Ensemble Decipher will perform two shows in Illinois in March 2024 with music by Erin Rogers, Niloufar Nourbakhsh, and Taylor Long and premieres by Eric Lemmon and Rob Cosgrove. The ensemble will be in residence at Knox College in Galesburg March 6–7, 2024, followed by a performance at Constellation’s Frequency Series in Chicago on Sunday, March 9, 2024.
Ensemble Decipher has been awarded a $30,000 grant from the MAP Fund to produce a new collaborative work with composer and decipherist Joseph Bohigian. The funded project is an evening-length multimedia work titled I Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment about the life of the visionary Georgian-born Soviet-Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov (1924–1990), most well known for his 1969 film The Color of Pomegranates. The premiere of this new project will take place in 2026 at the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco, California.
Decipher will be joined for this project by Lebanese-Armenian vocalist Khatchadour Khatchadourian, a specialist in a variety of traditional Armenian musical genres, who will sing lyrics by the 18th century singer-poet Sayat Nova in three languages.
Ensemble Decipher is excited to be a resident ensemble at the National Philharmonic’s Summer String Institute this week. We’ve had a blast the past two days working with the wonderful students at SSI!
We are teaching two groups of string students about music and technology. One younger group fittingly called the “Guarneri” group is learning how to play as an ensemble with live-looping and live processing through effects like delay, reverb, and distortion. The older group, the “Strad’s,” are working with Cycling ‘74’s Max/MSP and learning to both improvise and compose with computers!
We are performing this Thursday with the students, along with two works from our repertoire: Pamela Z’s Twenty Answers and Niloufar Nourbakhsh’s Of Breath and Feeding Back.
Our concert will be at 4:00 pm on July 25, 2024, at the River Road Unitarian Universalist Congregation (6301 River Rd, Bethesda, MD 20817).
Ensemble Decipher presents a concert of music written and adapted for networked performance on Thursday, May 9, 2024 at 5:30pm PT / 7:30pm CT / 8:30pm ET. The music will be performed live via the internet from six different locations and streamed on Decipher’s YouTube channel. The concert is being held to raise funds for Ensemble Decipher’s upcoming performances and ticketing will be Pay What You Can with a suggested donation of $25.
The concert will feature a series of works new to Decipher’s repertoire by some of our favorite composers. Magic 8 Balls, toy instruments, and machine listening abound in Pamela Z’s Twenty Answers in an arrangement by Paula Matthusen, Angélica Negrón’s The Little Things, Scott Miller’s Exit Velocity, Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi’s Speculating and Reflecting, and toy_5 by Decipher’s own Eric Lemmon.
Ensemble Decipher will perform at the 2023 New Music Gathering at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. The concert on Friday, June 23, 2023 at 1:00 pm will include music by Mari Kimura, Lyn Goeringer, and Joseph Bohigian.
Ensemble Decipher will perform at the LoKo Arts Festival in Potsdam, New York. The concert on Friday, April 28 2023 will include music by Yaz Lancaster, Lyn Goeringer, Oliver Hickman, Joseph Bohigian, and the premiere of Jerod Sommerfeldt’s Plantronica.
Ensemble Decipher has been awarded a grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council to present world premieres of interdisciplinary works by Bora Yoon and Chelsea Loew, as well as recent works by Erin Rogers, Lyn Goeringer, and Mari Kimura at Brooklyn’s Roulette Intermedium in October 2023. This project is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by Brooklyn Arts Council.
Decipher will perform at Rhizome in Washington DC on March 31, 2023 alongside our friends Sideband and Warp Duo. A few days later on April 3, see us in Baltimore at the Peabody Institute, where we’ll perform music by Margaret Schedel, Oliver Hickman, Joseph Bohigian, and premiering newly commissioned works by Erin Rogers and Lyn Goeringer.
We are pleased to announce we will be in residence at Michigan State University in January, holding a workshop with student composers and presenting a concert on Friday, January 27, 2023 at 8:00 pm. We will be performing music by Mari Kimura, Sam Pluta, Oliver Hickman, Rob Cosgrove, and Joseph Bohigian.
Composer Bora Yoon has been awarded a Barlow Endowment General Commission to write a new work for Ensemble Decipher. The piece will be premiered in Fall 2023 in New York.