The International Contemporary Ensemble Performs Jennie C. Jones at The Met on October 5

For Immediate Release
Contact: Leah Rankin | Morahan Arts & Media
leah@morahanartsandmedia.com | 646-378-9386

The International Contemporary Ensemble Performs
Jennie C. Jones at The Met on October 5

The International Contemporary Ensemble Joins The Met’s 2025 Roof Garden
Commission Artist for a World Premiere Performance,
Plus a Discussion Between Jones and George Lewis

iceorg.org

September 11, 2025 (New York, NY) — The International Contemporary Ensemble kicks off its 23rd season, showcasing a collaboration with interdisciplinary artist Jennie C. Jones on Sunday, October 5, 2025 at 2:00 p.m. at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. While Jones has long created graphic scores as part of her visual practice, this marks the first time they will be interpreted through live performance. This concert explores the entanglement of visual art and sound, revealing how Jones’s minimalist works resonate when performed by musicians. Jones’s commission for The Met’s Roof Garden, Ensemble, is currently on view until Sunday, October 19, 2025. 

Jones and the Ensemble’s Artistic Director, composer and musicologist George Lewis, who has published articles on her graphic scores, will also discuss the score’s formal and sonic structure, which reframes Minimalism’s legacy and illuminates new intersections between music, abstraction, and experimentation.

“The works of Jennie C. Jones advance trenchant cultural, aesthetic, and social critiques,” George Lewis wrote in an article for Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. “Her aesthetically multivoiced corpus, which included audio collages, immersive sound installations, paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, evince a sharp engagement with histories and memories of sound and music.”

The Ensemble welcomes nine phenomenal musicians who were introduced into its collective during the 2024-2025 season. Continuing its commitment to evolution, growth, and the exchange of new perspectives and practices, the Ensemble proudly welcomes: Alexander Davis, bassoon; Erika Dohi, violin; Jonathan Finlayson, trumpet; Darius Jones, Erin Rogers, saxophone;  Nicolee Kuester, horn; Mariel Roberts Musa, cello; Emmalie Tello, clarinets; and Lizzie Burns, double bass. 

International Contemporary Ensemble features in another interdisciplinary collaboration on Thursday, November 6, 2025 at 8:00 p.m. and Saturday, November 8, 2025 at 8:00 p.m. as part of The Museum of Modern Art's major retrospective, Stephen Prina: A Lick and a Promise in which the Ensemble and Ensemble Either/Or bring to life the world premiere of American artist, musician and composer Stephen Prina's newest work, A Lick and A Promise. These concerts at MoMA are part of the first in-depth survey to focus on Prina’s performances, drawing out a central theme in his work: time, and the way it shifts cultural values. MoMA’s survey offers an opportunity to celebrate Prina’s innovative approach to appropriation—one uniquely focused on sound and music—and the rare warmth and intellectualism that mark him as a prescient and still-evolving artist. Both at the forefront of contemporary and experimental music over the past twenty years, the International Contemporary Ensemble and Ensemble Either/Or have enjoyed many successful collaborations in recent years, including presenting the work of Society of Black Composers co-founder Talib-Rasúl Hakím together with three MacArthur Fellows at the New York Public Library last season. 

Concert Information

The International Contemporary Ensemble Performs Jennie C. Jones
Sunday, October 5, 2025 at 2:00 p.m.
The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, The Metropolitan Museum of Art | 1000 Fifth Avenue | New York, NY 10028
Tickets: Starting at $35
Link: http://bit.ly/3I8Uryr 

Program:
Jennie C. Jones: Oxide Score 
Jennie C. Jones: Met Color Study 

Artists:
International Contemporary Ensemble
     Emmalie Tello, clarinet
     Mike Lormand, trombone
     Nuiko Wadden, harp
     Clara Warnaar, percussion
     Josh Modney, violin
     Kyle Armbrust, viola
     Brandon Lopez, bass

About the International Contemporary Ensemble
Described as “America’s foremost new-music group” (The New Yorker), the International Contemporary Ensemble is dedicated to supporting living composers through commissioning, developing, and premiering new works. Now in its third decade, the Ensemble has premiered over 1,000 works and plays a pivotal role in launching and shaping the careers of today’s most influential composers. Through its bold programming and innovative curation, the Ensemble continues to redefine the possibilities of contemporary music.

The International Contemporary Ensemble has brought its vision of a mosaic musical ecosystem to festivals and venues all over the world including Carnegie Hall, Maerzmusik/Berliner Festspiele, Warsaw Autumn, Miller Theatre Composer Portraits, Museum of Modern Art New York, Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, HEAR NOW Los Angeles, Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, NYU Skirball, Pioneer Works, Oberlin College, House of World Cultures, Ojai Music Festival, Peabody Conservatory, TIME:SPANS Festival, Big Ears Festival, Adelaide Festival, the Dutch National Opera, Cité de la Musique (Paris), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Walt Disney Concert Hall, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Japan Society.

Through trailblazing initiatives such as the Call for ____ Commission Program and Ensemble Evolution (in partnership with The New School’s College of Performing Arts), the Ensemble has had a major impact on the contemporary performance ecosystem in New York City, nationally, and internationally, supporting the creativity of its composer-collaborators and presenting workshops and performances for hundreds of student composers. Many of the Ensemble’s composer-collaborators have developed highly influential careers, such as Du Yun, who won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for the opera Angel’s Bone, which the Ensemble developed and premiered, and MacArthur Fellows Courtney Bryan and Tyshawn Sorey, winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize.

The Ensemble’s Digitice platform provides high-quality video documentation for artist-collaborators, as well as public access to an archive of composers’ workshops and performances. In addition, the Ensemble continues to build space for dialogue on equity, and has facilitated New Music Virtual Town Hall meetings for peer organizations and individual musicians to share resources, processes, and initiatives around equity and inclusion.

Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the Ensemble. Read more at www.iceorg.org 

??The International Contemporary Ensemble’s performances and commissioning activities during the 2025-26 concert season are made possible by the generous support of our board of directors, 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., Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, The Arlene and Larry Dunn Fund for Afrodiasporic Music, Fromm Music Foundation, Amphion Foundation, The Cheswatyr Foundation, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Siemens Musikstiftung, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, BMI Foundation, as well as public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, New York State Council for the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and New York State Legislature. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the International Contemporary Ensemble.

Photo credit: Joshua Franzos

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