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 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 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.

Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lamprea is an architect of new sounds and expressions as a performer, recitalist, curator, and improviser, specializing in contemporary classical repertoire. Trained as an operatic coloratura, she uses her voice as a mechanism of avant-garde performance art, creating “maniacal shifts of vocal production and character… like an icepick through the skull” (Jason Eckardt). Stephanie has received awards from the Concert Artist Guild, St. Botolph Club Foundation, the John Cage Orgel Stiftung, the Puffin Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Stephanie has performed as a soloist at Roulette Intermedium (New York City), Constellation Chicago, Sound Scotland's 2021 soundfestival, National Sawdust (NYC), the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Casa da Música (Porto). She has collaborated with several leading new music ensembles and bands including Wavefield Ensemble, So Percussion, Red Note Ensemble, Talujon, Guerilla Opera, and Post Coal Prom Queen. In 2022, Stephanie released her debut solo album, Quaking Aspen, on New Focus Recordings. Featuring new works for voice and electronics by Jason Eckardt, Wang Lu, Kurt Rohde, Hannah Selin, George N. Gianopoulos, and James May, the album was hailed by PopMatters.com as "a bold artistic statement that’s exciting and innovative... a magical, intense, and deeply satisfying journey." A passionate educator and speaker, Stephanie has taught and performed in residency for universities across the United States and Europe including the University of California at Davis, Temple University, the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. She has presented her artistic research for the Wildflower Composers (USA), the European Platform for Artistic Research in Music (London), and the 2021 Shared Narratives Conference (Scotland), and she was a featured TEDx Speaker for TEDxWaltham: Going Places. http://www.stephanielamprea.com/

Fay Victor is a sound artist that 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 & 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 & 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, 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.

https://www.fayvictor.com/

Flutist Isabel Lepanto Gleicher is a soloist, chamber musician and educator. Enjoying an international career, Isabel performs throughout Europe, China, Japan, Canada and the United States. The New York Times has called her “excellent” and John Zorn writes “Isabel’s display of virtuosity and her beautiful attitude and stunning musicality inspired me”. Isabel is an artist member of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICEensemble), new music sinfonietta Ensemble Echappe, the Annapolis Chamber Music Festival, and hip-hop band ShoutHouse. She is a founding member of woodwind quintet SoundMind. Her project Song Sessions, alongside clarinetist Eric Umble, and composer Barry Sharp received a 2019 New Music USA grant. Isabel performs with ensembles such as wild Up, Talea Ensemble, the Argento New Music Project, Contemporaneous, Imani Winds and Friends of MATA Ensemble. As part of these and other groups, Isabel has had the opportunity to premiere works by Steve Reich, Missy Mazzoli, John Zorn, Beat Furrer, Augusta Read Thomas, and Dai Fujikura among others. She also performs at festivals such as Mostly Mozart, Big Ears, Opera Omaha’s One Festival, Sacrum Profanum Festival, MATA, Prototype Festival, Resonant Bodies, New Haven Arts and Ideas, Lake George Summer Music Festival and the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. Isabel has appeared on the Guggenheim Museum Works and Process Series, Music of the Americas Society Composer Portrait Series, Park Avenue Armory Martin Creed The Back Door exhibit, the Clark Institute of Art Celebration of Helen Frankenthaler and the American Academy of Arts and Letters annual event An Afternoon of Music and Art. 

As a soloist, Isabel has been called a “rising talent and stand out performer in the new music scene” by Miller Theatre. She was featured in a solo recital on Miller Theatre’s Pop Up series. Isabel has also collaborated with So Percussion on a performance of Lou Harrison’s Flute Concerto at the Kennedy Center and with the Aizuri Quartet on a portrait recording of music by composer Ilari Kaila.  Isabel won first prize at the Myrna Brown Young Artist Competition at the Texas Flute Festival in 2015 as well as placing second prize at both the South Carolina and Kentucky Flute Festival Young Artist Competitions in 2012. You can hear Isabel featured on several recordings ranging a variety of genres: composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Aequa, Augusta Read Thomas The Auditions, Missy Mazzoli’s Proving Up original cast album, Indie rock band San Fermin’s The Cormorant and Jackrabbit, and hip-hop band ShoutHouse’s CityScapes. In 2020 while in quarantine, Isabel presented a solo recital on the Recital Stream platform, as well as a solo set on ChamberQUEERantine’s virtual festival that featured projections by Paige Seber.  

Active as a teaching artist Isabel has worked with the Bridge Arts Ensemble in the Adirondacks  and the American Composers Orchestra at Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton High School. She held a one year position with New York Philharmonic Education as a teaching artist apprentice, teaching 3rd grade. Isabel has conducted flute and chamber music master classes, and workshops in experimental music at the University of Nebraska, SUNY Purchase, DePauw University, University of Massachusetts and at the Texas Flute Festival. She has also collaborated with many composition departments, performing young student composers’ pieces from the Third Street Music School Settlement, Face the Music, Luna Composition Lab, the Music Advancement Program at the Juilliard School and the Very Young Composers program at the New York Philharmonic. Isabel, alongside her colleagues in ICE, is guest faculty at the Walden School Music Camp. Isabel holds an MM in Contemporary Performance from the Manhattan School of Music, an MM from the Yale School of Music, and a BM from SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Music. Her primary teachers have included Tara Helen O’Connor, Ransom Wilson and Tanya Dusevic Witek. 

Isabel believes that classical music is an open ended canon and the commissioning of new work is crucial to the continued evolution of the art form. Isabel is a queer woman who has spent her entire life butting heads with the stereotypes and expectations of a female flute player, both in her appearance and musical aesthetic. She strives to create a home for artists who have been othered by the music community. By commissioning and collaborating with  female identifying artists and artists of color as well as celebrating the underrepresented history of POC artists in classical music, she hopes to be a part of changing the expectation of what a classical musician looks like. This representation is the next step in our continued evolution as musicians and members of a larger community. For more information please visit  isabellepantogleicher.com 

Praised for "superb" performances by The New York Times as well as his ability to "show off the instrument's malleability and freakish extended range as well as its delicacy and refinement" by The Chicago Reader, Ryan Muncy is a saxophonist who performs, commissions, and presents new music. His work emphasizes collaborative relationships with composers and artists of his generation and aims to reimagine the way listeners experience the saxophone through contemporary music. He is a recipient of the Claire Rosen and Samuel Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists as well as a Fulbright Fellowship and has participated in the creation of more than 100 new works for the instrument. His debut solo album Hot was released by New Focus Recordings in 2013 to critical acclaim, praised as "absorbing" (Alex Ross) and "one of the year's best albums" (Time Out New York). 

Before joining the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) as saxophonist and Grants Manager, Muncy was, from 2010 to 2014, the executive director of the Chicago-based new music collective Ensemble Dal Niente. Under his leadership, Dal Niente was named the first-ever ensemble recipient of the Kranichstein Music Prize, awarded at the 46th International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, Germany. Muncy is also a founding member of Anubis Quartet, a multi-faceted chamber group established in 2007 with the aim of reshaping the saxophone quartet genre. During that time, the quartet has commissioned more than 40 new works and remains one of few worldwide in which all four players perform regularly on the entire battery of saxophones. 

He performs frequently at international festivals and series, including Wien Modern, Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, Ecstatic Music Festival, MATA's Interval Series, Liquid Music at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra Center, Unruly Music, Festival Internacional Chihuahua, The Fromm Concert Series at Harvard, SALT New Music Festival, MusicArte Panamá, World Saxophone Congresses in Bangkok and Montreal, and the Ear Heart Music Series in New York as well as classical radio stations WQXR (New York) and WFMT (Chicago). Muncy performs regularly with the Talea Ensemble and the Grant Park Symphony, and has held numerous residencies and conducted arts management workshops at universities and cultural institutions across North America and abroad. 

In 2012, Muncy received the Doctor of Music degree from Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music, where he studied with Frederick L. Hemke. A devoted educator and pedagogue, Muncy previously served on Northern Illinois University's School of Music faculty as an instructor of saxophone and music business.

www.ryannmuncy.com

Josh Modney is a NYC-based violinist, violist, and improviser dedicated to performing contemporary music, collaborating closely with composers on new work over extended time periods, and exploring adventurous interpretations of the standard repertoire. A “superb violinist” and “new-music luminary” hailed for “brash, energetic performances” (The New York Times), Josh has performed as a soloist and chamber musician at festivals and concert series across four continents, presented hundreds of premieres, and worked closely with major figures including Mathias Spahlinger, Helmut Lachenmann, George Lewis, Christian Wolff, and Peter Ablinger.

In addition to his membership in ICE, Josh is violinist and Executive Director of the Wet Ink Ensemble, a unique collection of composers, improvisers, and interpreters committed to making adventurous music, lauded for "dense, wild, yet artfully controlled" performances (The New York Times), "combining striking stylistic and aesthetic assurance with technical perfection" (Torsten Möller, Dissonanz). Josh performed internationally with the Mivos Quartet for eight years, a vital new-music string quartet that he co-founded in 2008.

Josh’s repertoire encompasses a wide range, from J.S Bach to seminal Late 20th Century works by Bernard Parmegiani, Luciano Berio and Kaija Saariaho, and new compositions by some of today’s most innovative and exciting composers. Deep collaboration with composers and the long-term development of performance practice for contemporary music is a focus of Josh’s activities, and he has developed new work with artists including Kate Soper, Alex Mincek, Eric Wubbels, Sam Pluta, Rick Burkhardt, Andrew Greenwald and Scott Wollschleger, among others. Josh’s interests include Just Intonation and psycho-acoustic phenomena, extended playing techniques, and performance with live electronics. As an improviser, Josh has appeared with performers including Nate Wooley, Sam Pluta, ZS, and Patrick Higgins.

An active recording artist, Josh’s credits include albums on Carrier Records, Deutsche Grammophon, hat[now]ART, Tzadik, Sacred Bones, and Ex Cathedra. He holds degrees from the Manhattan School of Music (M.M. in contemporary performance) and Ithaca College.

French-American pianist Julia Den Boer is a passionate advocate for contemporary music, praised for her “emotional power” (The New York Times) and “cleverly contrasted” (The Guardian) programming. Based in New York City, she is internationally recognized as a soloist and chamber musician and is an active commissioner of new works, committed to exploring and broadening her instrument’s boundaries through close collaboration with composers. Julia is joining acclaimed piano percussion quartet Yarn/Wire as a guest artist for their 21/22 season, she is also a member of Longleash and Wavefield Ensemble.

Clara Warnaar is a percussionist and drummer based in New York City. Clara's work as a performer focuses primarily on the music of living composers; and this work has led to numerous premieres, recordings and collaborations. A composer and producer herself, Clara plays drums in the post-rock band Infinity Shred. This intersection of heavier music, drums, and experimental or contemporary music, is a place where Clara can often be found. 

Nicholas DeMaison is an American conductor and composer based in New York City. He is Co-Director of Wavefield. Passionately devoted to the music being made in our own time, Nicholas has led dozens of premiere performances of new works for orchestra, opera, choir and various mixed ensembles with new technologies, and appears on albums released by New Focus, Mode, New World, Bright Shiny Things, and Con d'or Records. In recent seasons he has lead the premiere productions of Pauline Oliveros’ The Nubian Word for Flowers (which he assembled posthumously for performance - ICE/Roulette), Nathan Davis’ Hagoromo (ICE/AOP/BAM Next Wave), Mikael Karlsson’s The Echo Drift (ICE/AOP/Prototype Festival), Mojiao Wang’s Encounter (Beijing Modern Music Festival), James Ilgenfritz’s The Ticket That Exploded, Charles Fussell’s The Astronaut’s Tale, Victor Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis (Montclair State Opera Productions), and of newly commissioned orchestral works by Zosha DiCastri, Katherine Balch, Miya Masaoka, Zach Layton, Erica Ball, Eli Greenhoe and others. The US premiere of his arrangement of Milhaud’s La Mère Coupable by OnSite Opera was lauded as “a natural fit”. He has been a regular collaborator with International Contemporary Ensemle, and previously worked with The Composers Conference, American Opera Projects, Giants are Small, Ensemble Sospeso, Talea Ensemble, and Opera Cabal among others.

Currently the Director of Orchestral Studies at the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University, he is conductor of the MSU Symphony Orchestra and MSU Opera. In his former role as Conductor of the Rensselaer Orchestra, he had the opportunity to collaborate extensively with the world-renowned Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, NY to realize a variety of new hybrid works for ensembles, voices, and new technologies.

Also an active composer, Nicholas’s music has been described as “crossing the threshold from being abstractly academic to emotionally provocative,” (Time Out NY) and “faster and blippier…smooth-versus-screechy…both ominous and playful at the same time.” (Lucid Culture). His work spans from chamber works with live electronic audio and video components to works for chorus and orchestra. Ensembles that have performed DeMaison’s music include The New York Philharmonic, Giants Are Small, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, NOISEBridge, andPlay, Del Sol String Quartet, ensemble dal niente, UCSD New Music Ensemble, Florilegium Chamber Choir and Opera Cabal, and has been featured at June in Buffalo. He has received grants from New Music USA, Fractured Atlas, American Composers Forum, Melodious Accord, and the Harry and Alice Eiler Foundation. He was twice been offered residencies at High Concept Laboratories (Chicago, IL). He regularly works on the music staff for broadcast productions with the New York Philharmonic, MediciTV, Live from Lincoln Center, and most recently the Dallas Symphony.

Nicholas is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory and UC San Diego, where he studied composition with Chaya Czernowin and Philippe Manoury. He has studied conducting with Franck Ollu, Lucas Vis, Peter Eötvös, Pierre Boulez, Gustav Meier, Carl St. Clair, Vance George, Alice Parker, and Lewis Nielson.

Ross Karre (b. 1983 in Battle Creek, MI) is a per­cus­sionist and tem­poral artist based in New York City. His pri­mary focus is on com­bining media, including clas­sical per­cus­sion per­for­mance, elec­tronics, the­ater, moving image, visual art, and lighting design. Ross is a per­cus­sionist and the executive producer for the Inter­na­tional Con­tem­po­rary Ensemble where he was the artistic director from 2016-2022.

Nick Bentz (b. 1994 - Charleston, SC) is a composer, violinist, and multimedia artist whose work is drawn to remote fringes and recesses of experience. In his work he seeks to render intimately personal spaces imbued with an individual sense of storytelling and narrative. Finding inspiration in historical materials, Nick's work often explores the destructive relationship between sound artifacts and time. His art centers around the blurring, juxtaposition, and amalgamation of stylistic idioms into singular sonic statements.

​Nick's music has been performed by leading artists including yMusic, HOCKET, flutist Marina Piccinini, Charleston Symphony, Suzhou Symphony Orchestra, New Opera West, LIGAMENT, NYsoundCircuit, Jacksonville Symphony, TEMPO Ensemble, Occasional Symphony, and Symphony Number One, and featured at Copland House's CULTIVATE, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art - Shanghai, Chengdu Museum, Bowdoin Music Festival, FSU Festival of New Music, Ethan Cohen Galleries, New Music on the Point, Sounding Now Festival, and Piccolo Spoleto Festival. Current projects include works for Wigmore Hall, pianist Han Chen, /kor/ productions, Thornton EDGE, and multimedia collaborations with visual artist Sicheng Wang and filmmaker Ian Kent. His work has received top honors from the Tribeca New Music Festival, the American Prize, the iSING International Young Artists Festival, Boston New Music Initiative, Hartford Opera Theater, and American Composer’s Orchestra’s EarShot Readings. Nick was previously a Composition Teaching Artist Fellow at Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and was composer-in-residence at Symphony Number One.

As a violinist, Nick has soloed with the Charleston Symphony, Thornton EDGE, and the Pacific Philharmonic. He has also performed with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. An avid interpreter of new music, Nick has commissioned and premiered over thirty pieces ranging from chamber and solo pieces to concerti and multimedia works.

Nick is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Brown University, pursuing a doctorate in Music and Multimedia Composition. He received a master’s degree in composition from the University of Southern California. Nick also earned a master's in violin from the Peabody Conservatory, receiving bachelor's degrees in violin and composition from Peabody under the tutelage of Herbert Greenberg and Kevin Puts. Nick's mentors include Wang Lu, Eric Nathan, Anthony Cheung, Nina Young, Donald Crockett, Ted Hearne, Andrew Norman, Felipe Lara, and Yiorgos Vassilandonakis; his violin teachers include Lina Bahn, Yuriy Bekker, Espen Lilleslåtten, and Diana Cohen.

nickbentz.com

Inga Chinilina is a composer and pianist based in Providence, Rhode Island. Ensembles that have performed Inga C’s music include: The Empyrean, Jack Quartet, Neave Trio, Lydian String Quartet, Loadbang, Longleash, Splice, Russia State Academic Russian folk ensemble, Moscow Contemporary Music (MCME) Ensemble, Sound Icon, and Talea. Inga’s work has been performed at  Zeitströme Tage für aktuelle Musik (Darmstadt, Germany), Taproot New Music Festival (UC Davis CA), The International Festival of Contemporary Music Moscow Autumn (Moscow, Russia) Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Creative Arts (Waltham, USA), and Open Space International Composers Laboratory (Moscow, Russia). In 2019, Inga was a resident composer at the Documentary Choreography Laboratory in Moscow, Russia. Inga also participated in Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, IRCAM's CataRT Workshop, and Arts, Letters, and Numbers’ program. Inga is currently pursuing her PhD in “Music and Multimedia Composition” at Brown University. She holds a BM in Composition and Performance from Berklee College of Music and an MFA in Theory and Composition from Brandeis University.

chinilina.com

Uzbekistan-born Tatar composer Adeliia (Adele) Faizullina (b.1988) is a vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and Tatar Quray player. As a composer, she explores cutting-edge vocal colors and paints delicate and vibrant atmospheres inspired by the music and poetry of Tatar folklore. The Washington Post has praised her compositions as "vast and varied, encompassing memory and imagination." 

Her recent commissions include works for Jennifer Koh, the Tesla Quartet, Johnny Gandelsman, and the Metropolis Ensemble. Her works have also been performed by cellist Ashley Bathgate, the Del Sol Quartet, and Duo Cortona. She herself performed as soprano soloist with the Seattle Symphony in her own work, Tatar Folk Tales, after she won the Seattle Symphony Celebrate Asia Competition in 2019. Her music has been performed at the Next Festival of Emerging Artists, Chamber Music Society of the Carolinas, and National Sawdust. 

In 2021, she was featured in the The Washington Post, “21 for ’21: Composers and Performers Who Sound Like Tomorrow.” In 2020, she was a finalist for the All Russia Young Composers Competition Dedicated to the 66th International Rostrum of Composers, in Moscow, Russia. From 2018 to 2020, Adeliia was a Cynthia Jackson Ford Fellowship recipient at the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music. In 2018, she won first prize in the Radio Orpheus Young Composers Competition in Moscow, and was a finalist for International Rostrum of Composers, in Budapest. 

Adeliia received her BM in Voice in Kazan, Russia, and BM in Music Composition in Gnessins Russian Academy of Music. She has an MM in Music Composition from the University of Texas at Austin, studying with Yevgeniy Sharlat, and in 2019 started her DMA at the University of Southern California, studying with Nina C. Young. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Music & Multimedia Composition at Brown University.

adeliiacomposer.com

George Lewis is an internationally renowned composer, musicologist, computer-installation artist, and trombonist, a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin. Other honors include the Doris Duke Artist Award (2019), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), and a MacArthur Fellowship (2002). His music is performed worldwide, and he is widely regarded as a pioneer in the creation of improvising computer programs. He is the author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press) and co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies. Lewis holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, New College of Florida, and Harvard University.

Jake Sokolov-Gonzalez is a musician and educator who thinks vibration is a structuring force of life. His current projects include real-time spectral audio processing, live cinema, performance lecture, no-input mixing, histories of communication and extraction, electro-acoustic improvisation, disability aesthetics, and Latin-inflected jungle drum and bass.

jakesokolovgonzalez.com/

Amber Vistein (b. 1984) is a composer and sound artist who delves deeply into the poetics of timbre, texture, and gesture. Praised for her conceptual “acuity” (Big, Red, and Shiny) and “blooming phrases” (New Music Box), they draw upon research in affect theory, phenomenology, aesthetics, sonic materialism, historical musicology, and psychoacoustics to compose music filled with storied textural details, shifting temporal effects, and affectively charged atmospheres. Their style is defined by the juxtaposition of a visceral gestural vocabulary alongside evocative textural constructions; cross-cutting registers from the autonomic to the atmospheric. This highly tactile approach to composition works to unearth invisible events, networks, and histories by introducing expressive imperfections—dysfluencies—into the musical sentence. These sites of rupture (a suspended trill, stutter, or broken-record loop) expose the submerged complexities of sound, the labor of its production, and its fragility.

Amber has recently had the pleasure of composing for the Talea Ensemble (2020), Chartreuse (2019), Ensemble Dal Niente (2018), the International Contemporary Ensemble (2017), Russel Greenberg of Yarn/Wire (2016), and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (2016). She created site-specific sound installations for the deCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA (2016) and collaborated with video artist Justice to present the multi-media work Landscapes at the Peabody Essex Museum (2017). They were an artist-in-residence with ArtsIceland in Ísafjörður, Iceland (2016). And participated in NYU's Summer Film Scoring Workshop (2017), EMPAC's Spatial Audio Workshop (2017), and soundSCAPE composer-performer exchange in Cesena, Italy (2019).

From 2017-19 Amber was a Composition Fellow with the American Opera Project’s Composers and the Voice program. They were commissioned by the Washington National Opera to compose a 20-minute chamber opera in collaboration with librettist Rebecca Hart as part of the American Opera Initiative program. This work, entitled The Barrens, premiered at the Kennedy Center in April 2021. Man Will Not Outlive the Weather—Amber’s first chamber opera for mezzo-soprano, ensemble and electronics—premiered in 2017. Their full-length opera film, entitled Dark Exhalation, for four voices, ensemble, and electronics premiered in Spring 2022. Amber is the recipient of a 2022 Discovery Grant from Opera America

Amber holds a B.A. in Music & Philosophy from New College of Florida and an MFA in Sonic Arts from Massachusetts College of Art. She is currently a doctoral student in Music and Multimedia Composition at Brown University, where her scholarly research focuses on sonic materiality, embodiment, temporality, vocality, affect theory, and autonomic poetics.

ambervistein.com

Reorientations is a reflection on memory, community, and care. Each performer has brought with them a personal audio recording of a moment they wish to remember. In turn, each performer invites the audience into their memory as listeners before inviting musicians to sonically cohabitate in it with them. Reorientations asks, how do memories change when they are revisited? What is the transformative potential of sharing experiences in community? How can we best attend to others whose experiences are necessarily opaque?

Text

Motto der Svendborger Gedichte [Motto to the Svendborg Poems]
by Bertolt Brech (1939) 

In den finsteren Zeiten  
Wird da auch gesungen werden? 
Da wird auch gesungen werden 
Von den finsteren Zeiten. 

Translation:
In the sinister times 
Will there also be singing? 
There also will be singing 
From/about the sinister times.

filigree is a piece that explores the margins of sound, attempting to show musical gestures under varying degrees of magnification and compression. Sonic materials are at turns hyper-compacted and expanded to a grandiose volatility as the piece searches for a vantage point of relative stability.

Lyrics by Tatar poet Musa Jalil (1906-1944) translated to English

A lot of young and handsome guests with presents: gold and pearl
Over the seas, from all over the world are hurrying to the girl
Who waits the only one!
They bestrew her way with diamonds and stones
They competed for being her choice
But the silence was heard in response
“Who is yours the only one?”
Once the poet came to her
His song is love, his heart like gold
Embracing flame and light of world
It was a miracle to her
He was the only one!

Icarus, just before retells the myth from Icarus’ perspective; detailing the youth’s hesitancy to don an unfamiliar costume (wings) to accomplish an unthinkable task (fly). Reflecting these circumstances, the piece is largely written in the Locrian mode (often characterized as ‘unsettled’ because of its diminished tonic triad) and is filled with flutters, false starts, and repeated moments of rehearsal that cut off abruptly. At the same time, it is the story of parent and child, a relationship of care—wherein each party is trying their best and hoping for a positive outcome. I wrote this piece reflecting on my own youthful experiences of routinely 'failing' at femininity and the uneasiness I felt when required to wear costumes that felt as foreign as Icarus’ wings.

Text

My father, 
my father shrouded me 
in wings 
crafted from the cast offs of
flighted things:

birds and bees,
wax and feathers.
Wax and feathers.

My trepidation was only half-hid
as he fastened them beneath my chin
with a half-Windsor.

Wax and feathers,
wax and feathers.

It takes effort 
to move in this costume!
It takes effort—
the wax is sticky.
The sun is hot.

It takes effort!

Wildly fluttering—in search of lift,
then, it clicks.

Dust clung to my ankles 
as I left the ground

on wings of 
wax and feathers,
wax and feathers!

The clouds had never looked
so close.
Nor the sea:
so clear.

It takes effort.
It takes effort.

Created for the Splitter-Orchester of Berlin, an “un-conducted, leaderless” ensemble of twenty-four musicians, Creative Construction SetTM (CCSTM) is a mobile, situational-form, open-instrumentation work for an ensemble of eight or more musical performers who use a set of instruction cards to create and explore sonic environments. CCSTM enacts a sonic counterpublic in which musical decisions are produced via social relations, and discontinuity, support, and struggle become audible pathways to larger lessons for societies seeking to remain open to change, but also to justice. The title of the work pays homage to the “Creative Construction Company,” part of the experimental African American composer-performer collective, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.