Yarn/Wire and Baritone Jeffrey Gavett Premiere Three New Works At The Americas Society

On Friday, November 5, 2021 at 7:00pm, acclaimed percussion and piano quartet Yarn/Wire returns to the Music of the Americas Concert Series and Americas Society to present Hilos de viento. The program includes the world premieres of The Machine Stops by Taylor Brook and a new version of Como hilos de viento y luz by Andrés Guadarrama with baritone Jeffrey Gavett as well as the world premiere of DM R's Sunsets in Mars are Blue. The video for this in-person concert will also be available for viewers to watch online on November 12, 2021 at 7pm EST on the Americas Society website and YouTube channel.

Taylor Brook's The Machine Stops (2020) was written for baritone Jeffrey Gavett and Yarn/Wire. The title comes from E.M. Forster's short story, an unusually prescient work of science-fiction describing life in the distant future where all of humanity lives beneath the Earth's surface in a machine through which they have their every need met. Brook's piece sets seven fragments of text from The Machine Stops, providing glimpses of the characters and world that Forster envisioned.

Sunsets in Mars are Blue was conceived by DM R as an electroacoustic-performance installation that reveals contradictions co-existing in parallel. The work uses recorded sounds on Mars from NASA, plus field recordings of protests, popular Rock en Español, explicit Salsa Choque, and Neo-Colombian Folk chants during Colombia's unrest between 2019-2021. DM R says, "The use of these snippets emphasizes the vastness of disparity. While one country is wealthy and can explore space, the other condemns its youth to fly out or die fighting for a better future. The blue sunset consumes the red planet into darkness. One may interpret it as hope or as an apocalyptic nightmare. Sunsets in Mars are Blue is a tale of positionality, about an outsider looking in, placed between excesses, always longing to belong and come back home. Through the field recordings, Mars's sonic world is dry, mechanical yet violent. The joyful chants convey anger, rebellion, and hope."

Andrés Guadarrama's new version of Como hilos de viento y luz "Like threads of wind and light" stems from the composer's desire to develop a special sensibility to wind and light through collective composition, improvisation, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Taking the place of a written score is an online folder named "Realization Materials" which contains photographs, videos, audio files, texts/quotes, instructions and exercises, musical notation, and more. Guadarrama suggests that, "anyone willing to realize this project, to engage individually with all of these materials and later, start a collective process for deciding aspects of the realization, such as: duration, form, instrumentation/inventory, number of players, etc." The folder is available to those who wish to upload their own materials to enlarge the documentation of the project and is intended to remain that way in the future. Watch Yarn/Wire perform the virtual premiere of Como hilos de viento y luz.