TOCSIN: Patrick Higgins, Tauba Auerbach & Alexander Arroyo at Pioneer Work

For two nights only, Pioneer Works will present a program of experimental music from avant-garde composer Patrick Higgins, who will debut three compositions on November 3 and 4. For this engagement, Higgins has collaborated with a few of New York’s most gripping and accomplished musicians, Vicky Chow, Mivos Quartet, and Wet Ink Ensemble, to offer a moving, sonic experience via string quartet, piano trio, and chamber orchestra. The program is further enhanced by the visual installations of Tauba Auerbach and Alexander Arroyo.

The evening’s program includes SQ3, for string quartet, a dark and brooding meeting point of ancient rite and modern mourning; the world premiere of TOCSIN, played by virtuosic pianist Vicky Chow and backed by cellists Mariel Roberts and Brian Snow, a highly dramatic and demanding intersection between piano, cello, and ethereal sounds evoking its title name, which in Old French translates to “warning bell”; and the world premiere of EMPTYSET [0,0], written for and performed by Wet Ink Ensemble, a harrowing mélange of musical materials that reorients the mind’s relationship to music.

Patrick Higgins, heralded by the New Yorker as one of the “prime movers of the local avant-garde,” is a staple of the New York experimental music scene, composing for chamber orchestra works, percussion cycles, and string quartets, and scoring works for museum exhibitions, television, and film. Higgins describes the new works “as ‘crisis music’ — because they each in their own way engage with our present moment of crisis in the world, environmental, social, and psychic. The musical works offer expressions of our various rituals of mourning, memory, and crisis management, how we cope with an increasingly complex, dangerous, and unstable world, how the world itself is becoming saturated with environmental and political poisons and threatening a profound collapse.”