ENSEMBLES & SOLOISTS

Orchestre de Nouvelles Créations, Expérimentations et Improvisations Musicales (ONCEIM)

Onceim is an orchestra made up of thirty-five high-level musicians with a variety of musical formations: improvised music, jazz, free jazz, classical and contemporary and experimental music . When he created Onceim in 2011, Frédéric Blondy sought to take the exploration of sound creation to a dimension of contemporary research. With Onceim, it’s always about creating, innovating, breaking free from the limits that instruments and classical musical writing sometimes impose. Thus, in the individual and singular precision of each musician, all are at the service of the whole to produce a result never known in advance and necessarily collective. website

Maurice quartet

Since its creation in 2002, Quartetto Maurice has been characterized by its unwavering commitment to the exploration of sound. The quartet embarked on extensive research into 20th and 21st century repertoire, fostering a meticulous approach to sheet music and close attention to performance detail.

Over the years, the Quartetto Maurice carried out an intensive training in the contemporary music repertoire, together with the greatest performers and composers of the international scene. It is active in promoting new music through commissions to young composers, keeping an open mind on the complex contemporary music panorama. website

Scordatura Ensemble

Elisabeth Smalt, viola – Alfrun Schmid, voice – Reinier van Houdt, keyboards

Scordatura Ensemble is based in Amsterdam. It was formed in 2006 to perform music that explores these expanded pitch resources.  Founder of the group was the musicologist and keyboard player Bob Gilmore (1961- 2015). After his death, the other two original members Alfrun Schmid (vocals) and Elisabeth Smalt (viola) invited pianist (and composer) Reinier van Houdt to be a permanent member of the ensemble. website

Frederic Blondy

Born in Bordeaux in 1973. On completing his studies in Mathematics and Physics at Bordeaux University. Frédéric Blondy dedicated himself full time to music, firstly as a jazz pianist and subsequently as a student at the Bordeaux National Conservatory where he studed piano, harmony, analysis and composition. Since moving to Paris he has worked with Marie-Christine Calvet at the “International Piano Center”, refining a body-based approach to the instrument.
 As musician, he has performed in many festivals and venues in Europe, North America, Middle East and Asia, working with, amongst others Paul Lovens, Rhodri Davies, Lê Quan Ninh, Michel Doneda, Joëlle Léandre, Urs Leimgruber, Thomas Lehn, Daunik Lazro, Radu Malfatti, John Tilbury, Otomo Yoshihide, Mats Gustafsson, and developed a thorough work with ensembles like Hubbub, Ethos.
 In 2011 he created the Orchestre de Nouvelles Créations, Expérimentations et Improvisations Musicales (ONCEIM – ensemble of 30 musicians) to develop links between improvisers skills and written music. He is actually artistic director and composer for this ensemble. website

Elisabeth Smalt

Elisabeth enjoys a versatile career as a violist in chamber music, in styles varying from period instrument performance to extremely new music.

From 2005 to 2011 Elisabeth was directing Amsterdam’s KlankKleurFestival, a festival with a creative collaboration between chamber musicians and visual artists. Since 2015 she co-leads the Scordatura ensemble, together with singer Alfrun Schmid. Scordatura commissions and programs new works as well as highlights from the spectral and microtonal tradition, in alternative tuning systems originally inspired by the American composer Harry Partch. 

Recordings of her solo- and chamber performances, several award-winning, have appeared on Q-disk, Vanguard Classics, Explicit, Fuga Libera, Tzadik, Megadisc, New World Records, Mode Records, Brilliant Classics, Métier/Divine Art, Pogus, Kairos and Another Timbre. website

Reinier van Houdt

Reinier van Houdt started working with tape-recorders, radio’s, objects and various string-instruments at a young age. He studied piano at the Liszt-Akademie in Budapest & the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. He developed a fascination for matters that escape notation: sound, timing, space, physicality, memory, noise, environment – points beyond composition, interpretation and improvisation.    

Aside from his own music he premiered music by Robert Ashley, Alvin Curran, Kaikhosru Sorabji, Francisco López, Christian Marclay, Charlemagne Palestine, Yannis Kyriakides, Maria de Alvear, Jerry Hunt, Michael Pisaro, Walter Marchetti, Jürg Frey, Nomi Epstein. He has also worked with Annea Lockwood, John Cage, Alvin Lucier, Luc Ferrari and Peter Ablinger. 

He is also one of the moving forces behind the experimental music collective MAZE. website

COMPOSERS

Ellen Arkbro

Ellen Arkbro is a sound artist and composer from Stockholm, currently living and working in Berlin.

Her music has been presented at Barbican in London, Kölner Philharmonie, Serralves in Porto, Issue Project Room in New York, Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, The Lab in San Fransisco, Ina GRM in Paris and Tempelaukkio Kirke in Helsinki among other places.

In Ellen’s music, harmonic sound interacts with the acoustic architecture of the space, and changes in different ways when the listener is moving through the sound. Her chordal textures spread out like invisible sculptures – diamond formations for the listening mind. website

Catherine Lamb

Catherine Lamb (b. 1982, Olympia, WA. U.S.) is an active composer exploring the interaction of tone, summations of shapes and shadows, phenomenological expansions, the architecture of the liminal (states in between outside/inside), and the long introduction form. She began her musical life early, later abandoning the conservatory in 2003 to study Hindustani music in Pune, India. She received her BFA in 2006 under James Tenney and Michael Pisaro at CalArts in Los Angeles, where she first developed her research into the interaction of tone and continued to compose, teach, and collaborate with musicians (such as Laura Steenberge and Julia Holter on Singing by Numbers).

She toured Shade/Gradient extensively and was awarded the Henry Cowell Research Fellowship to work with Eliane Radigue in Paris. In 2013 Lamb relocated to Berlin, Germany where she lives currently.

She is a 2020 recipient of the Ernst von Siemens Composer’s prize, a 2018 recipient of the Grants to Artists award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a Staubach Fellow for the 2016 Darmstadt Summer course as well as a 2016-2017 Schloss Solitude Fellow. 

Clarence Barlow

Born in 1945 of English, Portuguese and French colonial descent in Calcutta, he obtained a science degree at Calcutta University in 1965 as well as the Licentiate Diploma of Trinity College of Music London in piano. From 1966-68 he taught music theory at the Calcutta School of Music. From 1968-73 Barlow studied electronic music and composition with Herbert Eimert, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Vinko Globokar and Karlheinz Stockhausen at the Music University (Musikhochschule) of Cologne.

Clarence Barlow began to compose music with the help of computers as early as 1971 and worked thereafter in computer music studios in Stockholm (EMS), Paris (IRCAM), Amsterdam (STEIM), Warsaw (Chopin Academy) und Chicago (Northwestern University).

In 1980 he was awarded the Kranichstein Composition Prize at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, in 1981 the Composition Prize of Cologne. From 1982-94 he regularly taught computer-aided composition at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music and since 1984 at the Music University of Cologne.

From 1990-94 he was Artistic Director of the Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, where he has since been Professor of Composition and Sonology.

In 1995 he initiated and directed (with GIMIK) the four-city Trapezium Festival in Amsterdam, Essen, Cologne and The Hague involving 24 composers, six from each city. At the Royal Conservatory The Hague he initiated and organized in 1991 the Roboard Pfestival (including a two-hour and a three-hour concert of player-piano music) and the RATIO project (1992-93) involving structured music from mediaeval and contemporary Europe as well as North India, the Middle and Far East.

Since 2006 Corwin professor and head of composition at the Music Department, University of California in Santa Barbara.

Gabriel Paiuk

Gabriel Paiuk is a composer and sound artist whose work addresses the variable forms in which listening occurs.  His work includes sound installations, compositions for instruments and electronic sources and collaborations with other disciplines. These have been presented in festivals and venues internationally and performed by ensembles such as ASKO ensemble, Österreichisches Ensemble für Neue Musik, Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, Slagwerk Den Haag, Ensemble Modelo62 and soloists such as Francesco Dillon, Ekkehard Windrich and Arne Deforce. In 2006 his work Res Extensa was the first sound installation to be awarded the Gaudeamus Composition Prize.

In 2023 he completed a PhD in Leiden University, and teaches since 2014 at the Institute of Sonology (Royal Conservatoire – Den Haag).  He is a guest lecturer at the Master in Scenography (HKU, Utrecht), the Master for Experimental Opera (Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, Buenos Aires) and has led workshops at the Master Artistic Research (KABK, Den Haag) and KASK-School of Arts (Ghent).  He was academic director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Contemporary Music in Buenos Aires (2009) and taught sound design at the Center for Cinematographic Investigations in Buenos Aires (2004–2009). His music has been published in labels such as Another Timbre, Cut, Sedimental and Unsounds and his research has been published in Organised Sound magazine (Cambridge University Press, UK) the Orpheus Institute research Series (Leuven University Press) Kunstlicht Tijdschrift Journal (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Reflexiones Marginales (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México).

Eliane Radigue

From her childhood in Paris, Éliane Radigue will preserve the memory of a secret introduction to music by an understanding piano teacher. Then the harp, singing and composition are added to the piano. But it was only through contact with Concrete Music with Pierre Schaeffer and later with Pierre Henry that Éliane Radigue found her true path.

In more than 50 years there are three different periods, each of which will always mark a break, but each in its own way stands for an inspired exploration of thresholds, of spaces that expand in intervals, and for a dialogue between listening experience and inner experience, between personal history and sensual memory.

The first period (1968-1971) was that of the work on feedbacks and reinjections, an embryonic phase already characterized by extreme precision and work on thresholds and threatened balances.

The second period, spanning thirty years (1971-2001), is characterized by a fruitful production of electronic compositions that inextricably combine her music with the unique beats of her ARP 2500 synthesizer. This period is also marked by the development of long forms with subtle variations that disappear and resound between the history carried by the music and the time necessary for its unfolding.

The third and still ongoing period is that of her mainly acoustic works, which are produced in close collaboration with like-minded musicians from all over the world, giving an additional dimension of relationship to music created up to then alone.

In the course of her life, Éliane Radigue has produced a researching, demanding and inspiring work that today influences a whole new generation of musicians.

Luigi Nono

Luigi Nono (1924-1990), leading Italian composer of electronic, aleatory, and serial music. Nono began his musical studies in 1941 at the Venice Conservatory. He then studied law at the University of Padua, receiving a doctorate there, while at the same time studying with the prominent avant-garde composer Bruno Maderna.

The whole of Nono’s output is based on the pursuit of new sonorities, requiring not only a different manner of experiencing sound (by performers and listeners) but also new configurations for concert venues. Far from being apolitical or disengaged, this output projects the ideal of an art that is as human as it is politically committed into the interior realms of the ‘unsayable’ (a topic that was every bit as dear to Nono in his later years as ‘utopia’). In the wake of Prometeo, once the collaboration with Cacciari had come to an end and he was spending an increasing amount of time in Germany, Nono wrote his most visionary orchestral works: A Carlo Scarpa architetto, ai suoi infiniti possibili (1984) for orchestra using micro-intervals, Caminantes… Ayacucho (1986-87) and ‘No hay caminos. Hay que caminar’-Andrei Tarkowskij (1987). These works for large forces were accompanied by chamber pieces employing live electronics, including tributes to Boulez and Cacciari, A Pierre, dell’azzurro silenzio, inquietum (1985) and Risonanze erranti. Liederzyklus a Massimo Cacciari (1986), and solo works with or without transformation technology: Post-Prae-Ludium per Donau (1988), La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura. Madrigale per più ‘caminantes’ con Gidon Kremer (1988-89), inspired by the outstanding violinist, and ‘Hay que caminar’ sognando (1989), the final work in Nono’s catalogue.

VISUAL ARTIST & COMPOSER

Adi Hollander

Adi Hollander creates site-specific installations as places of exchange, in the form of objects and sculptures that can be experienced simultaneously as interiors and exteriors.

The source of this interest comes from Hollander’s fascination with the concept of time in the domain of architecture, as well as with the question of how form and structure allow spectators to actively develop the environments they are part of.

Her projects are an attempt to embody a certain complexity of sensory experience, as an alternate form of knowledge about the senses and how we ‘read’ the world around us. An aspect of inquiry or doubt is introduced to leave the process of questioning open, and to allow for more questions to enter.

Adi Hollander is Co-founder of the Amsterdam-based artist initiative Public Space With a Roof active since 2003, she holds a MS degree in Art, Culture and Technology from the MIT. Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums in the Netherlands and internationally.

Annea Lockwood

New Zealand-born American composer Annea Lockwood (b. 1939) brings vibrant energy, ceaseless curiosity, and a profound sense of openness to her music. Lockwood’s lifelong fascination with the visceral effects of sound in our environments and through our bodies—the way sounds unfold and their myriad “life spans”—serves as the focal point for works ranging from concert music to performance art to multimedia installations.

In recent years Lockwood and her music have received widespread attention, including a Columbia University Miller Theatre Composer Portrait concert, a feature article in The New York Times, a SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award, a documentary film by director Sam Green, and most recently, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her recent collaborative works Into the Vanishing Point with the ensemble Yarn/Wire and Becoming Air with avant-garde trumpeter Nate Wooley were released on Black Truffle Records to great acclaim. Her work has been presented internationally at institutions and festivals such as Lucerne Festival, Tectonics Athens Festival, Signale Graz, Counterflows International Festival of Music and Art, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and many others.

Lockwood has received commissions from numerous ensembles and solo performers, including Bang On A Can, baritone Thomas Buckner, pianists Sarah Cahill, Lois Svard, and Jennifer Hymer, the Holon Scratch Orchestra, Essential Music, Yarn/Wire, and Issue Project Room.

Her music is recorded on the Lovely, XI, Mutable, Pogus, EM Records (Japan), Rattle Records, Recital, Harmonia Mundi, CRI, Superior Viaduct, Black Truffle, New World, Gruenrekorder, and Moving Furniture Records. Hearing Studies, co-authored with Ruth Anderson, was published by Open Space in 2021.