International Contemporary Ensemble Featured in Two Composer Portraits Concerts at Miller Theatre

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International Contemporary Ensemble Featured in
Two Composer Portraits Concerts at Miller Theatre

Ensemble Performs World Premiere of Suzanne Farrin’s
Their Hearts are Columns on February 2; and
Retrospective of Composer Nicole Mitchell’s Work on March 30

www.iceorg.org

New York, NY (January 27, 2023) — International Contemporary Ensemble is featured in two concerts as part of the Composer Portraits series at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre this season. The first concert, on Thursday, February 2, 2023 at 8:00 p.m., features works by Rome Prize-winner and Guggenheim Fellow, Suzanne Farrin, including the world premiere of Their Hearts are Columns. Following this, on Thursday, March 30, 2023 at 8:00 p.m. the Ensemble joins award-winning composer and flute player, Nicole Mitchell, for a retrospective program of Mitchell’s works spanning from 2015 to 2021.

The Composer Portraits concert centering on the work of Suzanne Farrin highlights not only the composer’s exploration of the interior worlds of instruments in the music she writes, but also her musicality as an accomplished performer of the early electronic music instrument ondes Martenot. Farrin joins members of International Contemporary Ensemble on the ondes Martenot for the world premiere of her new work Their Hearts are Columns along with selections from dolce la morte, an opera based on the love poetry of Michelangelo.

Award-winning composer Nicole Mitchell is also featured as an instrumentalist playing the flute alongside International Contemporary Ensemble in a selection of her work from the past decade. As an acclaimed bandleader, noted educator, and the first woman president of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Mitchell’s work defies classification and celebrates contemporary African American culture. Vocalist Lisa E. Harris, who co-composed Whispering Flame with Mitchell, is also a featured performer on the program.

Concert Information:

Composer Portraits: Suzanne Farrin
International Contemporary Ensemble
Thursday, February 2, 2023 at 8:00 p.m.
Miller Theatre | 2960 Broadway (at 116th Street) | New York, NY 10027
Tickets: $10-$30
Link: https://iceorg.org/events/2023/2/2/composer-portrait-suzanne-farrin

Program to Include:
Suzanne Farrin - Their Hearts are Columns (2020) WORLD PREMIERE for soprano, harp, ondes Martenot, percussion, and double bass
Suzanne Farrin - dolce la morte: unico spirto, come serpe, veggio, l’onde della non vostra, rendete (2016) for countertenor and ensemble
Suzanne Farrin - Il Suono (2016) for harp and soprano
Suzanne Farrin - corpo di terra (2009) for cello
Suzanne Farrin - polvere et ombra (2008) for harp
Suzanne Farrin - Time is a Cage (2007) for violin

Artists
Soloists
     Alice Teyssier, soprano
     Eric Jurenas, countertenor
     Josh Modney, violin
     Nuiko Wadden, harp
     Clare Monfredo, cello
     Kemp Jernigan, oboe
Performers
     Suzanne Farrin, ondes Martenot
     Kemp Jernigan, oboe
     Rebekah Heller, bassoon
     Nathan Davis, percussion
     Kyle Armbrust, viola
     Randy Zigler, double bass

Composer Portraits: Nicole Mitchell
International Contemporary Ensemble
Thursday, March 30, 2023 at 8:00 p.m.
Miller Theatre | 2960 Broadway (at 116th Street) | New York, NY 10027
Tickets: $10-$30
Link: https://iceorg.org/events/2023/3/30/composer-portrait-nicole-mitchell

Program to Include:
Nicole Mitchell - Transitions Beyond (2021) for soprano, flute, violin, clarinet, and cello
Nicole Mitchell - Inescapable Spiral (2017, rev. 2020)
Nicole Mitchell - Whispering Flame (2017) co-composed by Nicole Mitchell and Lisa E. Harris
Nicole Mitchell - Procession Time (2017)
Nicole Mitchell - Building Stuff (2015)

Artists
International Contemporary Ensemble
Lisa E. Harris, voice
Nicole Mitchell, flute

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.

Her music has been featured at venues and festivals including The BBC Proms (with the JACK Quartet), The LA Phil (with So Percussion), The Gothenburg Art Biennial, Mostly Mozart, Matrix, Alpenklassik, Music in Würzburg, BAM NextWave, Theaterforum (Germany), Town Hall Seattle, Carnegie’s Weill Hall, Symphony Space, Wigmore Hall, Centro de Artes de la Universidad Nacional de San Martín (Argentina) and, in her home city of New York, Carnegie Hall, The Stone, Spectrum, Subculture, Miller Theater, Merkin Hall, Wavehill, Lincoln Center, the Park Avenue Armory, and Joe’s Pub, among many others.

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. Her life as an interpreter on the instrument has taken her to venues such as the Abrons Arts Center in NYC, Centro de Artes in Buenos Aires as well as television, where she was was featured in an episode directed by Roman Coppola on the Amazon series Mozart in the Jungle. She is featured as a performer in Chicuarotes, directed by Gael García Bernal, which is currently in theaters throughout Mexico and was premiered at Cannes, as well as the Iranian film Sade Ma’bar (Blockage) directed by Mohsen Gharaie, which won best film in the New Currents section of the Busan International Film Festival.

Suzanne is the Frayda B. Lindemann Professor of Music and Chair at Hunter College and The CUNY Graduate Center, where she teaches composition. She holds a doctorate in 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 Nicole Mitchell
Nicole M. Mitchell is an award-winning creative flutist, conceptualist, poet and composer. Having emerged from Chicago’s creative music community, she is the former first woman president of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a Doris Duke Artist and United States Artist. For over twenty years, Mitchell has utilized her art to create worlds that “bridge the familiar with the unknown,” with her Black Earth Ensemble. She also composes for contemporary ensembles of varied instrumentation and size (from solo to orchestra and big band) while incorporating improvisation and a wide aesthetic expression. As a creative flutist, she’s developed a unique improvisational language which has repeatedly awarded her “Top Flutist of the Year” by Downbeat Magazine Critics Poll and the Jazz Journalists Association from 2010-2022. As a composer, she has been commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Music NOW, the French Ministry of Culture, the Fromm Music Foundation, Chamber Music America, International Contemporary Ensemble, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the Newport Jazz Festival, the French American Jazz Exchange, the Chicago Jazz Festival, and the Chicago Sinfonietta. Much of Mitchell’s creative process is informed by literature and narrative, with a special interest in science fiction. Mitchell is a professor of music at the University of Virginia. Her first book, The Mandorla Letters was published in 2022 by Green Lantern and the University of Minnesota Press.

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 of Suzann Farrin by Luke Redmond; Photo of Nicole Mitchell by Kristi Sutton Elias

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