International Contemporary Ensemble Performs New Works by Mazz Swift and Murat Çolak at Roulette on April 5

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PR Contact: Leah Rankin | Morahan Arts and Media
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International Contemporary Ensemble Performs
New Works by Mazz Swift and Murat Çolak
at Roulette on April 5

World Premiere of MEMORY THREE: Wrestling Waters by Mazz Swift
and NYC Premiere of LAV (Death is Not Final) by Murat Çolak

Additional Works by Akiko Yamane, Brittany J. Green,
Tyshawn Sorey, Yaz Lancaster, and Aliya Ultan

www.iceorg.org

New York, NY (March 28, 2023) — International Contemporary Ensemble presents two new commissions: a world premiere of MEMORY THREE: Wrestling Waters by Mazz Swift and the NYC premiere of Murat Çolak’s LAV (Death is Not Final), on Wednesday, April 5, 2023 at 8:00 p.m. at Roulette. The program also features works by Akiko Yamane, Brittany J. Green, Tyshawn Sorey, Yaz Lancaster, and the NYC Premiere of a film by Aliya Ultan.

Murat Çolak describes LAV (Death is Not Final) as a form of requiem: a mass written in a nomadic language for the memories, the feelings, the people, and the places that left us. As lava is in constant flux – a flux that destroys and reforms – LAV (Death is Not Final) laments what’s gone and celebrates what’s yet to come. International Contemporary Ensemble gave the world premiere performance of LAV (Death is Not Final) at Sonic Matter Festival in Zurich, Switzerland in December 2021. The concert at Roulette presents an updated version for its NYC premiere with Çolak performing electronics alongside members of the Ensemble.

Mazz Swift performs vocals and violin with members of the Ensemble – Alice Teyssier, voice & flute; Peter Evans, trumpet; Cory Smythe, piano – on their new work, MEMORY THREE: Wrestling Waters, commissioned by the Ensemble as part of the “Call for ____” commission program.

The piece is presented alongside five exciting recent pieces. Akiko Yamane’s ambiguous garnet colored fragments, for flute, violin, and piano, is a closely personal piece that relates to feelings of emotional movements such as attachment, destruction, and disappearance. Brittany J. Green’s Thread and Pull, scored for bassoon, violin, viola, cello, and piano, uses text from Ghazal 1419 by Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi to help unpack the struggle of how to find joy and community despite the hostility of our reality. Tyshawn Sorey’s For Harold Budd, deploys alto flute, piano, and vibraphone to find commonality and connection between himself and composer Harold Budd in a kind of music that is about people, resonating emotionally and spiritually with listeners. Yaz Lancaster’s Among Verticals, for alto saxophone solo, was inspired by Frantisek Kupka's painting Mme Kupka among Verticals (1910-1911), which Lancaster visited several times while living in Prague. The NYC Premiere of Aliya Ultan’s film Residuum features International Contemporary Ensemble cellist Katinka Kleijn. The work engages the relation between the environmental and the personal–how “the plastic built a nest inside our organs and a summit in our oceans and a city in our conscience.”

Concert Information:

New Works by Mazz Swift and Murat Çolak
International Contemporary Ensemble
Wednesday, April 5, 2023 at 8:00 p.m.
Roulette | 509 Atlantic Avenue | Brooklyn, NY 11217
Tickets: $25 advance | $30 doors | $20 Student/Senior (w/ ID, Senior 65 )
Link: https://roulette.org/event/international-contemporary-ensemble-new-works-by-mazz-swift-and-murat-colak/

A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing. The livestream is available to view here.

Program to Include:
Akiko Yamane: ambiguous garnet colored fragments
Brittany J. Green: Thread and Pull
Tyshawn Sorey: For Harold Budd
Mazz Swift: MEMORY THREE: Wrestling Waters (World Premiere, an Ensemble commission)
Yaz Lancaster: Among Verticals (2018)
Aliya Ultan: Residuum – film screening (NYC Premiere)
Murat Çolak: LAV (Death is Not Final) (NYC Premiere, an Ensemble commission)

Murat Çolak’s LAV (Death is Not Final) was commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble with lead support from the Jerome Foundation and premiered in 2021.

Mazz Swift’s MEMORY THREE: Wrestling Waters was commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble with lead support from the Jerome Foundation.

Performers:
Isabel Lepanto Gleicher, flute
Alice Teyssier, flute/voice
Erin Rogers, saxophone
Peter Evans, trumpet
Sara Schoenbeck, bassoon
Nathan Davis, percussion
Josh Modney, violin
Mazz Swift, violin/voice
Kyle Armbrust, viola
Katinka Kleijn, cello
Murat Çolak, electronics
Cory Smythe, piano
Vicky Chow, piano

About Murat Çolak
A native of Asia Minor, Murat Çolak is a composer, producer, and audio engineer based in New York City. He writes what he calls “Dark World Music” - a dystopian sound-world that finds home in the spirituality and poise of Turkish art music, experimentalism of modern concert music, and hazy, hypnotic coils of dub techno and trance.

Murat has collaborated extensively with some of contemporary music's most prominent exponents, artists like Ensemble Dal Niente, International Contemporary Ensemble, Wet Ink, Distractfold, Vertixe Sonora, Ensemble Surplus, Meitar Ensemble, and Scenatet. His work has been presented and supported by the BBC Radio 3, New Music USA, the Yaddo Corporation, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Akademie Schloss Solitude, ISCM World New Music Days, MATA Festival, Frequency Series, and Sonic Matter among others.

Besides composing, Murat operates GERYON Sound - a boutique music production studio that serves a global clientele with a focus on bringing cutting-edge production visions into new and experimental music. He also runs GERYON Label, a progressive electronic music imprint whose roster hosts composers, programmers, and audio researchers with a deep passion for electronic dance music.

Murat received a DMA in composition from Boston University, and he holds an MA in music from Istanbul Technical. He’s taught composition and production at New England Conservatory, Montclair State University, Kaufman Music Center, and the New York Philharmonic. He is a regular visiting lecturer at Simon Fraser University School of Contemporary Arts, and has given talks and masterclasses at Harvard University, UC Berkeley, Columbia University, Pomona College, University of Baltimore, Kent State University, and others.

About Mazz Swift
Critically acclaimed as one of America’s most talented and versatile performers today, Violin/Vox/Freestyle Composition artist Mazz Swift has engaged audiences all over the world with the signature weaving of song, melody and improvisation that they call MazzMuse. As a singer, composer and Juilliard-trained violinist who plays electronic and acoustic instruments, Mazz has performed and recorded with a diverse accumulation of artists including The Silkroad Ensemble, William Parker, Butch Morris, Jason Lindner, James “Blood” Ulmer, Vernon Reid, Valerie June, Whitney Houston, DJ Logic, Kanye West, D’Angelo. Mx. Swift is a 2021 United States Artist and 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, currently working on a series of compositions that involve conducted improvisation, and that are centered around protest, spirituals, and the Ghanaian concept of “Sankofa”: looking back to learn how to move forward.

About Akiko Yamane
Born in Osaka in 1982, Akiko Yamane studied composition at Kyoto City University of Arts. Influenced by materials, space, pop cultures, subcultures, games, and digital expression, Yamane transforms them into sounds with physical reality. Yamane is currently working on themes such as consumer society, pop, oppression, and kawaii. Yamane’s expressional core is “pop toxicity” which is one of the symbols of Japanese society in the 80s and 90s, and has been created by mass production, mass consumption, peer pressure and human desire. Yamane is also working on curating and creating places where people can listen deeply and share their own individual, small senses that are unique to each of us.

About Brittany J. Green
Brittany J. Green is a North Carolina-based composer, creative, and educator. Her music facilitates intimate musical spaces that ignite visceral responses at the intersection of sound, video, movement, and text. Recent works engage sonification and black feminist theory as tools for sonic world-building, exploring the construction, displacement, and rupture of systems. Her artistic practice includes spoken and electronic performance, interdisciplinary collaboration, experiential projects, and acoustic and electroacoustic chamber and large ensemble works. Her music has been featured at NYC Electronic Music Festival, WoCo Fest, and Experimental Sound Studio. Her collaborators include the International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Transient Canvas, Castle of our Skins, Emory University Symphony Orchestra, and Wachovia Winds. Brittany holds awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP Foundation, and New Music USA. She is a doctoral candidate at Duke University, pursuing a PhD in music composition as a Dean’s Graduate Fellow.

About Tyshawn Sorey
Newark-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey is celebrated for his incomparable virtuosity, effortless mastery and memorization of highly complex scores, and an extraordinary ability to blend composition and improvisation in his work. He has performed nationally and internationally with his own ensembles, as well as with artists such as John Zorn, Vijay Iyer, Muhal Richard Abrams, George Lewis, and Jason Moran, among many others. Soreyholds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Columbia University, and was named a 2017 MacArthur fellow and a 2018 United States Artists Fellow. He joined the composition faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in the Fall of 2020.

About Yaz Lancaster
Yaz Lancaster (they/them) is a Black transdisciplinary artist. They are most interested in practices aligned with relational aesthetics and the everyday; fragments and collage; and liberatory politics. Yaz performs as a violinist, vocalist and steel-pannist in a wide variety of settings; and their work is presented in many mediums and collaborative projects. Their ongoing independent studies navigate politics/poetry of horror, Marxist theory, and digital (sub)cultures. Yaz has had the opportunity and privilege to create with artists/organizations like A Far Cry, BAKUDI SCREAM, Beth Morrison Projects, ContaQt (with Evan Ziporyn), Contemporaneous, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Miss Grit, National Sawdust, Opera Philadelphia, and Skiffle Steel Orchestra. With guitarist-producer Andrew Noseworthy, they perform in post-genre duo laydøwn. They are the arts editor of Peach Mag and live in Lenapehoking (NYC) with their little dog Nori.

About Aliya Ultan
Aliya Ultan is a composer-improviser, cellist-vocalist, and video artist from Brooklyn, NY based in Brooklyn, NY. Growing up homeless with her mother and sister, Aliya entered music as a means of escape and emergence from severe poverty. As music and the cello continue to serve Aliya as a vehicle for change, her approach to the instrument and composition continues to evolve resulting in works that defy genre. Aliya’s recent works include the film RESIDUUM for Cello and Trash, featuring International Contemporary Ensemble cellist Katinka Kleijn, as well as a performance piece titled DOWN involving the destruction and burial of a 1920’s German cello - calling into question the many connotations the instrument bears such as class, tradition, expectation, and access.

About 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.

The International Contemporary Ensemble’s performances and commissioning activities during the 2022-23 concert season are made possible by the generous support of many individuals as well as the Mellon Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Aaron Copland Fund for Music Inc., MAP Fund, Mid Atlantic Arts, Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, The Cheswatyr Foundation, Amphion Foundation, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, New Music USA’s Organizational Development Fund, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, BMI Foundation, as well as public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council for the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, the Illinois Arts Council Agency, and the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) from the U.S. Small Business Administration. The International Contemporary Ensemble was the Ensemble in Residence of the Nokia Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology from 2018-2021. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the International Contemporary Ensemble.

Photo at top of release by Nisha Sondhe (Swift) and Zeynep Özkanca (Çolak).

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