BlackBox concludes our first week as ensemble-in-residence at the University of Richmond with a headlining performance on the Third Practice Festival of electroacoustic music, featuring works by Kelley Sheehan, Chris Chandler, Heather Stebbins, Bekah Simms, Bobby Gee, Annie Nikunen, and a world premiere by University of Richmond Professor and Third Practice Festival Director Benjamin Broening.

BlackBox residency at George Washington University with a performance on 11/8 performing works by Annie Nikunen, Baldwin Giang, Heather Stebbins, and a world premiere by GW Professor of Music Composition Douglas Boyce.

BlackBox Ensemble accompanies Kyle Marshall Choreography for their evening length dance piece set to Julius Eastman’s seminal work Femenine. Join us after the show for an after-hours concert of our Speculative Listening program.

BlackBox Ensemble accompanies Kyle Marshall Choreography for their evening length dance piece set to Julius Eastman’s seminal work Femenine.

BlackBox brings our Speculative Listening project to the Whitney for a special performance presented as part of the Whitney’s Free Second Sundays series. Stay for an afterparty featuring DJs by Lovie and Honey Bun.

BlackBox performs alongside Dice Trio as the recipients of the 2025 Dwight and Ursula Mamlok Foundation Prize.

BlackBox presents a wide-ranging sonic portrait of Julius Eastman curated by Eastman scholar Isaac Jean-Francois as part of Bang on a Can’s LongPlay Festival. Featuring works by Hildegard von Bingen, Gérard Grisey, Barbara Kolb, and Julius Eastman.

BlackBox performs new works by University of Chicago graduate composition students.

On Saturday, November 23rd at 8pm at the Church of St. Luke & St. Matthew in Brooklyn, BlackBox Ensemble presents a series of works unified in their explorations of physicality and duality. Featuring works by Anthony Cheung, Annie Nikunen, Bekah Simms, Baljinder Sekhon, James Diaz, Brittany J. Green and Reilly Spitzfaden, we traverse dialogues between present and memory, sound and silence, structure and freedom, clarity and complexity, propulsion and resistance, unpredictability and certitude, chaos and smoothness, magic and science. This program features the US premieres of Simms’ Stygian Pulse and Diaz’s mil cuartos en linea recta as well as the NY premieres of Nikunen’s all mass is interaction and Sekhon’s Divination, commissioned for BlackBox to perform at University of South Carolina’s Southern Exposure New Music Series last month. From pitchwheel motions and chronic pain to physics and a thousand white rooms in a straight line, each of these composers expresses their own unique avenue in which to see, hear, and feel these physicalities and dualities through sound.

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BlackBox presents an eclectic program of works by Jessie Cox, George Lewis, Brittany J. Green, and James Diaz.

The Sound of Space Between Us - a film of our performance at the Clark Art Institute - is premiered at the Fête de la Cite in Paris, France.

Director of Production and Cinematography: Kevin Chiu

Choreography: Annie Nikunen & Joelle Santiago

Dancers: Peter Cheng, Annie Nikunen, Liana Zhen-ai

Music: Feldman, Fujikura, Nikunen, figgis-vizueta

Performed at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, October 1, 2023

BlackBox performs the premiere of What We Owe to Birds, a multimedia cycle meditating on bird migration and conservation by the Consonance Collective, at the New Jersey Audubon Society’s annual Cape May Spring Festival.

BlackBox workshops and performs new works by composition students at the Special Music School, the music magnet high school of the Kaufman Music Center.

BlackBox performs new works by New York University graduate composition students.

BlackBox performs new works by University of Michigan composition students in a public composition seminar.

The ensemble presents a reprise performance of Dai Fujikura’s Borrowed Landscape, a play by the German playwright duo tauchgold with original music by prominent composer Dai Fujikura. Conceived by tauchgold as a “narratorio”—a dramatic play based on the musical structure of an oratorio—this piece was originally broadcast as a radio play in Germany in 2022. The BlackBox Ensemble presented the staged premiere of this new English translation at New York City’s Noguchi Museum in November 2023.  

The narratorio tells the story of three special instruments: a famous Stradivarius walled up for years in a cellar in Budapest, a double bass left behind by a Jewish orchestral bassist fleeing Poland in 1939, and a Baldwin upright piano silenced after the Hiroshima bomb killed its young owner. As the musicians of a trio approach these instruments, which for decades were considered lost, they uncover the stories, secrets, and histories these objects contain.

The performance will begin with Dai Fujikura’s Being As One.

The ensemble begins our series at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art with a companion program to Thursday evening’s performance of Borrowed Landscape, featuring works by Angélica Negrón, Tristan Murail, Baldwin Giang, and George Lewis.

The BlackBox Ensemble closes out our festival with a special New York performance of The Sound of Space Between Us, an interdisciplinary, live-Art-infused performance experience connecting sound and movement through and within physical space. Conceived and co-curated by our flutist - composer, dancer, choreographer and Annie Nikunen - space is used as a meeting place for music and dance to converse from both ecological and interpersonal perspectives; our public place in the ecosystem and our private paths with(in) it.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir: Ró

Tristan Murail: Paludes

Angélica Negrón: Espacios, objectos, sonidos y tiempo

Seth Cluett: Interference is partial/afterimage

Morton Feldman: Dance Passage from Piano and String Quartet

Dai Fujikura: Being As One

Annie Nikunen: The Sound of Space Between Us

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Stick around after our festival opening concert for a late night electroacoustic show featuring solo and chamber performances by members of the BlackBox Ensemble!

Brittany J. Green: Thread and Pull

Nina Shekhar: Vocalise

Kaija Saariaho: Cendres

Lucy McKnight: fated joy

Additional works to be announced

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Our 2024 Festival begins with a program of works by new and frequent BlackBox collaborators, featuring an expanded roster of the BlackBox Ensemble in full force.

Paul Novak: Somatic Interludes (World Premiere)

Bobby Ge: Pupil of Light

Jessica Meyer: The dappled light just beyond her skin…

Baldwin Giang: butterfly, posthumously

Yaz Lancaster: Gender Envy

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