James Poke (born 1963 in Dorking, England) is a musician, primarily known as artistic director and co-founder of the ensemble Icebreaker. [1]
Poke studied music at the University of York and composition with Erich Urbanner at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Vienna. With John Godfrey he founded Icebreaker in 1989. As well as running the group, he also plays flutes, pan-pipes, keyboards and WX11 wind synthesiser in the ensemble. He has arranged many pieces for Icebreaker and produced or co-produced several of Icebreaker's albums. [2] He also works as a music copyist.
He also has a strong interest in politics and is currently chair of the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, chairs the West Surrey branch of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign and has twice stood for election as a councillor for the Green Party in Mole Valley.
Playing flutes, pan-pipes, wind synthesiser and keyboards:
Meredith Jane Monk is an American composer, performer, director, vocalist, filmmaker, and choreographer. From the 1960s onwards, Monk has created multi-disciplinary works which combine music, theatre, and dance, recording extensively for ECM Records. In 1991, Monk composed Atlas, an opera, commissioned and produced by the Houston Opera and the American Music Theater Festival. Her music has been used in films by the Coen Brothers and Jean-Luc Godard. Trip hop musician DJ Shadow sampled Monk's "Dolmen Music" on the song "Midnight in a Perfect World". In 2015, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by Barack Obama.
Evan Ziporyn is an American composer of post-minimalist music with a cross-cultural orientation, drawing equally from classical music, avant-garde, various world music traditions, and jazz. Ziporyn has composed for a wide range of ensembles, including symphony orchestras, wind ensembles, many types of chamber groups, and solo works, sometimes involving electronics. Balinese gamelan, for which he has composed numerous works, has compositions. He is known for his solo performances on clarinet and bass clarinet; additionally, Ziporyn plays gender wayang and other Balinese instruments, saxophones, piano & keyboards, EWI, and Shona mbira.
Julia Wolfe is an American composer and professor of music at New York University. According to The Wall Street Journal, Wolfe's music has "long inhabited a terrain of its own, a place where classical forms are recharged by the repetitive patterns of minimalism and the driving energy of rock". Her work Anthracite Fields, an oratorio for chorus and instruments, was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Music. She has also received the Herb Alpert Award (2015) and was named a MacArthur Fellow (2016).
David Lang is an American composer living in New York City. Co-founder of the musical collective Bang on a Can, he was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music for The Little Match Girl Passion, which went on to win a 2010 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance by Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices. Lang was nominated for an Academy Award for "Simple Song #3" from the film Youth.
Bang on a Can is a multi-faceted contemporary classical music organization based in New York City. It was founded in 1987 by three American composers who remain its artistic directors: Julia Wolfe, David Lang, and Michael Gordon. Called "the country's most important vehicle for contemporary music" by the San Francisco Chronicle, the organization focuses on the presentation of new concert music, and has presented hundreds of musical events worldwide.
Michael Gordon is an American composer and co-founder of the Bang on a Can music collective and festival. He grew up in Nicaragua.
Michael Harrison is an American contemporary classical music composer and pianist living in New York City. He was a Guggenheim Fellow for the academic year 2018–2019.
1984 is a studio album by the English keyboardist Rick Wakeman, released in June 1981 on Charisma Records. After reforming his band The English Rock Ensemble in 1980 and completing a European tour, Wakeman entered a recording deal with Charisma and began preparing material for a studio album. He decided on a concept album based on the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. The lyrics are by Tim Rice.
Icebreaker is a UK-based new music ensemble founded by James Poke and John Godfrey. They interpret new music, specialising in a post-minimal and "totalist" repertoire. Icebreaker always play amplified and have a reputation for playing, by classical standards, "seriously loud". They have expanded their repertoire to include non-classical material, particularly in their version of the Brian Eno album Apollo, a project based on the music of Kraftwerk, and music by Scott Walker.
Diderik Wagenaar is a Dutch composer and musical theorist.
Liberation Music Orchestra is a band and jazz album by Charlie Haden released in 1970, Haden's first as a band leader.
Alarm Will Sound is a 20-member chamber orchestra that focuses on recordings and performances of contemporary classical music. Its performances have been described as "equal parts exuberance, nonchalance, and virtuosity" by the Financial Times and as "a triumph of ensemble playing" by the San Francisco Chronicle. The New York Times said that Alarm Will Sound is "one of the most vital and original ensembles on the American music scene."
Susanne Abbuehl is a Swiss/Dutch jazz singer and composer.
John Godfrey is a composer and performer, co-founder and musical director of Icebreaker (1989-1997), founder member of Crash Ensemble (1997–present), founder of the Quiet Music Ensemble, and lecturer in music at National University of Ireland, Cork.
Michel van der Aa is a Dutch composer of contemporary classical music.
Maya Beiser is an American musician, cellist, performing artist and producer who lives in New York City. Beiser was raised on a kibbutz in Israel by her French mother and Argentine father, and graduated from Yale University School of Music. She has been described by the Boston Globe as "a force of nature", "a cello goddess" by The New Yorker and "the reigning queen of the avant-garde cello" by The Washington Post. Beiser is a 2015 United States Artists Distinguished Music Fellow and the Inaugural Mellon Distinguished Visiting Artist at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology.
This is the discography of the UK ensemble Icebreaker.
Sarah Howells is a Welsh singer-songwriter and photographer also known as Bryde. She was a member of Welsh indie-folk band Paper Aeroplanes. She has been performing as the solo project 'Bryde' since 2016.
Kate Moore is an Australian composer currently based in the Netherlands. Moore was born in Oxfordshire, England, and has studied with Australian composers Larry Sitsky, Jim Cotter, and Michael Smetanin; Dutch composers Louis Andriessen, Martijn Padding, Diderik Wagenaar and Gilius van Bergeijk; and attended summer schools including Bang on a Can hosted by David Lang, Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon and Tanglewood hosted by John Harbison, Michael Gandolfi and Helen Grime.
James Woodrow is an English guitarist, active primarily in classical, contemporary classical music and jazz fields, and equally adept on classical and electric guitar.