Modern Orchestral Music

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)

Live recording of the world premiere of Spirits Hover as part of the LA Phil Noon to Midnight festival — April 9, 2022 Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA

Performance by Wild Up (Christopher Rountree, conductor)
Mastering Engineer, Murat Çolak
Recorded at Walt Disney Concert Hall, courtesy of the LA Phil

Spirits Hover

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

Achilles Dreams of Ebbets Field
by Dylan Mattingly

performed by Robert Fleitz
January 31, 2021

PART II (XIV - XXIV)

For hundreds of years, bards would travel the Aegean and sing from memory the 15,693 lines of the Iliad. Each time the story might change a little bit depending on the bard’s surroundings and memory. With thousands of years between us and then, uncountable waves on the shore, a speckling across the universe of momentary loves and victories and breakfasts and hands running through hair, I wonder what the Iliad in which I find myself might look like — evolved in some cases like fish on land and in others torn asunder like the endless reconfiguration of the continents, or perhaps transformed like the green Sahara only 10,000 years ago. These are the days I’ve grown up in — from the divine intervention in a walk-off home run to the rivergods in the Hudson to the soft breathing of someone sleeping beneath the window.

Achilles Dreams of Ebbets Field (Live at Jacaranda)

Achilles Dreams of Ebbets Field: Part II (XIV - XXIV) — Performed by Robert Fleitz

performed by Mivos Quartet May 2, 2019 at Northwestern University

1. 
In 2015, musician Nick Cave’s son Arthur died suddenly at age 15. Below is an excerpt from Cave’s response to a fan’s letter asking whether he and his wife felt that Arthur was still somehow in contact with them.
 
"… Dread grief trails bright phantoms in its wake. These spirits are ideas, essentially. They are our stunned imaginations reawakening after the calamity. Like ideas, these spirits speak of possibility. Follow your ideas, because on the other side of the idea is change and growth and redemption. Create your spirits. Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jettisoned; better now and unimaginably changed."
 
2.
In the wake of a traumatic or negative experience, we often engage in counterfactual thinking in which we imagine how changes in our own behavior might have resulted in a different outcome. Although this can seem futile (dwelling on the past cannot change it), counterfactuals can provide an opportunity to consider how we can change our future behavior in order to avoid negative outcomes.   
 
3. 
Each time we recall a memory, that memory is rewritten. This allows imperfections in the recollection to be incorporated into the new version of that memory. The more we recall a memory, the more opportunities that memory has to be corrupted so that our most-frequently revisited memories can also become our most-heavily revised. 
 
My piece Trails Bright Phantoms explores these ideas of imagined alternate outcomes and rewritten memories, dwelling on a musical object as its wake takes different forms across repeated iterations.