Yarn/Wire | photo by Bobby Fisher
There’s something surprisingly elegant about the unusual pairing of two pianists with two percussionists in a chamber music group — particularly when you’re talking about playing the kind of adventurous, boundary-pushing avant-garde compositions that fall under the “new music” head of contemporary classical work being made today.
“It just sort of happened that way,” shrugs pianist Laura Barger, a co-director of the New York City-based Yarn/Wire, which has thrived with that eclectic personnel, becoming an urgent force on the contemporary classical scene. The group won first prize in the open division of the University of Michigan’s prestigious M Prize competition in 2016.
Yarn/Wire was born during the members’ days at Stony Brook University and was forged more by shared interests than a particular vision for the group.
“We were the people who were interested in playing the weird contemporary music that not as many other more traditional instrumentalists wanted to play,” Barger recalls. “So [percussionist] Russell Greenberg and myself, we just had ended up playing together so many times and really liked working together, and he discovered [percussionist Ian Antonio].”
“We just started playing together because we liked each other, honestly.”
Despite the happenstance of the ensemble’s formation, Barger points out that there were a few standard pieces in the contemporary classical repertoire for such a lineup, and that the group began with those pieces first. Now, they mostly perform commissioned pieces from contemporary composers, like they will this Friday as part of the Southern Exposure New Music Series, that actually make a virtue of the odd quartet.
“Piano is this really standard 19th century instrument in a way. It kind of reached its peak in the early 20th, late 19th century,” Barger notes. “And percussion at the time didn’t really exist as a solo or chamber music instrument, it was just kind of something that got stuck in the back of the orchestra. So they are two instruments that have really different histories and trajectories. The longer that we’ve played together, the more interesting it is to see that composers almost want to take us away as far as possible from the idea of what a piano should be or could be.”
In some cases, this means shying away from the melodic or virtuosic possibilities of the instrument in favor of simple loops or minimalist punctualism — in others, it means percussively scraping against the outer shell of the instrument or augmenting the sound with electronics.
“As pianists, Ning [Yu] and I have gained a lot of skills in percussion playing, we’ve gained in a lot of skills in working with keyboards and synthesizers and electronics,” Barger explains. “We’ve really been taken out of our comfort zone as traditional performers.”
The very nature of these compositions takes the percussionist in the group, Greenberg and Antonio, into unexpected directions as well.
“Because percussion is so amazingly flexible — anything can be an instrument — the guys have amassed an insane amount of instruments over the years,” Barger enthuses. “They are really expanding their abilities too as players. I think we’ve all become much better musicians over the years because of that.”
The pianist also emphasizes that the group’s real passion is to present experimental music as accessibly, and even intimately, as possible, and their performances and relationship to the audience follows suit.
“I think for us the next step beyond [classical music] is not just the music itself, but the experience of seeing a performance,” she contends, “both what could that be and what should it be. Because of the classical background we come from, what a concert experience should be like is still fairly rigid, although there are a lot of people definitely experimenting with that, and I would count us among them.”
“One thing that happens a lot of times is that people think there’s a barrier between performers and audience, and I think that we hope to project ourselves in a way that make us approachable,” she continues. “We are trying to position ourselves as ambassadors of experimental music, even if at the same time we don’t apologize for it.”
What: Yarn/Wire
Where: USC School of Music Recital Hall, 813 Assembly St.
When: Friday, March 23, 7:30 p.m.
Price: Free
More: 803-777-4421, music.sc.edu