Violist Wendy Richman, a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, releases her debut full length recording of music she commissioned for voice and viola for one performer. Including premieres by Ken Ueno, Christian Carey, Arlene Sierra, Everette Minchew, Jose-Luis Hurtado, David Smooke, Jason Eckardt, Lou Bunk, and Stephen Gorbos, Richman drastically expands the repertoire for singing violist with this varied program. Wendy Richmanhas been celebrated internationally for her compelling sound and imaginative interpretations. As a soloist and chamber musician, she has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center Festival, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Miller Theater, Mostly Mozart Festival, Park Avenue Armory, Phillips Collection, and international festivals in Berlin, Darmstadt, Helsinki, Hong Kong, Karlsruhe, Morelia, and Vienna. She is a founding member of the New York-based International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and a member of The Rhythm Method, a string quartet of four performer-composers that strives to reimagine the genre in a contemporary, feminist context.

Composer Rand Steiger releases the first volume chronicling his collaboration with the International Contemporary Ensemble, Coalescence Cycle. Volume 1 highlights works Steiger wrote for soloists in ICE (Claire Chase, Josh Rubin, Rebekah Heller, Kivie Cahn-Lipman, and Jacob Greenberg) that feature real time electronics processing, virtuosic writing tailored to the dedicatees of the works, and an approach to harmony that explores the intersection of tempered and just intonation material. Rand Steiger's music has been commissioned and performed by many distinguished soloists and ensembles and has been presented in concert halls and at festivals internationally. Throughout his career, Steiger has been involved in computer music research, having held three residencies at Ircam, and enjoying a long fruitful collaboration with leading computer music researcher Miller Puckette. He was Composer in Residence at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology from 2010 to 2013.

Dolce La Morte, Suzanne Farrin's monodrama for countertenor and ensemble, is based on Michelangelo's love poetry inspired by the young Roman nobleman Tommaso de Cavalieri. Farrin's sensual writing elegantly imports the aesthetics of the Italian Renaissance into a contemporary music context. The International Contemporary Ensemble is joined by countertenor Eric Jurenas for a deeply felt performanc

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International Contemporary Ensemble releases Afterword: An Opera in Two Acts by George Lewis on its Tundra Records imprint. Lewis’s first opera, Afterword, premiered in 2015 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The opera was created in conjunction with the exhibition The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now, as part of the 50th anniversary commemorations of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the Chicago-born and now internationally acclaimed African American collective whose members have explored an unprecedentedly wide range of new and influential ideas in new music.

REVIEWS:

George Lewis’s recent chamber and orchestral scores have been action-packed thrill rides, full of lovingly crafted dissonances and exciting collisions of rhythmic contour. But his foray into opera, “Afterword: An Opera in Two Acts,” is less traditionally dramatic. That’s intentional.

In the liner notes for this finely produced live recording, Lewis – a scholar, computer music specialist and trombonist – talks about the conceptual influence of Anthony Braxton’s operas. In those works, singers are not bound to representations of a single character from one act to the next. And so it is in “Afterword,” in which three singers rotate roles to depict the formation and development of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a pathbreaking experimental music community.

Lewis, a veteran of the artistic network, wrote a celebrated historical tome on the organization, and his libretto for “Afterword” freely adapts that text. The composer describes the result as a Bildungsoper, a “a coming-of-age opera of ideas.” As such, historical figures represented in his text dissolve into a collective voice. The result may stint on narrative continuity, but Lewis also offers stretches of poetic meditation. One such passage dramatizes an early meeting in which association figures debate a tenet of the A.A.C.M.’s artistic mission – specifically, all original music, all the time.

You may find yourself wanting to read along with the stream-of-collective-consciousness libretto, which is helpfully included with digital and physical purchases. Behind the vocal lines you can hear Lewis’s whirling, distinct approach to instrumental variation, even if his typical rate of change has been slowed a bit to allow for conversational English to flourish. And it does flourish, among the trio of vocal soloists, most prominently in an extraordinary performance by the contralto Gwendolyn Brown.

-- The New York Times

Clarinetist Joshua Rubin's debut solo recording features landmark works representing forty years of electronic exploration in contemporary music. The album highlights music by Suzanne Farrin and Olly Wilson, newly commissioned works by Mario Diaz de Leon and Ignacio Baca Lobera, alongside world-premiere recordings of Mario Davidovsky and work co-composed with pianist Cory Smythe. In his notes for the album, Rubin unifies these works by their humanized use of technology toward musical ends.

Pulitzer Prize winner Du Yun's collaboration with the International Contemporary Ensemble traces back to the group's formation at Oberlin Conservatory and the composer's budding early years. This new release on ICE's Tundra imprint chronicles that fruitful relationship with dynamic ensemble works, solos with and without electronics, and improvisations. Dinosaur Scar captures the synergy that can only come as a result of musicians who have absorbed a composer's language over many years, and a composer writing specifically with specific performers in mind. Du Yun writes: “It feels as though I grew up with the International Contemporary Ensemble. It has been 20 years that I have known many of them individually, half of my lifetime. Friendship ebbs and flows like the river. It washes and takes you over. Perhaps more than that, it transfigures and defines you in a subtle, intense and poignant way. There are so many metaphors about water as the method of being reborn in life. For me, ICE and I are like that flowing river, from the streaming start, the dramatic gorges, and to the currents that flood into the ocean. And this album is, precisely, a testament to that.”

Nathan Davis’ Hagoromo is a setting of a tale that has its roots in many cultures. In some form or another, the swan maiden archetype can be found in Western and Asian folklore, specifically in Germanic sources, Japanese Noh theatre, and Scottish traditional stories. The core plot of the story is consistent- a man steals a magic garment from an angel, robbing her of her connection to her native, mystical realm. The symbolism in the skeletal plot is rich, engaging with issues surrounding transactional versus enlightened interaction, boundaries of relationships, and lines between the earthly and the spiritual. Davis’ dance opera, written for dancers Wendy Whelan, Jock Soto, vocal soloists Katalin Karolyi and Peter Tantsits, the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and a puppet troupe, was premiered and recorded over several performances on BAM’s Next Wave Festival in November 2015.

Bassoonist for the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Rebekah Heller releases her debut CD with a collection of works for bassoon and electronics. This recording also marks the launch of ICE's own imprint, Tundra, which will be dedicated to the ensemble's recordings. Featured are premiere recordings of some of the new music world's most intrepid and exciting composers, including Dai Fujikura, Nathan Davis, Marcos Balter, Edgar Guzman and Marcelo Toledo, with a special bonus track by Du Yun.

Ryan Muncy emphasizes collaborative relationships with composers and artists of his generation and aims to reimagine the way listeners experience the saxophone through contemporary music. "Superb" - The New York Times The Chicago read said Muncy has an ability to "show off the instrument's mailleability and freakish extended range as well as its delicacy and refinement".

George Lewis is a modern musical polymath, in the truest sense of the word. As the legendary trombonist and pioneering member of the Chicago based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Lewis was a driving force in one of the most important movements in improvised music in the last decades of the twentieth century. His work with interactive computer software has transformed the fields of electro-acoustic music and virtual instruments. He has had an equally large impact on the academic community, both through his publications and his mentoring of student composers and performers alike. Lewis’s work as a composer fuses the many facets of his musicianship together, and his collaboration with ICE documented here on this recording, gives us an opportunity to see the wide net that he casts. The recording opens with the title track, a boisterous and colorful ensemble work that is inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s 1934 essay, “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” The recording closes with Lewis’s performance of T. J. Anderson’s “In Memoriam Albert Lee Murray,” a writer and colleague of Anderson who often chose the African-American musical tradition as his subject matter and the departure point of inspiration.

ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble) releases a recording documenting its close and longstanding relationship with Brazilian born composer Marcos Balter on its own in-house recording label, TUNDRA. Balter and ICE first began collaborating when Balter was on faculty and ICE was in residence at Chicago's Columbia College, and the fruitful relationship has continued to the present day, chronicling Balter's unique trajectory as a voracious and eclectic artist.