I&I Foundation

This is the best Christmas present we could wish for - a new work for baroque violin and cembalo by Alexandra Filonenko 🎵❤️ Watch out for its premiere on March 11 in Rome at !

We are thrilled to announce that two new works created with help have just been premiered: Elena Rykova’s “Forget Me
Not” for/by Ensemble Nikel and Bohdan Sehin’s “The Last Lullaby” for/by Diana Tishchenko.
We are all grateful to the composers and performers for making these premieres possible - stay tuned for more great music!

The I&I Foundation is thrilled to announce the launch of our collaboration with the Lucerne Festival. 🇨🇭Starting in summer 2022, we will facilitate the commissioning of new works for the Festival’s Debut series, where the artists will be given an opportunity to have a new work created for their debut recital at the Lucerne Festival!
Here is this year's lineup:

25 August, 2022 - Mishka Rushdie Momen performs “an inviting object” for piano by Heloïse Werner


30 August, 2022 - Aaron Akugbo performs They know what they’ve done to us for trumpet and electronics by Joy Guidry


1 September, 2022 - Samuel Nebyu and Charles Abramovic perform Grey Fireworks (after H. Frankenthaler) for violin and piano by Tyson Davis


More good music is on the way!🎶🥂

We couldn’t stay silent as Russia’s aggression in the Ukraine claims more and more lives. We condemn this aggression in strongest possible terms - and have decided to dedicate our next micro-commissioning initiative to the Ukrainian music scene. The next 6 commissions will go to composers of Ukrainian origin 🇺🇦 Our founder Ilya Gringolts has already started by commissioning pieces from Alexandra Filonenko and Anna Korsun. In the course of the next weeks we will tell you more about these bright talents - and other commissions to follow! 🇺🇦 #славаукраїні

🇷🇺 Boris Filanovsky, the last of our 2021 composers whom we are commissioning works from!

Born 1968 in Leningrad. Graduated from St. Petersburg State Conservatory in 1995. Studied at IRCAM in 1998. Master-classes with Louis Andriessen, Paul-Heinz Dittrich. In 2000-2012 he was artistic leader of ​eNsemble​, the only sinfonietta-like contemporary music group in St.Petersburg. Accomplished numerous musical projects, among them “Pythian Games” (annual composers’ competition with anonymous performance and public voting) and “Step Aleft” (competition for young composers). In total ​eNsemble has commissioned and premiered about a hundred works by new Russian composers.

More about Boris on filanovsky.ru

🇩🇪 Philipp Christoph Mayer is the next on our list of 2021 composers who we'll be working with. Philipp (b.1995) is a composer of experimental music who currently resides in Stuttgart. He writes music for instruments, works with electronics and in the fields of music theatre and sound installation.

He studied composition in Munich with Isabel Mundry, one year at the CNSM in Paris (with Stefano Gervasoni) and finished his master at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart (with Martin Schüttler and Joanna Baille).

He wrote music for the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, the Quartetts Maurice, Petra Hoffmann, Duo 2KW, Ensemble N, and many others. His music could be heard at Festivals and venues such as the Münchner Opernfestspiele, the Biennale Munich, Evimus-Festival Saarbrücken, Symposium Performing Voice (Bern), aDevantgarde-Festival, Alte Schmiede Wien, Scène National d’Orléans or the Mozartfest Würzburg. He was supported by the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (2017-2021), the Office Franco-Allemand and received several other grants. In 2016 he was awarded with the price for young artists by the Main-Kinzig region.

Next to his practice as a composer, since 2019 Philipp Christoph Mayer pursues a degree in philosophy at the University Stuttgart. He is member of the interdisciplinary collective Inter-.

🇦🇲🇺🇸 Introducing Mary Kouyoumdjian, an Armenian-American composer whom we've commissioned a work for 2021. She currently resides in the U.S.

As a first generation Armenian-American and having come from a family directly affected by the Lebanese Civil War and Armenian Genocide, Kouyoumdjian uses a sonic palette that draws on her heritage, interest in music as documentary, and background in experimental composition to progressively blend the old with the new.

She has received commissions for the Kronos Quartet, New York Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, Bang on a Can, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alarm Will Sound, Roomful of Teeth, OPERA America, Beth Morrison Projects, the American Composers Forum/JFund, International Contemporary Ensemble, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, REDSHIFT, the Nouveau Classical Project, Music of Remembrance, Friction Quartet, Experiments in Opera, and Ensemble Oktoplus. Her documentary work was recently presented by the NY Philharmonic Biennial and her residencies include Alarm Will Sound, Roulette/The Jerome Fund, Montalvo Arts, and Exploring the Metropolis.

Kouyoumdjian holds a D.M.A. and M.A. in Composition at Columbia University, an M.A. in Scoring for Film & Multimedia from New
York University, and a B.A. in Composition from UC San Diego. Kouyoumdjian is a cofounder of the annual new music conference New Music Gathering and is on composition faculty at Boston Conservatory at Berklee.

Visit marykouyoumdjian.com for more info.

📷 Desmond White

Something brewing ✍ 📖 🎶 With Mikel Urquiza and Maja Horvat!

🇺🇸 Let's welcome American composer Kate Soper, the next on our list of composers whom we've commissioned works from for 2021!

Kate Soper is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated composer, performer, and writer. She has been hailed by The Boston Globe as "a composer of trenchant, sometimes discomfiting, power" and by The New Yorker for her "limpid, exacting vocalism, impetuous theatricality, and mastery of modernist style." Soper has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters (The Virgil Thomson and Goddard Lieberson awards and the Charles Ives Scholarship), the Koussevitzky Foundation, Chamber Music America, the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund, the Music Theory Society of New York State, and ASCAP, and has been commissioned by ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, and Yarn/Wire.

Praised by the New York Times for her "lithe voice and riveting presence," Soper performs frequently as a new music soprano. She has been featured as a composer/vocliast on the New York City-based MATA festival and Miller Theatre Composer Portraits series, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's MusicNOW series, and the LA Philharmonic's Green Umbrella Series. As a non-fiction and creative writer, she has been published by McSweeney's Quarterly, Theory and Practice, the Massachusetts Review, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies.

Soper is a co-director and performer for Wet Ink, a New York-based new music ensemble dedicated to seeking out adventurous music across aesthetic boundaries. She is the Iva Dee Hiatt Professor of Music at Smith College.

Full bio of Kate available at katesoper.com

📷: Liz Linder

🇺🇸 Originally from rural Northern Nevada, Andrew McIntosh is currently based in the Los Angeles area. Here is a brief introduction to another of our 2021 composers whom we've commissioned works from!

Andrew McIntosh is a composer, violinist, violist, and baroque violinist who teaches at the California Institute of the Arts, with musical interests covering a broad spectrum including historical performance practice, improvisation, microtonal tuning systems, long-form works, and the 20th-century avant-garde. He holds degrees in violin performance, composition, and early music performance from the University of Nevada, Reno, CalArts, and the University of Southern California, and principal teachers included Phillip Ruder, Martin Chalifour, Mark Menzies, Lorenz Gamma, Sue Feldman, Marc Sabat, and Wolfgang von Schweinitz. He also co-directs Populist Records, a label dedicated to new music from Southern California.

As a composer he often works with forms and ideas found in nature or in other artistic disciplines, working in instrumental, vocal, and fixed media forms, and was described by Alex Ross in the New Yorker as “a composer preternaturally attuned to the landscapes and soundscapes of the West". His compositions have been featured at venues including Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Gaudeamus Festival, Time:Spans Festival, Hamburger Klangwerktage, Moments Musicaux Aarau, Bludenzer Tage Zeitgemasse Muzik, Miller Theatre, National Sawdust, Issue Project Room, Monday Evening Concerts, and Tectonics Festival Glasgow. The individual musical personalities of performers he writes for are a central consideration in his work, and he has worked particularly closely with the musicians of Wild Up, the Formalist Quartet, Yarn/Wire, and soprano Estelí Gomez. Recent commissions include works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Industry opera company, Yarn/Wire, the Calder Quartet, and violinists Movses Pogossian and Marco Fusi.

🥳🎂 Happy birthday to Yair Klartag, the talented Israeli composer whom we had commissioned a brilliant piece from, titled "Instabilities", in 2020. The work had its premiere given by Ilya Gringolts who founded the I&I Foundation and is currently Co-Artistic Director with Ilan Volkov.

🇷🇺 Introducing Elena Rykova, one of our 2021 composers whom we'll be commissioning from! A Composer, visual and performance artist, currently based in Boston, here is a short glimpse of Elena's achievements thus far as a musician 🎶

Born in 1991, in Ufa, Bashkortostan Republic, Russia, Elena Rykova studied piano, composition and conducting at music college. After graduation in 2010, Elena decided to continue as a composer in Moscow State Conservatory with prof. Yuri Kasparov for the next five years. In 2015 she started her masters program in composition at Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln with prof. Johannes Schöllhorn. And since fall 2016 she has been a PhD candidate at Harvard University; after studying composition with prof. Chaya Czernowin and prof. Hans Tutschku, she is now teaching composition in Harvard College.

🥳 We're thrilled to welcome our composers for 2021, whom we'll be commissioning works from! Here is an introduction to Mikel Urquiza, born in Bilbao in 1988.

Urquiza studied composition at Musikene (San Sebastian) with Gabriel Erkoreka and Ramon Lazkano, then at the CNSM in Paris with Gérard Pesson. In 2019-2020 he is first mentored by the Peter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation, then a fellow of the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici. As a PhD student of the SACRe doctoral program, he wrote a thesis under the direction of Francesca Alberti, Stefano Gervasoni and Martin Kaltenecker.

He works in France and Germany with the ensembles C Barré, L'Instant Donné, Intercontemporain, Ascolta, mosaik, and Musikfabrik ; and accross Europe with PHACE, UMZE, New European Ensemble, Lemniscate, mdi, Sonido Extremo, Meitar.

Deeply linked to voice, he writes several song cycles, such as Alfabet, for Sarah Maria Sun, I nalt be clode on the frolt, for Marion Tassou, or Songs of Spam, for the Neue Vocalsolisten. A new cycle will be premiered by Exaudi at the Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik 2022.

His chamber music pieces are premiered by first-class partners, such as the Catch Trio, which performs Pièges de neige at the Cologne Philharmonie, Radial System in Berlin, Resonanz Raum in Hamburg, and the Maison de la Radio in Paris, or the Diotima Quartet, which performs Indicio at the Festival Pontino in Italy, the BBVA Foundation in Bilbao, Ensems Festival in Valencia, and Musikprotokoll in Graz.
His piano piece Contrapluma has travelled along the ECHO network — from Amsterdam Concertgebouw to the Wiener Musikverein — and has been in the selection of piano competitions Ferruccio Busoni and Concours International d’Orléans.

He collaborates with some of the main Basque and Spanish institutions for music : the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra, Euskadiko Orkestra, BBVA Foundation, San Sebastian Musical Fortnight, JONDE and INAEM. His music is performed at festivals such as Présences, ManiFeste, ECLAT, MATA New York, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, and the Venice Biennale.
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📷 Balint Hrtokó - Peter Eötvös Foundation.

⛪🥳 Happy to share that Ilya Gringolts, our Founder and Co-Artistic Director, performed Yu Kuwabara's "Bai and Dharani" (a 2020 work commissioned by our foundation!) yesterday at the Kammermusikfest Lockenhaus, which celebrated their 40th anniversary as well, having been established in 1981!