Eighth Blackbird

Eighth Blackbird centers its mission on the performance and commissioning of new music from living composers while forging partnerships across a broad spectrum of performers, creators, and venues. The sextet has issued recordings on Cedille, Bridge, Nonesuch, and additional imprints; its most recent project, the 2024 release David Lang: composition as explanation, appeared on Cedille.

Formed in 1996 at the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio by six students who had played together in the school’s Contemporary Music Ensemble, the group took its instrumentation—flute, clarinet, piano, violin, cello, and percussion—directly from Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, a work it continues to present. Its name derives from Wallace Stevens’s poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. The players credited ensemble director Tim Weiss with guiding their early artistic growth. Within its inaugural season the sextet captured the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition; after relocating to the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, it won the Concert Artists Guild Competition, securing management and an extensive touring schedule. Three of the founding members remained active as of 2020; pianist Lisa Kaplan and percussionist Matthew Duvall continue to serve as executive director and artistic director, respectively. The ensemble’s first commercial recording, Round Nut Tool, appeared on its own label in 1999.

Eighth Blackbird has generated commissions from composers spanning multiple generations, among them George Perle, Jennifer Higdon, and Bryce Dessner. It has held residencies at the Ojai Festival, at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music from 2012 to 2015, and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where rehearsals took place inside the galleries. Additional collaborations include performances with soprano Dawn Upshaw and pianist Jeremy Denk. In 2017 the group launched the Blackbird Creative Laboratory, a two-week summer program in Ojai for performers and composers that has since produced further projects throughout the United States and Australia.

Four Grammy Awards have recognized three of its albums: two for strange imaginary animals, plus one each for Lonely Motel: Music from Slide and Meanwhile. In 2020 the ensemble issued Singing in the Dead of Night on Cedille, containing music by David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe. Its return to the label in 2024 with David Lang: composition as explanation brought the catalog past fifteen titles.