Library of Congress and Portland Ovations Co-Present the International Contemporary Ensemble in World Premieres by Suzanne Farrin and Ashley Fure, Live on YouTube May 28

Featuring Live, Interactive Discussions with Farrin, Fure, and ICE Musicians, Plus Newly Released Documentary Footage About Suzanne Farrin

www.iceorg.org

New York, NY (May 14, 2020) — Library of Congress and Portland Ovations co-present “America’s foremost new-music group” (Alex Ross), the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), in an interactive digital concert—Aural Explorations: Farrin, Fure, and Messiaen—on Thursday, May 28, 2020 at 7:00 p.m. EDT featuring the world premieres of Suzanne Farrin’s Nacht (co-commissioned by the Carolyn Royall Just Fund in the Library of Congress and ICE) and Ashley Fure’s interior listening protocol 1, paired with Olivier Messiaen’s “Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus” for ondes Martenot, and Suzanne Farrin’s Polvere et Ombra.

The stream will also include a “lobby” experience, before and after the performance, where audiences can tune in to live discussions between Farrin, Fure, and members of ICE. Glimpses into the creation of Suzanne Farrin’s Nacht will be shared in a screening of a short documentary. Viewers around the world can tune in to view and participate in the digital event via YouTube Live and are invited to continue conversations with artists after the performance via Zoom.

The program takes the audience through a virtual-immersive experience, focusing on notions of perception and listening. Suzanne Farrin’s Nacht, created in collaboration with ICE through remote collaborative systems, unfolds in a dreamy atmosphere featuring the ondes Martenot (an early electronic cousin of the theremin), harp, percussion, bass, and voice. Set to texts by Rumi and Hafiz in translation by Cyrus Atabay, the work explores language, translation, and identity. In writing the piece, Suzanne thought about the question, “What do we experience differently by seeing writers like Rumi and Hafiz through the filter of the German language?”

“This is a listening score. To perform it, please find two mason jars or two large glasses,” is how Ashley Fure’s interior listening protocol 1 begins. Created specifically for and in this time of social distancing, the piece is a full-body listening experience, only made possible by audience members participating from their homes. As Fure leads a slowly evolving physical choreography, the jars produce a magically immersive soundscape in the privacy of each listeners’ own ears.

Also on the program is Suzanne Farrin’s Polvere et ombra (2008). The title and the form of the work are derived from Petrarch with Sonnet No. 23, “an impassioned declamation to a night sky,” providing the syllabic rhythmical grid for the piece. “Polvere et ombra magnifies the physical relationship of the player to the instrument,” explains Suzanne. “The arms must move to their fullest range of motion, the fingers grab into the strings and the polite beauty of the harp is replaced by raw action.”

The human voice is evoked through the tones of the ondes Martenot, especially in the work of Olivier Messiaen. In 1941 while Messiaen was prisoner of war during World War II, he composed one of his greatest pieces, Quatour pour la fin du temps (The Quartet for the End of Time). The opening of the work as well as the source for the fifth movement, Louange à l'Eternité de Jésus, is from Messiaen’s 1937 Fêtes des Belles Eaux (Festival of the Beautiful Waters), written for six ondes Martenot to accompany the majestic fountains along the Seine for the International Exposition for Art and Technology in Paris. One of the few pieces Messiaen took from his life outside of captivity was this moment for ondes Martenot. In this program, we will hear a re-translation: the version for cello and piano performed on ondes Martenot and piano.

As Nokia Bell Labs’ E.A.T Ensemble-in-Residence, ICE is uniquely positioned to assemble contemporary music's most creative and resourceful minds to establish field-leading best practices for remote collaboration through a new initiative, Re.Co Lab. By creating a system of custom-calibrated hardware and software toolkits, composers can discover new sounds with instrumentalists/vocalists from around the world. 23 new works will be created with this system. A major component of this initiative is to continue compensating artists during this time when they cannot meet in close physical proximity. By sharing toolkits for remote collaboration, artistic agency is optimized and keeps the music community connected. Dozens of composers, performers, and technologists are joining forces to develop this new system during COVID-19.

Program Information
Aural Explorations: Farrin, Fure, and Messiaen
Thursday, May 28, 2020 at 7:00 p.m.
More Information: https://www.iceorg.org/events/may28livestream
RSVP Link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/aural-explorations-farrin-fure-and-messiaen-tickets-105147813942

Performers:
Suzanne Farrin, ondes Martenot
Alice Teyssier, voice
Ross Karre, percussion
Randall Zigler, bass
Nuiko Wadden, harp
Jacob Greenberg, piano
Ryan Streber, sound engineer

Program:
Suzanne Farrin: Polvere et Ombra (2008)
Suzanne Farrin: Nacht [World Premiere, co-commissioned by the Carolyn Royall Just Fund in the Library of Congress and ICE] 
Ashley Fure: interior listening protocol 1 [World Premiere]
Olivier Messiaen: “Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus” from Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1941)

About Suzanne Farrin
Suzanne Farrin is a composer who explores the interior worlds of instruments and the visceral potentialities of sound. Her music has been performed by some of the great musicians of today on stages across Europe and North and South America.

Earlier works have concentrated on establishing an intensity and personal language through careful study of solo instruments along with the interpretive personalities that come with them. Those works include pieces for solo strings (corpo di terra, for cello; Time is a Cage for violin and uscirmi di braccia, for viola and piano or bass drum). Though they have now been played by many interpreters, they were expressly written for people close to Suzanne (Julia Lichten, cello; Cal Wiersma, violin and Antoine Tamestit and Markus Hadulla, viola and piano). That intimacy is a productive space for her: it is as if exploring the very personal habits, sounds and physicality of each brings her closer to a more universal expressivity. This search for transcendence has more recently been applied to vocal music. In dolce la morte, Suzanne felt she was expressing the inherent conflicts, contractions and corporal strife that exists in the great master’s love poetry. The piece is her own, but the “mask” of Michelangelo provided a productive mouthpiece from which she could project her own sound world.

In addition to composing, Suzanne is a performer of the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument created by the engineer Maurice Martenot in France in the 1920s as a response to the simultaneous destruction and technological advances of WWI. She is the Frayda B. Lindemann Professor of Music and Chair at Hunter College and The CUNY Graduate Center, where she teaches composition, and holds a doctorate from Yale University. Corpo di Terra (New Focus Recordings) is her debut album and Dolce la morte (Tundra), her second release, came out in November 2018. Her work may also be heard on VAI, Signum Classics and Albany Records labels. She was the 2017 Frederic A. Juilliard/Walter Damrosch Rome Prize winner in Composition and she is currently a Guggenheim Fellow in Music Composition.

About Ashley Fure
Ashley Fure (b.1982) is an American composer and sound artist. Called “raw, elemental,” and “richly satisfying” by The New York Times, her work explores the kinetic source of sound, bringing focus to the muscular act of music making and the chaotic behaviors of raw acoustic matter.

She holds a PhD in Music Composition from Harvard University and joined the Dartmouth College Music Department as Assistant Professor in 2015. A finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Fure also won a 2018 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Prize, a 2017 Rome Prize in Music Composition, a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant for Artists, a 2015 Siemens Foundation Commission Grant, the 2014 Kranichsteiner Composition Prize from Darmstadt, the 2014 Busoni Prize from the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, a 2014 Mellon Post-doctoral Fellowship from Columbia University, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship to France, a 2013 Impuls International Composition Prize, a 2012 Darmstadt Stipendienpreis, a 2012 Staubach Honorarium, a 2011 Jezek Prize, and a 2011 10-month residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude.

Her work has been commissioned by major ensembles throughout Europe and the United States including The New York Philharmonic, The Los Angeles Philharmonic, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, the Diotima Quartet, International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and Dal Niente. Notable recent projects include The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects, an immersive intermedia opera called “staggeringly original” and “the most purely visceral music-theatre outing of the year” by Alex Ross in The New Yorker; and Bound to the Bow, for Orchestra and Electronics, named “boldly individual” by The New York Times and “the most arresting of the world premieres” at the 2016 New York Phil Biennial in The New Yorker.

About the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE)
The International Contemporary Ensemble is an artist collective that is transforming the way music is created and experienced. As performer, curator, and educator, the Ensemble explores how new music intersects with communities across the world. The Ensemble’s 36 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.

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 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. The International Contemporary Ensemble 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.

OpenICE, made possible with lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, offers free concerts and interactive, educational programming wherever the Ensemble performs. As the Ensemble in Residence of the Nokia Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology, the International Contemporary Ensemble advances music technology and digital communications as an empowering tool for artists from all backgrounds. Curricular activities include a residency and coursework at the New School College of Performing Arts, 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.

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