Afterword: An Opera in Two ActsGeorge Lewis & International Contemporary Ensemble

George Lewis

George E. Lewis has been a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis's work in electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, and notated and improvisative forms is documented on more than 140 recordings. His work has been presented by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonia Orchestra, Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Talea Ensemble, Dinosaur Annex, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Wet Ink, Ensemble Erik Satie, Eco Ensemble, and others, with commissions from American Composers Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, Harvestworks, Ensemble Either/Or, Orkestra Futura, Turning Point Ensemble, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad, IRCAM, Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, and others. Lewis has served as Ernest Bloch Visiting Professor of Music, University of California, Berkeley; Paul Fromm Composer in Residence, American Academy in Rome; Resident Scholar, Center for Disciplinary Innovation, University of Chicago; and CAC Fitt Artist In Residence, Brown University.

Lewis received the 2012 SEAMUS Award from the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, and his book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008) received the American Book Award and the American Musicological Society’s Music in American Culture Award. Lewis is co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016), and his opera Afterword, commissioned by the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago, premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in October 2015 and has been performed in the United States, United Kingdom, and the Czech Republic.

Professor Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. A 2015 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Lewis has received a MacArthur Fellowship (2002), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), a United States Artists Walker Fellowship (2011), an Alpert Award in the Arts (1999), and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2015, Lewis received the degree of Doctor of Music (DMus, honoris causa) from the University of Edinburgh. He came to Columbia in 2004, having previously taught at the University of California, San Diego, Mills College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Koninklijke Conservatorium Den Haag, and Simon Fraser University's Contemporary Arts Summer Institute. Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey.

International Contemporary Ensemble

With a commitment to cultivating a more curious and engaged society through music, the International Contemporary Ensemble – as a commissioner and performer at the highest level – amplifies creators whose work propels and challenges how music is made and experienced. The Ensemble’s 39 members are featured as soloists, chamber musicians, commissioners, and collaborators with the foremost musical artists of our time. Works by emerging composers have anchored the Ensemble’s programming since its founding in 2001, and the group’s recordings and digital platforms highlight the many voices that weave music’s present.

Acclaimed as “America’s foremost new-music group” (The New Yorker), the Ensemble has become a leading force in new music throughout the last 20 years, having premiered over 1,000 works and having been a vehicle for the workshop and performance of thousands of works by student composers across the U.S. The Ensemble’s composer-collaborators—many who were unknown at the time of their first Ensemble collaboration—have fundamentally shaped its creative ethos and have continued to highly visible and influential careers, including MacArthur Fellow Tyshawn Sorey; long-time Ensemble collaborator, founding member, and 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winner Du Yun; and the Ensemble’s founder, 2012 MacArthur Fellow, and first-ever flutist to win Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Prize, Claire Chase.

A recipient of the American Music Center’s Trailblazer Award and the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, the International Contemporary Ensemble was also named Musical America’s Ensemble of the Year in 2014. The group has served as artists-in-residence at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival (2008-2020), Ojai Music Festival (2015-17), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2010-2015). In addition, the Ensemble has presented and performed at festivals in the U.S. such as Big Ears Festival and Opera Omaha’s ONE Festival, as well as abroad, including GMEM-Centre National de Création Musicale (CNCM) de Marseille, Vértice at Cultura UNAM, Warsaw Autumn, International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, and Cité de la Musique in Paris. Other performance stages have included the Park Avenue Armory, ice floes at Greenland’s Diskotek Sessions, Brooklyn warehouses, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and boats on the Amazon River.

The International Contemporary Ensemble advances music technology and digital communications as an empowering tool for artists from all backgrounds. Digitice provides high-quality video documentation for artist-collaborators and provides access to an in-depth archive of composers’ workshops and performances. The Ensemble regularly engages new listeners through free concerts and interactive, educational programming with lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Curricular activities include a partnership at The New School’s College of Performing Arts (CoPA), along with a summer intensive program, called Ensemble Evolution, where topics of equity, diversity, and inclusion build new bridges and pathways for the future of creative sound practices. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the Ensemble. Read more at www.iceorg.org and watch over 350 videos of live performances and documentaries at www.digitice.org.

The International Contemporary Ensemble’s performances and commissioning activities during the 2023-24 concert season are made possible by the generous support of the Ensemble’s board, 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, Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, The Cheswatyr Foundation, Amphion Foundation, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, New Music USA’s Organizational Development Fund, 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. The International Contemporary Ensemble was the Ensemble in Residence of the Nokia Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology from 2018-2021. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the International Contemporary Ensemble.

David Fulmer

Winner of the 2019 Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, David Fulmer has garnered numerous international accolades for his bold compositional aesthetic combined with his thrilling performances. A Guggenheim Fellow, and a leader in his generation of composer-performers, the success of his Violin Concerto at Lincoln Center in 2010 earned international attention and resulted in immediate engagement to perform the work with major orchestras and at festivals in the United Kingdom, Europe, North America, and Australia. Fulmer made his European debut performing and recording his concerto with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Matthias Pintscher in 2011. That same year, Fulmer debuted at Tanglewood, appearing with the work. A surge of recent and upcoming commission include new works for the New York Philharmonic, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Scharoun Ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, Alte Oper Frankfurt, BMI Foundation, Concert Artists Guild, Washington Performing Arts, Kennedy Center, Fromm Music Foundation, Koussevitzky Foundation, and Tanglewood.

As conductor, Fulmer recently led the NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic Orchestra, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, Elision Ensemble, Sydney Modern Music Ensemble, along with appearances at the New York Philharmonic Biennial, Tanglewood Music Festival, and Lucerne Festival. Recent highlights include important debuts leading the Ensemble Intercontemporain, ASKO|Schönberg Ensemble, South Netherlands Philharmonic, and assisting concerts and projects with the New York Philharmonic. Fulmer made a triumphant return to the NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic Orchestra, which included a collaboration with IRCAM. This season he returns as Director, curator, and conductor of the Mannes American Contemporary Ensemble in programs of 20th and 21st Century music, and continues his close relationship with the International Contemporary Ensemble. Recently appointed as Music Director and Conductor of the Hunter Symphony Orchestra, Fulmer will lead programs including works of Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Mendelssohn, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Debussy, Schubert, Fauré, and Florence Price. He made his debut appearance in 2014 on the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella series at Walt Disney Concert Hall. During the summer seasons, Fulmer leads concerts at the Chamber Music Northwest Festival, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, and has maintained a very close relationship with the Lucerne Festival and Tanglewood Music Festival.

Fulmer was recently the recipient of both the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Carlos Surinach Commissioning Prize from the BMI Foundation. He is the first and only American recipient of the Grand Prize of the International Edvard Grieg Competition for Composers. He has also received the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award, the BMI Composer Award, the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a special citation from the Minister of Education of Brazil, the Hannah Komanoff Scholarship in Composition from The Juilliard School, and the highly coveted George Whitefield Chadwick Gold Medal from the New England Conservatory. Fulmer appears regularly and records often with the premiere new music ensembles in New York, including the International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Argento New Music Project, Speculum Musicae, The Group for Contemporary Music, and the New York New Music Ensemble. His work is recorded by the Ensemble Intercontemporain. He has appeared recently on the Great Performers Series at Lincoln Center, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and Live from Lin- coln Center broadcasts. Fulmer is Director of Orchestral Studies, Head of Strings, and Composition Faculty at Hunter College, CUNY. He graduated from The Juilliard School.

Joelle Lamarre

American soprano Joelle Lamarre is an in-demand performer of new works by today’s living composers. Notable recent performances include George Lewis’s experimental opera Afterword the Chicago premiere of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking; working with multi-disciplinary artist Sean Griffin in Charles Gaines’s Manifestos 2, a score based on Malcolm X’s last public speech made in 1965 in Detroit’s Ford Auditorium; the South Shore Opera of Chicago’s production of Nkeiru Okoye’s Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed that Line to Freedom; the Lyric Opera Unlimited’s comedic opera, Factotum, by Liverman DJ Rico & Maharaj; the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s performance of Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones; Chicago Opera Theater’s world premiere of Errolyn Wallen’s Quamino’s Map; and Long Beach Opera’s production and recording of Anthony Davis’s Pulitzer Prize–winning opera The Central Park Five. A 3Arts Make a Wave grant recipient, Lamarre performs across genres in theater, musical theater, and opera, and seeks to push boundaries as a librettist, poet, and artistic advisor. She is the creator of the one-act play The Violet Hour, which explores the life and career of American soprano Leontyne Price, as well as her own EP The Other American.

Gwendolyn Brown

Contralto Gwendolyn Brown’s extraordinary versatility in operatic performances in traditional, 20th century, American Art Song, Negro Spiritual, and avant-garde settings has earned her many superlatives: “...astonishing range and timbre, a stern voice of certainty” (Huddersfield Examiner); “a transfixing force of nature” (Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times); “an overwhelming power” (Tageszeitung, Berlin). Ms. Brown’s performances in George Lewis’ opera Afterword (2015) and his monodrama Song of The Shank (2023) with the Ensemble Modern were met with critical acclaim, as well as her creation of the lead role of Marie Laveau in Anne LeBaron’s Crescent City (2012) for Los Angeles’ The Industry. Ms. Brown has performed with opera companies and orchestras throughout the United States and overseas, and has been lauded for her interpretation of such character roles as the Principessa in Suor Angelica, Zita in Gianni Schicchi, Erda in Das Rheingold, and her signature role of Maria in Porgy and Bess. Originally from Memphis, Tennessee, Ms. Brown studied music at the University of Memphis, the American Conservatory of Music, and Fisk University, where she is now Assistant Professor of Music. She participated in the young artist programs of Des Moines Metro Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago Center for American Artists.

Julian Terrell Otis

Multidisciplinary artist, creative vocalist and composer Julian Terrell Otis progressively pushes positive energy into his interests in experimental music, movement, and theater making. As a vocalist he has collaborated with Nicole Mitchell, VijayIyer, Renée Baker, Dougla R. Ewart, Sean Griffin, Angel Bat Dawid, Isaiah Collier, Asher Gamedze, Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, and Chicago Sinfonietta among others. Julius Eastman’s vocal music has been of particular interest to him, with multiple performances of Prelude To The Holy Presence Of Joan D’Arc performed nationally. Otis’s own explorations involve a melding of fact and fable to piece together new recollections/imaginings of personal narrative, word games, sense and nonsense utterances, digital layering and looping. This storytelling ritual has culminated in a musical release of All the Pretty Flowers on the Chicago Improvised Music label, and a recent Creative Capital award has allowed him to expand on this through his project, Resolved: Critiquing Contemporary Music Through Improvised Performance.

Sean Griffin

For decades, Sean Griffin has been active in interdisciplinary contemporary music, bridging performance and art communities of Los Angeles, Chicago and abroad. Griffin has composed, directed, conducted and produced new intermedia works, bringing to life dazzling, unique interpretations to the stage and gallery with his opera design and performance consortium called Opera Povera, with which he has created new works with George Lewis, Pauline Oliveros, Charles Gaines, Ron Athey, Catherine Sullivan, and others. Often characterized by rigorous rhythmic scores and choreographies mixed with improvisation, Griffin’s operas navigate interactions between contemporary music performers, performance artists, dancers, vocalists, actors and sculptural sets through uncharted interdisciplinary forms. As a director, Griffin has established a distinctive form of physically-based, interdisciplinary operatic theater, creating large-scale works that integrate choreography, archives, public outreach, interactive media and his distinctive vocal method, Full Body Singing. These new forms of opera include archival, algorithmic, ritual and gallery-based events that engage the public in new kinds of performing arts experiences. In 2020, during Covid lockdown, Opera Povera created a version of Pauline Oliveros’s Lunar Opera called Full Pink Moon, a participant’s opera that featured over 270 international performers connected through Zoom. Described as the first Zoom opera, Full Pink Moon was acknowledged and archived by the Library of Congress. Griffin’s critically acclaimed productions, recordings, live performances, installations, operas and stage designs have been featured at EMPAC, MoMA, Brooklyn Museum, RedCat, LACMA, 56th Venice Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Ostrava Days Festival, Ojai Festival, The Broad Museum, and Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella Series. Griffin is an award-winning and prolific visual artist, exhibiting his drawings and graphic scores in galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. He holds a PhD in music composition from the University of California, San Diego.

Catherine Sullivan

Born in Los Angeles (1968) and based in Chicago, Catherine Sullivan works in film, theater and installation. The ensembles she works with are her true medium, and her highly collaborative productions are often concerned with aesthetic behaviors in historically conditioned contexts. Solo exhibitions include Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Metro Pictures, New York and Tate Modern, London, and she has also participated in the Lyon, Whitney, Moscow and Gwang Ju biennials. Screenings include the Berlin International Film Festival and International Film Festival Rotterdam and theater works have been staged at venues including Opéra de Lyon; Volksbühne, Berlin; Cricoteka, Krakow and Trap Door Theatre, Chicago. Her work is held in public and private collections including Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Castello di Rivoli, Turin and Sammlung Goetz, Munich. Awards include a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin residency, a United States Artists Walker Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She holds a BFA in Acting from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA in Fine Art from Art Center College of Design. She is a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.