we are the blackbox ensemble.

Named as “ambitious” by TimeOut & The New Yorker, we strive to ensure our work continues to live up to that word.

NYC-based BlackBox Ensemble is a collective of contemporary music performers founded in 2018 dedicated to exploring the wide-ranging world of the music of our time. Our 2025-2026 season includes a return to The Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, debuts at National Sawdust and Bowerbird, and residencies at Penn State, George Washington University, UC Davis, SFSU, Williams College and a year-long appointment as Ensemble in Residence with University of Richmond, along with more in store.

Our name, BlackBox, comes from the many meanings the term holds. In theatre, a black box is a bare, flexible space—four dark walls that can transform into anything, creating an environment ripe for bold experimentation and intimate connection. In science and technology, a black box is a system where you see the inputs and outputs, but the mystery of what happens inside is what makes it compelling. For us, we believe music, as a cultural medium, lives in that same space—enacting an ambiguous but vital relationship between artistic expression and social life, where sound, expression, and human experience collide in ways that can’t always be explained, but always resonate. Guided by the spirit of the theatrical black box, we create programs that invite risk, innovation, and connection, presenting contemporary classical music in ways that feel fresh, human, and alive.

Our 2024-2025 season included concerts at home in New York and around the country, including a thrilling run of our Speculative Listening program at Bang On A Can Long Play Festival, The Whitney Museum and Chatham PS21 curated by Eastman scholar Isaac Jean-François, as well as performances at Southern Exposure Series at the University of South Carolina, Timucua Arts Foundation, and residencies at the University of Chicago, University of Florida, and University of Central Florida. Our 2023-2024 season included touring engagements in Washington, DC, Florida, Michigan, and throughout the Northeast as well as residencies at University of Florida, University of Michigan, NYU, and the Kaufman Music Center’s Special Music School. The season opened with The Sound of Space Between Us, a site-specific, outdoor music and dance performance at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts conceived by our flutist Annie Nikunen. We also presented 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. We reprised our performance of Borrowed Landscape at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art as part of a two-concert series. In addition, we celebrated our 5-year anniversary with our inaugural BlackBox Festival, including our debut at Roulette Intermedium.

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 we 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.”