The PRISM Quartet will commission Martin Bresnick, George Lewis, Juri Seo, and Arturo O’Farrill to compose works exploring the meaning of walls in contemporary society, each inspired by a text of their choosing. PRISM will present Mending Wall in Philadelphia (co-presented by the Bryn Mawr College Performing Arts Series) and Brooklyn (Roulette) as staged concerts directed by Jorinde Keesmaat with lighting by Aaron Copp. PRISM will be joined by soprano Tony Arnold on Lewis’ piece, and O’Farrill (piano) on his commission.

Mending Wall gives musical form to a range of pressing questions about community, tribalism, racial identity, division, and freedom. Although America’s current zeal for wall-building is not without precedent, we might understand it as a specific failure of imagination. As artists, we are called to build another kind of structure: a collaborative experiment that restores mystery, complexity, and generosity to our discourse about walls, and to our encounters with one another.