International Contemporary Ensemble To Perform BOULEZ REBOOTED At Carnegie Hall

As part of Carnegie Hall's Pierre Boulez centennial celebration, International Contemporary Ensemble performs a cutting-edge concert on Thursday, January 30, 2025 at 7:30 p.m. at Zankel Hall Center Stage. The concert includes the world premiere of an interactive work for artificial intelligence and live performers inspired by Boulez, as well as music by Boulez himself and composers inspired by him, including Philippe Manoury, Kaija Saariaho, and Tyshawn Sorey.

The French composer, conductor, and writer Pierre Boulez was one of the crucially important figures of the twentieth-century musical avant-garde. In 1977, he founded the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), which became the world's best-known center for computer music. Both Philippe Manoury and Kaija Saariaho, two of the world's most influential and widely performed composers, worked extensively with IRCAM's model of collaboration between composers, scientists, performers, and engineers, one that still resonates strongly today as part of Boulez's ongoing legacy.

At the top of the program, Manoury's Hypothèse du Sextuor takes a repetitive motif from Debussy's Des pas sur la neige as a starting point for sonic experimentation while Saariaho's Sombre, a work composed for the famed Rothko Chapel, takes its “minimal form” and “heartbreaking content” from fragments of American poet Ezra Pound's very last Cantos. The performance of Sombre features baritone Will Liverman, who starred in the title role in the Metropolitan Opera's acclaimed presentation of Anthony Davis's X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, and recently received another Grammy Award nomination for his 2024 album Show Me The Way.  

Pulitzer Prize winner Tyshawn Sorey's octet Sentimental Shards, performed by the Boulez-founded Ensemble Intercontemporain in 2019, can be seen as part of what Sorey has always acknowledged as a Boulezian influence. Meanwhile, Boulez's own Anthèmes II presents his recombinatorial mode of composing, in which all electronic sounds are generated in real time during the performance from the sounds of the violin.

The final work on the program takes the experiments of Anthèmes II a step further, showcasing the latest breakthroughs in responsive music-performance technology with the world premiere of Pliages, hommage à Pierre Boulez. Conceived by the head of the Music Representation Research Group at IRCAM, Gérard Assayag, ICE percussionist/electronics-engineer Levy Lorenzo, and International Contemporary Ensemble, the work incorporates the advancements of Somax2, an artificial intelligence application created at IRCAM in the REACH research project (reach.ircam.fr) that can co-create real-time improvisations with live musicians, either autonomously or steered by a human musician. Trained via an engagement with Boulez's works, this premiere is an homage to the creator of the institute where this research was born.

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Concert Information:

International Contemporary Ensemble presents Boulez Rebooted
Thursday, January 30, 2025 at 7:30 p.m.
Zankel Hall Center Stage at Carnegie Hall | 881 7th Ave | New York, NY 10019
Tickets: $50
Link: https://iceorg.org/events/2024/boulez-rebooted 

Program:

Kaija Saariaho - Sombre (2012)
      for bass flute, baritone, harp, percussion, and bass
Philippe Manoury - Hypothèse du Sextuor (2011)
      for flute, clarinet, piano, violin, cello, percussion
Tyshawn Sorey - Sentimental Shards (2014)
      for string quartet, two vibraphones, glockenspiel, and piano
Pierre Boulez - Anthèmes II (1997)
      for violin and electronics
Pliages, hommage à Pierre Boulez (2025) *World Premiere
      for ensemble and Somax2 AI electronics
      Concept: Gérard Assayag, Levy Lorenzo, International Contemporary Ensemble

Artists:

Will Liverman, voice
Isabel Lepanto Gleicher, flute
Alice Teyssier, voice & flute
Emmalie Tello, clarinet
Gabriela Diaz, violin
Josh Modney, violin
Wendy Richman, viola
Kivie Cahn-Lipman, cello
Erika Dohi, piano
Nuiko Wadden, harp
Randy Zigler, bass
Nathan Davis, percussion
Ross Karre, percussion
Levy Lorenzo, Somax2 interactive AI and percussion
Marco Fiorini and Levy Lorenzo, computer music design

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About 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 in “a mission worth following” (I Care If You Listen). 

Co-founded in 2001 by flutist and MacArthur “genius” Fellow Claire Chase, the Ensemble has premiered over 1,000 works and is the recipient of the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, as well as Musical America's Ensemble of the Year Award. Past artistic leadership includes co-founder Claire Chase and Ensemble members Joshua Rubin, Rebekah Heller, and Ross Karre. Notable presenting partners have included Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, TIME:SPANS Festival, Roulette, and Miller Theatre. The Ensemble has given performances at Warsaw Autumn, Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, Cité de la Musique (Paris), Park Avenue Armory, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ojai Music Festival, and Big Ears Festival as well as in venues such as the Dutch National Opera, Carnegie Hall, and Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Through trailblazing initiatives such as the Call for ____ Commission Program and Ensemble Evolution (in partnership with The New School's College of Performing Arts), the Ensemble has had a major impact on the contemporary performance ecosystem in New York City, nationally, and internationally, by supporting the creativity of their composer-collaborators, as well as presenting workshops and performances for hundreds of student composers. Many of the Ensemble's composer-collaborators have developed highly influential careers, such as Du Yun, who won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for the opera Angel's Bone, which the Ensemble developed and premiered, and MacArthur Fellows Tyshawn Sorey and Courtney Bryan. 

The Ensemble's Digitice platform provides high-quality video documentation for artist-collaborators, as well as public access to an archive of composers' workshops and performances. In addition, the Ensemble continues to build space for dialogue on equity, and has facilitated New Music Virtual Town Hall meetings for peer organizations and individual musicians to share resources, processes, and initiatives around equity and inclusion.

Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the Ensemble. Read more at www.iceorg.org 

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, 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.