Music of the Americas: Pianos and More

Wednesday, March 26, 10 am

Pianist and composer Lucas Pierro was born in Buenos Aires in 1983 and started playing the piano as a child. He works as a pianist, arranger, musical director, and teacher. He has been part of numerous jazz, folk, and Latin American music groups. He has accompanied singers such as Dyango, Nadia Larcher, and Ayelén Zuker, among others. He is currently part of a duo with drummer Gustavo Chenu, with whom he has just released the album Enero, which follows their 2024 debut album, Un Jardín.

"El trajín" is an original composition with rhythmic roots in Latin American folk music, a harmonic sequence that stems from twentieth-century experimentalism, and a general improvisational approach.

Thursday, March 27, 10 am 

Lucas Ávila is an Argentine composer, charango and guitar player, and professor at universities and conservatories in the Buenos Aires area. He is also a composer and performer in El Combo del Santiamén, an instrumental folk group directed by Gustavo Santaolalla.

Fabiana Martínez, an interdisciplinary artist who explores sound as vibration, memory, and trance, fuses improvisation, psychoacoustics, techno-poetics, and pre-Columbian instrument-making techniques. She investigates energy and kinesthetic perception, expanding the visual, the aural, and the gestural. For her, listening is a portal to the intuitive and the human. 

The duo sent us two pieces that explore the fusion of the ancestral and the electronic through improvisation and sound architecture. In "Flora," the digitally processed charango and pre-Columbian wind instruments generate an ethereal, trance-like soundscape, evoking continental psychoacoustics. The work expands auditory perception, integrating natural and digital timbres in a journey where the ritual and the experimental converge, blurring the boundaries between past and future in an immersive experience of timeless vibrations and resonances.

Friday, March 28, 10 am 

Ana Foutel is back with "Dejar vibrar," a free improvisation on the piano in which the composer coaxes unexpected, dreamy sonorities from the instrument through the use of extended techniques, letting the sound vibrate, as the title suggests. 

The MetLife Foundation Music of the Americas concert series is made possible by the generous support of Presenting Sponsor MetLife Foundation.

The 2024-2025 series is also supported, in part, by the Howard Gilman Foundation, Augustine Foundation, Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, Mex-Am Cultural Foundation, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, and Mid Atlantic Arts.