: Grand Pianola Music (1982)

The Force of Things
Monday, August 6, 2018 at 6:30 pm
Monday, August 6, 2018 at 8:30 pm
Tuesday, August 7, 2018 at 6:30 pm
Tuesday, August 7, 2018 at 8:30 pm
Wednesday, August 8, 2018 at 6:30 pm
Wednesday, August 8, 2018 at 8:30 pm
Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center | 29 Jay St. | Brooklyn, NY
Tickets: $30
Link: http://www.lincolncenter.org/mostly-mozart-festival/show/the-force-of-things

Performers:
International Contemporary Ensemble
Ashley Fure, composer and co-director
Adam Fure, architectural design
César Alvarez, co-director
Lucy Dhegrae and Lisa E. Harris, voice
Ross Karre, percussion and producer
Levy Lorenzo, percussion and engineer
Nick Houfek, lighting
Lilleth Glimcher, associate director

Program:
Ashley Fure and Adam Fure: The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects (2016-17)

A wave and waves
Thursday, August 9, 2018 at 7:30 pm
Thursday, August 9, 2018 at 9:30 pm
David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center | 61 W 62nd St. | New York, NY
Tickets: Free. Due to the intimate, immersive nature of this experience, seating is very limited and will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Link: http://www.lincolncenter.org/mostly-mozart-festival/show/a-wave-and-waves

Performers:
International Contemporary Ensemble
Greg Stuart, guest artist
Performers from the Walden School Young Musicians Program and Usdan Summer Camp for the Arts

Program:
Michael Pisaro: A wave and waves (2007)

The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) is an artist collective that is transforming the way music is created and experienced. As performer, curator, and educator, ICE explores how new music intersects with communities across the world. 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 ICE's programming since its founding in 2001, and the group's recordings and digital platforms highlight the many voices that weave music's present.

A recipient of the American Music Center's Trailblazer Award and the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, ICE was also named the 2014 Musical America Ensemble of the Year. The group currently serves as artists-in-residence at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts' Mostly Mozart Festival, and previously led a five-year residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. ICE was featured at the Ojai Music Festival from 2015 to 2017, and at recent festivals abroad such as gmem-CNCM-marseille and Vértice at Cultura UNAM, Mexico City. Other performance stages have included the Park Avenue Armory, The Stone, ice floes at Greenland's Diskotek Sessions, and boats on the Amazon River.

New initiatives include OpenICE, made possible with lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which offers free concerts and related programming wherever ICE performs, and enables a working process with composers to unfold in public settings. DigitICE, a free online library of over 350 streaming videos, catalogues the ensemble's performances. ICE's First Page program is a commissioning consortium that fosters close collaborations between performers, composers, and listeners as new music is developed. EntICE, a side-by-side education program, places ICE musicians within youth orchestras as they premiere new commissioned works together; inaugural EntICE partners include Youth Orchestra Los Angeles and The People's Music School in Chicago. Summer activities include Ensemble Evolution at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, in which young professionals perform with ICE and attend workshops on topics from interpretation to concert production. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for ICE. Read more at iceorg.org.

The Mostly Mozart Festival is a presentation of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (LCPA), which serves three primary roles: presenter of artistic programming, national leader in arts and education and community engagement, and manager of the Lincoln Center campus. A presenter of more than 3,000 free and ticketed events, performances, tours, and educational activities annually, LCPA offers a variety of festivals and programs, including American Songbook, Avery Fisher Career Grants and Artist program, David Rubenstein Atrium programming, Great Performers, Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Awards, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Lincoln Center Vera List Art Project, LC Kids, Midsummer Night Swing, Mostly Mozart Festival, White Light Festival, the Emmy Award-winning Live From Lincoln Center, which airs nationally on PBS, and Lincoln Center Education, which is celebrating more than four decades enriching the lives of students, educators, and lifelong learners. As manager of the Lincoln Center campus, LCPA provides support and services for the Lincoln Center complex and the 11 resident organizations: The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Jazz at Lincoln Center, The Juilliard School, Lincoln Center Theater, The Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet, New York Philharmonic, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, School of American Ballet, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

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