International Contemporary Ensemble Kicks Off 2024-2025 Season with World Premiere of Earl Howard’s Boson1

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

International Contemporary Ensemble 
Kicks Off 2024-2025 Season with World Premiere of 
Earl Howard’s Boson1 at Pioneer Works on September 5

Quince Ensemble Joins ICE for Composer Portraits Series Featuring
Works by Courtney Bryan at Miller Theatre on September 12

iceorg.org

New York, NY (August 28, 2024) —  International Contemporary Ensemble kicks off its 22nd season in 2024-2025 with the world premiere of Earl Howard’s Boson1 for electronic performer and ten musicians on Thursday, September 5, 2024 at 8:00 p.m. at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, followed by a performance of works by MacArthur “genius” Fellow Courtney Bryan with with ICE and Quince Ensemble as part of the Composer Portraits series on Thursday, September 12, 2024 at 7:30 p.m. at Miller Theatre.

Commissioned by ICE, Boson1 is written for flexible instrumentation with structured improvisation for ten musicians and a performer of live sound processing. The work, performed by Howard together with ICE, is the outcome of a series of workshops at the composer’s home, where the performers learned to become conversant with Howard’s unique compositional and improvisatory languages. The program begins with musicians of ICE performing works by Fay Victor, Nicole Mitchell, Isabel Lepanto Gleicher, Ingrid Laubrock, and Rick Burkhardt.

A week later, Quince Ensemble joins International Contemporary Ensemble to perform a program of recent works by composer and 2023 MacArthur Fellow Courtney Bryan as part of the Composer Portraits series at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre. Works include Bryan’s Dreaming (Freedom Sounds), a work for large ensemble and voices commissioned by Larry and Arlene Dunn for ICE, Blessed, for voice and piano,

and Requiem, a powerful five-movement work for four sopranos and chamber ensemble bridging end-of-life rituals from a spectrum of traditions.

Concert Information
International Contemporary Ensemble & Earl Howard
Thursday, September 5, 2024 at 8:00 p.m.
Pioneer Works | 159 Pioneer St | Brooklyn, NY 11231
Tickets: $25
Link: https://iceorg.org/events/2024/earl-howard 

Program:
Fay Victor - SafeHarbor Shade (2021)
Nicole Mitchell - Birdsongs for Equitable Togetherness (2020)
Isabel Lepanto Gleicher - Del Lago (2022)
Ingrid Laubrock - Koan (selections) (2024)
Rick Burkhardt - Prologue (2013)
Earl Howard -  Boson1, for electronic performer and ten musicians (2024, World Premiere)

Artists:
International Contemporary Ensemble
Earl Howard, electronic performer
____________________________________________

Composer Portraits: Courtney Bryan 
Thursday, September 12, 2024 at 7:30 p.m.
Miller Theatre | 2960 Broadway | New York, NY 10027
Tickets: $48 - $140
Link: https://iceorg.org/events/2024/courtney-bryan-composer-portrait 

Program:
Courtney Bryan - Requiem (2019)
Courtney Bryan - Blessed (2020)
Courtney Bryan - Dreaming (Freedom Sounds) (2023)

Artists:
International Contemporary Ensemble
     Isabel Lepanto Gleicher, flute
     Campbell MacDonald, clarinet
     Alexander Davis, bassoon
     Rebekah Heller, bassoon
     Gareth Flowers, trumpet
     Michael Lormand, trombone
     Clara Warnaar, percussion
     Alice Teyssier, voice
     Damian Norfleet, voice
     Josh Modney, violin
     Kyle Armbrust, viola
     Randall Zigler, acoustic bass
Courtney Bryan, piano
Nicholas Houfek, lighting
Quince Ensemble

About Earl Howard
Earl Howard has been performing his compositions and creating sound installations and soundtracks for over fifty years. His recent compositions include music for live electronics, electronic tape music as well as music for electronics and instruments. Howard's method of creating orchestrated sounds with electronics and adding live, improvisational performance creates unique, densely layered compositions. Howard has performed at numerous venues including Merkin Hall, the Whitney Museum, The Kitchen, The Knitting Factory, Roulette, and Carnegie Recital Hall. Howard is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and he has received three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships and a Fromm Foundation Commission.

Howard has performed nationally and international with such major artists as Georg Graewe, Mari Kimura, Mark Dresser, Anne LeBaron, Evan Parker, Thomas Buckner, JD Parran, Gerry Hemingway, Miya Masaoka, Mark Dresser, Ernst Reijseger, Mari Kimura, Carl Stone, Roscoe Mitchell, Wu Wei, Carl Stone, Richard Teitelbaum, David Wessel, and Maryanne Amacher. In 2005 he premiered a live improvisation with at CINMAT in Berkeley, California. In 2006 he was commissioned by the Donaueschinger Musiktage to produce a new ensemble work, Clepton. Howard has been guest synthesizer performer and sound designer for Anthony Davis’s operas, including the Metropolitan Opera’s performance of X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, and Wakonda’s Dream. Howard has also produced soundtracks for some of the leading film and video artists, including Nam June Paik, Mary Lucier, Rii Kanzaki, Bob Harris, and Bill Brand.

About Courtney Bryan
Courtney Bryan, a native of New Orleans, Louisiana, is “a pianist and composer of panoramic interests” (The New York Times). She is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow, and currently serves as composer-in-residence with Opera Philadelphia.

This season sees two world premieres: Dreaming (Freedom Sounds), performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble at New York’s Kaufman Music Center, and a new orchestral piece for Jacksonville Symphony. Last season, Bryan performed as soloist in the world premiere of her piano concerto House of Pianos, which debuted in a chamber ensemble version with the LA Phil New Music Group led by Paolo Bortolameolli, and in a full orchestra version with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Louis Langrée. Bryan’s Gathering Song, with libretto by Tazewell Thompson, also received its debut with the New York Philharmonic and bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green, conducted by Leslie B. Dunner.

Other recent works include Blessed, commissioned by Opera Philadelphia and produced as a film that weaves together musical recordings and footage from New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia; Syzygy for violin and orchestra, premiered by Jennifer Koh and the Chicago Sinfonietta; and Yet Unheard for soprano, chorus, and orchestra, commissioned by The Dream Unfinished and premiered with Helga Davis.

Bryan’s work has been presented in a wide range of venues, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Miller Theatre, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Blue Note Jazz Club, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

Her compositions have been performed by the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra (Creative Partner, 2020-2023), Jacksonville Symphony (Mary Carr Patton Composer-In-Residence, 2018–2020), London Sinfonietta, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Chicago Sinfonietta, Quince Ensemble as part of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra MusicNOW series, American Composers Orchestra, Colorado Springs Philharmonic, La Jolla Symphony and Chorus, New York Jazzharmonic, Spektral String Quartet, and Talea Ensemble.

Bryan’s interest across multiple artforms have led to collaborations with visual artists Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Steffani Jemison, Abigail DeVille, Kara Lynch, Lake Simons, Amy Bryan, and Alma Bryan Powell; director Patricia McGregor; writers Sharan Strange, Matthew D. Morrison, and Ashon Crawley; and musicians Branford Marsalis, Jennifer Koh, Ryan Speedo Green, Helga Davis, Brandee Younger, and Damian Norfleet.

Bryan holds a doctorate in composition from Columbia University, where she studied with George Lewis. She also holds degrees from Oberlin Conservatory (BM) and Rutgers University (MM). Bryan completed postdoctoral studies in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is currently the Albert and Linda Mintz Professor of Music at Newcomb College in the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University. Recent accolades include the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2018), Samuel Barber Rome Prize in Music Composition (2019–2020), United States Artists Fellowship (2020), and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship (2020–2021).

Bryan has given music workshops at various universities including Princeton University, Columbia University, Harvard University, Berklee College of Music, The California Institute of the Arts, The University of South Carolina, Brown University, University of California, San Diego, DePaul University, and Xavier University of Louisiana. She has participated in and helped design programs that guide young people to improvise, compose, and work with music technology, including programs through Columbia University, Jacksonville Symphony, and Carnegie Hall.

Bryan has released two recordings, Quest for Freedom (2007) and This Little Light of Mine (2010); a third recording is in progress, Sounds of Freedom.

About Quince Ensemble
Quince Ensemble is a treble voice quartet dedicated to changing the paradigm for contemporary vocal chamber music. Described as "the Anonymous 4 of new music" by Opera News, Quince continually pushes the boundaries of vocal ensemble literature. By performing almost exclusively the music of living composers, and actively commissioning works with a broad and curious aesthetic ear, we seek to create a landscape of contemporary vocal music that is embodied, complex, and expressive, with the musical boldness and virtuosity that is often reserved for instrumental groups.

As dedicated advocates of new music, Quince regularly commissions new works for voices, providing wider exposure for the music of living composers. In 2019, they launched the Quince New Music Commissioning Fund, a fund to grow the repertoire for women and treble voices. Through educational activities, Quince works to bring this music to a larger community of singers and listeners, offering new and empowering pathways to vocal excellence. Quince has released four studio albums, Realign the Time, Hushers, Motherland, and David Lang's love fail, all available on iTunes, CD Baby, Spotify, Bandcamp, and Amazon. 

Quince has been featured on many festivals and series like KODY Festival in Lublin, Poland in collaboration with David Lang and Beth Morrison Projects, the Outpost Concert Series, the Philip Glass: Music with Friends concert at Issue Project Room, University of Michigan’s Hill Auditorium, and the SONiC Festival in New York, to name a few.  

Comprised of vocalists Liz Pearse (soprano), Kayleigh Butcher (mezzo soprano), Amanda DeBoer Bartlett (soprano), and Carrie Henneman Shaw (soprano), Quince thrives on unique musical challenges and genre-bending contemporary repertoire.

About International Contemporary Ensemble
Now in its third decade, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) is a multidisciplinary collective of musicians, digital media artists, producers, and educators committed to building and innovating collaborative environments in order to inspire audiences to reimagine how they experience contemporary music and sound. The Ensemble creates a mosaic musical ecosystem as “America’s foremost new-music group” (New Yorker), honoring the diversity of human experience and expression by commissioning, developing, recording, and performing the works of living artists in “a mission worth following” (I Care If You Listen). 

Co-founded in 2001 by flutist and MacArthur “genius” Fellow Claire Chase, the Ensemble has premiered over 1,000 works and is the recipient of the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, as well as Musical America’s Ensemble of the Year Award. Past artistic leadership includes co-founder Claire Chase and Ensemble members Joshua Rubin, Rebekah Heller, and Ross Karre. Notable presenting partners have included Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, TIME:SPANS Festival, Roulette, and Miller Theatre. The Ensemble has given performances at Warsaw Autumn, Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, Cité de la Musique (Paris), Park Avenue Armory, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ojai Music Festival, and Big Ears Festival as well as in venues such as the Dutch National Opera, Carnegie Hall, and Walt Disney Concert Hall.

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, by supporting the creativity of their composer-collaborators, as well as 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 Tyshawn Sorey and Courtney Bryan. 

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 2024-25 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, Robert D. Bielecki Foundation, Aaron Copland Fund for Music Inc., Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, The Arlene and Larry Dunn Fund for Afrodiasporic Music, Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, Amphion Foundation, Cheswatyr Foundation, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Siemens Musikstiftung, New Music USA, 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. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the International Contemporary Ensemble.

Image of Earl Howard provided by artist; Image of Courtney Bryan by Taylor Hunter

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