and features excerpts from the music and theater work Slide, a collaboration between Eighth Blackbird, composer Steve Mackey, and singer, actor, and librettist Rinde Eckert. Meanwhile, an album featuring Stephen Hartke's piece of the same name, won a Grammy in 2011. FILAMENT won the 2015 Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance. Since its founding in 1996, Eighth Blackbird has been active in commissioning new works from composers such as Steve Reich, David Lang, George Perle, Frederic Rzewski, Joseph Schwantner, Paul Moravec, and Stephen Hartke, as well as works from Jennifer Higdon, Derek Bermel, Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner, David Little, Daniel Kellogg, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, and the Minimum Security Composers Collective. The group received the first BMI/Boudleaux-Bryant Fund Commission and the 2007 American Music Center Trailblazer Award and has received grants from BMI, Meet the Composer, the Greenwall Foundation, and Chamber Music America. In June 2009, Eighth Blackbird served as Music Director of the Ojai Music Festival in Southern California. In February 2011, Eighth Blackbird curated the Tune-In Music Festival at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. The group devised a program which centered around Igor Stravinsky's controversial statement that music was, "essentially powerless to express anything at all," and culminated in the indoor premier of John Luther Adams' monumental percussion work Inuksuit. In 2012, the group also developed the Metropolis New Music Festival in Melbourne, Australia, which featured Steve Reich as its composer-in-residence. Demonstrating its flair for combining musical and theatrical elements in its performances, Eighth Blackbird has also created an original cabaret-opera style staging of Arnold Schoenberg's seminal work Pierrot Lunaire, which the group performs entirely from memory and a fully staged, evening-length work by Amy Beth Kirsten entitled Colombine’s Paradise Theatre. Recordings References External links Eighth Blackbird official site University of Chicago Ensemble-in-Residence Eighth Blackbird wins Grammy Awards Music of Richmond, Virginia Contemporary classical music ensembles Musical groups established in 1996 Cedille Records artists