International Contemporary Ensemble & Roulette to Co-Present New Works By Kate Gentile, Fay Victor & Peter Evans

On Thursday, May 26, 2022 at 8:00PM at Roulette Intermedium, the International Contemporary Ensemble will present Fay Victor's SIRENS AND SILENCES - marking the debut performance of Victor's work in a concert with the Ensemble after joining as a new, permanent Ensemble member in the summer of 2021 - and the world premiere of Kate Gentile's biome ii. Trumpet player and composer Peter Evans presents new compositions for a quartet of multi-instrumentalist virtuosi, Ars Sublitor, featuring Evans with Mazz Swift, Alice Teyssier, and Ryan Muncy.

Fay Victor's SIRENS AND SILENCES (2020) was commissioned by the Jazz Coalition and is a "memory document" composition created to encapsulate "the moments when NYC was the epicenter of the Coronavirus pandemic and the sonic experience of living through that," according to Victor. Of hunkering down and staying home during the pandemic, "The quiet was deafening, punctuated for days only by the sound of sirens. I started recording those sirens. I recorded as many variations of sirens as I heard-police, fire, ambulances. Later on, I transcribed these recordings and those tones became the basis for SIRENS AND SILENCES." The piece will feature Patrick Holmes (clarinet), Kalia Vandever (trombone), Mazz Swift (violin), and Marika Hughes (cello).

biome ii (2021), Kate Gentile's 13-movement composition for septet, was commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble. It consists of musical abstractions that twist and connect in "dream logic"-like ways, as if representing aspects of unfamiliar but interconnected systems, such as the balance of alien ecologies on a distant moon orbiting a gas giant. The septet orchestration allows for the full expansion of harmonic and rhythmic textures. The piece may assume a semi-modular structure in performance, using any number of movements in many possible orders. This performance of biome ii will feature Isabel Lepanto Gleicher (flute, piccolo), Josh Modney (violin), Joshua Rubin (clarinet, bass clarinet), Rebekah Heller (bassoon), Matt Mitchell (piano), Ross Karre (vibraphone, percussion), and Kate Gentile (drumset).

In the spring of 2020, Gentile began her work with the International Contemporary Ensemble via their open call process to develop commissions. The music was composed with the parameters of the pandemic in mind, which meant focusing primarily on making a recording, and a live performance later on, if possible. The Ensemble sought to support Gentile's creative vision by executing two of her goals: First, that the musicians could come out of pandemic lockdown (having been vaccinated) to record the work together in Oktaven Audio with Ryan Streber, and second, that the work would have a live performance as soon as that was safe to undertake. The recording of the complete version of biome ii was completed on April 17, 2021 and will be released in 2022. The live performance and world premiere of biome ii will be at this concert on May 26, 2022.

Trumpet player, composer, and recent Guggenheim awardee Peter Evans presents new compositions for this unusual quartet of multi-instrumentalist virtuosi, Ars Sublitor. Stretching back to his week of concerts at The Stone in 2019, as well as his work with Mazz Swift in his Ensemble (2016-18), this quartet has explored a unique and comprehensive approach to chamber music, involving notation, improvisation, text pieces, historically informed styles and noise.

The performance - postponed from January 21, 2022 - is co-presented by the International Contemporary Ensemble and Roulette Intermedium which celebrates music as a living entity, wherein history collides with the future in every note.

Event Information

New Works by Kate Gentile, Fay Victor, and Peter Evans
Thursday, May 26, 2022 at 8:00PM
Roulette Intermedium | 509 Atlantic Ave | Brooklyn, NY 11217
Tickets: $20
Link: https://iceorg.org/events/roulette-may26

FAY VICTOR: SIRENS AND SILENCES (2020)
Patrick Holmes, clarinet
Kalia Vandever, trombone
Mazz Swift, violin
Marika Hughes, cello
Fay Victor, conductor

KATE GENTILE: biome ii (2021) [World Premiere]
International Contemporary Ensemble
Isabel Lepanto Gleicher, flute
Joshua Rubin, clarinet
Rebekah Heller, bassoon

Clara Warnaar, vibraphone
Kate Gentile, drumset
Matt Mitchell, piano
Josh Modney, violin

Peter Evans: New Works [World Premiere]
Ars Sublitor
Peter Evans, brass
Mazz Swift, violin, voice
Alice Tessyier, flutes, voice
Ryan Muncy, saxophones

About the Artists

Fay Victor is a sound artist who uses performance, improvisation, and composition to examine representations of modern life and blackness while honing a unique vision for the vocal role in jazz and improvised music. Victor has an "everything is everything" aesthetic, using the freedom in the moment to inform the appropriate musical response, viewing the vocal instrument as full of possibilities for sound exploration. The voice, a vocal conduit for direct messages in an improvising context. Victor embraces all of these ideas in real-time, aiming to push the vocal envelope to forge greater expression. On Victor's 11 critically acclaimed albums as a leader one can hear the through-line of this expansive expression including Victor's current release, WE'VE HAD ENOUGH on the ESP-Disk label is the 2nd outing from Victor's improvising quartet, SoundNoiseFUNK.

Victor's work has found light in media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Rolling Stone Magazine and The Huffington Post; Victor's performed with luminaries such as William Parker, Roswell Rudd, Dr. Randy Weston, Nicole Mitchell, Misha Mengelberg, Myra Melford, Archie Shepp, Marc Ribot & Tyshawn Sorey to name but a few; Performance highlights include The Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC), The Hammer Museum (LA), The Kolner Philharmonie (Germany), De Young Museum (SF), Symphony Space (NY), The Earshot Jazz Festival (Seattle), The Winter Jazz Festival (NYC) and the Bimhuis (Netherlands). As a composer, Victor has been awarded prizes such as the 2017 Herb Albert/Yaddo Fellow in Music Composition and a 2018 AIR in Composition for the Headlands Center for the Arts in the Marine Headlands in Northern California. As an educator, Victor is currently on the Faculty at the New School of Jazz & Contemporary Music, Rocnation School of Music, Sports and Entertainment (LIU), chairs the Advisory Board for the Jazz Leaders Fellowship via the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music a new initiative to fund and support black female and non-binary jazz artists. Fay continues to give talks, lectures and masterclasses on Jazz, Creative Improvisation, Political engagement through artistic expression and more at institutions around the world. www.fayvictor.com.

Kate Gentile is a Brooklyn-based drummer and composer. As a leader, Kate released Mannequins (Skirl Records) in 2017 with Jeremy Viner, Matt Mitchell, and Adam Hopkins. Her current band, Find Letter X, features Mitchell, Viner, and Kim Cass on bass.

Snark Horse, a band in which Kate co-leads and shares compositional duties with pianist Matt Mitchell, released a 6-CD box set on Pi Recordings in July 2021 featuring Kim Cass, Ben Gerstein, Jon Irabagon, Davy Lazar, Mat Maneri, Ava Mendoza, Matt Nelson, and Brandon Seabrook. Kate also co-leads Secret People, the cryptic jazz/noise rock trio with guitarist Dustin Carlson and saxophonist Nathaniel Morgan, with an album to be released in 2022. Kate has composed for and recorded with International Contemporary Ensemble. She has also been commissioned by Adult Swim. Kate also plays in Matt Mitchell's projects Phalanx Ambassadors (Pi Recordings 2019) and A Pouting Grimace (Pi Recordings 2017), Dustin Carlson's septet Air Ceremony (Out Of Your Head Records 2018), and Will Mason's Happy Place. Kate has also worked with Michaël Attias, Tim Berne, Anthony Braxton, Cloud Becomes Your Hand, Steve Coleman, Dave Douglas, Marty Ehrlich, Miles Okazaki, God Is My Co-Pilot, Helado Negro, Chris Speed, Chris Tordini, Anna Webber, and John Zorn. https://kategentile.com.

Peter Evans is a trumpet player and composer based in New York City since 2003. Evans is part of a broad, hybridized scene of musical experimentation and his work cuts across a wide range of modern musical practices and traditions. Peter is committed to the simultaneously self-determining and collaborative nature of musical improvisation as a compositional tool, and works with an ever-expanding group of musicians and composers in the creation of new music. His primary groups as a leader are the Peter Evans Ensemble (with Mazz Swift, Ron Stabinsky and Levy Lorenzo) and Being & Becoming (with Joel Ross, Nick Jozwiak and Savannah Harris). www.peterevanstrumpet.com.

Mazz Swift engages audiences worldwide with their signature weaving of improvisation and composition. They are a violinist, composer, conductor, and educator whose works include commissions by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the University of Delaware, the Canales Project, and the Blaffer Foundation. Mazz is a 2019 Jerome Hill Fellow and 2021 United States Artist Fellow, working on several projects, all of which are centered around protest songs, spirituals and the Ghanaian concept of 'Sankofa': looking back to learn how to move forward. www.mazzmuse.com.

Flutist and vocalist Alice Teyssier brings something new, something fresh, but also something uncommonly beautiful to her performances. She has appeared as a soloist with the San Diego Symphony, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Bach Collegium San Diego, Talea Ensemble, La Jolla Symphony, Ensemble Echappé, Cantata Profana, International Contemporary Ensemble and is regularly featured on Los Angeles' renowned Monday Evening Concerts series. Alice is a core member of the International Contemporary Ensemble and founding member of the interdisciplinary troupe The Atelier, and serves as Assistant Professor of Performance in the Music Department at New York University. www.aliceteyssier.com.

Ryan Muncy is saxophonist of the International Contemporary Ensemble, having been praised for his "amazing virtuosity" (The Chicago Tribune) and ability to "show off the instrument's malleability and freakish extended range as well as its delicacy and refinement" (The Chicago Reader). He is a recipient of the Kranichstein Music Prize awarded at the 46th Darmstadt Summer Courses, a Fulbright Fellowship in France, the Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists, and has participated in the creation of more than 250 new works for the saxophone, highlighted by deeply collaborative relationships with leading artist-creators including Ashley Fure, Tyshawn Sorey, Du Yun, Wang Lu, Marcos Balter, Wojtek Blecharz, and Matana Roberts. https://ryanmuncy.com/.

About the 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.

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.

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.

About Roulette
Founded in 1978 by four artists in a TriBeCa loft in NYC, Roulette is an internationally recognized performing arts venue and presenter of experimental music, dance, and intermedia featuring some of today's most prolific artists and their extraordinary emerging counterparts. Roulette presents 120 annual performances alongside an additional 150 community/rental events, serving up to 70,000 annual visitors in its 12,000-square-foot venue in Downtown Brooklyn. In addition to its robust live programming, Roulette presents a monthly podcast, weekly and monthly radio shows, and weekly TV segments on Manhattan and Brooklyn public access. Its mission is to support artists creating new and adventurous art in all disciplines by providing them with a venue and resources to realize their creative visions, and to build an audience interested in the evolution of experimental art. Visit roulette.org.

Photo credit: Kate Gentile by TJ Huff; Fay Victor by Kyra Kverno; Peter Evans by Reuben Radding

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