Speech and Silence concert season brings to the fore two ways of listening. In an alternating series of live music works (many with spoken word) and five serene and stunning films of artist Edgar Endress, we gather in these two realms and explore the deep possibilities that lie within and outside of our auditory sphere. The audience contemplates a visual world in front of them, a soft, direct experience of the mind as it is; until listening is reawakened, drawn outwards by the live music piece that follows until the cycle begins anew. It has been said that while speech may divide us, silence can connect us – not only to our deeper selves, but to each other. Two ways of listening explored in succession, a push-pull, inside-out encounter between two worlds; Fuse Ensemble’s Speech and Silence holds much for the audience to discover.
Speech and Silence includes works by Pamela Z, Nicole Mitchell, Caroline Shaw, Brittany J. Green, and Gina Biver, plus the premiere of a work by bassist/composer Ethan Foote.
Also included this season are several original short films by new media artist Edgar Endress.
The ensemble is thrilled to be performing live in NYC with Pamela Z on her Ways of Looking at ROULETTE in BROOKLYN 6/27/2025!
Collaborators and Composers for Speech and Silence Season 2024/2025
Composer Brittany J. Green
Brittany J. Green (she/her(s)) is a North Carolina-based composer, creative, and educator. Her music facilitates intimate musical spaces that ignite visceral responses at the intersection of sound, video, movement, and text. Recent works engage sonification and black feminist theory as tools for sonic world-building, exploring the construction, displacement, and rupture of systems. Her artistic practice includes spoken and electronic performance, interdisciplinary collaboration, experiential projects, and acoustic and electroacoustic chamber and large ensemble works. Her music has been featured at TIME:SPANS, NYC Electronic Music Festival, WoCo Fest, and Experimental Sound Studio. Her collaborators include the International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Transient Canvas, Castle of our Skins, Emory University Symphony Orchestra, and Wachovia Winds. Brittany holds awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP Foundation, and New Music USA. She is a doctoral candidate at Duke University, pursuing a PhD in music composition as a Dean’s Graduate Fellow.
Media Artist Edgar Endress
“Broadly, my art process is centered in a strong conceptual research frame where material and forms appear as consequences of the idea, with a strong entanglement in the socio-cultural context where the project takes place. Influenced by Richard Schechner’s concepts of environmental, in situ, or contextual theater, my art seeks to transit between “impure life”—like public events and demonstrations—and “pure art,” or traditional theater. It is in this constant transiting between ‘impure’ and ‘pure’ art forms where I find aesthetic and conceptual inspiration…”
Ethan Foote is a composer and musician rooted in jazz, Euro-American folk music, and the Western classical tradition. From his grounding as a jazz bassist in his hometown of Washington, D.C., he ventured into songwriting, arranging, theatre, and concert music, developing a multidimensional creative practice as a performer-composer that has also been shaped by literature, philosophy, and religion. His work tends to be obliquely expressive, often attempting to analogize musical structures to spiritual ones and playing with the mirroring of form and the structures of human consciousness. He received a BA in English from Oberlin College in 2010 and an MFA in Music Composition from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2020. He is currently pursuing his Doctorate in Composition at Duke University.
Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist making works for voice, electronics, samples, gesture activated MIDI controllers, and video. She has toured throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. Her work has been presented at venues and exhibitions including Bang on a Can (NY), the Japan Interlink Festival, Other Minds (SF), and the Venice Biennale, and the Dakar Biennale. She has composed scores for dance, film, and chamber ensembles (including Kronos Quartet and Eighth Blackbird). Her awards include the Rome Prize, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, MIT McDermott Award, the Guggenheim, American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
Composer Caroline Shaw
Caroline Shaw is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed. She is the recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, several Grammy awards, an honorary doctorate from Yale, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. She has worked with a range of artists including Rosalía, Renée Fleming, and Yo Yo Ma, and she has contributed music to films and tv series including Fleishman is in Trouble, Bombshell, Yellowjackets, Maid, Dark, and Beyonce’s Homecoming. Her favorite color is yellow, and her favorite smell is rosemary.
Nicole M. Mitchell is an award-winning creative flutist, composer, bandleader and educator. She is perhaps best known for her work as a flutist, having developed a unique improvisational language and having been repeatedly awarded “Top Flutist of the Year” by Downbeat Magazine Critics Poll and the Jazz Journalists Association (2010-2022). Her music celebrates contemporary African American culture. She is the founder of Black Earth Ensemble, Black Earth Strings, Sonic Projections and Ice Crystal, and she composes for contemporary ensembles of varied instrumentation and size, while incorporating improvisation and a wide aesthetic expression. As a composer, Mitchell has been commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Institute of Chicago, the Stone, the French American Jazz Exchange, Chamber Music America (New Works), the Chicago Jazz Festival, ICE, and the Chicago Sinfonietta. Mitchell is a Professor of Music at the University of Virginia.
Fuse Ensemble director Gina Biver is a composer of electroacoustic music for chamber ensemble, choir, multimedia, dance, sound installations and film. Her work is inspired by the written word and by visual art, both static and moving; she collaborates with other musicians, filmmakers, choreographers, poets, computer artists, sculptors, painters and video artists.
Hannah Rosa Schiller from I Care If You Listen writes “Biver creates a playground for internal exploration that is both fascinating and deeply effective.” Perhaps her favorite review came from Midwest Record “She doesn't look like an art chick that would show up in a dress made of meat but I guess looks can be deceiving… Prepare for a sonic walk on the wild side.”