Composing while Black, Paris Edition

This event will be held in English.

This program is a collaboration between International Contemporary Ensemble, L’Itineraire, the Columbia Global Paris Center, and the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, where ICE Artistic Director George Lewis is currently a Fellow.

—

This event is a unique international collaboration between ICE and the Paris-based ensemble L'Itineraire, one of the world’s finest ensembles for contemporary music. The concert celebrates a new generation of Afrodiasporic composers from around the world. By presenting perspectives that have historically been missing from academic research, concert programs, and journalistic coverage, this program demonstrates the important role that Afrodiasporic new music is playing as an intercultural, multigenerational space of innovation that offers new subjects, histories, and identities.

Program

6:30 p.m. Doors open

7:00 p.m. to 7:45 p.m. Pre-concert conversation with composers Alyssa Regent and Corie Rose Soumah, moderated by Dr. Harald Kisiedu, co-editor, Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today

8:00 p.m. Concert

• Alyssa Regent: Émergence (2024), for bass flute, bass clarinet, trombone, and violin
• Andile Khumalo: Schaufe[r]nster II (2014), for piano
• Corie Rose Soumah: Limpidités IV (2022), for violin solo
• Hannah Kendall: when flesh is pressed against the dark (2024), for baritone voice, bass clarinet, trumpet, and trombone
• Levy Lorenzo and Fay Victor: MODIFIED (2024), for percussion, electronics, and voice
• Jessie Cox: (Noisy) Black/blackness (Unbounded) (2024), for mezzo-soprano, baritone, bass clarinet, trumpet, violin, and percussion

Following the concert, there will be a reception and book-signing.

Performers

International Contemporary Ensemble

• Rebekah Heller, conductor
• Joshua Rubin, clarinets
• Jonathan Finlayson, trumpet
• Fay Victor, voice
• Levy Lorenzo, percussion and electronics
• Jacob Greenberg, piano

in collaboration with L'Itinéraire

• Yua Souverbie, flute
• Mathilde Lauridon, violin

with guest artists

• Damian Norfleet, voice
• Weston Olencki, trombone

1964-2024: Celebrating 60 Years of Columbia at Reid Hal

2024 marks the 60th anniversary of the gift of Reid Hall to Columbia University by Helen Rogers Reid. Today, the space houses the Columbia Global Paris Center, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, the longstanding undergraduate programs, and Columbia’s M.A. in History and Literature program. Please join us as we celebrate this milestone.

View the full anniversary program on our website.

Panelists

Alyssa Regent is a New York based composer originally from the islands of Guadeloupe. Her works have been performed at thethe Lucerne Music Festival (Switzerland), 77th Composer’s Conference, String Quartet Evolution at the Banff Center (Canada), and New Music on the Point. In 2023, she was awarded the Ascap Morton Gould Young Composer Award. Regent is inspired by what she calls “the unseen”, seeking to evoke passions and sensations that are deeply rooted in introspection. She harvests from the ethereal, the enigmatic intersections between music and spirituality. She loves to think about music as an exploration of the spiritual and emotional dimensions of the human experience. Her compositions urge listeners to reflect and embrace their emotions; connect with each other during a shared listening experience. Regent studied composition with Suzanne Farrin, David Fulmer, Marcos Balter and George Lewis and is currently pursuing a DMA at Columbia University.

Corie Rose Soumah is a Canadian composer based in New York, originally from Quebec. She specializes in creating fragmented and reconstructed sounds through hyper-collages and physical gestures, often incorporating Afro-diasporic perspectives. Her work blends various acoustic, electronic, and analog technologies. Soumah’s compositions have been performed by numerous ensembles, including Longleash and Hypercube, and featured at festivals like MATA and Domaine Forget. She has recent collaborations involving saxophones, electronics, and a commission for Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne for the 2025 Forum. Currently pursuing a DMA in composition at Columbia University, Soumah holds a BMus from the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, with mentorship from notable composers such as George Lewis and Zosha Di Castri.

Dr. Harald Kisiedu (moderator)is a historical musicologist and saxophonist who received his PhD in historical musicology from Columbia University. His research interests include Afrodiasporic classical and experimental composers, jazz as a global phenomenon, improvisation, music and politics, and Wagner. His writings have appeared in the WIRE, Grove Dictionary of American Music, Critical Studies in Improvisation, and Journal der Künste a. o. He has taught at the University of Music and Theatre “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig and the University of Applied Sciences Osnabrück’s Institute of Music. He is the co-editor of Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today (Wolke-Verlag, 2023), and the author of European Echoes: Jazz Experimentalism in Germany, 1950-1975 (Wolke-Verlag, 2020).

Organizers

Now in its third decade, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) is a multidisciplinary collective of musicians, digital media artists, producers, and educators committed to building and innovating collaborative environments in order to inspire audiences to reimagine how they experience contemporary music and sound. The Ensemble creates a mosaic musical ecosystem as “America’s foremost new-music group” (The New Yorker), honoring the diversity of human experience and expression by commissioning, developing, recording, and performing the works of living artists. Co-founded in 2001 by flutist and MacArthur “genius” Fellow Claire Chase, the Ensemble has premiered over 1,000 works. The Ensemble’s notion of polyaspora is intercultural, intermedial and interdisciplinary, as well as conscious, collaborative, creolized, and connected, across borders of aesthetics, practices, gender, ethnicity, race, and transnational formations.The Ensemble has given performances at Lincoln Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, TIME:SPANS Festival, Roulette, Miller Theatre, Warsaw Autumn, Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, Cité de la Musique (Paris), Park Avenue Armory, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ojai Music Festival, and Big Ears Festival, Dutch National Opera, Carnegie Hall, and Walt Disney Concert Hall Stage.

L’Itinéraire is one of Europe’s leading contemporary music ensembles. Since its founding in 1973, L’Itinéraire has been instrumental in the emergence of spectral music, which focuses on sound perception and is represented by composers such as Gérard Grisey, Michael Lévinas, Tristan Murail, and Hugues Dufourt. Now under the direction of Lucia Peralta, L’Itinéraire features highly skilled soloists whose diverse talents bridge generations and practices, pushing the boundaries of sound through acoustic saturation, electrification, groundbreaking electronic spaces, as well as improvisation, open-air concerts, and societal experiments. An internationally renowned ensemble, it regularly collaborates with IRCAM-Centre Pompidou, Radio France, and the National Centers for Musical Creation (CNCM). L’Itinéraire has performed in the United States, Mexico, South America, Israel, Japan, and throughout Europe. Widely recognized as a hub for musical exploration and creation, L’Itinéraire focuses on three key areas: the creation and dissemination of contemporary music, knowledge transmission through cultural initiatives and professional development programs, and the exploration of innovative formats such as open-air performances and in-situ projects, addressing crucial societal issues like ecology.

The Columbia Global Paris Center addresses pressing global issues that are at the forefront of international education and research: agency and gender; climate and the environment; critical dialogues for just societies; encounters in the arts; and health and medical science. The Paris Global Center is part of Columbia Global, which brings together major global initiatives from across the university including the Columbia Global Centers, Columbia World Projects, the Committee on Global Thought, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, and Undergraduate Global Engagement.

Each year the Institute for Ideas and Imagination brings together a cohort of 14-15 Fellows, half of them Columbia faculty and post-docs, the other half artists and writers from around the world, to spend a year together in work and conversation. The Institute fosters intellectual and creative diversity unconstrained by medium and discipline through the interaction of the arts and academia.

This evening is made possible through the generous support of the Columbia Global Paris Center, Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Cornelia G. Bronson Fund in the Department of Music at Columbia University, and the Edwin H. Case Chair in American Music, Columbia University.

Venue

Nestled in the Montparnasse district, Reid Hall hosts several Columbia University initiatives: the Columbia Global Paris Center, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, the Columbia Undergraduate Programs, the M.A. in History and Literature, and the GSAPP Shape of Two Cities Program. This unique combination of resources is enhanced by our global network whose mission is to expand the University's engagement with the world through educational programs, research initiatives, regional partnerships, and public events.

This event will take place in Reid Hall’s Grande Salle Ginsberg-LeClerc, built in 1912 and extensively renovated in 2023 thanks to the generous support of Judith Ginsberg and Paul LeClerc.

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and guests do not necessarily reflect the official policies or positions of the Columbia Global Paris Center or its affiliates.