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TIME:SPANS Festival 2021 Presents Yarn/Wire, August 24
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Katy Salomon | Morahan Arts and Media
katy@morahanartsandmedia.com | 863.660.2214
TIME:SPANS Festival 2021 Presents
Yarn/Wire, August 24
A Concert Featuring the World Premieres of New Works by
Andrew McIntosh and Wolfgang Heiniger,
Plus Zosha Di Castri’s JUNO Award-Nominated Tachitipo
“Sonic art that is clearly going places.” – Gramophone Magazine
New York, NY (July 21, 2021) — On Tuesday, August 24, 2021 at 7:30pm, the TIME:SPANS Festival presents the magnetic and experimental percussion and piano quartet Yarn/Wire at Mary Flagler Cary Hall at The DiMenna Center for Classical Music. Yarn/Wire performs the world premieres of Andrew McIntosh’s Little Jimmy and Wolfgang Heiniger’s Neumond, in addition to Zosha Di Castri’s Tachitipo, which was nominated for a 2021 JUNO Award.
American composer Andrew McIntosh’s Little Jimmy (2020) for two pianos and two percussionists is a 29 minute piece commissioned by Yarn/Wire for the 2020 Virtual TIME:SPANS Festival. In his compositions, McIntosh works with forms and ideas found in nature and incorporates instrumental, vocal, and fixed media forms. Little Jimmy uses field recordings taken on April 23, 2020 in the San Gabriel Mountains, near the Little Jimmy backpackers' camp on Mt. Islip. McIntosh says, “I wasn’t intending to write a piece about wildfire or climate change, but I had already been planning to use those recordings in this piece in late August of 2020 when the Bobcat Fire burned the trees captured in the recordings.” Watch Yarn/Wire’s Feedback episode with Andrew McIntosh about Little Jimmy: https://youtu.be/-W-5C4K0Rco.
Yarn/Wire also performs the world premiere of Swiss composer Wolfgang Heiniger’s Neumond (2018) for two keyboards and two percussionists. Neumond (“new moon”) is a nostalgic and gothic piece that is reminiscent of early, black-and-white horror film music. Audible are two electronic organs in microtonal tuning and two drums singing a song of wistfulness during the new moon. “Or something like that,” says Heiniger. “The horror is only fake but the yearning might be real and present.” Watch Yarn/Wire’s Feedback episode featuring Wolfgang Heiniger: https://youtu.be/2aD80UTQZcY.
Canadian composer Zosha Di Castri describes Tachitipo (2016), written for Yarn/Wire, as a “reflection on writing and the machines we use to execute our ideas.” Tachitipo, which Yarn/Wire performs on Di Castri’s acclaimed album of the same name, out in 2019 on New Focus Recordings, was nominated for a 2021 JUNO Award for Classical Composition of the Year. The title comes from an 1823 typewriter model (also called the tachigrafo) invented by the Italian engineer Pietro Conti and Di Castri turns to the vintage manual typewriter as her inspiration for building a vocabulary of sounds. Watch Yarn/Wire's Feedback episode with Zosha Di Castri about Tachitipo: https://youtu.be/zaNUzQOLjug.
Concert Information
TIME:SPANS Festival Presents Yarn/Wire
Tuesday, August 24, 2021 at 7:30pm
Mary Flagler Cary Hall, DiMenna Center for Classical Music | 450 W 37th Street | New York, NY
Tickets: $20 for General Admission, $10 for Students and Seniors. On sale August 1, 2021 at 9:00am ET
Link: https://timespans.org/concert/
ANDREW MCINTOSH: Little Jimmy (2020) [World Premiere Live Performance]
WOLFGANG HEINIGER: Neumond (2018) [World Premiere]
ZOSHA DI CASTRI: Tachitipo (2016)
Yarn/Wire
Laura Barger, piano
Russell Greenberg, percussion
Sae Hashimoto, percussion
Julia Den Boer, piano
TIME:SPANS Festival will operate at 50% capacity and will be checking vaccination statuses at the door. More COVID-19 Safety Protocols are listed at https://timespans.org.
About Yarn/Wire
Yarn/Wire is a New York-based percussion and piano quartet (Sae Hashimoto and Russell Greenberg, percussion; Laura Barger and Ning Yu, pianos) dedicated to the promotion of creative, experimental new music. Pianist Julia Den Boer will join as guest artist for the 2021-2022 season. Described by The Brooklyn Rail as “fascinating and exciting, with playing that is precise and full of purpose,” the ensemble is admired globally for the energy and precision it brings to performances of today’s most adventurous compositions. Founded in 2005, the ensemble seeks to expand the representation of composers so that it might begin to better reflect our communities and experience new creative potential.
Yarn/Wire appears internationally at prominent festivals and venues including the Lincoln Center Festival, Edinburgh International Festival, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra Hall, Rainy Days Festival (Luxembourg), Ultima Festival (Norway), Transit Festival (Belgium), Dublin SoundLab, Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Contempuls Festival (Prague), Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York’s Miller Theatre at Columbia University, River-to-River Festival, La MaMa Theatre, Festival of New American Music, and London’s Barbican Centre. Their numerous commissions include works from composers such as Enno Poppe, Michael Gordon, George Lewis, Ann Cleare, Raphaël Cendo, Peter Evans, Alex Mincek, Thomas Meadowcroft, Misato Mochizuki, Tristan Murail, Sam Pluta, Tyondai Braxton, Kate Soper, and Øyvind Torvund. The ensemble enjoys collaborations with genre-bending artists such as Tristan Perich, Ben Vida, Mark Fell, Sufjan Stevens, and Pete Swanson.
Through the Yarn/Wire International Institute and Festival and other educational residencies and outreach programs, Yarn/Wire works to promote not only the present but also the future of new music in the United States. Their ongoing commissioning series, Yarn/Wire/Currents, serves as an incubator for new experimental music.
Yarn/Wire has recorded for the WERGO, Northern Spy, Distributed Objects, Black Truffle, Populist, and Carrier record labels in addition to maintaining their own imprint. For more information, please visit: www.yarnwire.org.
About Andrew McIntosh
Andrew McIntosh is a composer, violinist, violist, and baroque violinist who teaches at the California Institute of the Arts, with musical interests covering a broad spectrum including historical performance practice, improvisation, microtonal tuning systems, long-form works, and the 20th-century avant-garde. He holds degrees in violin performance, composition, and early music performance from the University of Nevada, Reno, CalArts, and the University of Southern California, and principal teachers included Phillip Ruder, Martin Chalifour, Mark Menzies, Lorenz Gamma, Sue Feldman, Marc Sabat, and Wolfgang von Schweinitz. He also co-directs Populist Records, a label dedicated to new music from Southern California.
As a composer he often works with forms and ideas found in nature or in other artistic disciplines, working in instrumental, vocal, and fixed media forms, and was described by Alex Ross in The New Yorker as “a composer preternaturally attuned to the landscapes and soundscapes of the West". His compositions have been featured at venues including Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Gaudeamus Festival, Time:Spans Festival, Hamburger Klangwerktage, Moments Musicaux Aarau, Bludenzer Tage Zeitgemasse Muzik, Miller Theatre, National Sawdust, Issue Project Room, Monday Evening Concerts, and Tectonics Festival Glasgow. The individual musical personalities of performers he writes for are a central consideration in his work, and he has worked particularly closely with the musicians of Wild Up, the Formalist Quartet, Yarn/Wire, and soprano Estelí Gomez. Recent commissions include works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Industry opera company, Yarn/Wire, the Calder Quartet, and violinists Movses Pogossian and Marco Fusi.
Originally from rural Northern Nevada, McIntosh is currently based in the Los Angeles area. Learn more at www.septimalcomma.com.
About Wolfgang Heiniger
Wolfgang Heiniger studied drums, electroacoustic music and composition in Basel and Stanford, and his teachers included Thomas Kessler. Between 1995 and 2003 he was the head of the audio design course at the Basel University of Music, and since 2003 he has been a professor for intermedia composition at the Hanns Eisler University of Music in Berlin. He is one of the two artistic directors of the Klangzeitort Institute for New Music at the Hanns Eisler University of the Arts, Berlin.
He is a co-founder and former member of various ensembles for electronic and improvised music such as Basel Electric Art Messengers (1994-2006) and European Powerbook Orchestra 1995-2001), as well as curator of several festivals including Echt! Zeit and Tage für Neue Musik Rümlingen, among others. He is a member of the theater collective Mehrblick & Ton.
His compositions often include scenic and interactive elements and use a loudspeaker orchestra and self-developed electroacoustic instruments, are currently being used by ensembles such as the musikFabrik Nordrhein-Westfalen, the ensemble mosaik berlin, the Ensemble Phoenix Basel, Soyuz21 Zurich, Inverspace, EW-4, among others. Together with Kirsten Reese he develops and directs the Berlin Loudspeaker Orchestra (BLO). He and the composer Enno Poppe have had a long-term collaboration from which, among other things, Animals Don't Sit and Tape were co-composed.
Heiniger also works as a sound director, improviser and performer of electronic music in productions in Europe, Asia and America. Learn more at www.wolfgangheiniger.de.
About Zosha Di Castri
Zosha Di Castri, a Canadian “composer of riotously inventive works” (The New Yorker), currently lives in New York. Her music extends far beyond purely concert music, including projects with electronics, sound arts, and collaborations with video and dance that encourage audiences to feel “compelled to return for repeated doses” (The Arts Desk). She is currently the Francis Goelet Assistant Professor of Music at Columbia University and a 2021 Guggenheim fellow.
Zosha’s orchestral compositions have been commissioned by John Adams, the San Francisco Symphony, New World Symphony, Esprit Orchestra, the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, and the BBC, and have been featured by the Tokyo Symphony, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and the Cabrillo Festival among others. In July 2019, Long Is the Journey, Short Is the Memory opened the first night of the BBC Proms. She has made appearances with the Chicago Symphony, the LA Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and has worked with many leading new music groups including Talea Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, Wet Ink Ensemble, Ekmeles, Yarn/Wire, the NEM, Ensemble Cairn, and JACK Quartet. She was the recipient of the Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music in 2012, and participated in Ircam's Manifeste Festival in Paris. Other major projects include a string quartet for the Banff International String Quartet Competition; a piece for Yarn/Wire that premiered at her Miller Theatre Composer Portrait concert; a piano/violin duo with violinist Jennifer Koh; and a string octet premiered by JACK Quartet and Parker Quartet at the Banff Centre.
Zosha’s debut album Tachitipo was released on New Focus Recordings in November 2019 to critical acclaim and the title track was nominated for The JUNO Awards’ 2021 Classical Composition of the Year. Tachitipo was named in the Best of 2019 lists by The New Yorker, I Care if You Listen, AnEarful, Sequenza21, and New York Music Daily.
Zosha completed her Bachelors of Music in Piano Performance and Composition at McGill University, and has a doctorate from Columbia University in Composition. She was also an inaugural fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris in 2018-19. Zosha was born in St. Albert in Alberta, Canada and currently lives with her family in New York City. Learn more at www.zoshadicastri.com.
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Photo Credit: Yarn/Wire by Bobby Fisher
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