HISTORY OF LIFE

Act I, Scene 7 — Dance

performed by Contemporaneous, September 21, 2024 at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park

Music by Dylan Mattingly
Text by Thomas Bartscherer
Concept by Dylan Mattingly and Thomas Bartscherer

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A new epic, History of Life is a wild, enthralling 6-hour musical event — a folk revival, a rock concert, a communal feast, and a meditation on all that has lived and all that has died in this world. More than just a performance, History of Life is a celebration — like a wedding or a wake — that bears witness to the vast, beautiful, violent, manyvoiced history of life on Earth. Through music and words, in story and song, History of Life offers the rare opportunity to abide in wonder and to look upon the world as though seeing it for the first time.

In History of Life, acclaimed Irish vocalist Iarla Ó Lionáird (The Gloaming) resurrects the role of the Homeric bard. As both singer and storyteller, he embodies an imagined tradition of oral epic, as if it had evolved continuously over 2700 years, from the time of Homer to the present, incorporating new stories and new sounds with every retelling. Beginning with the Odyssey and exploding out in all directions, History of Life weaves together three central stories — Odysseus’s long journey home as an older man; Charles Darwin setting out as a young naturalist on the HMS Beagle; and the coming of age of Luzia, a girl born on the Cabo Verdean island of Santiago in the first half of the 19th century — into an enormous musical tapestry that comes to encompass the whole bewildering narrative of organic life on Earth. 

Ó Lionáird, himself the bearer of the long tradition of Irish sean-nós singing, is joined by a band of twelve musicians, playing an array of instruments that includes two hurdy-gurdies, two re-tuned upright pianos, two guitars, re-tuned harp, toy piano, harmonium, mandolin, strings, and percussion. A group of six fellow-travelers, like the regulars in a pub, host the evening, sharing the space with the audience, humming along or breaking into dance, taking in the music as though they’ve known it all their lives: they create the world in which History of Life is received. Over the course of three acts and two intermissions, the Regulars, the audience, and all the performers share a meal. 

Sung and spoken in over a dozen languages, including English, ancient Greek, Old Provençal, Dante’s Tuscan, Cape Verdean Creole, and Irish, History of Life draws on folk traditions both real and imagined to create a sound that is altogether new and yet strangely and deeply familiar. It offers a vision of what is beyond our capacity to imagine: the vastness of history, seen not only as a succession of dates and names, of monarchs and empires and extinctions, but as the superabundant multitude of singular moments of experience — the near-infinite seconds of yearning and hunger and love and anger and wonder, the sheer vitality of every person and animal and plant that has ever lived. Minimalist in form and maximalist in content, by turns exuberant and meditative, majestic and tender, History of Life feels like both an age-old ritual and something entirely unlike anything else.

History of Life: Scene 7 — Dance

new album "Delicious" released on 16 May. New Amsterdam records.

Alex (1990),"A riotous overabundance of love and rage..an extraordinary experience” The Wire Magazine, is an award-winning composer & improvising-trombonist based in the UK. His Music is published by Ricordi (Berlin). "highly innovative...of exceptional creative imagination and musical energy, packed with life force unlike anything else” BBC Magazine Ivor Novello British Composer Awards.

Alex has been awarded the Paul Hindemith Prize, and Ivor Novello Composer He was nominated for the Gaudeamus Award for 2022 and was elected to the 9th International Composition Seminar and awarded a commission ILOLLI-POP for Improviser and Ensemble which he played with Ensemble Modern. He has been awarded by the London Sinfonietta’s Writing the Future commission CANDYFOLK- SPACE-DRUM  and has won the RPS Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize, DANKWORTH JAZZ prize for composition BYE and was made a London Symphony Orchestra Panufnik Composer. Alex played and recorded his concerto OD ODY PINk’d for Jazz Musician and Royal National Scottish Orchestra (RSNO). He was a Leverhume Art Scholar with the London Philharmonic Orchestra 2016-2017: NOW WE ARE DUH-DUR and has been awarded the Harriet Cohen Memorial Music Award for his compositions. His piece SPAKE represented the UK in the Orchestral section of the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM). He is a commissioned contributor to John Zorn’s Arcana X 2021. "Paxton is a system-crasher of genre, who merges jamming video game soundtracks, musical overtures, virtuoso chamber music and jazz improv into an unmistakable style...highly complex, sophisticated and extremely entertaining, virtuoso ad absurdum" Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik

His albums to date as a composer: MUSIC for BOSCH PEOPLE and iLOLLI-POP released to critical acclaim on Birmingham Record Company/ NMC label and nonclassical. Listen Pony Label (TELLSONG), Indigne de nous on Everest Records and leading Spotify playlists. HAPPY MUSIC for ORCHESTRA released on Delphian Label in  April 2023. “This is the most joyous sound I’ve heard in ages!”New York Times

His music has been played/recorded/ commissioned by leading orchestras and ensembles including Ensemble Modern, London Sinfonietta, London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO), Philharmonia Orchestra, AskSchöenberg, Riot Ensemble, Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain, Wigmore hall, Explore Ensemble, Klammer Klang, Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO), National Youth Orchestra (BBC proms 2021), Making Music (UK), Ensemble x.y, x.y Song, Hyper Duo, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (BSO), National Youth Jazz Orchestra (UK) NYJO, Listen-Pony, Aldeburgh Festival, Psappha Ensemble, Orion Symphony Orchestra OSO, Helios Collective, Chaos Collective Orchestra, Mirrors of Hall Big Band, Dr. K Sextet, 5KBrass Quintet, RAM Philharmonic and RCM Philharmonic and soloists Zubin Kanger, Tabea Debus, Beibei Wang, Patrick Terry, David Zucchi. “This is what an orchestra can be like in the 21st century: an ensemble that speaks with one voice yet also gives voice to each of its members” The Times

He has written six operas including NOGGIN and the WHALE (Massed forces including 500 young instrumentalists and singes) FOR the LOVE of THORNSTIEN SHIVER hosted by English National Opera and Helios Collective, BEL and the DRAGON as part of the Tête à Tête opera festival, the EQUIVOCAL HARRIET BOWDLER at Second Movement Opera and WOOLF MUSIC at the Forge in Camden and RAVEN’s CHILD for Jacob Colier and Orchestra.
“Operatic Game Boy music played by a virtuosic motley crew that’s inexplicably been hired to provide live jingles for a primetime TV show sometime in the recent past that never quite was” Point of departure

As an improvising and jazz trombonist Alex has played as a soloist with Ensemble Modern, London Sinfonietta,  Riot Ensemble, Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO), & ensemble x.y. He is founder of Dreammusics ensemble and performs regularly with pioneering improvisers (eg: Charlotte Keeffe, Steve Noble). “meticulously scored…seems to change with every bar, enfolding bite-size pieces of classic minimalism, brass brand tradition, electronic noise, & video game plasticity..intensely virtuosic and giddily joyful. electronically slathered trombone…Paxton is a monster improviser …connects his garrulous attack to the most extroverted playing of George Lewis & Roswell Rudd..." Bandcamp Daily Best Contemporary Classical.

Extensively, Alex writes art-music for musicians in community settings including, innovative ways of writing for young instrumentalists & singers in a post-Roald Dahl world of new-music.  eg: NOGGIN and the WHALE (Massed forces including 500 young instrumentalists and singes), Fly Like a Kitchen, Muffin, Pudding Tummy and The Sound of Magic. He is professorial composition staff at Trinity Laban Conservatoire and has worked as lead-composition tutor (and workshop leader) on the National Youth Orchestra GB, he has taught/ lectured at composition and improvisation at conservatories including, RAM, GSMD & RCM (and multiple universities in the UK). “one of the most exceptional voices from a new generation of UK talent” The Philharmonia Orchestra

Alex studied as a scholar at Royal Academy of Music (BMushons1stclass)and LRAM (Distinction) and the Royal College of Music (MComp Distinction).“a Brit who defies every conceivable genre boundary…an extremely modern and future-oriented style.” Paul Hindemith Prize winner 2023

Alex is an endorsee solo artist with Micheal Rath Trombones since 2023 (R12 nickel bell & tuning slide).