we are the blackbox ensemble.

The BlackBox Ensemble is a collective of young contemporary music performers based in New York City dedicated to exploring the experimental boundaries of the music of our time through projects that are innovative, impactful, and resonant with our contemporary moment. Founded in 2018, out 2023-2024 season is out most ambitious to date, with major performances in New York City and beyond, including touring engagements in Washington, DC, Florida, Michigan, and throughout the Northeast. Our season begins in September with The Sound of Space Between Us, a site-specific, outdoor music and dance performance at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. In November, we will present the live premiere of Borrowed Landscape, a radio play by German playwright duo tauchgold with music by Dai Fujikura, at the Noguchi Museum, in a program that also features music by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, inti figgis-vizueta, and Toru Takemistu. Our fall season concludes with an educational residency at the University of Florida in collaboration with their composition department and the HARN Museum of Art. Our spring season includes performances of a new multi-media work about bird migration and ornithological conservation by the Consonance Composers Collective at scientific museums throughout the Northeast, a reprise performance of Borrowed Landscape at the Smithsonian Institute of Asian Art, and a performance of The Sound of Space Between Us during a residency at the University of Michigan.

Our 2022-2023 season included a season-opening performance marathon on Pier 45 in Manhattan, a portrait concert of Jessie Cox, and performances at Culture Lab LIC and the Columbia University Sacred Music Series. Throughout the season, the ensemble was supported by the Chamber Music America’s Ensemble Forward grant for emerging ensembles, through which they received coaching and mentorship from Alan Pierson, Conductor and Co-Artistic Director of Alarm Will Sound. Past projects include world premieres by Paul Novak (for the 2021 New Music Gathering Conference), Annie Nikunen, Erich Barganier, and composer-vocalist Tanner Porter;  Gallery of Sound” a performance of solo pieces performed in isolated rooms at an underground bar and record store in Midtown Manhattan; a performance of Julius Eastman’s “Femenine” on the Brooklyn waterfront; and “Elegy,” a video concert featuring music by Juhi Bansal, Carlos Simon, Yaz Lancaster, Brittany J. Green, and Jessica Mays. Reviewing this program, I Care If You Listen wrote" “the 45-minute chamber music program showcased five worthy contemporary composers, with earnest performances that did justice to the extramusical connotations.”

Our name, BlackBox, is inspired by this term's meaning in other fields. In theatre, a Black Box is a type of performance space - usually a square room with black walls - that offers flexible staging and seating arrangements, creating an environment ripe for creative experimentation and intimate human connection. Meanwhile, in science, computing, and the humanities, a "black box" is a system with defined inputs and outputs whose inner workings are unknown. We believe that music, as a cultural medium, fills the role of the black box, enacting an ambiguous but vital relationship between artistic expression and social life. In doing so, we follow the inspiration of the theatrical definition – to foster experimentation, innovation, and human connection. In all of our programs, we aim to present contemporary classical music in a format that is approachable, innovative, and impactful.