After Nan Shepherd: Nate Wooley with Joan La Barbara & Yarn/Wire

Friday, January 30th at 8pm, ISSUE’s 2026 Winter Season Opening concert, After Nan Shepherd, co-presented with Brooklyn Music School is a work of chamber music composed by 2011 ISSUE AIR, Nate Wooley. Written expressly for its performers, Wooley brings together esteemed vocalist Joan La Barbara (2006 AIR) and NYC-based new music quartet Yarn/Wire (2012 AIR) for a rare shared appearance. 

After Nan Shepherd explores tensions between improvisation and composition, modern and ancient expression, history and memory. Following inspiration from Scottish poet Anna “Nan” Shepherd’s repeated trips into the Cairngorm Mountains—as documented in her groundbreaking book, The Living Mountain—the piece takes four themes and slowly unravels them first, by using traditional methods of compositional variation, and then through increasing amounts of performer agency. This movement from composition to improvisation expands upon other pieces by Wooley, such as Mutual Aid Music and Four Experiments, and pays homage to historical movements in improvisation and indeterminacy in the grand tradition of American experimentalism.

Shepherd’s Proustian attempt to recreate her memory of raw human experience is translated into music by the slow disintegration of the themes. Once a theme is presented, it goes through a sustained evolution for the duration of the piece, slowly being dissembled through transposition, diminution, and expansion. It also becomes material for a series of improvisatory techniques: aleatory, parametric improvisation, and text or graphic means. Central to Wooley’s piece is the interjection of the performers’ voices and bodies: the sound of feet, hands, whistling, and humming coexist with modernist atonal instrumental composition. This method of using spoken and sung text plays on a confluence of high modernism and ancient storytelling traditions that Wooley has been developing over the last five years in his practice alongside his concept of “social music.” The transition from interpreting the set material of a score to the spontaneity of performer-driven scoring techniques builds upon a broad reinterpretation of the American and European jazz traditions, and echoes Shepherd’s hundreds of visits to the Cairngorms as poetically documented through the vivid, human filter of her memory.

New York-based American trumpeter Nate Wooley has performed on over 100 recordings. Increasingly acknowledged internationally, Wooley’s specific style is part of a burgeoning revolution in experimental trumpet technique. His own compositions expand conceptions of linguistic based embouchure manipulation and utilize the trumpet to control amplified feedback. He has performed regularly with such icons as John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Éliane Radigue, Ken Vandermark, Fred Frith, Evan Parker, and Yoshi Wada, as well as being a collaborator with some of the brightest lights of his generation like Chris Corsano, C. Spencer Yeh, Peter Evans, and Mary Halvorson.

Joan La Barbara is a composer, performer, sound artist, and actor renowned for her unique vocabulary of experimental and extended vocal techniques, influencing generations of composers and singers. La Barbara's recent work for voice, chamber ensemble and fixed media "Ears of an Eagle; Eyes of a Hawk: In the Vortex" commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, uses as its text the names of women of color who have long been missing from the history of the Suffragist movement and places the audience in the center of a swirling surround soundscape. Exploring ways of immersing the audience in her music, La Barbara seated the American Composers Orchestra around and among the audience in Carnegie Hall’s Zankel auditorium, building her sonic painting “in solitude this fear is lived”, inspired by Agnes Martin’s minimalist drawings. Her works have been performed at Brisbane Biennial, Festival d'Automne à Paris, Warsaw Autumn, MaerzMusik Berlin, and Lincoln Center among many others. Joan received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award, recently released "The Early Immersive Music of Joan La Barbara" (Mode 298) and is on the Performing Arts Faculty at Mannes, the New School.

Yarn/Wire is a New York-based percussion and piano quartet (Russell Greenberg and Sae Hashimoto, percussion; Laura Barger and Julia Den Boer, pianos) dedicated to the promotion of creative, experimental new music. Yarn/Wire's 20th anniversary season in 2025-2026 includes its New York Philharmonic debut, a celebratory Pop Up Festival at Columbia University's Miller Theatre, the premiere of Endlings by Raven Chacon and John Dieterich at the Time:Spans Festival, Swoonfest with TAK Ensemble, ISSUE Project Room in new works by Nate Wooley, Annea Lockwood's Into The Vanishing Point at Harvard University, Composer Portraits of Anthony Cheung and Andrew McIntosh at Miller Theatre at Columbia University, and more. Since its formation in 2005, the ensemble has become a fixture at the world's preeminent halls and music festivals, and through hundreds of commissions, Yarn/Wire has championed composers including Annea Lockwood, Enno Poppe, Michael Gordon, George Lewis, Ingrid Laubrock, Ann Cleare, Catherine Lamb, Sarah Hennies, Tyshawn Sorey, Peter Evans, Alex Mincek, Thomas Meadowcroft, Misato Mochizuki, Sam Pluta, Tyondai Braxton, Kate Soper, and Oyvind Torvund. In addition, their ongoing commissioning series, Yarn/Wire/Currents, serves as an incubator for new experimental music in partnership with a variety of Brooklyn-based institutions, including Roulette, Blank Forms, and ISSUE Project Room. Since 2014, the ensemble has hosted the annual Yarn/Wire International Institute and Festival for composers and performers interested in exploring the collaborative side of contemporary music. A strong advocate for education, Yarn/Wire has presented collaborative workshops, masterclasses, and residencies at Princeton, Columbia University, Harvard, Stanford, Brown, Duke, Northwestern, and Cornell universities, among others.