The Yarn/Wire quartet of two pianists and two percussionists takes an active role in the creation of new music. The group has emphasized music by members of racial and gender minority groups. Yarn/Wire was founded at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where all its original members were graduate students, in 2005. After playing the relatively small corpus of music for two pianos and two percussionists, the members realized that they would have to actively create their own repertory, and the creation of new music has remained a central focus of the group ever since. The original members were pianists Laura Barger and Daniel Schlosberg and percussionists Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg. Barger and Greenberg remain members of the group, which as of 2021, includes pianist Ning Yu and percussionist Sae Hashimoto. All of the members have individual performing and teaching careers outside the group and have collaborated with many outside artists and ensembles, both traditional and avant-garde. The members of Yarn/Wire state that they are "devoted to expanding the representation of composers including but not limited to those who identify as women, LGBTQIA+, Black, African, Indigenous, Latina(o)(x), Asian, or Arab so that it might better reflect our communities and amplify their full creative potential." Yarn/Wire both commissions new music and works collaboratively with cross-genre artists, working both in the U.S. and abroad. The group's work also includes educational activities. It has performed works commissioned from composers Tyondai Braxton, Kate Soper, and Øyvind Torvund, among many others, as well as developing projects with such figures as Tristan Perich, Mark Fell, and Sufjan Stevens. The group has gained wide attention for its recordings, which have appeared on such labels as Wergo, New Amsterdam, Northern Spy, and, in 2021, Black Truffle, which featured Yarn/Wire on an album of new music by experimental composer Annea Lockwood. ~ James Manheim, Rovi