John Aylward | Director/Composer/Piano

johnaylward.com

John Aylward is a composer, performer and Ecce’s Artistic Director. His music has been praised for its “brilliant energetic rhythmic figures…imaginative sonorities and harmonies that always move, always inflect” and its “zones of suspended motion and otherworldly calm” (American Academy of Arts and Letters). Aylward’s music is frequently performed within the U.S and abroad by numerous leading ensembles and soloists. 

Aylward has been awarded fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Koussevitzky Foundation at the the Library of Congress, the Fulbright Foundation (to Germany) and First Prize from the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and many other awards and honors. He has also been awarded fellowships and residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Tanglewood, the Aspen Music School, the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. John lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and his music is published by Peters, Composers Edition and through Poco Forte music.

A multitalented artist, American oboist Hassan Anderson is a soloist, chamber musician, and teacher noted for his clarity of tone, range of colors and energetic stage presence. A popular collaborator, amongst his numerous guest appearances with distinguished ensembles are performances with the American Ballet Theater, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra, the Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players, Ecce Ensemble, Harlem Chamber Players and the Juilliard Orchestra.

Mr. Anderson has recorded an album of works by various artists including Schumann, Gershwin, Avner Dorman (world premiere) and Jonathan Keren (world premiere) with SHUFFLE Concert (in house label, October 2013). He is also featured on “Unremembered”, a song cycle by Sarah Kirkland Snider (New Amsterdam Records, September 2015). With SHUFFLE Concert, he can next be heard on their upcoming CD to be released in 2016-17, which will include the commissioned world premiere of Piotr Szewczyk’s Twisted Dances for Oboe, Violin, Cello and Piano.

Equally adept in the classical and jazz genres, and dedicated to the next generation of musicians, Mr. Anderson regularly schedules teaching opportunities around his performances. He has served as a teaching artist for Carnegie Hall and The Little Orchestra Society in New York City, and Jazz House Kids, the only community arts organization in New Jersey exclusively dedicated to educating children through jazz. Currently, Mr. Anderson serves on the faculty of the renowned Juilliard School Music Advancement Program, and as Assistant conductor New Jersey City University Orchestra, a post he has held since 2014.

Conductor/Pianist Oliver Hagen was born in New York City in 1986. In 2010 Oliver was named Assistant Conductor of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris. In this position, Oliver mainly assisted music director, Susanna Mälkki; he also worked there with Pierre Boulez, Peter Eötvös, Ludovic Morlot, and Matthias Pintscher. In April and May of 2012, Oliver served as Assistant Conductor at the Paris Opéra Comique, conducting staging rehearsals for a world premiere opera by Marco Stroppa, Re Orso. Earlier this year, Oliver made his début with the musicians of the National Orchestra of Lyon, conducting Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire with former Bayreuth soprano, Anja Silja. Since 2010, Oliver has appeared in concert with American and French ensembles such as the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Linea, Ensemble soundinitiative, the Firebird Ensemble, and the Orchestra of the League of Composers--the last of whom he conducted in June of 2012 at Symphony Space in NYC, at the 75th Anniversary Celebration concert of the American Composers’; Alliance. Oliver conducted the Ecce Ensemble for the first time in March of 2012.

In the summers of 2010 and 2011, Oliver was Assistant Conductor to Pierre Boulez, David Robertson, and Peter Eötvös at the Lucerne Festival Academy; Oliver conducted the Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble in concert in 2011, performing Stockhausen’s Kontra-punkte and Kreuzspiel. As part of his duties as Assistant Conductor of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Oliver served as Assistant Conductor for the Paris Conservatory Orchestra on several concerts.

Currently, Oliver is working as Assistant Conductor of Face the Music Ensemble, a new music ensemble for high school students, at the Kaufman Center in NYC. As a pianist, Oliver has a strong association with the Lucerne Festival Academy, which he attended between 2005 and 2009. In September of 2009, Oliver appeared as one of the solo pianists in Pierre Boulez’s Répons, under the direction of the composer at the KKL in Lucerne. The 2007-08 Season brought an international tour, also under the direction of Pierre Boulez, in which Oliver performed Boulez’s sur Incises, which was heard at venues including the Philharmonie in Essen, Germany and Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall. The touring ensemble also performed sur Incises in Japan at the Art Tower Mito under the direction of Jean Deroyer.

As a pianist of the New York City based new music ensemble Signal, which performs under the direction of Brad Lubman, Oliver has appeared at venues ranging from The Ojai Music Festival, Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, and the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood to the Bang on a Can Marathon and Le Poisson Rouge in NYC. As a member of Signal, Oliver has worked closely with composers Steve Reich, Helmut Lachenmann, Charles Wuorinen, and Oliver Knussen. Oliver can be heard on two upcoming Signal releases: a CD/surround-sound DVD of music by Lachenmann, with the composer as soloist in “…Zwei Gefühle…”  (Mode); Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe’s Shelter (Canteloupe).

Oliver holds a bachelor of music degree in clarinet and composition, and a master of music degree in conducting—both from the Eastman School of Music.

Laine Rettmer | Video Artist, Director

Laine Rettmer is a video artist and opera director whose work explores performance, gender, and methods of social control. Her work has been shown at The Clay Arts Center (2018), the Museum of Fine Art (2017), the Boston Independent Film Festival (2017), FPAC (2017), Manifesta (2016), Yuan Art Museum (2016), Yve Yang Gallery (2016), Perkins and Ping (2016), Present Company (2015), NADA NY, NADA Presents, (2014). For the past four years she was the resident stage director for the New York based company LoftOpera, with whom her Macbeth last December received a Freddie Award for best new production, and her Barber of Seville was named one of the top 10 classical music productions of 2014 by the New York Times. She has also worked extensively on new opera with companies such as New York City Opera, Ecce Ensemble, Guerrilla Opera, Rhymes with Opera, and Fresh Squeezed Opera. Recent awards received include a MAP Fund grant for a collaborative opera, Standby Snow: Chronicle of a Heat Wave, a Fellowship from the Center for Arts Design and Social Research, a Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, an Art School Alliance Fellowship from HFBK Hamburg and a residency at Skaftfell Center for Visual Arts in Iceland. Rettmer is currently a Residential Scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and teaching at Northeastern University. She holds a BFA from New York University and a MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts.

Born in California and trained as an actor at the Dell’ Arte School of Physical Theater (1991-1992) and the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris (1994 – 1996), Colin Gee was the founding Whitney Live artist-in-residence at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the 2009 visiting artist-in-residence at the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine. He performed as a clown in the Cirque du Soleil production Dralion (2001-’04), and has created works for film, performance and opera since 2002.

Works in 2014 include concert/opera Mouthpiece XX (story, direction, and performance, composed by and performed with Erin Gee) with Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, at Vienna Konzerthaus; and Mouthpiece VI+I, (composed by Erin Gee) performed with Fonema consort in Chicago. Also in 2014 he delivered the Lorado Taft Lectureship on Art at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

In 2011 Gee was awarded a Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome for Frontier, a solo theatrical opera. Previous residencies for Frontier include NYU / Gallatin, Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, New York Theater Workshop, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center and the Whitney Museum. Workshop showings of Frontier have taken place at New York Theatre Workshop, Watermill Center, and LaGuardia Performing Arts Center.

In 2013 In the first place…, an EMPAC Dance Movies Commission was installed at EMPAC, and the video series I, who am the chorus, was produced by Wayne Ashley’s FuturePerfect. Two Satires (2012), a musical character study composed by Martin Brody, was performed in March with the Scharoun Ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic at the American Academy in Rome.

The Fabulist (2011), an evening-length work on the Fables of Jean de la Fontaine was commissioned by, and premiered at, the French Institute Alliance Francaise in New York. It was also included in the Kids Euro festival, produced by the French Embassy in Washington DC, also in November 2011.

In 2010, a dance collaboration with Judith Sanchez Ruiz, Blind Studies, premiered at Danspace Project, in New York. The video series I felt I’d been here before (2010), was commissioned and presented by Belfast Exposed Photographic Archive, in Belfast. A series of eight video works entitled History Plays (2010 – ongoing), responded to works of visual art held in the collection of the Whitney Museum. These works were presented by Whitney Live.

Frequently collaborating with sibling/composer Erin Gee, he provided the libretto for her opera SLEEP(2009), which premiered at the Zurich Opera House. In November of 2009, the concert/opera Mouthpiece XII, Mathilde of Loci, Part I, with libretto, performance, filmmaking, and direction by Colin Gee, composed by Erin Gee, was presented by the American Composer’s Orchestra at Zankel Hall in Carnegie Hall.

Also in 2010, the video work Untitled (lightwell) was featured in the Contemporary Performance P4V Video Festival, and Portrait and Landscape was presented at Cornell University as part of the film festival, The Shifting Face: Portraiture and the Art of the Moving Image. A live performance, The Band (2010), that responded to and was performed on Martin Kersels’ sculptural installation 5 Songs, was featured in the Whitney Biennial.

Also in 2009, an essay on performance entitled Firespots was published in the Austrian art journal, kursiv, and a series of 10 video works, Studies for “Marley,” created with Angie Smalis in Limerick, Ireland, were presented through the Whitney Live residency. A video work Nested (2009), responding to Louise Bourgeouis’s The Nest, was commissioned by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The first works in the video/dance series, Portrait and Landscape (2006 – current), premiered in New York at Dance Theater Workshop in 2006. Recent works from the series include, untitled, stairwell (2009), untitled, lightwell (2009), untitled, conference room 1 and 2 (2009), Limerick Station (2009), untitled, café 1 and 2 (2009), exterior, house (2009), exterior, park (2009), and exterior, garden (2009). A second series included Hotel Lobby (2009), Field (2009), Hospitality (2009), and Market (2009). Cathedral Project (2009), a third series, comprised of 12 short films, was created in residence at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. These works premiered at the Whitney Museum through the ARTPORT and Whitney Live divisions.Studies for Portrait and Landscape (2009), was conducted as a residency at chashama, in New York.

Objective Suspense (2008), an object-theater work, was commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art and performed there by Gee over 500 times, as part of the exhibition “Alexander Calder: the Paris Years.” A series of three lectures entitled Line Takes Flight, were conducted in association with the performance.

Film/performance work Across The Road (2009) received a NYSCA Individual Artist Commissioning Award and was created through a four-week residency at Daghdha Dance Company in Limerick, Ireland, and a residency at The Chocolate Factory Theater in New York, where it premiered. An adaptation of Across The Road was produced as The Chestnut (2009), written, directed and set designed by Gee, with Limerick Youth Theatre, in Limerick Ireland.

Two screenplays, Across the Road (2007) and Lady Heard Voices (2007), were Official Selections for the Bare Bones International Film Festival Screenplay Competition, and a short film, Stardust (2007), premiered at the 2007 Brooklyn Arts Council film festival, September 11th, Remembered in Film. Other original film projects written and created by Gee include the short Hotel (2003), and Lady Heard Voices (2004), a Swedish production featuring Irene Hultman.