Caballito Negro presents a sparkling new program with science fiction/futurism as the theme. The music is performed on a good sized menagerie of instruments, but with the caveat that the instruments are small and intimate enough to fit into a house concert! Narratives are interwoven through out, with words from writers Amy Miller, Adrian Shirk, Arthur C. Clarke, Octavia Butler and Tessa Brinckman, in an intimate tribute to futurist speculations, and to science as play.

• The concert opens with Caballito Negro’s version of David Lang’s gorgeous piano work called “Wed,” which is part of a his set of “Memory Pieces”.
• The west coast premiere of our co-commission from Wally Gunn, “Bare White Bones” where we speak a wild haunting Scottish text where two crows incant how they will perch on a corpse, nest in his golden hair and peck out his beautiful blue eyes!
• A first for Caballito Negro in performing on toy piano & percussion, Christopher Adler’s playful, brilliant and tender “The Toy Robot’s Mechanical Heart”.
• The premiere of our own joint composition “Phantom Canyon”, which is one of three music scores to be performed later on, live, with film-maker Stacey Steers’ trio of films, at the Ashland Independent Film Festival in April 2018.
• The world premiere of Tessa Brinckman’s new solo, “Blazing World,”scored for French baroque flute (which sounds a whole step down from modern flute) and electroacoustics. The inspiration came from the Duchess Margaret of Cavendish’s science fiction story written in 1666, where a woman travels through a portal into a parallel universe.
• Terry Longshore will perform a solo, “Aphasia” by Mark Applebaum. This piece is a metaphor for the composer “confronting the terror of composing a new piece.” It’s literally hundreds of transformed vocal samples from renowned baritone Nicholas Isherwood, set to a score of hand motions, and coordinated to each sound.
• The concert will close with “That Which Colors the Soul”, a favorite composed jointly by Caballito Negro for hybrid flute, tabla, Handsonic, waterphone, and bottles, which places Hindustani musical traditions alongside the more restless and destabilized Western ideas.