FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 17, 2021
More Info: mendingwall.prismquartet.com

 

Aleba Gartner, 212/206-1450
aleba@alebaco.com

In February 2022, the omnivorous all-sax ensemble PRISM Quartet presents MENDING WALL, its most ambitious project to date. This boundary-pushing production was originally scheduled for March 2020, but was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, it will finally come to life onstage, with new direction that explores the ways the pandemic has affected us all.

Named after the 1914 poem by Robert Frost, Mending Wall is a fully staged concert exploring the meaning of walls in our world by giving musical form to questions about identity, community, division, and freedom.

“Mending Wall began as a response to the symbol of a wall as a dehumanizing force during America’s recent zeal for wall-building," says Matthew Levy, PRISM's co-founder, executive director, and tenor saxophonist. "As artists, we’re called to build another kind of structure: a collaborative experiment that restores mystery, complexity, and generosity to our encounters with one another. Mending Wall amplifies a range of musical and poetic voices; our hope is that the project will illuminate and help us to confront and mend fractures in our human community.”

Soprano Tony Arnold and pianist Arturo O’Farrill join PRISM Quartet (Matthew Levy, Timothy McAllister, Zachary Shemon, and Taimur Sullivan) in world premiere performances of newly commissioned works by four visionary composers: Martin Bresnick, George Lewis, Juri Seo, and O’Farrill. Each composer took inspiration from poetry of their choosing: Bresnick from Frost; Lewis from South Africa's Keorapetse Kgositsile; Seo from Brazil's Waly Salomão; and O'Farrill from the Mexican/Chicano performance artist, writer, activist, and educator Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Jump to the program details here. 

Staging and lighting are central to this project. The Dutch opera director Jorinde Keesmaat, known for immersive multidisciplinary work that plays with the relationship between spectator and actor/musician, choreographs movement among the artists, building a powerful, mobile integration of music, poetry, and light. The ingenious lighting design, which involves the musicians themselves manipulating walls of wireless LED RGBW light-batons, is by Aaron Copp, whose recent projects include lighting shows for Yo-Yo Ma, Natalie Merchant, Maya Beiser, Miami City Ballet, Eliot Feld, and more. 

In December 2022, Mending Wall will be released as a commercial album on XAS Records, distributed by Symphonic Distribution.

Martin Bresnick’s commission, Mending Time, is inspired by the contradictions in Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” in which two neighbors meet yearly to rebuild the structure separating their farms. Bresnick writes, “According to Frost we are trapped and doomed by fences to eternal contact and inevitable alienation. But what if the walls between us were made of music?”
 
In Where Her Eye Sits, George Lewis set texts examining the legacy of apartheid by the late South African poet and activist Keorapetse Kgositsile, who after years of exile became poet laureate of post-apartheid South Africa. The piece joins PRISM and soprano Tony Arnold “to link a coloratura’s sonic sensibility with the saxophone’s evocation of South African popular music via mbube-like orchestration.”

Juri Seo's Unsung Lullaby is inspired by Algaravi: Echo Chamber, a volume of poetry by Syrian-Brazilian writer Waly Salomão. In her work, Seo explores the dual meaning of “echo chamber”—the figurative connotation that’s ubiquitous in our politics/media, and its older (and literal) meaning, a walled space that repeats, amplifies, and distorts sounds.

Arturo O’Farrill’s Something to declare? (yeah, fuck your wall) is based on “Freefalling Toward a Borderless Future” by Guillermo Gomez Peña and son jarocho, a Mexican song form with a lead trovador voice supported by jaranas (guitar-like instruments), which PRISM’s saxophones approximate. His piece draws upon the rich political/cultural underpinnings of Fandango Fronterizo, an annual festival on both sides of the San Diego/Tijuana border fence.

Please visit the detailed Mending Wall Website to learn more. It includes photographs from workshops, artist statements from the project's stage director and composers, information about Mending Wall poets, a project blog, ticket links, and more. 

"One of America's finest saxophone quartets"
— The New Yorker

The PRISM Quartet (Timothy McAllister, Zachary Shemon, Matthew Levy, and Taimur Sullivan) seeks to place the saxophone in unexpected contexts, chart fresh musical territory, and to challenge, inspire, and move audiences. “A bold ensemble that set the standard for contemporary-classical saxophone quartets” (The New York Times), PRISM has been presented by Carnegie Hall and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center; appeared as soloists with the Detroit Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra, and conducted residencies at the nation’s leading conservatories, including the Curtis Institute and the Oberlin Conservatory. PRISM has commissioned hundreds of works, from talented students to recipients of the Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Fellowship. PRISM’s discography is extensive, with releases on Albany, BMOP/Sound, ECM, innova, Koch International, Naxos, and its own label, XAS Records. The PRISM Quartet plays Selmer saxophones exclusively. 

Acknowledgements

Major support for Mending Wall has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, with additional support from Chamber Music America, The Presser Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, New Music USA, the Musical Fund Society, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature,  the Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York, and Conn-Selmer, Inc.

Please visit mendingwall.prismquartet.com for the complete funding credit.

For further information, press tickets, photos, and to arrange interviews, please contact Aleba & Co. at 212/206-1450 or aleba@alebaco.com.

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