Program Notes - Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Photo: Joshua Bright 

ICE (International 

Contemporary Ensemble): 

George Lewis and Friends 

Sunday, 

February 5, 2012

Photo: Carrie Schneider

George Lewis 

and Friends 

Steven Schick, conductor 

Steve Lehman, saxophone 

Tyshawn Sorey, 

trombone ⁄percussion 

Nicole M. Mitchell, flute 

George E. Lewis 

Artificial Life 2007 

for ensemble (2007) 

Chicago premiere 

Steve Lehman 

Impossible Flow 

for ensemble (2010, rev. 

2011; ICElab commission) 


Nicole M. Mitchell 

Cave of Self-Induction 

for two flutes and 

percussion (2012) 

World premiere 

Tyshawn Sorey 

Ode to Gust Burns 

for bassoon, piano, 

percussion, guitar, and 

trombone (2012; 

ICElab commission) 

World premiere 


The Will to Adorn 

for ensemble (2011, rev. 2012) 


This concert runs 

approximately 75 minutes 

without intermission. 

ICE (International 

Contemporary Ensemble) 

Eric Lamb, flute 

Claire Chase, flute 

Joshua Rubin, clarinet 

Rebekah Heller, bassoon 

David Byrd-Marrow, horn 

Gareth Flowers, trumpet 

Mike Lormand, trombone 

Cory Smythe, piano 

Erik Carlson, violin 

Katinka Kleijn, cello 

Tony Flynt, bass 

Dan Lippel, guitar 

Nathan Davis, percussion 

Ross Karre, percussion 

Support for this project is generously 

provided by Katherine A. 

Abelson and Robert J. Cornell and 

the Amphion Foundation, Inc. Additional 

generous support is provided 

by the National Endowment 

for the Arts. 

ICElab 2012 is made possible 

through lead support from The 

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 

alongside generous funding from 

the Greenwall Foundation, the 

Creative Capital Multi-Arts 

Production (MAP) Fund, the 

National Endowment for the Arts, 

the French American Cultural 

Exchange, the Alice M. Ditson 

Fund, and public funds from 

the New York City Department of 

Cultural Affairs in partnership 

with the City Council. 

Tyshawn Sorey’s participation 

in ICElab is supported by the 

Greenwall Foundation. 

Steve Lehman’s Impossible Flow 

was commissioned jointly by 

the Manhattan New Music Project 

and ICE. 

Join us for the final 

concert of ICE’s 2011/12 

season at MCA Stage. 

Georges Aperghis 

and the New Generation 

Saturday, May 26, 

7:30 pm 

Georges Aperghis’s 

aggressive yet playful 

experimental music 

pushes the boundaries 

between classical performance 

and performance 

art. The ensemble performs 

the Chicago premiere 

of a major new 

ICE-commissioned work 

from Aperghis, plus two 

new chamber works by 

ICElab 2012 composers 

Patricia Alessandrini and 

Juan Pablo Carreño.

Teatr ZAR 

The Gospels of 

Childhood Triptych 

Mar 29–Apr 1, 2012 

Theater 

Music 

Presented by MCA Stage 

in association with Goodman Theatre 

“profoundly moving … 

echoing from the deep, 

deep past with the 

evanescent present” 

New Theatre Quarterly 

Photo: Irena Lipinska 

For tickets, visit mcachicago.org or call 312.397.4010. 

Support for this project is generously provided by the 

Consulate General of Poland in Chicago.

About the program 

George E. Lewis: Artificial Life 2007 (2007) 

Created for the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, 

Artificial Life 2007 is a schema for collective improvisation—and 

collective silence. No musical 

material is prescribed; the principle is stimulus, 

and the medium is verbal instructions that give 

rise to radically different results, depending on 

the performers taking part. 

There are just two pages to these instructions, 

which may be followed separately, in either 

order, or together. Page 1 is to be read by musicians 

acting individually or in groups, and is the 

same for everyone: a set of sixteen words, some 

of them suggesting kinds of sound (“smooth,” 

“soli”), some having to do with how one soloist 

or group might respond to one another (“end,” 

for example, asks for an imitative response to 

another group, starting immediately as that other 

group has come to an end). Page 2 consists of 

single words or very elementary directions and 

proposes several groups (at least three) each 

create a pathway either in relation to what is happening 

or independently. 

Lewis further suggests that moments of silence 

will be needed—not empty silence, but a silence 

filled with listening and decision-making as the 

musicians prepare to contribute to the artificial 

life that is their joint creation. “The success of the 

performance,” the composer finally notes, “is not 

so much related to individual freedoms but to the 

assumption of personal and collective responsibility 

for the sonic environment.” 

© Paul Griffiths, http://disgwylfa.com 

Steve Lehman: Impossible Flow 

(2010, rev. 2012) 

“In Impossible Flow, delicate and highly nuanced 

spectral harmonies are integrated into a series of 

meticulously crafted rhythmic environments. Expressive 

timing, compound meter, rubato phrasing, 

changing tempi, irrational rhythms, and instrumental 

gesture are treated as a seamless continuum 

designed to explore the psychology of musical 

time and its connection to the elision of timbre and 

harmony in spectral music. By imagining Impossible 

Flow in this way, I hope to create an elaborate 

sense of directionality and form that remains rooted 

in the physicality of live performance and the 

corporeal nature of urban rhythmic sensibilities.” 

—Steve Lehman 

Nicole M. Mitchell: Cave of 

Self-Induction (2012) 

“Before thought, before the birth of an idea, one 

enters a dark cave of formlessness, of timeless 

and endless potential. The cave is where all 

minds meet, where all minds have met, in search 

of Source, before sound, before self, before 

manifestation’s beginning.” 

—Nicole M. Mitchell 

Tyshawn Sorey: Ode to Gust Burns 

(2012; ICElab commission) 

“Eight years ago, on a cold, rainy day in New York 

City, the pianist Vijay Iyer and I decided to listen 

to some music together at his apartment; we 

listened to a CD containing four solo improvisations 

by Seattle-based pianist/composer Gust 

Burns, whose music was astonishingly beautiful. 

Burns creates a unique dialogue between gesture 

and rhythm in his improvisations. His approach 

to piano performance opens up a world 

of sound complexes, creating a fresh, relevant 

language of improvisation. Burns’s work continues 

to inspire me as an improviser and composer, 

and Ode to Gust Burns directly deals with 

my initial exposure to his music.” 

—Tyshawn Sorey

George E. Lewis: The Will to Adorn 

(2011, rev. 2012) 

Lewis has taken the title for his new piece from 

a 1934 essay by Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics 

of Negro Expression” (available online). 

Key phrases for Lewis are: “The stark, trimmed 

phrases of the Occident seem too bare,” “decorating 

a decoration,” and “one always finds a 

glut of gaudy calendars.” However, the identification 

of “the will to adorn” as characteristic of a 

particular racial-cultural group—an identification 

no doubt defensible eight decades ago as an assertion 

of identity—is here not accepted without 

question. 

Describing his interest as “adornment as a compositional 

attitude or method,” Lewis distances 

himself from any naive view of it as a marker, 

and his references include not only “those amazing 

church hats worn by African American women” 

but also ideas of “saturation” put forward by 

the French composer Franck Bedrossian. 

He has further proposed the following longer 

quotation from Hurston’s essay as relevant to his 

composition: 

I saw in Mobile a room in which there was an 

over-stuffed mohair living-room suite, an imitation 

mahogany bed and chifferobe, a console 

victrola. The walls were gaily papered 

with Sunday supplements of the Mobile 

Register. There were seven calendars and 

three wall pockets. One of them was decorated 

with a lace doily. The mantel-shelf was 

covered with a scarf of deep home-made 

lace, looped up with a huge bow of pink 

crepe paper. Over the door was a huge lithograph 

showing the Treaty of Versailles being 

signed with a Waterman fountain pen. 

It was grotesque, yes. But it indicated the 

desire for beauwty. And decorating a decoration, 

as in the case of the doily on the gaudy 

wall pocket, did not seem out of place to the 

hostess. The feeling back of such an act is 

that there can never be enough of beauty, let 

alone too much. 

© Paul Griffiths, http://disgwylfa.com 

About the artists 


serves as the Edwin H. Case Professor of American 

Music and the Director of the Center for Jazz 

Studies at Columbia University. The recipient of a 

MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, an Alpert Award 

in the Arts in 1999, and fellowships from the 

National Endowment for the Arts, Lewis studied 

composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the 

Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians 

(AACM) School of Music, and trombone 

with Dean Hey. A member of the AACM since 

1971, Lewis’s work as composer, improvisor, performer, 

and interpreter explores electronic and 

computer music, computer-based multimedia 

installations, text-sound works, and notated and 

improvisative forms, and is documented on more 

than 120 recordings. His published articles on 

music, experimental video, visual art, and cultural 

studies have appeared in numerous scholarly 

journals and edited volumes. His book, Power 

Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American 

Experimental Music, published by University of 

Chicago Press, was released in fall 2007. 

Steve Lehman 

is a composer, performer, educator, and scholar 

who works across a broad spectrum of experi-

mental musical idioms. Lehman’s pieces for 

large orchestra and chamber ensembles have 

been performed by ICE (International Contemporary 

Ensemble), So Percussion, Kammerensemble 

Neue Musik Berlin, The Jack String Quartet, 

members of the Argento and Wet Ink Ensembles, 

and the pianist Marilyn Nonken. An alto and 

sopranino saxophonist, Lehman has performed 

and recorded nationally and internationally with 

his own ensembles and with those led by Anthony 

Braxton, Dave Burrell, Mark Dresser, Vijay 

Iyer, Oliver Lake, Meshell Ndegeocello, and High 

Priest of Anti-Pop Consortium. Lehman is also a 

published scholar; his article in the journal Critical 

Studies in Improvisation, “I Love You with an 

Asterisk: African-American Experimental Composers 

and the French Jazz Press, 1970–1980,” 

is based on his Fulbright research in France. 

Lehman received his BA (2000) and MA in Composition 

(2002) from Wesleyan University where 

he studied under Anthony Braxton and Alvin 

Lucier, while concurrently working with Jackie 

McLean at the Hartt School of Music. Lehman 

is currently a doctoral candidate in Music Composition 

at Columbia University, where he is a 

departmental fellow and studies under Tristan 

Murail and George Lewis. His most recent recording, 

Travail, Transformation & Flow (Pi Records, 

2009), was chosen as the #1 Jazz Album 

of the year by The New York Times. 

Nicole Margaret Mitchell 

is a creative flutist, composer, and bandleader. 

She was named Top Flutist 2010 by Downbeat’s 

Critic’s Polls and placed first as Downbeat’s Rising 

Star Flutist 2005–2010. She was awarded 

Jazz Flutist of the Year 2010 by the Jazz Journalist 

Association and Chicagoan of the Year 

2006 by the Chicago Tribune. The founder of the 

critically acclaimed Black Earth Ensemble and 

Black Earth Strings, Mitchell’s compositions 

reach across sound worlds, integrating new 

ideas with moments in the legacies of jazz, gospel, 

pop, and African percussion to create a fascinating 

synthesis of “postmodern jazz.” With her 

ensembles, as a featured flutist, and as a music 

educator, Mitchell has been a highlight at art 

venues, festivals throughout Europe, the United 

States, and Canada. Mitchell has performed 

with creative luminaries including George Lewis, 

Miya Masaoka, Lori Freedman, James Newton, 

Bill Dixon, and Muhal Richard Abrams. She also 

works on ongoing projects with Anthony Braxton, 

Ed Wilkerson, David Boykin, Rob Mazurek, Hamid 

Drake, and Avreeayl Ra. 

The first woman president of Chicago’s Association 

for the Advancement of Creative Musicians 

(AACM), Mitchell works to raise respect and 

integrity for the improvised flute, to contribute 

her innovative voice to the jazz legacy, and to 

continue the bold and exciting directions that the 

AACM has charted for decades. 

Tyshawn Sorey 

composes works that embrace a basic paradox 

in contemporary experimental music, bridging 

technical precision and an acute sense of space 

with the raw, virtuosic energy of improvisation 

central to his work in avant-jazz collectives such 

as Fieldwork and the Steve Lehman Octet. As a 

pianist, drummer, and trombonist, Sorey has performed 

alongside leading improvisers of our time, 

including John Zorn, Muhal Richard Abrams, 

Steve Coleman, and Anthony Braxton, and had 

his work featured in major festivals throughout 

the United States. His work as a composer and 

performer has been featured on recordings from 

Firehouse 12 and Pi Records. He is currently

studying at Columbia University. 

International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) 

is dedicated to reshaping the way music is created 

and experienced. With a modular makeup of 

thirty-three leading instrumentalists performing 

in forces ranging from solos to large ensembles, 

ICE functions as performer, presenter, and educator, 

advancing the music of our time by developing 

innovative new works and new strategies 

for audience engagement. ICE redefines concert 

music as it brings together new work and new 

listeners in the twenty-first century. 

Since its founding in 2001, ICE has premiered 

more than 500 compositions, the majority by 

emerging composers, in a range of venues 

around the world. The ensemble received the 

American Music Center’s Trailblazer Award 

in 2010 for its contributions to the field, and 

received the ASCAP/Chamber Music America 

Award for Adventurous Programming in 2005 

and 2010. ICE is the ensemble-in-residence at 

MCA Chicago through 2013. The ICE musicians 

also serve as artists-in-residence at the Mostly 

Mozart Festival of Lincoln Center through 2013, 

curating and performing chamber music programs 

that juxtapose new and old music. 

ICE has released acclaimed albums on the 

Nonesuch, Kairos, Bridge, Naxos, Tzadik, New 

Focus, and New Amsterdam labels, with several 

forthcoming releases on Mode Records. Recent 

and upcoming highlights include headline performances 

at the Lincoln Center Festival (New 

York); Musica Nova Helsinki (Finland); Wien 

Modern (Austria); Acht Brücken Music for Cologne 

(Germany); La Cite de la Musique (Paris); 

and tours of Japan, Brazil, and France. 

ICE recently launched The Listening Room, a 

new educational initiative for public schools 

without in-house arts curricula. Using teambased 

composition and graphic notation, ICE 

musicians lead students in the creation of new 

compositions, nurturing collaborative creative 

skills and building an appreciation for musical 

experimentation. Read more at www.iceorg.org. 

Claire Chase, Executive Director 

Joshua Rubin, Program Director 

Eric Hoff, Operations Manager 

Rose Bellini, Director of Development 

Jacob Greenberg, Education Director 

Steven Schick 

is a percussionist, conductor, and author, who 

was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family. 

For the past thirty years he has championed 

contemporary percussion music as a performer 

and teacher by commissioning and premiering 

more than one hundred new works for 

percussion. Schick is Distinguished Professor 

of Music at the University of California, San 

Diego, and a Consulting Artist in Percussion 

at the Manhattan School of Music. He was the 

percussionist of the Bang on a Can All-Stars 

of New York City from 1992 to 2002, and from 

2000 to 2004 served as Artistic Director of the 

Centre International de Percussion de Genève 

in Geneva, Switzerland. Schick is founder and 

Artistic Director of the percussion group red fish 

blue fish and director of “Roots and Rhizomes,” 

a summer course on contemporary percussion 

music hosted at the Banff Centre for the Arts. In 

2007 Schick assumed the post of Music Director 

and conductor of the La Jolla Symphony and 

Chorus, and in 2011 he became Artistic Director 

of the San Francisco Contemporary Music 

Players. Schick is the principal guest conductor 

of ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble).

Dance 

John Jota Leaños 

Imperial Silence: 

Una Ópera Muerta 

May 17–19, 2012 

“one of the most beautiful 

and seamless pieces of 

performance art, culture 

and commentary I have 

ever seen.” 

Presa POBRE ⁄ 

POOR Magazine 

For tickets, visit mcachicago.org or call 

312.397.4010. 

Funded in part by the National Performance Network 

Residency Program. 

Photo: George Hagegeorge

Courtesy 

Guidelines and 

Information 

As one of the nation’s largest multidisciplinary museums devoted to 

the art of our time, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago offers 

exhibitions of the most thought-provoking art of today. The museum’s 

performing arts program, MCA Stage, is the most active presenter of 

theater, dance, and music in Chicago, featuring leading performers 

from around the globe in our 300-seat theater. 

MCA Stage is committed to presenting groundbreaking performances 

that focus on collaboration; working closely with artists; converging 

with the larger programming of the museum; and offering a contemporary 

view of the traditional roots of performance. 

Parking 

Validate your ticket at coat 

check for $11 parking in the MCA 

garage (220 E. Chicago Avenue) 

and Bernardin garage (747 N. 

Wabash). The $11 parking is 

limited to six hours on date 

of performance. 

Lost and found 

To inquire about a lost item, 

call the museum at 312.280.2660. 

Unclaimed articles are held for 

30 days. 

Mary Ittelson, 

Chair of the Board of 

Trustees 

Madeleine Grynsztein, 

Pritzker Director 

Janet Alberti, 

Deputy Director 

Michael Darling, 

James W. Alsdorf Chief 

Curator 

Performance Committee 

Lois Eisen, Chair 

Katherine A. Abelson 

Ellen Stone Belic 

Pamela Crutchfield 

Ginger Farley 

Gale Fischer 

Jay Franke 

Timothy A. Herwig 

John C. Kern 

Lisa Yun Lee 

Elizabeth A. Liebman 

Lewis Manilow 

Alfred L. McDougal 

Paula Molner 

D. Elizabeth Price 

Carol Prins 

Cheryl Seder 

Patty Sternberg 

Richard Tomlinson 

Performance Programs 

Peter Taub, Director 

Yolanda Cesta Cursach, 

Associate Director 

Surinder Martignetti, Manager 

Kevin Brown, 

House Management Associate 

Alicia M Graff, 


Quinlan Kirchner, 


Eboni Senai Hawkins, Intern 

Kitty Huffman, Intern 

Theater Management 

Dennis O’Shea, 

Manager of Technical 

Production 

Richard Norwood, 

Theater Production Manager 

Box Office 

Matti Allison, Manager 

Phongtorn Phongluantum, 

Assistant Manager 

Molly Laemle, Coordinator 

Sarah Aguirre, Associate 

Jena Hirschy, Associate 

Lucy Pearson, Associate 

Program notes compiled by 

Yolanda Cesta Cursach 

Seating 

Switch off all noise-making 

devices while you are in 

the theater. 

Late arrivals are seated at the 

management’s discretion. Food 

and open beverage containers are 

not allowed in the seating area. 

Reproduction 

Unauthorized recording and 

reproduction of a performance 

is prohibited. 

Museum of Contemporary Art 

Chicago 

220 E. Chicago Avenue 

Chicago, Illinois 60611 

mcachicago.org 

General information 312.280.2660 

Box office 312.397.4010 

Volunteer for performances 

312.397.4072 

housemanagers@mcachicago.org 

Contact the Performance department 

housemanagers@mcachicago.org 

Museum hours 

Tuesday: 10 am–8 pm 

Wednesday–Sunday: 10am–5pm 

Closed Mondays, Thanksgiving, 

Christmas, and New Year’s Day

Program Notes - Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

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