International Contemporary Ensemble Presents SIRENS AND SILENCES by Fay Victor and the World Premiere of biome ii by Kate Gentile

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PR Contact: Katy Salomon | Morahan Arts and Media
katy@morahanartsandmedia.com | 863.660.2214

International Contemporary Ensemble Presents
SIRENS AND SILENCES by Fay Victor and the
World Premiere of biome ii by Kate Gentile

January 21, 2022 at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn

Presented by NYC Winter Jazzfest,
International Contemporary Ensemble, and Roulette Intermedium

www.iceorg.org

New York, NY (December 15, 2021) — On Friday, January 21, 2022 at 8:00PM, the International Contemporary Ensemble presents Fay Victor’s SIRENS AND SILENCES, which will be the debut performance of Victor’s composed work in a concert with the Ensemble after joining as a new, permanent Ensemble member in the summer of 2021, plus the world premiere of Kate Gentile’s biome ii. The performance will take place at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn.

Fay Victor’s SIRENS AND SILENCES (2020) was commissioned by the Jazz Coalition and is a “memory document” composition created to encapsulate “the moments when NYC was the epicenter of the Coronavirus pandemic and the sonic experience of living through that,” according to Victor. Of hunkering down and staying home during the pandemic, “The quiet was deafening, punctuated for days only by the sound of sirens. I started recording those sirens. I recorded as many variations of sirens I heard—police, fire, ambulances. Later on, I transcribed these recordings and those tones became the basis for SIRENS AND SILENCES.” The piece will feature Patrick Holmes (clarinet), Kalia Vandever (trombone), Mazz Swift (violin), and Marika Hughes (cello).

biome ii (2021), Kate Gentile’s 13-movement composition for septet, was commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble. It consists of musical abstractions that twist and connect in “dream logic”-like ways, as if representing aspects of unfamiliar but interconnected systems, such as the balance of alien ecologies on a distant moon orbiting a gas giant. The septet orchestration allows for the full expansion of harmonic and rhythmic textures. The piece may assume a semi-modular structure in performance, using any number of movements in many possible orders. This performance of biome ii will feature Isabel Lepanto Gleicher (flute, piccolo), Jennifer Curtis (violin), Joshua Rubin (clarinet, bass clarinet), Rebekah Heller (bassoon), Matt Mitchell (piano), Ross Karre (vibraphone, percussion), and Kate Gentile (drumset).

In the spring of 2020, Gentile began her work with the International Contemporary Ensemble via their open call process to develop commissions. The music was composed with the parameters of the pandemic in mind, which meant focusing primarily on making a recording, and a live performance later on, if possible. The Ensemble sought to support Gentile’s creative vision by executing two of her goals: First, that the musicians could come out of pandemic lockdown (having been vaccinated) to record the work together in Oktaven Audio with Ryan Streber, and second, that the work would have a live performance as soon as it was safe to do so. The recording of the complete version of biome ii was completed on April 17, 2021 and will be released in 2022. The live performance and world premiere of biome ii will be at this concert on January 21, 2022.

The January 21, 2022 performance is co-presented by the International Contemporary Ensemble, Roulette Intermedium and NYC Winter Jazzfest, which celebrates music as a living entity, wherein history collides with the future in every note. Winter Jazzfest is the annual New York home to the exciting and forward-thinking contemporary jazz music being made today. The 2022 Winter Jazzfest takes place from January 13 to 22, 2022.

Event Information
New Works by Kate Gentile and Fay Victor
Friday, January 21, 2022 at 8:00PM
Roulette Intermedium | 509 Atlantic Ave | Brooklyn, NY 11217
Tickets: $20
Link: https://www.iceorg.org/events/roulette-jan21
 
FAY VICTOR: SIRENS AND SILENCES (2020)
     International Contemporary Ensemble
     Patrick Holmes, clarinet
     Kalia Vandever, trombone
     Mazz Swift, violin
     Marika Hughes, cello
 
KATE GENTILE: biome ii (2021) [World Premiere]
     International Contemporary Ensemble
     Isabel Lepanto Gleicher, flute
     Joshua Rubin, clarinet
     Rebekah Heller, bassoon
     Ross Karre, percussion
     Kate Gentile, drumset
     Matt Mitchell, piano
     Jennifer Curtis, violin

About the 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.

About Fay Victor
Fay Victor is a sound artist who 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 and 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 and 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. www.fayvictor.com.

About Kate Gentile
Kate Gentile is a Brooklyn-based drummer and composer. As a leader, Kate released Mannequins (Skirl Records) in 2017 with Jeremy Viner, Matt Mitchell, and Adam Hopkins. Her current band, Find Letter X, features Mitchell, Viner, and Kim Cass on bass.

Snark Horse, a band in which Kate co-leads and shares compositional duties with pianist Matt Mitchell, released a 6-CD box set on Pi Recordings in July 2021 featuring Kim Cass, Ben Gerstein, Jon Irabagon, Davy Lazar, Mat Maneri, Ava Mendoza, Matt Nelson, and Brandon Seabrook. Kate also co-leads Secret People, the cryptic jazz/noise rock trio with guitarist Dustin Carlson and saxophonist Nathaniel Morgan, with an album to be released in 2022. Kate has composed for and recorded with International Contemporary Ensemble. She has also been commissioned by Adult Swim. Kate also plays in Matt Mitchell’s projects Phalanx Ambassadors (Pi Recordings 2019) and A Pouting Grimace (Pi Recordings 2017), Dustin Carlson’s septet Air Ceremony (Out Of Your Head Records 2018), and Will Mason’s Happy Place. Kate has also worked with Michaël Attias, Tim Berne, Anthony Braxton, Cloud Becomes Your Hand, Steve Coleman, Dave Douglas, Marty Ehrlich, Miles Okazaki, God Is My Co-Pilot, Helado Negro, Chris Speed, Chris Tordini, Anna Webber, and John Zorn. https://kategentile.com.

About Roulette
Founded in 1978 by four artists in a TriBeCa loft in NYC, Roulette is an internationally recognized performing arts venue and presenter of experimental music, dance, and intermedia featuring some of today's most prolific artists and their extraordinary emerging counterparts. Roulette presents 120 annual performances alongside an additional 150 community/rental events, serving up to 70,000 annual visitors in its 12,000-square-foot venue in Downtown Brooklyn. In addition to its robust live programming, Roulette presents a monthly podcast, weekly and monthly radio shows, and weekly TV segments on Manhattan and Brooklyn public access. Its mission is to support artists creating new and adventurous art in all disciplines by providing them with a venue and resources to realize their creative visions, and to build an audience interested in the evolution of experimental art. Visit roulette.org.

About Winter Jazzfest
“Winter Jazzfest illustrates just why the City is aptly known as the Jazz capital of the world.” (Vanity Fair)
 
Since its founding in 2005, Winter Jazzfest has cemented a reputation as a hotbed of cultural discovery, presenting new and exciting sounds and scenes throughout New York.  
 
Praised by New York Times, The New Yorker, NPR and others, the festival continues to grow as a dynamic rate, from its original one-day single-location program, to a 2020 itinerary that spanned 21 stages over eleven nights, in Downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn, featuring over 700 artists, and more than 170 groups. In 2015, the festival was voted “#1 Jazz Festival in North America” by JazzTimes magazine, and has become a pivotal destination for any arts leaders and cultural cognoscenti who visit the city early in the year.
 
The music marathon that takes place during the festival’s Friday and Saturday nights has, in particular, become recognized as a crucial, unique New York nightlife offering, giving audiences full access to all participating venues from early evening, deep into the wee wee hours. Winter Jazzfest is an unparalleled experience for educated consumers of jazz, experimental sound and global creative impulses. In 2020, that meant welcoming 17,000 deeply engaged audience members. Due to the challenges faced by the pandemic the 2021 festival will offer continuity through conversations, programming, and other virtual programming in January 2021 and beyond.
 
Winter Jazzfest celebrates the music as a living entity, wherein history collides with the future in every note.  Creative improvisation in the digital age continues to stimulate thought and emotion of its listeners, embracing innovation, defying instrumental boundaries and the old cliches of “What is Jazz?”
 
Winter Jazzfest is the annual New York home to the exciting and forward-thinking contemporary jazz music being made today. NYC’s largest Jazz festival attracts a unique, deeply engaged, discerning audience, a diverse range of cultural enthusiasts and music fans from across North America and from over 20 countries.  The festival also plays host to attendees of the annual Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP), who attend Winter Jazzfest in order to discover new talents. www.winterjazzfest.com.

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*Photo at top of release: Fay Victor by Kyra Kverno (left); Kate Gentile by TJ Huff (right)

The International Contemporary Ensemble’s performances and commissioning activities during the 2021-22 concert season are made possible by the generous support of our board of directors and many individuals as well as The Andrew W. 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 Foundation, Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, Amphion Foundation, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, The Casement Fund, 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.