International Contemporary Ensemble Announces 20th Anniversary Season In 2022

For 20 years, the International Contemporary Ensemble has been a home for experimental new music, the artists who make it, and the community that supports it. In celebration of its 20th anniversary, the Ensemble announces a season of performances and programs highlighting the artists who have shaped the past two decades, many of them skyrocketing to individual prominence, and those who will shape the third. Highlights of the season include new Ensemble members Matana Roberts and Fay Victor presenting their work at Miller Theatre and Roulette Intermedium respectively; Artist-in-Residence Vimbayi Kaziboni conducting a portrait concert of composer Felipe Lara; and a NYU Skirball presentation of two works by founding Ensemble member and Pulitzer Prize-winner Du Yun.

As the International Contemporary Ensemble enters its third decade, it re-commits to being a home for artists to develop their authentic practice with adventurous collaborators, realize their work at the highest level, and take part in the co-creation of a musical ecosystem that honors the diversity of human expression and experience. Other artists championed by the Ensemble over the last two decades include Rome Prize-winner Ash Fure, MacArthur Foundation Fellow Tyshawn Sorey, Nordic Council Music Prize-winner Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Rome Prize-winner Suzanne Farrin, MacArthur Foundation Fellow George E. Lewis, and many more.

Composer Marcos Balter, one of the Ensemble's first iceLAB-commissions in 2011 and Board Member, comments, "To act boldly requires courage. To exist boldly, however, requires much more than that. For two decades, the International Contemporary Ensemble has always chosen the uncharted and the unearthed not as destinations but as home. The trust and dedication of its musicians, and their advocacy towards new voices in contemporary music have changed the trajectories of so many artists around the globe, myself included."

Felipe Lara, composer and longtime collaborator, agrees, "I consider the International Contemporary Ensemble my musical family. I started working with [the Ensemble] sixteen years ago, in 2006. Our collaborations have been central to my musical journey over the years and remain as fertile as ever to this day. It is hard to imagine myself as an artist, as well as the new music community in New York, and the US as a whole, without [the Ensemble's] presence, their vision, commitment, courage, and excitement. Here's to the next twenty years of brilliance, innovation, and activism!"

Mixed media composer and sound experimentalist Matana Roberts adds, "The International Contemporary Ensemble operates in a manner that puts community, arts care, and mutual creative respect above all else. Their impact on me as an arts person has been somewhat vital and immense during such uncertain times. They move as an malleable organism that creates a creative interdependence that I have seen spread in so many hopeful directions, since my short time with them. I deeply admire their continued courage and fortitude."

In line with the Ensemble's commitment to intergenerational collaboration and opportunities for shared learning, the yearly Ensemble Evolution program, in partnership with The New School's College of Performing Arts (CoPA), will engage over 30 pre-professional artists in a tuition-free intensive. Now in its 6th year since its founding by Claire Chase and Steven Shick, Ensemble Evolution invites creative artists into a collaborative environment that fosters social consciousness and new modes of community-building through music, imagining pathways forward for the future of collective music making.

Beginning in March 2022, the Ensemble will also develop new work with the 8 composers of its "Call for ___'' commissioning program: Lesley Mok, Kevin Ramsay, Mazz Swift, Chris Ryan Williams, Sandra Kluge, Bonita Oliver, Cleo Reed, and Sylvain Souklaye. These workshops and world premieres, representing mostly first-time collaborations with the Ensemble, will take place in the spring and fall. Additionally, the Ensemble will work alongside graduate Columbia University composers - Dani Dobkin, Nina Fukuoka, Louis Goldford, Saad Haddad, Uri Kochavi, and Bethany Younge - resulting in six world premieres in April 2022.

The International Contemporary Ensemble, a longtime advocate of Brazilian-American composer Felipe Lara, performs two of his substantial recent works for a Miller Theatre Composer Portrait on Thursday, March 3, 2022 at 8:00pm. Ensemble Artist-in-Residence Vimbayi Kaziboni conducts. The program features Chambered Spirals (2020) and Metafagote (2015), a work for solo bassoon and six pre-recorded spatialized bassoons that results in the creation of an astonishing soundworld, developed with and performed by Ensemble bassoonist Rebekah Heller, who released a recording of Metafagote to critical acclaim in 2017.

The Ensemble returns to Miller Theatre for a Composer Portrait of American mixed media composer, sound experimentalist, and new Ensemble member Matana Roberts on Thursday, April 7, 2022 at 8:00pm. Roberts performs alongside the Ensemble, bass clarinet and pocket trumpeter Matt Lavelle, wordspeak artist Geng/King Vision Ultra, and percussionist Tomas Fujiwara for the world premiere commission of a new iteration of I call america: Sandy Speaks, a multimedia work for 13 improvising musicians written in reflection of the life and death of Sandra Bland.

At the heart of the 20th anniversary season is a revisiting of Du Yun's opera Zolle at NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts on Friday, April 29, 2022 and Saturday, April 30, 2022 at 7:30pm. The work, which centers around themes of belonging, migration, and identity, will be the inspiration for a series of community-engaged events featuring the artists of Zolle, as well as emerging diasporic artists such as artist and Ensemble Director of Individual Giving, Eddy Kwon. A Cockroach's Tarantella explores religion and belonging as the essential quest, as well as the existential dread that all sentient beings experience, cockroach or not. Scored for ensemble, electronics, and spoken word, with Du Yun as the narrator and Satomi Matsuzaki as Deerhoof, the two works together explore humankind's ubiquitous fascination with movement and alienation, amidst the hope of belonging. Du Yun's personal story - a founding member in 2001, a Pulitzer Prize-winner among many other awards and accolades, and now a leader on the board of directors and of her own initiatives - is one way the Ensemble's vision of artistic homebuilding has been realized and propelled by its members.

From May 4-6, 2022, the Ensemble performs concerts at Roulette Intermedium and National Sawdust as ensemble-in-residence of the 2022 MATA Festival, performing three concerts curated by MATA artist-in-residence, Darius Jones. 30 artists and collaborators will perform more than 20 works over the three days, including composers Michele Cheng, Fernanda Navarro, Nyokabi Kariũki, Laura Brackney, Shara Lunon, Nina Fukuoka, Christopher Williams, Hakan Ulus, Vicente Hansen, Cameron Graham, Jess Rowland, Naftali Schindler, Mengmeng Wang, June Young Will Kim, Christian Dimpker, Francisco del Pino, Shuyu Lin, John Aulich, Travis LaPlante, Piyawat Louilarpprasert, and Wajdi Abou Diab.

On Thursday, May 26, 2022 at 8:00pm, the International Contemporary Ensemble, NYC Winter Jazzfest, and Roulette Intermedium co-present Fay Victor's SIRENS AND SILENCES and the world premiere of Kate Gentile's biome ii at Roulette. 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. 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.

Looking ahead, the Ensemble's season culminates in a 20th Anniversary Winter Gala (2023, Date TBA) that will celebrate the community of musicians, staff, and supporters that have made the Ensemble a vital home for new music and adventurous artists for over two decades. The gala will also share the Ensemble's expanded vision for its third decade and beyond, highlighting the artists, programs, and values that will be at the core of this exciting period of the Ensemble's evolution.

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