GHOST ENSEMBLE: Music by Catherine Lamb & Ben Richter

The groundbreaking music of New York’s Ghost Ensemble blurs borders of genre, expanding perceptual horizons through shared immersive experience. Their performance at Epsilon Spires will present new works created in collaboration with Ben Richter and Catherine Lamb. 

WORKS:

Ben Richter’s Rewild traces the fragile evolution of a shadow biosphere, inspired by the perspectives and timescales of nonhuman beings. Exploring the uncanny zones at which pitch becomes rhythm, harmonic interval becomes beating rate, and timbres morph over time, the pulsing, breathing sonic ecosystem orients temporal perception toward global listening in a sound-world of constant transformation. By modeling the interacting gradual processes of quantum and cosmic systems, Rewild aims to auralize the vast and infinitesimal timescales we do not experience in everyday life.

Catherine Lamb’s interius/exterius, composed in close collaboration with the musicians of Ghost Ensemble explores multi-dimensional harmonic space, investigating how collective intentions or focal points sometimes allow unusual pathways to emerge. As the group links together in phase, the greater web of activity aligns intention and desire within a community of musicians sounding together, the initiation of sound constantly shifting, unfolding new sonic dimensions.This commission has been made possible by the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 

ARTIST BIOS:

Ghost Ensemble fosters groundbreaking music that blurs borders of genre, style, and scene, expanding perceptual horizons through shared immersive experience. Collaboration with living composers is the ensemble's primary focus. Since its 2012 inception, the ensemble has performed over 100 works and commissioned 34 new compositions by a diverse range of highly original composers who share a belief in music’s potential for individual and community transformation. Rethinking the norms of composer/performer collaboration, Ghost Ensemble conducts innovative workshops to nurture adventurous new music over the course of multiple seasons. The resulting work often draws from contemporary classical, experimental chamber music, avant-garde jazz, environmental sound art, and territories in between. Critics have praised Ghost Ensemble performances as “prodigious … a thrilling listen” (Christian Carey, Sequenza21), “wonderful work … both exhilarating and a bit scary” (Peter Margasak, Bandcamp Daily), “beautifully performed and recorded … a body-felt sound mass … a multifaceted texture that evokes the primeval” (Meg Wilhoite, Sound Meets Sound), and “cloudy, mysterious, and dark … Beckettian in its slow spread … certainly a group to keep an eye on” (Brian Olewnick, Just Outside).

Ben Richter is a composer, accordionist, and founding Artistic & Executive Director of Ghost Ensemble. Inspired by nonhuman consciousness, Ben’s immersive, gradually evolving compositions seek new orders of magnitude in musical parameters to mark humanity’s transient yet vital role within the immensity of geologic time. A student of Pauline Oliveros, Ben also explores the extended microtonal and timbral potential of the accordion in solo works such as Panthalassa: Dream Music of the Once and Future Ocean, hailed as “likely to offer a profound impact on the very nature of listening” (Stephen Smoliar, The Rehearsal Studio).

Catherine Lamb is an active composer exploring the interaction of tone, summations of shapes and shadows, phenomenological expansions, the architecture of the liminal, and the long introduction form. She began her musical life early, later abandoning the conservatory in 2003 to study Hindustani music in Pune, India. She received her BFA in 2006 under James Tenney and Michael Pisaro at CalArts in Los Angeles, where she first developed her research into the interaction of tone. She mentored under the experimental filmmaker/Dhrupad musician Mani Kaul until his death in 2011. In 2012 she received her MFA in music/sound from the Milton Avery School of Fine Arts at Bard College in New York. She toured Shade/Gradient extensively and was awarded the Henry Cowell Research Fellowship to work with Eliane Radigue in Paris. In 2013 Lamb relocated to Berlin, Germany where she lives currently, and has written for ensembles such as the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Konzert Minimal, Dedalus, Ensemble neoN, the London Contemporary Orchestra, as well as the JACK Quartet, while collaborating regularly with Marc Sabat, Johnny Chang (Viola Torros), Bryan Eubanks, and Rebecca Lane. In 2019 she co-founded the collectively oriented Harmonic Space Orchestra. She is a 2020 recipient of the Ernst von Siemens Composer's prize, a 2018 recipient of the Grants to Artists award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a Staubach Fellow for the 2016 Darmstadt Summer course, and a 2016-2017 Schloss Solitude Fellow.

Ghost Ensemble’s core lineup features Margaret Lancaster (flute), Sky Macklay (oboe), Ben Richter (accordion), Lucia Stavros (harp), Chris Nappi (percussion), Martine Thomas (viola), Tyler J. Borden (cello), James Ilgenfritz (contrabass), Kyle Motl (contrabass), and Carl Bettendorf (conductor), with frequent collaborators including flutist Alice Jones, violist Cassia Streb, cellists Laura Cetilia and Lester St. Louis, and bassist Rebekah Griffin Greene.