Zafraan Ensemble at Maerzmusik 2024 – Polyaspora

https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/maerzmusik/programm/2024/kalender/polyaspora

Multiple perspectives offer multiple possibilities: This is the core idea of ​​“Polyaspora” at MaerzMusik. As part of the project, the International Contemporary Ensemble will perform the “unheard of,” with works by Charles Uzor, Samir Odeh-Tamimi, Aida Shirazi, Raven Chacon, Laure M. Hiendl and Jessie Cox.

Multiple perspectives offer multiple possibilities. This seemingly simple core concept forms the starting point for the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) concert “Polyaspora”. The title is borrowed from Adrian Tchaikovsky’s 2021 science fiction novel “The Shards of the Earth”. The novel describes a future state of human life in our galaxy in which there is no fixed residence, but the inhabitants are always on the move; Currents that flow from everywhere in all directions. What is described here is not a diaspora, but a polyaspora.

If you follow the view of ICE’s artistic director, George Lewis, our lives and our perception of the world are already shaped by this idea. At the same time, this characteristic also applies to the ICE when Lewis describes the ensemble as intercultural, intermedial and interdisciplinary, which consciously, collaboratively, creolizes and connects and works across the boundaries of aesthetics, practices, gender, ethnicity, race and transnational formations.

Following this claim, the ICE, in collaboration with the renowned Zafraan Ensemble from Berlin, presents two generations of Afrodiasporic Swiss composers, Charles Uzor and Jessie Cox, as well as works by important personalities such as Samir Odeh-Tamimi and younger voices such as Aida Shirazi, Raven Chacon and Laure M . Hiendl. The aim of “Polyaspora” is to propose not only a new consciousness, but a new identity for new music.

program

Aida Shirazi
Crystalline Trees (2020)
for chamber ensemble

Raven Chacon
(Bury Me) Where The Lightning [Will] Never Find Me (2019)
for bass clarinet, violin and cello

Samir Odeh-Tamimi
Philaki (2009)
for flute, clarinet, harp and string quartet

Jessie Cox
Existence Lies In-Between (2017)
for chamber ensemble

Laure M. Hiendl
String Quartet No. 1 (Tubular—Mondo) (2018)
for string quartet and live electronics

Charles Uzor
Go (Ballet imaginaire) (1999)
version for seven instrumentalists
for clarinet, percussion, piano and string quartet

Cast
ICE – International Contemporary Ensemble
Zafraan Ensemble

Kazem Abdullah – conductor
Laure M. Hiendl – sound direction

The concert by the International Contemporary Ensemble will be recorded by Deutschlandfunk Kultur and broadcast on March 21st at 8:03 p.m.