Grammy-winning eighth blackbird promises – and delivers – provocative and mind-changing performances to its burgeoning audiences. Combining bracing virtuosity with an alluring sense of irreverence, the sextet debunks the myth that contemporary music is only for a cerebral few. The ensemble attracts fans of all ages to its performances and recordings, which sparkle with wit and pound with physical energy; it inhabits and explores the sound-world of new music with comfort, conviction, and infectious enthusiasm. eighth blackbird is lauded for its performing style – often playing from memory with theatrical flair – and for making new music accessible to wide audiences. “It’s new music you can bring home to your mother,” observed the Washington Post. Profiled in the New York Times and NPR’s All Things Considered, the sextet has also been featured on Bloomberg TV’s Muse, CBS News Sunday Morning, St. Paul Sunday, Weekend America, and The Next Big Thing, among others. The group is in residence at the University of Richmond in Virginia and the University of Chicago.

Now celebrating its 15th season, eighth blackbird showcases music by the two most recent Pulitzer Prize-winning composers in its 2010-11 recording and performing repertoire, programming new and recent works (written expressly for the ensemble) by both Jennifer Higdon and Steve Reich on its season concerts and CDs. Highlights include a return to Zankel Hall; performances at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, representing the fourth year of the ensemble’s hometown series; a tour of Higdon’s new concerto On a Wire with several high-profile orchestras; Reich festivals on both sides of the Atlantic – at Carnegie Hall and London’s Barbican Hall; a return to the Library of Congress for a concert that includes the world premiere of a new work by Stephen Hartke; and two new CDs – featuring, respectively, Reich’s prize-winning Double Sextet (on Nonesuch) and Steven Mackey and Rinde Eckert’s music-theater piece Slide (on Cedille). Headlining the group’s season is its new politically-driven two-part program "Powerful/less", tackling Stravinsky's provocative statement questioning the value, meaning and power of art.

Last season the sextet made its debut at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, playing the world premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Grazioso!; it presented a new version of Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire, with choreography and direction by Mark DeChiazza; the group toured Slide, by Eckert and Mackey (having premiered it in summer 2009 at the Ojai Music Festival); and it enjoyed residencies at the Universities of Richmond, Chicago and Maryland, as well as at the renowned Curtis Institute of Music. New York City hosted the ensemble at the Look & Listen Festival and the Peoples’ Symphony Concerts, and the group made its Minneapolis debut. Capping off the season – and looking forward to its next - eighth blackbird gave the world premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s new concerto for sextet and orchestra with the Atlanta Symphony.

Highlights of recent seasons included collaborations and performances with conservatory students from Oberlin and Los Angeles’s Colburn School; debuts in the UK (Liverpool), Rotterdam, and Australia (Melbourne); and eighth blackbird’s own “hometown” series over three years at Chicago’s prestigious Harris Theater, featuring guest artists such as Glenn Kotche and the Hilliard Ensemble. The sextet was Music Director of the famed Ojai Music Festival, where, as part of its “wild musical party,” the ensemble gave the world premiere of Slide. It performed new commissions by Steve Reich, by David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe, by Frederic Rzewski, and by Stephen Hartke; it toured Osvaldo Golijov’s song-cycle Ayre with soprano Dawn Upshaw, and performed a fully memorized and staged cabaret-opera version of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. Venue debuts at Zankel Hall and The Kitchen in New York City, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Houston Friends of Music, and Pittsburgh’s Chamber Music Society attest to eighth blackbird’s burgeoning allure – for both audiences and presenters.

The sextet has appeared in Canada, Mexico, the Netherlands, and South Korea; at nearly every major chamber music venue in North America, with performances at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, the Metropolitan Museum, Kennedy Center, Library of Congress, Cleveland Museum of Art, and La Jolla Chamber Music Society; and has been concert soloist with the Utah Symphony and the American Composers Orchestra. A summer favorite, the group took the reigns as Music Director of the Ojai Music Festival’s 2009 season, and it has appeared several times at Cincinnati’s Music X, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, Caramoor International Music Festival, and Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, also performing at Tanglewood, New York’s 20th annual Bang on a Can Marathon, and Bravo!-Vail.

Since its founding in 1996, eighth blackbird has actively commissioned and recorded new works from such eminent composers as Steve Reich, George Perle, Frederic Rzewski, and Joseph Schwantner, and has commissioned groundbreaking works from a younger generation (Jennifer Higdon, Stephen Hartke, Derek Bermel, David Schober, Daniel Kellogg, and Carlos Sánchez-Gutiérrez). The group was honored in 2007 with the American Music Center’s Trailblazer Award and a Meet The Composer Award. eighth blackbird received the first BMI/Boudleaux-Bryant Fund Commission, was the first contemporary music group to win the Grand Prize at the Concert Artists Guild International Competition, won the 2000 Naumburg Chamber Music Award and the 2004 NEA/CMA Special Commissioning Award, and has received grants from BMI, Meet The Composer, the Greenwall Foundation, and Chamber Music America, among many others.

The ensemble has enjoyed widespread acclaim for its four CDs released by Cedille Records. strange imaginary animals won the 2008 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance and amassed an impressive number of rave reviews, both in the U.S. press and internationally. Absolute Sound wrote of the album: “Like the band itself, all the music is fresh, vibrant, exciting, and slightly addictive. … I don’t know what eighth blackbird has planned for the future, [but] whatever comes next, their track record strongly suggests that it will be great.” What comes next – and has already been deemed great in the form of a Pulitzer Prize – is Steve Reich’s Double Sextet, which eighth blackbird recorded in August 2009, and will be released on a new CD by Nonesuch Records in September 2010. And in November, the group performs Slide on a new album released on Cedille. The group’s first CD, thirteen ways, featured works by Perle, Schober, Joan Tower, and Thomas Albert, and was selected as a Top Ten CD of 2003 by Billboard magazine. beginnings, featuring Kellogg’s Divinum Mysterium and George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae, was praised by the New York Times as having “all the sparkle, energy, and precision of the earlier outings. … It is their superb musicality and interpretive vigor that bring these pieces to life.” Of fred, eighth blackbird’s disc comprising three Rzewski works, the San Francisco Chronicle reported: “The music covers all kinds of moods and approaches, from dreamy surrealism to caffeinated unison melodies, and the members of eighth blackbird deliver it all with their trademark panache.” In 2006, the group debuted on the Naxos label in a performance of The Time Gallery, commissioned by eighth blackbird from 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Paul Moravec.

eighth blackbird is active in teaching young artists about contemporary music and, in addition to residencies, has taught master classes and conducted outreach activities around the country, at the Aspen Music School System (grades K-12), the La Jolla Chamber Music Series, the Candlelight Concert Series, Hancher Auditorium at the University of Iowa, and throughout the Greater Chicago area.

The members of eighth blackbird hold degrees in music performance from Oberlin Conservatory, among other institutions. The group derives its name from the Wallace Stevens poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” The eighth stanza reads:

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

Visit the ensemble’s official web site at eighthblackbird.org for more information.

+ Matthew Duvall endorses Pearl/Adams musical instruments, and Vic Firth sticks and mallets.