International Contemporary Ensemble

Program Notes

Ashkan Behzadi
Carnivalesque (2014–16)

“Carnivalistic laughter is directed toward something higher—toward a shift of authorities and truths, a shift of world orders.” — Mikhail Bakhtin

Tebogo Monnakgotla
Wooden bodies (2020)

The title refers, naturally, to the wooden bodies of the string instruments. The piece opens with a melancholic viola solo which is soon echoed and deepened by the cello, adding further richness and resonance to the melody. Gradually, the remaining instruments join in, and the music begins to flow with greater energy. The composition unfolds in a series of fragmentary episodes, following one another like glimpses of a moving object—perhaps a ball—bouncing through its unpredictable journey.

Corie Rose Soumah
Tossed Parachutes of Lilacs and Lungs (2025)

Tossed Parachutes of Lilacs and Lungs found itself in a period of my life where I sought moments of spirituality, in the bell hooks sense. Each word from the title is presented in its own way, collected in five distinctive tableaux, showcasing moments of personal wonders, either through vivid images or simply through a resonance that stirred something inside me. I always had an inclination towards multiplicity, which this piece doesn’t stray away from. The multiples here came to me in day-to-day small wonders. I leave here a few of them:

the poetry of Nicky Beer
the taste of clementines on the tongue
the strings of the Kora
the tip of an icy mountain
the faded light on green leaves

Marcos Balter
Árvore (2025)

At Guadeloupe’s Mémorial ACTe, a museum dedicated to the history of the transatlantic slave trade, I stood quietly before a life-size replica of a Tree of Forgetfulness. In parts of Africa, the captured once circled such trees after hanging personal tokens on their branches, entering a trance meant to erase names, memories, and selves, softening the traumatic descent from human to cargo before the Atlantic crossing. I mourned my ancestors and felt the bitter irony of using a tree, so deeply tied to roots, ancestry, and memory, as an instrument of erasure. Árvore (the Portuguese word for tree) imagines these trees not just as keepers of a painful past but as fertile organisms from which freed versions of the captured are reborn, not emptied of self but fortified by the power of kinship and collective memories. Within the work, a quote from an Afro-Brazilian chant for the Yoruba orixá Oxumarê, often linked to movement, transformation, and continuity, underlines the idea of rootedness and regeneration, where what was meant to be forgotten instead becomes a source of new and expanded life.

Thierry Pécou
Méditation sur la fin de l’espèce (2017)

The richness of the sounds of marine mammal songs and what biologists consider their creativity question the place of Man in nature, the destruction of which threatens the very survival of humanity itself. This is the question that runs through this score where a solo cello dialogues with various whales recorded by bio-acoustician Olivier Adam. It is also an attempt, following the work of anthropologist Philippe Descola, to change our view of the nature/culture opposition.