Yarn/Wire
Since its founding in 2005, intrepid NY-based piano and percussion quartet Yarn/Wire has forged a singular path in the contemporary classical music world. Its endlessly inventive collaborations, commissions, and performances have made a significant contribution to the canon of experimental works in the US and abroad. The group first came to Duke Performances in early 2022, and now returns with a clutch of pieces written especially for the ensemble.
In 2010, Yarn/Wire gave the first performance of Mincek's Pendulum VI, a piece that brings together disparate textures with scraped guiros, syncopated piano beats and juddering strings. acoustic sourings (2022) is fashioned around a set of specially fabricated 'speaker drums' - an assemblage of speaker cones with battery circuits attached to metal clips. When the clips touch, the speaker cones are activated, creating pops, crackles and static. This type of percussive creativity is also explored in Poppe's Feld, a piece for two pianos and two percussion, which brings out the flowing evolution of line and melody and percussive alternations of noise and sound within each set of instruments.