Yarn/Wire Will Perform at TIME:SPANS Festival Next Month

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.

Tickets and more information: https://timespans.org/concert/yarn-wire-3/