International Contemporary Ensemble Performs at Library Festival

The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts continue their ongoing partnership with an OpenICE Library Festival at the Astor Gallery from November 7-9, 2018. In five free performances featuring inclusive discussions, NYPL and ICE explore collecting and archiving works of living composers.

On Wednesday, November 7 at 1:00pm, ICE members lead sections of Pauline Oliveros' Sonic Meditations in a Deep Listening Session. These inclusive and participatory works emphasize the social power of sound, inviting us to understand ourselves and our world deeply.

On Wednesday, November 7 at 7:00pm, ICE presents Collecting Nathan Davis, featuring an album release event celebrating Davis' new album Hagoromo on Tundra Records. Inspired by Japanese Noh theater, Hagoromo is a chamber dance-opera about a fateful encounter between a poor fisherman and a fallen angel. Rebekah Heller, Claire Chase, and Nathan Davis play extended musical excerpts from the opera, as well as Nathan's On Speaking a Hundred Names, which provided inspiration for the work.

On Thursday, November 8 at 1:00pm, Seth Cluett, Director of the Computer Music program at Columbia University and Nokia Bell Labs Artist in Residence, curates an interactive sound salon of boundary-breaking electronic work in Circuits & Currents: Columbia Computer Music Center Showcase. Works span from Charles Dodges's 1969 computer generated masterwork Earth's Magnetic Field to the most boundary-blurring contemporary works by Columbia's current students.

On Thursday, November 8 at 7:00pm in a program titled Collecting Seth Cluett, ICE performs a concert featuring the works of Seth Cluett, including the New York Premiere of a state of mutual tension for wind quartet and 3D-printed instrument modifications. The concert explores exhilarating sound experimentation, tracing a music lineage from the earlier computer works of Charles Dodge, through the pathbreaking installations of Alvin Lucier, on to a new generation of music innovators, led by Cluett, Nokia Bell Labs artist in residence. This project is supported by Nokia Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology program.

The Festival closes with New Discoveries On ICECommons on Friday, November 9 at 1:00pm. Curated by ICE saxophonist Ryan Muncy, this showcase of new works features NYC-based composers discovered via ICEcommons, and the animated scores of Icelandic composer Bergrún Snaebjörnsdóttir, whose work the Ensemble discovered via the ICEcommons Living Archive at Nordic Music Days 2016. ICEcommons is a free, online, crowd-sourced database of newly composed music that welcomes all composers to share their new work. Learn more at www.ICECommons.org.