International Contemporary Ensemble: Composing While Black, Toronto Edition Afrodiasporic New Music Today, Concert

In Partnership with New Music Concerts

PANEL DISCUSSION: AFRODIASPORIC NEW MUSIC TODAY

With George Elliott Clarke, University of Toronto; 
Beth Coleman, University of Toronto; 
George E. Lewis, Columbia University; 
Rashaan Rori Allwood, composer; and a performance of Un petit brouillard cérébral (2020) for violin solo by Humberto Ramirez, DMA performance student, University of Toronto

CONCERT PROGRAM

Tossed Parachutes of Lilacs and Lungs (2025, Canadian premiere)

for flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, electric guitar, 
violin, viola, cello, and electronics

Corie Rose Soumah

Egwu Amala (from Talking Drums, 1991)

for piano

Joshua Uzoigwe

ourselves in the other (2025, Canadian premiere)

for amplified chamber ensembles + sampler

yaz lancaster

Intermission

Halting State (World Premiere)

for percussion, two violins, viola, cello, double bass, and electronics

Beth Coleman

Árvore (2025, Canadian premiere)

for flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, guitar, 
two violins, viola, cello, double bass, and electronics

Marcos Balter

Free...from life’s prisons (World Premiere)

for flute, clarinet, percussion, electric guitar,
piano, two violins, viola, cello, and double bass

Rashaan Rori Allwood

INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY ENSEMBLE

Rebekah Heller, conductor
Isabel Lepanto Gleicher, flute
Emmalie Tello, clarinet
Levy Lorenzo, percussion, electronics
Daniel Lippel, guitar
Jacob Greenberg, piano
Modney, violin
Lauren Cauley, violin
Kal Sugatski, viola
Lester St. Louis, cello
Randall Zigler, double bass, electric bass

PROGRAM NOTES

Corie Rose Soumah–Tossed Parachutes of Lilacs and Lungs (2025, Canadian premiere)

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

The piece is dedicated to George Lewis and the International Contemporary Ensemble. —Corie Rose Soumah

Co-commissioned by Darmstadt Summer Course and The Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust

Joshua Uzoigwe–Egwu Amala (from Talking Drums, 1991)

This work of the late Nigerian composer Joshua Uzoigwe (1946–2005), a major exponent of the style of African pianism, draws from his study of ukom (Igbo-tuned drums). As the Ghanaian musicologist Kofi Agawu has observed, Uzoigwe sought to ground his work in an affectively and structurally African sonic field.

yaz lancaster: ourselves in the other (2025, Canadian premiere)

“Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience... Fear is the primary force upholding systems of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety always lies in sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear - against alienation and separation. The choice to love is the choice to connect - to find ourselves in the other.” – bell hooks, All About Love

ourselves in the other is a love story in 4 parts. While I’ve provided a sample bank of one possible narrative, ensembles are encouraged to swap out their own recorded stories + field recordings. — yaz lancaster

Beth Coleman: Halting State (World Premiere)

In Alan Turing's theory of computation, the halting state is the condition in which a machine finishes its calculation and stops. This is a sign of success: things begin and end. But there is also the condition in which a machine never reaches a halting state and, in theory, runs forever. Turing's 1936 Halting Problem asks: can one write a universal program that predicts whether any program will halt or run forever? The answer is no. The possibility of the infinite loop marks a fundamental limit of computation. The world needs to intervene in the generation of numbers. In other words, a person needs to press stop.

For the composition Halting State, I take the infinite loop as a threshold that says something about human-machine interaction. That might sound pretty dry. And yet, across the long histories of setting limits, there is a super gooey relation between Man and what is taken for machine. Many thinkers, from George E. Lewis to Sylvia Wynter, have negotiated those relations. I give a nod to that history in my essay "Race as Technology" (2009).

The form of Halting State plays out, across different registers, what it means to sustain or to stop. Largo, the opening, essentially asks cello and bass to play one note forever. Or at least until the movement stops. The second movement, “Halting State,” takes Derrick May's techno anthem "Strings of Life" and turns it into a game of stop-and-go, moving across tempo and choice. It is not true improvisation, as the musicians have set material. Nonetheless, each chooses when to start, stop, or just listen as the contrabass holds the 4/4 clock. The “Finale” takes elements of the first two movements and moves through what is, to my ears, an acoustic rendition of the starts and stutters of machine music, ending with each musician finding a halting state. My thanks to collaborator Gadi Sassoon for the help in making this piece.—Beth Coleman

Marcos Balter: Árvore (2025, Canadian premiere)

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. — Marcos Balter

Co-commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble, Darmstadt Summer Course, and The Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust

Rashaan Rori Allwood: Free...from life’s prisons (World Premiere)

Free from Life’s Prisons explores the desire for freedom from social expectations, inherited beliefs, and the limits we associate with our bodies and identities. At its heart is the wish to have agency over our own lives: to choose what guides us, question what confines us, and explore physical, emotional, and spiritual possibilities on our own terms.

The musical language grows through transformation. The opening gesture stretches into sustained textures and breaks into fragmented material, retaining its identity as its shape changes. Stark attacks give way to lingering sonorities, while the instrumentalists’ vocalizations reach beyond the ensemble’s expected sounds.— Rashaan Rori Allwood

BIOGRAPHIES

Rashaan Rori Allwood is a multitalented musician based out of Toronto, currently pursuing a PhD in Composition. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Piano Performance and a Master's degree in Organ Performance. Rashaan is the recipient of the 2022 Marilyn Mason Award in Organ Composition from the American Guild of Organists, who commissioned him to compose a new piece for solo organ to be premiered in Washington in 2022. Rashaan was also one of the ICOT winners for Piano works by Canadian composers in 2020. Rashaan is now director of music at St. Ansgar Lutheran Church, Toronto where he regularly premieres new works, directing choirs and various ensembles. As a soloist, he has toured across Europe, and performed at St. Paul's Cathedral in London, UK; St. Nikolai-Kirche in Leipzig, Germany; and St. Pierre’s Cathedral in Geneva, Switzerland.

Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Marcos Balter is a Brazilian-American composer whose work explores Black and queer identity, ritual, collective experience, and collaborative models, primarily through Brazilian Afrodiasporic cosmologies and Afrofuturism, engaging ancestral memory and knowledge as living sources for building decolonized, liberated, and critically speculative musical futures. His music is performed by major orchestras and ensembles worldwide, including commissions from the New York Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and appearances as guest composer at international festivals such as Ojai, Marlboro, Darmstadt, TIME:SPANS, and Acht Brücken. Past recognitions include awards and fellowships from the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Guggenheim, Fromm, Chamber Music America, Koussevitzky, Civitella Ranieri, and Leonard Bernstein foundations, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Composition Award. He is currently Artist in Residence and Co-Coordinator of Music Composition at the Tanglewood Music Center and the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University. marcosbalter.com

George Elliott Clarke was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, near the Black Loyalist and Afro-Metis community of Three Mile Plains, in 1960. A graduate of the University of Waterloo (B.A., Hons.,1984), Dalhousie University (M.A., 1989), and Queen’s University (Ph.D., 1993), he is now the inaugural E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto. An Assistant Professor of English and Canadian Studies at Duke University, North Carolina, 1994-1999, Clarke also served as the Seagrams Visiting Chair in Canadian Studies at McGill University, 1998-1999, and as a Noted Scholar at the University of British Columbia (2002) and as a Visiting Scholar at Mount Allison University (2005), and as the 27th William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor in Canadian Studies at Harvard University (2013-14). He has also worked as a researcher (Ontario Provincial Parliament, 1982-83), editor (Imprint, University of Waterloo, 1984-85, and The Rap, Halifax, NS, 1985-87), social worker (Black United Front of Nova Scotia, 1985-86), parliamentary aide (House of Commons, 1987-91), and newspaper columnist (The Daily News, Halifax, NS, 1988-89; and The Halifax Herald, Halifax, NS, 1992-2016). His many honours include the Portia White Prize for Artistic Achievement (1998), Governor-General’s Award for Poetry (2001), the National Magazine Gold Medal for Poetry (2001), the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award (2004), the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellowship Prize (2005), the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction (2006), the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry (2009), appointment to the Order of Nova Scotia (2006), appointment to the Order of Canada at the rank of Officer (2008), appointment as Poet Laureate of the City of Toronto (2012-15), appointment as Parliamentary [National] Poet Laureate (2016-17), appointment as a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society (2017), and the receipt of eight honorary doctorates.

Dr. Beth Coleman is Associate Professor of Data & Cities at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology and Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Working in the disciplines of science and technology studies and generative aesthetics Beth Coleman’s research focuses on artificial intelligence & smart technology, urban data and civic engagement, and transmedia arts. She is the author of Hello Avatar and Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds, as well as many articles, including “Race as Technology” and “Technology of the Surround.” She has been a Google Brain and Responsible AI senior visiting researcher as well as a 2021 Google Artists and Machines Intelligence awardee. She is a founding member of the Trusted Data Sharing group and research lead on AI policy and praxis at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology & Society. Her research affiliations have included the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University; Microsoft Research New England; Data & Society Institute, New York; and expert consultant for the European Commission Digital Futures. She served as the Founding Director of the U of T Black Research Network Institute Strategic Initiative. She is the co-founder of SoundLab Cultural Alchemy, an internationally acclaimed multimedia art and sound platform. She has a history of international exhibition and artist residencies including venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Récollets Paris, and Pioneer Works, New York. She is currently working on the monograph, AI in the World: Perils and Possibilities of a General Purpose Technology.

The expansive practice of yaz lancaster encompasses experimental electroacoustic performances, notated compositions, open-format DJ-ing, music writing, steel pan, collage-based poetry, collaborative work, and organizing DIY shows across NYC’s underground and nightlife scenes. yaz performs solo sets with violin/voice/electronics that comprise songs, improvisations, and composed music – aptly displayed on their sophomore album AFTER (PTP, 2025). they find joy in collaboration – they’ve worked with artists like Andy Akiho, BAKUDI SCREAM, claire rousay, Dreamcrusher, KING VISION ULTRA, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Nyokabi Kariuki, and OHYUNG. yaz additionally performs as “death ambient” and hardcore DJ project “medium.” in deep collaboration with creative partner gg200bpm. recent highlights include performing at Dweller Forever (at Public Records), Paragon, The Lot Radio, Issue Project Room, The Music Gallery (Toronto), Nowadays, NTS (London), KINDL (Berlin), and Gaudeamus Festival in Utrecht; and commissions from International Contemporary Ensemble, Castle of Our Skins, and Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center. yaz is also a poet & (music/arts) writer, organizer, and amateur powerlifter. they are a member of communally-active PTP artist collective; and the creator/curator of HEAVY HEARTS performance series celebrating the community and vulnerability in harsh/experimental sonics. they love jalapeños, chess, reality competition TV, and hearing people laugh. their sun, moon, and rising signs are all Aquarius.

George E. Lewis is an American composer, musicologist, trombonist, and Professor of American Music at Columbia University. He is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Akademie der Künste, and an International Fellow of the British Academy. A MacArthur Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, Lewis has also received the Doris Duke Artist Award and the Alpert Award in the Arts. His books include A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008), the Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies,Volumes 1 & 2 (2016, co-edited with Benjamin Piekut), and Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today/Afrodiasporische Neue Musik Heute (2023, co-edited with Harald Kisiedu). Lewis is widely regarded as a pioneer in the development of AI programs that improvise music with human musicians, and his opera The Comet (2024) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Lewis holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Oberlin College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, New England Conservatory, Birmingham City University, and Curtis Institute of Music, among others. He serves as Artistic Director ot the International Contemporary Ensemble.

Corie Rose Soumah is a Canadian composer (QC) currently based in Chicago, where she serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago. Soumah is interested in shaping fractured and reconstructed sound components through hyper-collages and visceral physical gestures. Her approach is characterized by a keen interest in the interweaving of multiple aesthetic and sonic elements from the perspective of Afrodiasporic geologies. She explores these textures through the overlay of different acoustic mediums as well as electronic and analog technologies. Soumah’s works have been performed internationally by renowned ensembles and she has earned several distinctions, such as the Prix de composition 2025 as part of the Prix d’Europe and multiple awards from SOCAN Foundation. She holds a DMA in composition from Columbia University. corierosesoumah.com

Joshua Uzoigwe (1946-2005) was a distinguished Nigerian composer and ethnomusicologist, belonging to the Igbo ethnic group. His creative endeavors often found inspiration in the rich traditional music of the Igbo people. Born in Umuahia, Abia State (formerly Imo State), Nigeria, Uzoigwe commenced his education at the local primary school in Umuagu. His formative years were shaped alongside his elder brother, Sunday Uzoigwe, who worked at the University of Ibadan. Uzoigwe pursued his secondary education at King’s College, Lagos, and later enrolled at the International School Ibadan for his Advanced Level Certificate. Subsequently, he delved into music studies at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, between 1970 and 1973. Furthering his education, Uzoigwe completed his undergraduate degree at the Guildhall College of Music in London (1973–77) and pursued advanced studies at Queen’s University Belfast, earning an M.A. and a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from 1977 to 1981. Throughout his academic career, Uzoigwe served as a lecturer in Music at various Nigerian universities, including Obafemi Awolowo University in Ife, the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, and the University of Uyo in Akwa Ibom State. His commitment to music education and exploration of Igbo musical heritage left an indelible mark on Nigerian music. 

Humberto Ramírez is a Colombian violinist whose artistic career encompasses solo, chamber performance and violin pedagogy. He holds a Master of Music degree in Violin Performance and a Performer Diploma from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University Bloomington, where he studied with Simin Ganatra, the Pacifica Quartet, and Mimi Zweig. He completed his undergraduate studies in Violin Performance with a minor in Chamber Music at Universidad Juan N. Corpas in Bogotá. 

As a performer, Ramírez has collaborated with internationally recognized artists and ensembles, including Carlos Vives, Monsieur Periné, and the Colombian National Symphony Orchestra. His musical interests span the classical repertoire, chamber music, contemporary works, and projects that highlight Latin American composers and musical traditions. 

Ramírez previously served as Director and Dean of the Music Department at Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, Colombia. He is currently pursuing the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Violin Performance at the University of Toronto, where he studies with Professor Mark Fewer. 

The International Contemporary Ensemble is a multidisciplinary collective committed to inspiring audiences to reimagine sonic experience. Co-founded in 2001 by flutist and MacArthur “genius” Fellow Claire Chase, the Ensemble has premiered over 1,000 works and has won the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming and Musical America’s Ensemble of the Year Award. Past artistic leadership includes Ensemble members Joshua Rubin, Rebekah Heller, and Ross Karre. A number of the Ensemble’s composer-collaborators have developed highly influential careers, such as Du Yun, 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner for the opera Angel’s Bone, which the Ensemble developed and premiered, and MacArthur Fellows Tyshawn Sorey and Courtney Bryan. Notable presenting partners include Lincoln Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, TIME:SPANS Festival, Roulette Intermedium, and Miller Theatre. The Ensemble has given performances at Warsaw Autumn, Dutch National Opera, Carnegie Hall, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Paris Opera, Darmstadt Summer Course, Cité de la Musique (Paris), Park Avenue Armory, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Ojai Music Festival.

The Ensemble’s performances, as well as activities such as the “Call for___” Commissioning Program and Digitice, which provides public access to a high-quality video archive of Ensemble performances, are made possible by the generous support of our board of directors and many individuals, as well as the Mellon Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, Fromm Music Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Aaron Copland Fund for Music Inc., Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, The Arlene and Larry Dunn Fund for Afrodiasporic Music, Amphion Foundation, The Cheswatyr Foundation, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, BMI Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and New York State Legislature. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the International Contemporary Ensemble. iceorg.org

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Ensemble’s performances and commissioning activities during the 2026-27 concert season are made possible by the generous support of our board of directors, many individuals, as well as the Mellon Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, Fromm Music Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Aaron Copland Fund for Music Inc., The Arlene and Larry Dunn Fund for Afrodiasporic Music, Amphion Foundation, The Cheswatyr Foundation, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, BMI Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and New York State Legislature. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the International Contemporary Ensemble.

Special thanks to Ellie M. Hisama, Distinguished Professor of Music, Society, and Culture, University of Toronto; Ryan McClelland, Interim Dean and Professor of Music Theory, Faculty of Music, University of Toronto; Brian Current, Artistic Director, New Music Concerts for their support in making this evening’s program possible.

Ticket Prices: Adults $30, Seniors $20, Students $10