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Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center presents the Yarn/Wire quartet, performing compositions by Annea Lockwood and Katherine Young.The Yarn/Wire ensemble will perform the second realization of their Fromm Foundation-supported project in collaboration with composer Katherine Young, entitled BIOMES 6.1. They will also perform the music of Annea Lockwood, a legendary composer, sound artist, and acoustic ecologist and member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, who is renowned for her focus on the effects of sound in our environments.
Yarn/Wire
Described by The New York Times as “key figures from the contemporary music scene… with unmistakable devotion and excitement,” Yarn/Wire is a New York-based percussion and piano quartet (Sae Hashimoto and Russell Greenberg, percussion; Laura Barger and Julia Den Boer, pianos) dedicated to the promotion of creative, experimental new music.
Since its formation in 2005, the ensemble has become a fixture at the world’s preeminent halls and music festivals, making its German debut in two concerts at the prestigious Donaueschingen Musiktage in 2023. Yarn/Wire’s 2023-24 season includes a residency at IRCAM; performances at the Eclat Festival and Monday Evening Concerts; an appearance at the Bergen International Festival with JACK Quartet; Øyvind Torvund’s The Sound of the Forest at the Ultima Festival in Norway; as well as several high profile NYC performances. Yarn/Wire holds educational and performance residencies this season at Emory University, Georgia Tech, and UC Berkeley.
Their ongoing commissioning series, Yarn/Wire/Currents, serves as an incubator for new experimental music in partnership with a variety of Brooklyn-based institutions. Yarn/Wire has recorded for the WERGO, Kairos, New Amsterdam, Northern Spy, Distributed Objects, Black Truffle, Shelter Press, Populist, and Carrier record labels, in addition to maintaining its own imprint.
Since 2014, the ensemble has hosted the annual Yarn/Wire International Institute and Festival for composers and performers interested in exploring the collaborative side of contemporary music. A strong advocate for education, Yarn/Wire has presented collaborative workshops, masterclasses, and residencies at Princeton, Columbia University, Harvard, Stanford, Brown, Duke, Northwestern, and Cornell universities, among others. For more information, please visit www.yarnwire.org.
About the performances:
BIOMES 6.1 by Katherine Young
BIOMES is a platform for collective composition and an ongoing project for improvising performers / installation artists using electroacoustic sound, light, video, movement, set design, or other means. Performers utilize the in-progress taxonomy and still-accruing assemblage of BIOMES performance materials (photographs, scientific texts, fictional texts, musical notation, sound files, videos, drawings, code, links, maps, statistics, field notes, and other materials) related to a collection of (sur)real biomes to find structure and materials for a given performance. Some of the biomes are based on actual ecosystems, while others are more fabulously constructed, but each biome has its own characteristics that dictate processes, meaning, and – most importantly – interaction strategies. Naturalistic and fantastic interpretations are welcome and can co-mingle. Within the parameters of a given biome, individual creatures or features exist with their own ways of navigating the rules of that biome. Many creatures and features exist in multiple biomes, or travel from one to another. Different biomes coexist and can be explored exclusively, simultaneously, or sequentially.
Part of this project, BIOMES 6.1 is a mostly notated concert piece created for and in collaboration with Yarn/Wire; it is the most extensive piece of musical notation yet to be added to the collection. Although the BIOMES 6.1 score has specified notes and rhythms, tempos and meters, durations and proportions, etc. performers should utilize this score creatively, as they would any other BIOMES material. It was developed through a multi-year collaborative process that involved workshops, recording, transcription, creating outdoor performances and fixed media installations. This piece was made possible by a commission from the Fromm Music Foundation.
Bayou Borne by Annea Lockwood
“Bayou-borne, for Pauline (2016-17) is dedicated to Pauline Oliveros and was composed with her passions in mind. She was born in Houston so I created a graphic score from a map of the six bayous which flow through the city, thinking that she would have known them intimately as a child – swimming, wading, mud between her toes. She was a superb improviser, so it is scored for six improvising musicians with each player reading one of the rivers as a guide. Their lines move independently at first, the players moving closer together at the confluences to form duets and trios, before finally converging, the whole tone darkening as they approach Houston in memory of the devastation and deaths caused by Hurricane Harvey in 2017.” – AL
Yarn/Wire performs Annea Lockwood and Katherine Young
Thursday, January 23, 2025 at 7pm
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center {120 College Street}
TICKETS – $12 General Admission / $8 for BMCM+AC members + Students w/ID
Learn more: https://www.blackmountaincollege.org/events/yarn-wire-concert/
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
120 College Street, Asheville, NC, United States, North Carolina 28801
