In celebration of the centennial of Polish independence, the International Contemporary Ensemble partners with the Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne and the Polish Cultural Institute New York to present 100 for 100: Musical Decades of Freedom. Steven Schick will lead performances of works by five contemporary Polish composers: Agata Zubel, Paweł Mykietyn, Lidia Zielinska, Tadeusz Wielecki, and Aleksander Nowak.
100 for 100: Music Decades of Freedom aims to present 100 works by Polish Composers—one work for each year of the last century—to a global audience. The celebratory culmination of the whole project will be 11 concerts in Poland and 11 concerts worldwide. This evening’s presentation features works by Paweł Mykietyn, Tadeusz Wielecki, Lidia Zielinska, Aleksander Nowak, and Agata Zubel performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble led by Steven Schick.
Performers:
International Contemporary Ensemble
Program:
Agata Zubel: Double Battery
Tadeusz Wielecki: Liczne odnogi rozgalezionych splotow
Aleksandr Nowak: Quantemporette
Pawel Mykietyn: Klave for harpsichord and ensemble
Lidia Zielinska: Siedem wysp Conrada
The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) is an artist collective that is transforming the way music is created and experienced. As performer, curator, and educator, ICE explores how new music intersects with communities across the world. 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 ICE’s programming since its founding in 2001, and the group’s recordings and digital platforms highlight the many voices that weave music’s present.
A recipient of the American Music Center’s Trailblazer Award and the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, ICE was also named the 2014 Musical America Ensemble of the Year. The group currently serves as artists-in-residence at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts’ Mostly Mozart Festival, and previously led a five-year residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. ICE was featured at the Ojai Music Festival from 2015 to 2017, and at recent festivals abroad such as gmem-CNCM-marseille and Vértice at Cultura UNAM, Mexico City. Other performance stages have included the Park Avenue Armory, The Stone, ice floes at Greenland’s Diskotek Sessions, and boats on the Amazon River.
Percussionist, conductor, and author Steven Schick was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family. For the past thirty years he has championed contemporary percussion music as a performer and teacher, by commissioning and premiering more than one hundred new works for percussion. He was the percussionist of the Bang on a Can All-Stars of New York City from 1992-2002, and from 2000 to 2004 served as Artistic Director of the Centre International de Percussion de Genève in Geneva, Switzerland. Schick is founder and Artistic Director of the percussion group, red fish blue fish. In 2007 he was named Music Director and conductor of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus. Schick founded and is currently artistic director of “Roots and Rhizomes,” an annual summer course on contemporary percussion music held at the Banff Centre for the Arts. In 2011, he was named the Artistic Director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Recent publications include a book on solo percussion music, “The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams, a 3 CD set of the complete percussion music of Iannis Xenakis (Mode) and a 2012 DVD release of the early percussion music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Steven Schick is Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego. In 2012, he became the first ever Artist in Residence with the International Contemporary Ensemble.
100 for 100: Musical Decades of Freedom is co-organized by PWM Edition to celebrate the centenary of Poland regaining independence and is held under the National Patronage of Andrzej Duda, the President of the Republic of Poland and financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland as part of the Multi-Annual Program “Niepodległa” 2017-2021.
This performance is a co-production between Roulette and the International Contemporary Ensemble
