Dana Lyn & Kyle Sanna: The Coral Suite

New York-based fiddler and composer Dana Lyn inhabits a musical world somewhere in the Venn diagram of 70's art rock, classical, traditional Irish and improvised music. She has worked and performed with a wide variety of artists, such as Tony Award-winning musicians Stew and Heidi Rodewald; Irish poet Louis de Paor; actor-directors Ethan Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio; performance artist Taylor Mac; avant cellist Hank Roberts; Grammy Award-winning vocalists Loudon Wainwright and Susan McKeown; the late great Scots fiddler Johnny Cunningham; D’Angelo and the Vanguard and the Elysian Fields, among others. As a composer, Lyn has received commissions from the Brooklyn Rider, the Apple Hill String Quartet, the National Arts Council of Ireland, violist Nicholas Cords, the Los Angeles Inception Orchestra and the New Orchestra of Washington. Most recently, she was an artist in residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Upcoming releases include an album of original music inspired by visual artist Jay Defeo, as well as the sophomore release of her collaboration with actor Vincent D’Onofrio, Slim Bone Head Volt.

Guitarist and composer Kyle Sanna has collaborated with and performed alongside many of today’s virtuosos (cello superstar Yo-Yo Ma, bassist Edgar Meyer, A Prairie Home Companion host Chris Thile), with some of the greatest living interpreters of Irish music (Martin Hayes, Seamus Egan, Kevin Burke), and with improvisers worldwide. As a performer, Kyle Sanna has brought his music to such international venues as the Royal Opera House in Muscat, Oman, Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal, and Sydney’s ABC studios, as well as making stateside appearances at New York's Carnegie Hall and the Newport Jazz Festival. He has given guitar workshops at the Montana State Women’s Prison, at an orphanage in Juárez, Mexico, and at numerous universities and festivals from Alaska to Cuba.

Kyle Sanna’s arrangements have been performed by Grammy-winning banjo pioneer Bela Fleck and the Oregon and Colorado Symphony Orchestras, Germany’s SWR Orchestra, guitar icon Kaki King, K-pop superstar Rain, cellist Jan Vogler and the Knights (for Sony Classical), Grammy-winning Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne-Sofie Von Otter with Brooklyn Rider, renowned Irish fiddler Martin Hayes (NPR’s Performance Today), and Yo-Yo Ma (2010 and 2016 Grammy-winning releases for Sony Classical, performance on The Colbert Report).

Kyle Sanna’s compositions have been performed at the Bach House in Eisenach, Germany, the Oregon Bach Festival, Art Basel Miami Beach, the International Symposium on Electronic Art, and Carnegie’s Zankel Hall. WNYC’s New Sounds and Sound Check host John Schaefer called his music “unconventionally beautiful”.

Kyle studied jazz at the University of Oregon and composition at the Université Lumière Lyon II in France. He lives in Brooklyn and is a member of Kinan Azmeh’s CityBand, Marika Hughes & Bottom Heavy, The Seamus Egan Project, Ground Patrol, We the Gleaners, and a duo with violinist Dana Lyn. 

Hailed as “ground-breaking” by noted folklorist and NEA Award-recipient Mick Moloney and “bursting with creativity” by renowned fiddler Kevin Burke, Dana Lyn and Kyle Sanna connect the dots between their experience as composers and improvisers in New York City’s rich musical community and their deep admiration for traditional Irish music. The duo has collaborated with some of the greatest living interpreters of Irish music, including Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill, Cillian Vallely, Kevin Burke, and Mick McAuley.

Lyn and Sanna have brought their inventive arrangements and nuanced interpretations of traditional music to clubs, festival stages and concert halls throughout the US and Canada. They have taught workshops at the Old Songs Festival, the Catskills Irish Arts Festival, the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival, Wellesley College, West Virginia’s Augusta Heritage Center, Traditional Arts in Upstate New York, and since 2015 have been residents at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute in Boscawen, NH.

Their second album, The Great Arc, is inspired by and concerned with extinct and endangered animal species. The Irish Echo called it “a deep musical work full of lavish, evocative textures” and the Dublin-based Grammy-winning singer Susan McKeown called it “sublime”.

In April 2018 Dana Lyn & Kyle Sanna will release their third album. Picking up where The Great Arc left off, Lyn and Sanna continue their investigation of environmental fragility with an evocative suite of music that mirrors the life cycles and natural processes that occur within the ecosystem of a coral reef. Using light boxes, projections, and the vocabulary of Irish melody, Lyn and Sanna create an audiovisual poem for the reef, paying tribute to its miraculous biodiversity while calling attention to the urgent need for its protection.