A George Lewis work anchors a special concert with the Civic Fellows

When flutist Claire Chase decided to found a new-music group in Chicago, she steered clear of anything fancy or cutesy and chose a straightforward name that made its mission clear: International Contemporary Ensemble.

That no-frills approach has worked, because the group is still going strong after more than two decades. Of course, it also helped that the group has crafted a flexible roster of 35 top-level musicians committed to playing music of their time.

Two years ago, members of the ensemble were scheduled to perform the music of George Lewis and Nicole Mitchell as part of MusicNOW, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s contemporary-music series at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance. But the event had to be canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a kind of make-up event, six members of the International Contemporary Ensemble will join 13 musicians from the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the CSO’s pre-professional training arm, for a May 11 concert centered on George Lewis’ P. Multitudinis (2018). (The concert, held at Buntrock Hall, is free but tickets are required.)

The 13 Civic musicians are members of the Fellows program, a leadership training initiative in which eight to 14 players are chosen each year for additional educational and engagement work presented by CSO’s Negaunee Institute.

The work’s Latin title (the “P” stands for “Potencia”) can be translated as “the power of the multitudes,” an idea that Lewis said originates with the philosopher Spinoza and suggests that a reasoned, right direction will emerge from such collective action. 

It was written for an unspecified large ensemble. It is structured according to what the composer calls “situational form,” which he sees as being different than open-form or aleatoric music.

In this piece, there can be up to seven small ensembles, including a string quartet and a trio for electronics and percussion, alongside what is termed the “multitude,” which can incorporate any number of players.

“They all decide for themselves what to play and when to play it,” said Lewis, the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University and a 2002 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” winner. Sometimes, the musicians are called on to perform what he calls a “relational task,” like listening to what someone has just played and then replicating it. But, of course, the result is inevitably going to be a variation of the original passage.

“Situational form, for me, is way of allowing the players to make connections among themselves without a having a central conductor or a centralized score,” Lewis said. “Each concert is a way for the ensemble members to speak through their instruments and voices with each other about what they see the situation being in the music at that time.”

These situational choices mean that the piece is inevitably different every time that it is played. “I cannot predict the full range of what P. Multitudinis can create or can sound like,” Lewis said. “There is no canonical model for what the piece sounds like. You can’t go on YouTube and say, ‘I’ll imitate that.’ ”

In a happy coincidence, Lewis, a Chicago native, was appointed artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble on April 8. He replaces Ross Karre, who held the post in 2016-2022.

Lewis, who has undertaken curatorial projects with the Ensemble Modern in Germany and the London Sinfonietta, was attracted to the job because of the chance to work with what he called one of the greatest new-music ensembles in the world. “That was enough to me,” he said. “The possibilities are amazing for rethinking what the field of new classical music is capable of.”

The International Contemporary Ensemble began in Chicago, with mostly Oberlin alumni on its roster, and presented its first concert here in 2002 at the Three Arts Club. It went on to serve as ensemble-in-residence at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through 2015 and has given scores of concerts in the city.

Two years after its birth, the group gave a concert in New York and later began to split its performances between the two cities, along with touring and participating in other residencies. But after the pandemic struck, the group limited its activities to New York, according to Karre, who now serves as its executive producer. 

“It’s hopefully going to ramp back up,” he said of the ensemble’s Chicago presence. “We really love Chicago. We’ve played there so many times, and the audience and a lot of members are still living there. There is a lot of history there.”

Since its founding the ensemble has premiered more than 1,000 works and has influenced the careers of acclaimed composers such as Tyshawn Sorey, another MacArthur “genius grant” winner, and Du Yun, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Under his leadership, Lewis plans to accelerate the number of debuts. “The rate of production is going up,” he said.

Another big priority for Lewis is bringing more inclusion and equity to all aspects of the ensemble’s activities, a process he said was already under way when he arrived. In 2020, he took part in an international symposium on diversity in contemporary music, and from that experience, he penned an article titled “New Music Decolonialization in Eight Difficult Steps.”

“Classical music is already a diasporic music,” Lewis said. “What that means is that we find it being performed all over the world and not just in one place, and a lot of the tributaries, directions and references don’t all refer back to European histories. I think the ensemble is in a very good position to realize the implications of that so that we start to think about who we would like to commission and who we would like to work with.”

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