BlackBox performs at UC Santa Cruz as part of a year-long appointment as Ensemble-in-Residence.

BlackBox presents the world premiere of Through the Doors, a chamber opera by Ania Vu, in a concert performance as part of a residency at Pomona College.

In honor of the centennial year of pioneering American composer Morton Feldman, BlackBox Ensemble presents a program exploring time, perception, and process. The program includes three works by Feldman: the early chamber work "Four Songs to E.E. Cummings;" "Projection 2," one of his explorations in graphic notation; and "I Met Heine on the Rue Fürstenberg," a mid-career work for ensemble and vocalist in which Feldman begins to explore the expansive temporal and timbral properties that will define his later work.

Alongside these works by Feldman, the ensemble will present a preview of "Through the Doors," a new chamber opera by Los Angeles-based composer Ania Vu. The opera explores existential questions about time and free will through the journey of a young girl who travels through a series of surreal universes on a journey to find her father, a metronome maker. Finally, the program includes a new work by Kai Kubota-Enright. Titled "spatial communication of dripstone," the piece is inspired by the slow process of stalactites forming in caves, with the slow drip of water marking time, creating, in the composer's words, "a woven map drawn in pulses and pattern."

BlackBox performs music of American Morton Feldman alongside four new compositions by Stanford graduate composers Lemon Guo, Calvin Van Zytveld, Celeste Betancur and Brian Brown, which respond to Feldman’s work, especially his unique experiments in the organization and perception of time through sound.

In celebration of the centenary of the American composer Morton Feldman (1926 –1987), the Stanford Symposium on Music and the Brain, The Department of Music, the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, and the Anderson Collection at Stanford University present a program examining the decades-long aesthetic dialogue between Feldman and the painters of the New York School. Throughout his career, Feldman enjoyed close friendships with artists including Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Willem de Kooning. Feldman’s music, like the works of these artists, concerns abstract patterns, subtle variations, surface, materiality, and scale.

This concert is part of the symposium Stopping time: How music alters time perception and will include public lectures providing perspectives on Feldman’s unique temporal world, and the psychology and neuroscience of durational artistic experiences.

BlackBox performs works by Feldman, Kurtág, Nørgård, and Crumb, along with new works by Matthew Schultheis and Samuel Zagnit, as part of the Graphic Content Festival, a city-wide series celebrating the centennial birthdays of Morton Feldman and Earle Brown.

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BlackBox performs on closing night of the 28th Annual MATA Festival, INTERVAL: In Between Silence and Stasis.

PROGRAM:

Morton Feldman, For Frank O’Hara (1973)
Morton Feldman, I Met Heine on the Rue Fürstenberg (1971)

With pieces by Gillian Rae Perry, Floriana Provenzano, Laila Arafah, Kristupas Bubnelis, Jessica Shand and Erich Barganier.

TICKETS HERE!

BlackBox presents an evening of contemporary chamber music exploring the expressive relationship between the human voice and instrumental sound. Across works that move between narration, song, and fractured language, the ensemble becomes an extension of speech itself—echoing, distorting, and illuminating the voice.

PROGRAM
ANDILE KHUMALO Shades of Words
ELLIOTT CARTER A Mirror on Which to Dwell
PAUL NOVAK when I was nine (world premiere) & a diagnosis (NY premiere)
UNSUK CHIN Akrostichon-Wortspiel

TICKETS HERE!

BlackBox returns as Ensemble in Residence at the University of Richmond to perform the world premiere of a new work by composer and vocalist Peni Candra Rini.

BlackBox performs on the North Carolina New Music Initiative series at Eastern Carolina University.

BlackBox performs works by Annie Nikunen, Ursula Mamlok, Tania León, Nathalie Joachim, Ileana Perez Velazquez, and Douglas Boyce.

BlackBox performs works by Paul Novak, Alex Burtzos, James Diaz, and more as part of a residency at San Francisco State University.

BlackBox performs works by Paul Novak, Kelley Sheehan, Baldwin Giang, and James Diaz

https://arts.ucdavis.edu/event/blackbox-ensemble-friday-concert

Watch the livestream here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcLZe9QUg7g

In our second NYC show of the season, BlackBox performs works by Nathalie Joachim, Ursula Mamlok, Tania León, Ileana Perez Velazquez, and Douglas Boyce.

Tickets here!

BlackBox returns to the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, performing works by Anthony Cheung, Misato Mochizuki, Tania León, and Baldwin Giang.

BlackBox performs works by Annie Nikunen, Ileana Perez Velazquez, Baldwin Giang, Nathalie Joachim, Tania León, and James Diaz.

https://www.bowerbird.org/event/blackbox-ensemble/

BlackBox performs works by Anthony Cheung, Misato Mochizuki, and two works by Baldwin Giang, including the US premiere of PIPA BOY—Three Scenes from the Post-Diaspora (2024), a multimedia work for ensemble and pipa player exploring global identity and the conditions of belonging and non-belonging, written during his time as a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

https://www.nationalsawdust.org/event/scenes-from-the-post-diaspora-blackbox-ensemble-performs-cheung-mochizuki-and-the-us-premiere-of-baldwin-giangs-pipa-boy

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 performs works by Annie Nikunen, Baldwin Giang, Heather Stebbins, and a world premiere by George Washington University Professor of Music Composition Douglas Boyce.

BlackBox performs works by Annie Nikunen, Ileana Perez Velazquez, Nathalie Joachim, Alex Burtzos, Baljinder Sekhon, and James Diaz on the Living Music Series as part of a residency at Pennsylvania State University.

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.