ICE and Claire Chase Profiled

Source: New York Times.

It was 15 years ago on a bus ride between Elyria, Ohio, and Chicago — probably somewhere near Gary, Ind., she thinks — that the flutist Claire Chase decided to found the International Contemporary Ensemble, known as ICE. Quite a lot has happened since then.

The ensemble has performed hundreds of new works, staking a strong claim as the nation’s pre-eminent new-music group in the process. Its annual budget has grown from $603 — her holiday catering tips underwrote that first year — to north of $2 million. Ms. Chase won a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. And ICE now moves seamlessly among small nightclubs, schools and some of the nation’s premier stages, performing at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, at the Ojai Music Festival in California and, on Nov. 1, at Carnegie Hall.