Ensemble Dal Niente performs new and experimental chamber music with dedication, virtuosity, and an exploratory spirit. Flexible and adaptable, Dal Niente’s roster of 26 musicians presents an uncommonly broad range of contemporary music, guiding listeners towards music that transforms existing ideas and subverts convention. Audiences coming to Dal Niente shows can expect distinctive productions—from fully staged operas to multimedia spectacles to intimate solo performances—that are curated to pique curiosity and connect art, culture, and people.

Over the past two decades, Ensemble Dal Niente has performed concerts across Europe and the Americas, including  appearances at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC; The Foro Internacional de Música Nueva in Mexico City; Radialsystem Berlin, MusicArte Festival in Panama City; The Library of Congress and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.; the Art Institute of Chicago and the Hyde Park Jazz Festival; Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; The Americas Society; and the Darmstadt Summer Courses in Germany. Dal Niente is the recipient of the 2019 Fromm Music Foundation prize, and was the first-ever ensemble to win the Kranichstein prize for interpretation in 2012. The group has recordings available on the New World, New Amsterdam, New Focus, Navona, Parlour Tapes+, and Carrier labels; has held residencies at The University of Chicago, Harvard University, Stanford University, Brown University, Brandeis University, and Northwestern University, among others; and collaborated with a wide range of composers, from Enno Poppe to George Lewis to Hilda Paredes to Roscoe Mitchell.

The ensemble's name, Dal Niente ("from nothing" in Italian), is a tribute to Helmut Lachenmann's Dal niente (Interieur III), a work that upended traditional conceptions of instrumental technique; and also a reference to the group’s humble beginnings.

Key

* Mark S Kelly Scholarship
# Hansen Music Fellow
^ Guest artist

Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, soprano
Carolyn Anderson, soprano
Keri Lee Pierson, soprano
Andrew Nogal, oboe
Emma Hospelhorn, flute and electric bass
Zach Good, clarinet
Tom Snydacker, saxophone
Ben Roidl-Ward, bassoon
Matt Baker, trumpet
Riley Leitch, trombone
Matt Oliphant, horn
Jesse Langen, guitar
Evelyn Thom, guitar
Jonathan Hannau, piano
Ben Melsky, harp
Kyle Flens, percussion
Lena Vidulich, violin
Ammie Brod, viola
Otavio Manzano, cello
Eddie Kass, bass
Michael Lewanski, conductor
Hunter Brown, electronics

Pacific Time (2022)

In the summer of 2019, before the pandemic, I had a very nice and intense encounter with Ensemble Dal Niente, who performed three of my pieces as part of the De Paul summer course. I was very impressed by their great musicality and sensuality of sound.

That’s why I focused entirely on the sound and left out extra musical things such as samples, video, and performance. My inspiration is often ignited by noises.

Sound experiences outside of music challenge me to build a stage for them, to develop a sound space out of it. I track down the personality of the sounds and sort of create scenes in which they can unfold. For example, ‘Pacific Time’ begins with a dense band of noise as if we’re in a very dense fog. Gradually this is exposed differently as if a ray of sun is shining, but we cannot see it.

I finished Pacific Time at Villa Aurora near Los Angeles, with daily physical contact with the ocean. At the same time, it describes the privileged state of being able to devote oneself entirely to the idea of ​​sound and to finding solutions with instrumentalists in order to bring it to life. I am painfully aware of this privilege in view of the man-made ecological collapse, which is also fogging up and eating away our spiritual and material resources through warlike destruction, which we would have to use with all our might to redirect and repair.

Carola Bauckholt

to care for the bodies of the dead (2023) was written for and is dedicated to Ensemble Dal Niente.

I was at the New Museum in New York over the summer and watched the artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen's films installed on the walls there, in particular one called "Because No One Living Will Listen" about a Vietnamese woman whose Moroccan father defected from the colonialist French Army. She never had the chance to know him and so communicates with him through speculative letters. One line from such a letter read, (I'm paraphrasing) "...and who will care for the dead..."  In a review in the Asian American Arts Alliance on this exhibit, Jacinda Tran writes that Nguyen's work  "...highlights the continuation of lives, histories, and materialities beyond spatial and temporal punctuations to suggest, and imagine, their more capacious contexts and possibilities." His work deals with intergenerational trauma enacted by the violence of colonialism and through a series of films and installations of sculptures and archival objects, "...reveals the cyclical nature of time, the fluidity of memories, and the porosity of boundaries." 

The title of this piece adds the word "bodies" which casts a layer of visceral immediacy. When we can, we perform rituals around the death of someone to honor the memory of the now vacated shell. We do it for ourselves as much or more than for the dead's benefit. But there is a kind of care that extends beyond the immediate body. How do we care for the memories of the dead? A kind of continuance can be constructed by those who remember, and maybe even more critically, self reflection through a kind of speculative memory.

Michelle Lou