MUSIC CURRENT 2024: Meet Nadar Ensemble

As part of Music Current 2024, the Contemporary Music Centre, Ireland is delighted to host a mixer with the exciting New Music ensemble Nadar. This informal event is an excellent opportunity for early-career composers and sound artists to meet the ensemble and find out more about the Nadar’s international summer school held biennially in Antwerp, Belgium.

Join us at the Contemporary Music Centre Library for introductions and a friendly chat! Refreshments will be provided. Please note registration for this event is essential, see link below.

*Attendees may wish to head onwards to the BLACK PAGE ORCHESTRA concert at 8pm, for more information and booking for this performance – visit musiccurrent.ie

About Nadar Ensemble

Adventure, interdisciplinarity and above all a strong and critical contact with today’s world through (among others avenues) the use of new technologies: these are Nadar Ensemble’s main objectives, inspired by Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (1820-1910), whose pseudonym was Nadar. Nadar was not only a well-known photographer, balloonist, caricaturist, spy, art critic, and curator, but regularly organised informal ‘salons’ to which he invited artists, thinkers, writers and scientists, thus creating a true cross-disciplinary dialogue.

Since our 21st century is more and more inhabited by transmedia, digital natives and a networked generation, Nadar Ensemble is not only fascinated by contemporary music, but also by film, the visual arts, performance, theatre, installation art, and all that is contained – or not – by these categories. Nadar Ensemble wishes to develop forms of musical presentation that reflect this world, in an attempt to anchor new music more strongly in the present.

Nadar Ensemble has performed at the Darmstadt International Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Tzlil Meudcan (Tel Aviv), Ultima (Oslo), Musica (Strasbourg), Platforma (Moscow), Holland Festival, Opera Göteborg, Tfnm (Zürich), San Martin (Buenos Aires), Acht Brücken (Cologne), reMusik (Saint-Petersburg), Tampere Biennale, Gogolfest (Kiev), Cité de la musique (Paris) and Harvard University (Boston) and has been a guest curator at SPOR festival (Århus, Denmark). Although Nadar is Artist in Residence at DE SINGEL (Antwerp), its hometown is Sint-Niklaas – known for its famous hot air balloon festival!

About the Summer School

Every two years, Nadar Ensemble organizes an international summer school for young composers and sound artists at, and in collaboration with DE SINGEL.

The selected composers get to work for a week with Nadar’s musicians, artistic leaders, composer Stefan Prins and cellist and art historian Pieter Matthynssens, the technical team of DE SINGEL and Nadar’s production manager, scenographer (Marieke Berendsen, also violinist) and sound engineer (Wannes Gonnissen), who will challenge them to think further on electronics, sound, light, video, etc. After each rehearsal there is time for reflection. The composers can make adjustments to their scores, change things in the set-up or work on the electronics.

With this intense week Nadar wants to meet the need of young composers to spend time in a fully equipped concert hall and above all wants to keep in close contact with the composers who are still at the beginning of their careers.

After a first successful collaboration between the Nadar Summer School and Gaudeamus Muziekweek in 2019 (with premieres by Kelley Sheehan and Remy Siu), Nadar decided to further intensify and internationalize the project. For the 2023 edition Nadar Ensemble and DE SINGEL collaborated with Gaudeamus Muziekweek, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (//hcmf) and Warsaw Autumn.

https://nadarensemble.be/events/nadar-summer-school/

Tickets

This event is free, but registration is essential. 

*Registration has now closed, please contact mnoonan@cmc.ie for more information.