Elision Ensemble & Ensemble Musikfabrik
Biography Elision Ensemble & Ensemble Musikfabrik
Turgut Erçetin
(b. 1983 in Istanbul) received his doctorate in composition from Stanford University in 2014, where he taught and later worked as a researcher at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), focusing on 3D acoustic modeling, 3D auralization, and virtual acoustics. In 2016, he was awarded the Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD Fellowship, following which he has continued to live in Berlin and has expanded his research and compositional praxis through commissions received from the Arditti Quartet, ELISION Ensemble, Ensemble Mosaik, Ensemble Musikfabrik, JACK Quartet, Neue Vocalsolisten, and SWR Symphonieorchester, who have performed his works at festivals, such as the ECLAT Festival, Manifeste, MärzMusik, Traiettorie, Ultraschall Festival among others. Active also as a lecturer, Erçetin has given lectures at universities such as the University of Chicago, Institut für Elektronische Musik und Akustik in Graz, Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe, Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln. These lectures and the related research have led to publishing his work in scholarly journals, such as MusikTexte and others. He is currently working on a book project that further unpacks compositional and research methods in practice, addressing the interrelationships of space, sound, and corporeality for spatial sound praxis, with a focus on virtuality as a critical mode of unlearning and accountability, to engage with simultaneities of space as well as that which lies beyond measurement and enclosure.
Aaron Cassidy
(b. 1976) is a composer, conductor, teacher, record producer, and author. His work as a composer has, for over 25 years, focused on the development of innovative tablature notations that prioritize the physical, bodily, and mechanical aspects of sound-production in music. This approach is perhaps most notable in his work since 2010, which has created a multicoloured graphical notational practice that enables wildly multi-dimensional choreographic actions to be represented in a simple and non-stratified notational space, as well as through a parallel strand of activity since 2015 that has explored new ways of working with what he refers to as ‘non-geometrical’ rhythm, untethering the fundamental rhythmic characteristics of speed and duration from the notational regularity of beats and pulse while still maintaining the functional character and evocative impact of meter and syncopation. His interest in notation has always been driven by an approach to musical material that is deeply physical, resulting in a soundworld that is expressive and energetic, fractured but dancelike, sometimes violently mangled and sometimes fragile and vulnerable, but always grounded in a fascination with the sounds and textures that become possible when we allow ourselves to rethink our assumptions about what might constitute musical material.
This compositional approach has garnered widespread international visibility. His compositions have been presented in hundreds of performances across 29 countries by leading contemporary music specialists, including ELISION, Ensemble Musikfabrik, EXAUDI, Ensemble SurPlus, ensemble recherche, Ictus Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, line upon line, ekmeles, and the Kairos, Diotima, and JACK string quartets. His work has been presented at major international festivals and venues including Donaueschingen, Ultraschall, Warsaw Autumn, Huddersfield, Darmstadt, Gaudeamus, Dark Music Days, Music Biennale Zagreb, Tage für Neue Musik Zürich, Bludenz, Mixtur, Bendigo (BIFEM), Monday Evening Concerts, NYCEMF, London Contemporary Music Festival, June In Buffalo, Ear Taxi Festival (Chicago), Klangbrücken Hannover, the ISCM World Music Days, Southbank Centre, Merkin Hall, Miller Theatre, National Concert Hall Taipei, Melbourne Recital Centre, and Sendesaal Bremen, and has been supported through grants and commissions from the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, Südwestrundfunk, the American Music Center, British Council, PRS Foundation, Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), New York Foundation for the Arts, Haupstadtkulturfonds Berlin, the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music, allerArt Bludenz, RMIT Gallery Sonic Arts Collection, ASCAP, and the London Cultural Olympiad 2012. Recordings of his work are available on 12 commercial CD releases from NEOS, Kairos, NMC, HCR, and New Focus Records.
Also regularly active as a conductor of both contemporary and historical repertoire, Cassidy has appeared with Ensemble Musikfabrik, ensemble mosaik, ELISION, Ensemble Proton Bern, Schola Heidelberg, Ensemble Interface (then as IEMA), International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Incontri, and the Northwestern University Contemporary Music Ensemble, leading many dozens of world premieres, including for example new works from Richard Barrett, Mary Bellamy, Ann Cleare, Turgut Erçetin, Lucia Kilger, Dariya Maminova, Sergej Newski, and Erik Oña, as well as several of his own works. He has performed in the Großer Saal of the Berlin Philharmonie for Musikfest Berlin, at the Munich Biennale, MaerzMusik, the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall of the Melbourne Recital Centre, the Metropolis New Music Festival, Gare du Nord Basel, Dampfzentrale Bern, Akademie der Künste Berlin, the Klangbrücken Festival, June in Buffalo, and has recorded at Deutschlandfunk Köln and the WDR Funkhaus. From 2008–13 he served as conductor of the Symphony Orchestra and New Music Ensemble at the University of Huddersfield. He has recorded as a conductor for Kairos, HCR, and Wergo.
He has given invited lectures and masterclasses at many of the most significant institutions for new music worldwide, including Harvard, Columbia, Northwestern University, CalArts, SUNY Buffalo, University of Chicago, Oxford, Southampton, Durham, York, RMIT, Monash, University of Queensland, Kunstuniversität Graz, Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität Linz, Gustav Mahler Privatuniversität Klagenfurt, Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig, Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf, Hochschule der Künste Bern, Norwegian Academy of Music, Conservatorio Superior de Música de Málaga, National University of Singapore, SEGi College Malaysia, Orpheus Institute Ghent, Goethe Institut-Los Angeles, Kulturstiftung Schloss Wiepersdorf, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts London. His work has been written about and analyzed in dozens of books, articles, and doctoral dissertations/theses—including in journals such as Perspectives of New Music, Contemporary Music Review, and Tempo, as well as in encyclopedia entries in the Grove Dictionary and MGG (Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart)—and the work has increasingly been profiled in non-specialist publications as well, most notably in The Atlantic (‘Squiggles are the new quarter notes: why music looks different now’).
As an author his contributions include chapters in the first, second, and sixth volumes of Wolke Verlag’s New Music and Aesthetics in the 21st Century series and journals including Contemporary Music Review, Sonic Ideas/Ideas Sónicas, and Search Journal for New Music and Culture, and and he was the co-editor of the book Noise In And As Music, published in 2013 by Huddersfield University Press, which sold out its first printing in less than three months and has had well over 10,000 open access downloads via various platforms. He also works regularly as record producer. Over the past 20+ years he has produced, edited, and mixed recordings for releases on many of the leading labels in contemporary music, including NMC, Kairos, NEOS, mode, aeon, HCR, and Winter & Winter.
Cassidy has been teaching at the university level since 1998. He is currently Professor of Composition and Director of Incontri—Institut für neue Musik at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover. From 2007–22 he served as Professor of Composition at the University of Huddersfield, where he was Director of the Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM) from 2017–22, and prior to that worked as Lecturer of Composition at Northwestern University (2005–07) and as Lecturer in Music at Buffalo State College. He holds a PhD in Composition from the University at Buffalo (SUNY), where he studied principally with David Felder as a recipient of a Presidential Fellowship. Other teachers included Michael Pisaro, Jay Alan Yim, Alan Stout, Marta Ptaszynska, and Pauline Oliveros, in addition to further study with Brian Ferneyhough, Chaya Czernowin, Jonathan Harvey, Richard Barrett, and Alvin Lucier, among others. His conducting teachers have included Stephen Alltop, Erik Oña, Ilan Volkov, Zsolt Nagy, and Peter Eötvös.
Brad Lubman
American conductor and composer, has gained widespread recognition for his versatility, commanding technique and insightful interpretations over the course of more than two decades.
A frequent guest conductor of the world’s most distinguished orchestras and new music ensembles, Lubman has led performances with orchestras including including the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, WDR Symphony Orchestra and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. After recently conducting major international orchestras such as the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Filarmonica della Scala and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, for the 2021/22 season Brad Lubman will be appearing with the SWR Symphonieorchester, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, Frankfurt Radio Symphony and the Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra among others.
In addition, he has worked with some of the most important European and American ensembles for contemporary music, including Ensemble Modern, London Sinfonietta, Klangforum Wien, and Steve Reich and Musicians. Lubman has conducted at new-music festivals across Europe, including those in Lucerne, Salzburg, Berlin, Huddersfield, Paris, Cologne, Frankfurt, and Oslo. He was the recipient of the 2019 Ditson Conductor’s award, in recognition of his distinguished record of performing and championing contemporary American music.
Lubman is founding Co-Artistic Director and Conductor of the NY-based Ensemble Signal. Since its debut in 2008, the Ensemble has performed over 350 concerts and co-produced ten recordings. Their recording of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians on harmonia mundi was awarded a Diapason d’or in June 2015 and appeared on the Billboard Classical crossover charts. In Spring 2019, he conducted the ensemble in the premiere of Steve Reich’s Reich/Richter as part of the Reich Richter Pärt project at the opening of New York art space The Shed.
Brad Lubman has recorded for harmonia mundi, Nonesuch, AEON, BMG/RCA, Kairos, Mode, NEOS, and Cantaloupe. In 2017, he was Composer in Residence at the Grafenegg Festival; his compositions have been performed by acclaimed ensembles such as the Tonkünstler Orchester Austria and musicians form the Los Angeles Philharmonic. 2020 featured the premiere of a new piece written for Rudolf Buchbinder, premiered at the Vienna Musikverein, which Buchbinder also recorded for Deutsche Grammophon.
He is also Professor of Conducting and Ensembles at the Eastman School of Music, as well as on the faculty at the Bang on a Can Summer Institute.
ELISION
Collaborations between composers and ensembles can begin in many different ways. The collaboration between Richard Barrett and ELISION began nearly thirty years ago with Australian composer Michael Whiticker, freshly returned from the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, presenting Daryl Buckley with a cassette containing works by Barrett. The cassette was delivered with a warning: no one in Australia would ever be able or willing to play such ‘heavy dots’. A warning on these terms was of course the perfect way to excite Daryl’s curiosity (indeed it still is!), and before long the first letter suggesting a collaboration was on its way. The result was the trio another heavenly day – horrendously difficult at the time (and playing havoc with Buckley’s wedding preparations…) but by far the most modest of the many works by Barrett ELISION has commissioned over nearly three decades.
Many of these works involved collaborations between ELISION and other performers: sometimes guest performers of particular importance to Barrett’s work (Mary Oliver, Ute Wassermann, Barrett himself), sometimes entire ensembles (the cycle Dark Matter combined ELISION with the Norwegian ensemble Cikada). It is thus entirely appropriate that we combine members of two ensembles, ELISION and Ensemble Musikfabrik, this evening – not least because the ensembles share a surprising amount of membership given that they reside on opposite sides of the planet.
Paul Jeukendrup, Richard Barrett and Hannah Weirich preparing for the world premiere of natural causes I, IV, X, XIV at the WDR Funkhaus (Copyright: Klaus Rudolph)
Such combination has indeed long been central to Barrett’s compositional practice itself. Another heavenly day remains a purely free-standing piece but practically everything else Barrett has composed for ELISION (and not only for ELISION) forms part of one modular cyclic work or another. The guitar solo colloid acquired an accompanying ensemble part to become colloid-E, and was then combined with four other sections to form the cycle negatives. World-line is made up of split and recombined versions of five smaller works. And as its title makes clear, natural causes I, IV, X, XIV (Musikfabrik’s Barrett commission from 2017, first performed almost exactly a year ago, in our WDR concert series) is both a combination of smaller parts (two of which are heard this evening for the first time in their independent form) and part of a larger whole – whose premiere some day would certainly be a more than fitting subject for a subsequent meeting of my ensembles on a much larger scale.
Ensemble Musikfabrik
Since its foundation in 1990, Ensemble Musikfabrik (Landesensemble NRW) has had the reputation of being one of the leading ensembles for contemporary music. In keeping with the literal meaning of its name, Ensemble Musikfabrik is particularly concerned with commissioning and producing new works, often in close collaboration with composers. The results of their extensive endeavors, are performed by the international Cologne-based soloist ensemble in numerous concerts in Germany and abroad, at festivals, in the self-organized concert series “Musikfabrik im WDR” and “Montagskonzerte” (often with live broadcasts), and in audio and video productions. WERGO released the CD series “Edition Musikfabrik” with cover art by Gerhard Richter, who chose the paintings for the CDs himself. In 2014, the in-house Label Musikfabrik was founded.
Exploring forms of modern communication and new possibilities for expression in music and theatre are a focal point. Interdisciplinary projects that include live electronics, dance, theatre, live video, and visual art expand the conventional form of the conducted ensemble concert. Thanks to its extraordinary profile and its superb artistic quality, the Ensemble Musikfabrik is sought after world wide and is a trusted partner of renowned composers and conductors.
Since 2013, the ensemble owns a completely reconstructed set of Harry Partch’s instruments. Under the title PITCH 43_TUNING THE COSMOS, many compositions have been written especially for or with these instruments. In addition, the brass players’ instruments, equipped with double bells, are another outstanding feature of the ensemble’s eagerness to experiment.
Ensemble Musikfabrik has set itself the task of promoting the younger generation of performers and composers. Central initiatives are “Studio Musikfabrik” (Youth Ensemble for New Music of the Landesmusikrat NRW) and “Adventure”, which since 2019 has been developing projects by composition students of the Cologne University of Music and Dance and presenting them in four annual concert phases. The ensemble bundles these and other educational activities under the title “Akademie Musikfabrik”.
Ensemble Musikfabrik is supported by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the City of Cologne. Ensemble Musikfabrik is registered as a not-for-profit organization under German law (“eingetragener Verein”), all major artistic and business decisions are made by the members.
As of 2018, Thomas Fichter is the Executive Director (in German: Intendant).
