ICE – International Contemporary Ensemble
Performing works by: Ashley Fure / Chaya Czernowin / Luigi Nono
Mivos Quartet:
Helmut Lachenmann, String Quartet No. 3 “GRIDO” (2001)
Scott Wollschleger, String Quartet No. 2 “White Wall” (2014)
Festival Pass $50 for all three nights!
Festival pass includes admission for one + one free drink ticket to each night. Drink tickets will be hard copy and available at the box office when purchaser picks up ticket.
Darmstadt Institute New York: 70 Year Anniversary Celebration
After 70 years of new music from the International Summer Course for New Music at Darmstadt, Germany, New York based performers and ensembles come together to celebrate a legacy of radical innovation. Founded in 1946, the Darmstadt Summer Course emerged as one of the most critical epicenters for international contemporary music. In the 70 years since the festival’s beginnings, many of the twentieth century’s most influential composers and performers have premiered major works and engaged in fierce debates about the future of music.
Faculty and students at Darmstadt have included Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Olivier Messiaen, John Cage, Morton Feldman, György Ligeti, David Tudor, Luciano Berio, Helmut Lachenmann, and Brian Ferneyhough.
Festival highlights include the New York premiere of Matthias Spahlinger’s “Extension,” Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Mikrophonie,” John Cage’s “Concert for Piano and Orchestra,” new works by Ashley Fure and Darmstadt faculty member Jennifer Walshe, and a rare performance of Helmut Lachenmann’s “Pression” by Arditti Quartet cellist Lucas Fels.
Panel will begin at 7PM.
Panelists:
Thomas Schäfer, Director of Summer Courses at the Darmstadt Institute
Josh Rubin, Co-Artistic Director, International Contemporary Ensemble
Josh Modney, Violinist, Mivos Quartet, Wet Ink Ensemble
Martin Iddon, Author, New Music at Darmstadt
Chaya Czernowin, Composer
Ashley Fure, Composer
The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), described by the New York Times as “one of the most accomplished and adventurous groups in new music,” is dedicated to reshaping the way music is created and experienced. With a modular makeup of 35 leading instrumentalists, performing in forces ranging from solos to large ensembles, ICE functions as performer, presenter, and educator, advancing the music of our time by developing innovative new works and new strategies for audience engagement. ICE redefines concert music as it brings together new work and new listeners in the 21st century.
Since its founding in 2001, ICE has premiered over 500 compositions––the majority of these new works by emerging composers––in venues spanning from alternative spaces to concert halls around the world. The ensemble has received the American Music Center’s Trailblazer Award for its contributions to the field, the ASCAP/Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming, and was most recently named Musical America Worldwide’s Ensemble of the Year in 2013. From 2008 to 2013 ICE was Ensemble-in-Residence at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. ICE musicians serve as Artists-in-Residence at the Mostly Mozart Festival of Lincoln Center, curating and performing chamber music programs that juxtapose new and old music. In 2014 ICE began a partnership with the Illinois Humanities Council, the Hideout in Chicago, and the Abrons Art Center in New York to support the OpenICE initiative.
ICE has released acclaimed albums on the Nonesuch, Kairos, Bridge, Naxos, Tzadik, New Focus, New Amsterdam and Mode labels. Recent and upcoming highlights include headline performances at the Lincoln Center Festival (New York), Aspekte (Austria), Acht Brücken Music for Cologne (Germany), Festival de Música de Morelia (Mexico), Teatro Amazonas (Brazil), and performances with the Nagoya Philharmonic and Seattle Symphony. ICE has worked closely with conductors Ludovic Morlot, Matthias Pintscher, John Adams and Susanna Mälkki. Since 2012, conductor and percussion soloist Steven Schick has served as ICE’s Artist-in-Residence. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for ICE.
In 2011, with lead support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ICE created the ICElab program to place teams of ICE musicians in close collaboration with emerging composers to develop works that push the boundaries of musical exploration. ICElab projects have been featured in more than one hundred performances from 2011 to 2014, and are documented online through ICE’s blog, and DigitICE, its online library of performance videos. In 2014, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation renewed its leadership support to launch the OpenICE initiative, which brings the full scope of ICE’s programming and educational activities for free to broader audiences around the world.
ICE’s commitment to build a diverse, engaged audience for the music of our time inspired The Listening Room, an educational initiative for public schools without in-house arts curricula. Using team-based composition and graphic notation, ICE musicians lead students in the creation of new musical works, nurturing collaborative creative skills and building an appreciation for musical experimentation.
Read more at iceorg.org
The Mivos Quartet, “one of America’s most daring and ferocious new-music ensembles” (The Chicago Reader), is devoted to performing the works of contemporary composers, presenting new music to diverse audiences. Since the quartet’s beginnings in 2008 they have performed and closely collaborated with an ever-expanding group of international composers who represent multiple aesthetics of contemporary classical composition. Commissioning and premiering new music for string quartet is essential to the quartet’s mission; Mivos has performed works by emerging and established composers including Alex Mincek, Helmut Lachenmann, Anna Clyne, Wolfgang Rihm, Samson Young, Luke DuBois, Philip Glass, Huang Ruo, Felipe Lara, Sam Pluta, Tristan Perich and Kirsten Broberg. They have appeared at venues including The Guggenheim Museum, Kennedy Center, Zankel Hall, MoMA, The Stone, Issue Project Room, and Roulette, and have appeared on concert series including Wien Modern (Vienna, Austria), Darmstadt Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (Darmstadt, Germany), Asphalt Festival (Düsseldorf, Germany), Concerti Aperitivo (Udine, Italy), HellHOT! New Music Festival (Hong Kong), Shanghai New Music Week (Shanghai, China), Edgefest (Ann Arbor, MI), and Aldeburgh Music (UK). Mivos is invested in commissioning and premiering new music for string quartet, particularly in a context of close collaboration with composers over extended time-periods. In the current 2013-14 season, Mivos has collaborated on new works with Sam Pluta (Lucerne Festival Commission), Dan Blake (Jerome Commission), Mark Barden (Wien Modern Festival Commission), Scott Wollschleger, and Patrick Higgins (ZS), and in early 2014 will develop new work with Richard Carrick (Fromm Commission), Eric Wubbels (CMA commission), Kate Soper, and poet/musician Saul Williams.
In addition to their international performing activities, Mivos is active in education, and has conducted workshops at CUNY Graduate Center, Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music, Royal Northern College of Music (UK), Shanghai Conservatory (China), University Malaya (Malaysia), Yong Siew Toh Conservatory (Singapore), the Hong Kong Art Center, and MIAM University in Istanbul (Turkey). The quartet also runs the annual Mivos/Kanter String Quartet Composition Prize, established to support the work of emerging and mid-career composers and to encourage continued interest in new compositions for string quartet. The winning composer, selected from over one hundred and fifty applicants, receives a performance of their work in New York City on the Mivos Quartet concert season and a cash prize. In 2013 Mivos initiated a second competition for composers of Chinese descent, called the I-Creation Prize.
Beyond expanding the string quartet repertoire, Mivos is also committed to working with guest artists, exploring multi-media projects involving live video and electronics, creating original compositions and arrangements for the quartet, and performing improvised music. This has led to collaborations with artists such as Dan Blake, Ned Rothenberg, Chris Speed, Timucin Sahin, Saul Williams, and Nate Wooley.
The members of Mivos are: violinists Olivia De Prato and Joshua Modney, violist Victor Lowrie, and cellist Mariel Roberts, each of whom are recognized individually as extraordinary voices in contemporary music, and perform frequently with leading new music ensembles including Ensemble Signal, Victoire, and Wet Ink. They are all graduates of the Master’s in Contemporary Performance degree program at the Manhattan School of Music.
