Webinar #3 – Interdisciplinary approaches & Reimagining concert experiences

Tuesday, 1 July 2025

14:30 – 16:30 (CET)

Online Event (Teams)

The third and final session of the Tune-In webinar series turns its attention to interdisciplinary approaches and the reimagining of concert experiences. Long before music was confined to formal concert halls, it existed in dynamic interplay with other art forms—dance, theater, ritual, architecture—embedded in everyday and ceremonial life.

This session brings together diverse perspectives on how music can intersect with other disciplines and contemporary genres to expand both artistic practice and audience engagement. Through a series of presentations and open discussion, we will explore innovative projects that challenge established boundaries, foster inclusion, and reconnect early and classical music with broader cultural contexts.

Participants are warmly invited to join the exchange, reflect on evolving performance practices, and imagine new roles for early, classical, and world music in our changing world.

Moderator

• Davide Grosso, Director of Programmes & Partnerships at International Music Council

Speakers

• Chi-chi Nwanoku CBE, Double Bassist, Founder & Artistic Director, Chineke!.

• Leonhard Bartussek, Composer, Cellist & Inventor of Liquid Music

• Doug Balliett, Composer, Poet & Professor of Baroque Bass and Violone, The Juilliard School

Presentations

• Davide Grosso – Director of Programmes & Partnerships at International Music Council (IMC)

Five music rights activist with an academic background in ethnomusicology, he has carried out extensive field research in Indonesia about music and society and worked in journalism and media. He joined the International Music Council in 2013 where he is in charge of project management and communication. Among other assignments, he is the Secretary of the International Rostrum of Composers and curates the edition of the Music World News. From 2020 to 2022 he chaired the NGO-UNESCO Liaison Committee, representing a network of more than 400 NGOs in official partnership with UNESCO. Outside the office Davide composes electronic music and writes about music and politics for various magazines and blogs.

• Chi-chi Nwanoku CBE – Double Bassist, Founder & Artistic Director, Chineke!.

An ex-sprinter, and eldest of five children from Nigerian and Irish parents, Chi-chi Nwanoku is a celebrated classical double bassist and Professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of Chineke!, a Foundation which supports and creates opportunities for Black and ethnically diverse classical musicians in the UK and Europe. Through its two orchestras – the Chineke! Orchestra and Chineke! Junior Orchestra, various educational and community engagement initiatives, the foundation aims to enhance diversity within the classical music industry and boost representation in British and European orchestras. Chi-chi is a respected broadcaster, presenting BBC radio 3, 4 and Classic FM programmes, and has been featured on notable programmes such as Desert Island Discs and the 2020 BBC TV documentary, ‘BEING BEETHOVEN’.

Before creating Chineke!, Chi-chi was a founder member of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment where she held the position of Principal double bass for 30 years. Some of her notable chamber recordings include Schubert’s Trout Quintet (recorded three times), and Octet, Beethoven Septet, Hummel Piano quintet and Boccherini Sonatas. Her solo recording of Vanhal and Dittersdorf Concertos with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra received critical acclaim.

Her contributions to music and diversity have been recognised extensively; she was awarded the CBE in the 2022 Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Honours for Services to Music & Diversity, and has received accolades including the Commonwealth Cultural Enterprise Award, Creative Industries Award, and Top 10 BBC Women in Music. Chi-chi holds Honorary Doctorates of Music from Chichester, Open and Cambridge Universities.

In 2016, she was named Black British Business Awards ‘Person of the Year’ and received the 2017 Association of British Orchestras Award for her significant contribution to UK orchestral life. Named in the 2020 book of 100 Great Black Britons, she has also been consistently listed in the Powerlist of Britain’s 100 Most Influential Black People over the past seven years. In 2021 she became a Visiting Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, and was appointed an Honorary Bencher of Middle Temple in 2023. Chi-chi passionately champions the transformative power of music to enrich lives worldwide.

• Leonhard Bartussek – Composer, Cellist & Inventor of Liquid Music

The Austrian composer Leonhard Bartussek’s roots lie in classical music. He studied in Graz, Cologne and at the Juilliard School in New York, was a member of the tango punk collective “Astillero” in Buenos Aires and has played as a baroque cellist on all continents and major stages around the world, such as the Philharmonie Berlin and Cologne, Carnegie Hall New York, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Barbican Center London, Théâtre des Champs-Élysée Paris, etc. Radio, CD, TV and DVD recordings for WDR, NDR, France Musique, ORF, Sony, Arte, 3Sat, Deutsche Grammophon, Harmonia Mundi, Warner Brothers, etc. He has worked mostly as principal cellist with ensembles such as Concerto Köln, the Wiener Akademie, Il Pomo D`Oro, Les Musiciens du Prince Monaco, Festspielorchester Göttingen, Harmonie Universelle and many others.

For some years now, he has devoted himself exclusively to the development of his own music and works at the interface with the visual and performing arts. He develops various immersive formats as interdisciplinary performances or as sound installations, which are broken up in their fixed, temporal sequence and can be experienced individually, embedded in artistic environments. He is developing a new style of music that he calls Liquid Music. This is a kind of meta-genre, rooted in baroque music, that combines elements of different, often heterogeneous musical languages from different eras and cultures into a loose fabric of (yes, the forbidden word!) beauty. Key technique in order to achieve an open and at the same time cohesive and precise musical outcome is the use and implementation of Liquid Timing.

In his artistic work, Leonhard Bartussek attempts to soften the ideologically entrenched pillars of post-modernism and create new spaces for a meta-modern present. Projects conceived by him with new compositions of his Liquid Music have been performed at the Styriarte in Graz, at Lincoln Center in New York, the zamus festival in Cologne and the Bozar in Brussels.

• Doug Balliett – Composer, Poet & Professor of Baroque Bass and Violone, The Juilliard School

Doug Balliett is a composer, instrumentalist and poet based in New York City. The Los Angeles Times recently wrote “Bassist Doug Balliett, who teaches a course on the Beatles at the Juilliard School and writes cantatas for Sunday church services, as well as wacky pop operas, is in a class of his own.” The New York Times has described his compositions as “brainily bubble gum and lovably shaggy” (Rome is Falling!), his poetry as “brilliant and witty” (Clytie and the Sun), and his bass playing as “elegant” (Shawn Jaeger’s In Old Virginny). Doug has been professor of baroque bass and violone at The Juilliard School since 2017, and leads the Theotokos ensemble every weekend at The Church of St. Mary on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He plays regularly with AMOC, Les Arts Florissants, Jupiter Ensemble, ACRONYM, Ruckus, Boston Early Music Festival, Alarm Will Sound, and other ensembles.

Mr. Balliett has led Les Arts Florissants in his own compositions on several occasions, including his Ovid Cantatas, which were filmed for Qwest TV in 2022, and a St. Mark Passion performed and filmed in August, 2024. In New York City he leads the Theotokos Ensemble in new sacred works regularly, including dozens of cantatas and the most recently the American premiere of the St. Mark Passion. Upcoming performances of his compositions include his newest opera Rome is Falling! with AMOC (American Modern Opera Company) in Lincoln Center (July 2025), his Ovid Cantatas in Zurich (September, 2025), two new songs for Reggie Mobley’s upcoming album The Curious Bard, and a new vocal work, supported by Chamber Music America, for the New Consort and Theotokos Ensemble in New York City (October 2025). In 2026 he will compose music for Davoné Tines and Ruckus in a show developed with the New York Council for the Arts and Carnegie Hall.

In addition to regularly premiering new sacred vocal music by Mr. Balliett, Theotokos Ensemble gives frequent performances a sacred early music. Highlights include The Passion Before Bach, the sacred madrigals of Marenzio, and music from the 11th century monk Hermann of Reichenau, among many other ongoing projects. Fascinated by the roots of western music and notation, the ensemble also runs a Gregorian Chant club which is open to all. In February 2025, Theotokos Ensemble was in residence in France under the auspices of the Odyssée Foundation.

For three years he and his twin brother Brad Balliett hosted a weekly show dedicated to living composers on WQXR’s new music channel Q2. Other recent performances of his work include Beast Fights at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony bass section, Stabat Mater with Paul Agnew, Cyril Auvity and Les Arts Florissants, Medea with Emmanuel de Negri and Marc Mauillon, and the annual New Year’s Eve performance of his first opera, Gawain and the Green Knight, which was also recorded in 2024.