Sunt Lacrimae Rerum (these are the tears of things)

for two harps and two retuned pianos

by Dylan Mattingly

Co-commissioned by the LA Phil and the Ojai Music Festival. Performed by the LA Phil New Music Group, Ojai California, 9/19/21.

Sunt Lacrimae Rerum (Live at Ojai)

Sunt Lacrimae Rerum (these are the tears of things)

An ambient track made collaboratively featuring samples of Emily Drum's arrangement of Kid Laroi's Stay, backward bowed dulcimer, and vocoded AI-generated lyrics.

Websites: brianellissound.com, zacharyjamesritter.com, demilyest.wixsite.com/emilydrum
Instagrams: @brianellissound, @zacharyjamesritter, @musicofdrums

Convolution Cocktail Ambient Set - Brian Ellis and Zach Ritter

A collection of crowd-sourced messages voiced by contemporary composers reflecting on how California has inspired them. Many of the composers represented here are participating in the inaugural California Festival, a statewide music initiative happening November 3-19, 2023, showcasing the most compelling and forward-looking voices in performances of works written in the past five years. Discover more at https://cafestival.org.

FEATURED COMPOSERS:
Andrew Norman
Christopher Tin
Derrick Skye 
Dylan Mattingly
Jake Heggie 
Jeremy Cavaterra
Meara O’Reilly
Mingjia Chen
Michi Wianko 
Nicolás Lell Benavides 
Odeya Nini
Patrick Shiroishi
Rand Steiger
Sarah Davachi
Saunder Choi
Sheli Nan 
Shuying Li 
Thomas Dougherty 
Veronika Krausas

The California Festival Excursions expand on the festival’s scope by highlighting the visionary figures and lesser-known pathways that have helped shape the state’s storied continuum of contemporary music. Explore further at https://cafestival.org/excursions.

Dylan Mattingly - California Festival Composer Reflection

Catastrophe Theme

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

* * *

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

Part XI: For Jackie Robinson
Part XXII: Muddy River (Aristea...If I Had Wings)

Achilles Dreams Of Ebbets Field: Parts XI and XXI

innova 823

http://www.innova.mu/albums/dylan-mattingly/stream-stars

01 Atlas of Somewhere on the Way to Howland Island  I. Radial Liftoff Music for Amelia Earhart

What possibilities emerge when we begin to question the tacitly accepted — and easily overlooked — limits that govern who we can be and what we can do?

Composer Samuel Adams, rock climber/BASE jumper Steph Davis, and arts leader Ed Yim all push past traditional limitations in their everyday lives by writing music that reaches new emotional depths, scaling cliffs and flying off of them, or making a platform for artists to create without compromise. Each of them offers a unique and insightful perspective on this question in the debut episode of Imagination Radio.

Music in this episode:
— Dylan Mattingly: from Stranger Love (2018) — Contemporaneous
— Samuel Adams: Tension Study no. 2 (2010) — Living Earth Show
— Judd Greenstein: Change (2009) — NOW Ensemble
— David Moore: Broad Channel (2015) — Bing & Ruth
— Samuel Adams: from Chamber Concerto: Prelude (One by One) (2017) — Karen Gomyo, violin
— Samuel Adams: Shade Study (2014) — Sarah Cahill, piano
— Samuel Adams: Drift & Providence (2012) — National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic & James Ross, conductor; Samuel Adams, electronics
— John Lewis: Silver (1964) — John Lewis, piano; Orchestra U.S.A.; Gunther Schuller & Harold Farberman, conductors
— Dan Trueman: Silicon / Carbon (2008) — Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk); American Composers Orchestra & Jeffrey Milarsky, conductor
— Ólafur Arnalds: Hands, Be Still (2013)
— Philip Glass: from Symphony No. 4 (1996): I. Heroes — American Composers Orchestra & Dennis Russell Davies, conductor
— Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: from String Quartet No. 1, Op. 11 (1871): II. Andante cantabile — New York Philharmonic & Leonard Bernstein, conductor
— Julia Wolfe: from Fuel (2007): Part II — Ensemble Resonanz & Brad Lubman, conductor
— Hector Berlioz: from Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14 (1830): V. Songe d'une nuit du Sabbat — Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique & John Eliot Gardiner, conductor
— Gustav Mahler: from Symphony No. 8 in E-flat, Symphony of a Thousand (1906): Accende lumen sensibus — Schola Cantorum of New York, Juilliard Chorus, Columbus Boychoir; New York Philharmonic & Leonard Bernstein, conductor
— James Horner: from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
— Ludwig van Beethoven: from String Quartet in E-flat, Op. 74 (1809): I. Poco adagio; Allegro — Artemis Quartet
— Samuel Adams: Quartet Movement (2016) — Spektral Quartet
— Meredith Monk & Mieke van Hoek: Vow (2011) — Katie Geissinger, voice
— Steve Reich: Proverb (1995) — Theatre of Voices; Steve Reich Ensemble & Paul Hillier
— Dylan Mattingly: from Atlas of Somewhere (on the Way to Howland Island) (2011): II. Islanded in a Stream of Stars — Contemporaneous
— Morton Feldman: String Quartet No. 2 (1983) — FLUX Quartet
— Anthony Motto: Live at GGBY in Moab (2017)

With gratitude and admiration, this episode is dedicated to the memory of composer, conductor, pedagogue, and family man Harold Farberman (1929-2018).

1: What does it mean to work without limits?

Drawing influences from sources as diverse as Virginia Woolf, fractal geometry, and the theater, discovery is the catalyst for composer Katherine Balch's creativity, and her music is a deeply personal expression of the wonderment she feels in experiencing the new.

Thomasina Coverly, a precocious 13-year-old character in Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, breezes through her geometry exercises, but she is disappointed by the limitations of traditional geometry to map an equation for an apple leaf, so she invents a new geometric system to map the intricacies of nature. Katherine Balch’s New Geometry is inspired by the awe and drive for discovery that Thomasina feels when she sees the apple leaf, and the music explodes that image onto a rich canvas of sound.

In this episode, Balch shares how her deep love of Arcadia and science become a piece of music, and we also hear from physicist Matthew Deady about the natural phenomena that come to vivid life in New Geometry. Actors Hannah Mitchell and Lee Osorio contribute readings of segments from Arcadia.

Music in this episode:
— Katherine Balch: New Geometry (2015, rev. 2017) — Contemporaneous
— Katherine Balch: from Responding to the Waves (2017): I. Chrysalis — Michiko Theurer, violin
— Keith Jarrett: from The Köln Concert (1975): Part IIb
— Brad Mehldau: Anything Goes (2004)
— György Ligeti: Étude 14: Coloana infinita (1994) — Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano
— Katherine Balch: Thread Unfurled (2016) — Zach Sheets, flute & Wei-Han Wu, piano
— Katherine Balch: from Phrases (2017): III. and IV. — Departure Duo
— Franz Schubert: 36 Originaltänze, D 365, Op. 9, "Erste Walzer": No. 2 in A-flat, "Trauerwalzer" or "Sehnsuchtswalzer" — Paolo Bordoni, piano
— Thomas Adès: from Asyla (1997): III. Ecstasio — City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra & Simon Rattle, conductor
— Katherine Balch: Leaf Catalogue (2015) — Yale Philharmonia & Heejung Park, conductor
— Katherine Balch: With Each Breathing (2015) — FLUX Quartet
— Per Nørgård: from Voyage Into the Golden Screen (1968): II. — Copenhagen Philharmonic & Giordano Bellincampi, conductor
— Katherine Balch: off hesperus (2017) — Christophe Desjardins, viola
— Johann Sebastian Bach: from Partita for Violin No. 2 (1720): Ciaccona, with Just Intonation — Josh Modney, violin

2: The joy of creation — Katherine Balch on "New Geometry"

spring

An 1852 railroad map of Contemporaneous member Finnegan Shanahan's native Hudson Valley sparks his imagination, and into his genre-defying debut album, he pours not only his own story but the story of growing up.

Written for Contemporaneous and featuring Shanahan singing and playing violin, guitar, and keyboard, The Two Halves is inspired by the composer’s experience of coming of age, particularly symbolized by the train that took him back and forth between the Hudson Valley home of his youth and his current home of New York City.

In this episode, we not only hear from Shanahan sharing his inspirations behind this remarkable work, but we hear from cartographer Aaron Reiss with a perspective on the map that sparked the composer’s imagination and from percussionist Matt Evans on playing drums in The Two Halves.

The Two Halves was released by New Amsterdam Records in 2016 and features Shanahan performing with Contemporaneous. You can find the whole thing on Bandcamp, iTunes, and Spotify.

Music in this episode

• Finnegan Shanahan: The Two Halves (2015) — Finnegan Shanahan & Contemporaneous
• Tiny Tim: White Christmas (1994)
• Finnegan Shanahan: In Your Land (2018) — Robby Bowen, Jeff Mertz, and Finnegan Shanahan
• Sacred Harp: Amazing Grace — recorded by Alan Lomax, 1959
• Finnegan Shanahan: 18 hours (2018) — Finnegan Shanahan
• Sufjan Stevens, Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly & James McAlister: from Planetarium (2012): Pluto
• Animal Collective: Fireworks (2007)
• Zammuto: Idiom Wind (2012)
• Sylvester: Body Strong (1979)