Introducing the 2026 Albertine Music Grantees

Closing ISSUE’s 2026 season and marking the 20th anniversary of its Artist-in-Residence (AIR) Program, this performance reflects ISSUE’s commitment to practices that challenge conventional modes of listening and music-making. Led by French cellist, composer, and sound artist—and 2016 ISSUE Artist-in-Residence—Leila Bordreuil, this work centers on resonance as the primary instrument.

The performance emerges from a collective workshop-like practice developed over three months of exploration during which musicians meet regularly to respond to the evolving vibrational behavior of the room. The resulting minimalist, immersive concert reveals how music can arise from attentive presence rather than control, privileging collective deep listening and subtle activations of acoustic phenomena already present in the space. 

ro͞ot is a project led by French saxophonist Sakina Abdou that marks, after a first successful Franco-American solo touring grant in 2022, a new stage in her artistic trajectory as a lead international artist.  

Conceived as an open and evolving framework, it explores Afro-descendant musical languages not as a fixed identity, but as a constellation of practices shaped by oral transmission, circulation, and transformation, questioning how traditions, improvisation, and contemporary composition can interact without collapsing into a single narrative.  

ro͞ot unfolds across three interconnected geographies: France, as a base for creation and dissemination; Africa, as a space of oral transmission and rhythmic knowledge; and the United States, as a key site for artistic research and collaboration. The grant supports a focused phase of transatlantic development and rehearsals, contributing to a broader creation process involving multiple partners and future concerts in France. 

Lucinda Childs is creating a new evening-length work for Gibney Company to Philip Glass’s Another Look at Harmony, Part 4, built from her preferred recording by Les Métaboles. 

Living with this score for decades, Childs has long wanted to realize it choreographically in full, something never before done at this scale in dance. Central to the project is her deep artistic regard for French choir Les Métaboles and its founder and conductor Léo Warynski, and her insistence on working from their interpretation.  

The creation process (April 2026–January 2027) unites Childs’s rigorous, music-driven choreography with this French ensemble’s distinctive sound world. The collaboration culminates in Les Métaboles’ first appearance in New York City, performing live with Gibney Company at New York City Center.

Monday Evening Concerts (MEC) proposes a studio recording of OCCAM Hexa 8, the final installment of Éliane Radigue’s monumental Occam Ocean cycle. Widely hailed as one of the most significant bodies of work in contemporary experimental music, the Occam series has generated international attention, including a full issue of Sound American devoted to the project. 

OCCAM Hexa 8 was co-created by Radigue and bass clarinetist Carol Robinson and co-commissioned by Villa Albertine and MEC. Its world premiere was given in September 2025 by MEC’s Echoi ensemble, who became the first North American ensemble to create and premiere an Occam work. The proposed recording will happen at Zipper Hall in Los Angeles, a venue well-suited for the extreme quiet and sonic precision the work needs.  

Produced by Robinson and performed by the same musicians authorized by Radigue, the recording will preserve this unique realization for international dissemination via an experimental art-music label. 

Leave No Stone Unturned is a musical and performance project by sound artist and performer Stefania Becheanu. Accompanied by saxophonist Hunter Diamond and violist Whitney Johnson, she explores the intimate relationship between learning a language as a migrant, offering a perspective that is both personal and translocal on the experiences of migration and adaptation. 

Based on her own migratory journey—growing up in Romania before settling in France— Stefania approaches language first and foremost as a sound material: accents, rhythms, vocal textures, and breathing, before any stabilization of meaning. This approach places listening at the heart of the performative gesture, making the voice a sensitive space where memory, displacement, and transformation intersect.  

Following a research residency in Chicago, the project will unfold as a performance integrating urban field recordings and public conversations into an improvised composition for voice, acoustic instruments, and sound diffusion. 

The aim of this project is to recreate Meredith Monk’s fascinating work Turtle Dreams, a piece dating back to 1983, but dealing with topics that are terribly relevant today, and that has only been performed once since its creation. The project will bring together a unique transatlantic team of artists (four singers-dancers, two keyboardists, and technicians) from France and New York.  

Christine Bertocchi, singer and Co-Director of the Compagnie D’un instant à l’autre, an active musical company based in France, will be on stage and co-create this project with Katie Geissinger, a singer and member of the Meredith Monk company.  Geissinger will help put together the team and supervise rehearsals in New York and in France.  

Composer Meredith Monk herself, now 83 years old, will be consulted regularly throughout the process that is being carried out with her approval. Other members of Meredith Monk’s company will be invited to lead warm-ups and discuss the depth of the piece, the physical work, and the interpretation with the team. 

Dia Art Foundation will restage an ensemble of sonic installations by pioneering French composer Éliane Radigue in the program space at Dia Chelsea, opening in December 2026. Curated by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, this exhibition marks the first presentation of these works since 1972. Accompanying the installation, a live program of her synthesizer and acoustic compositions will demonstrate the continuity in her work across analogue and electronic methods, undertaken by performers whose artistic relationships to Radigue span decades.

Emerging from the French musique concrète scene, Radigue’s early feedback works consisted of short tape loops of unequal length that desynchronize over time. Her pioneering synthesizer works from the 1970s through the 2000s draw upon Eastern metaphysics, often realized in conversation with Minimalist peers in the United States. Works presented here span the breadth of Radigue’s influential and wide-ranging oeuvre. 

RUST on Tour is a U.S. tour by the Amaury Faye NOLA Quartet, featuring French pianist and composer Amaury Faye, tenor saxophonist Julian Lee, bassist Amina Scott, and New Orleans legend Herlin Riley. Following the acclaimed release of RUST—an album recorded in New Orleans and celebrated by European media and some American media, such as All About Jazz, The Concert Witness, Cultural Attaché, The Media Room, Chaotic Good Jazz, Step Tempest, and Notes on Jazz—the quartet will tour key American East Coast cities in 2027.

The project strengthens Franco‑American artistic dialogue through performances, workshops, and community engagement rooted in the shared heritage of jazz across New Orleans, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York.

2026 will mark the return of Correspondances to America (Canada and the United States). This new tour in North America will feature seven concerts over the course of two weeks, beginning in Canada and followed by the West and East Coasts. Correspondances is set to perform in the following cities: Montreal and Vancouver in Canada; San Francisco and San Diego on the West Coast; and Washington D.C. and Boston on the East Coast. 

Masterclasses and participatory choirs (preceded by workshops with the audience, a rare experience in the US) will be available to the public for certain concerts. Sébastien Daucé, the conductor, will end the tour by giving a masterclass in New York City.