Reading by New England Conservatory Philharmonia, conducted by Nathan Aspinall on 12.13.13. This 8-minute work for full orchestra has three chords that return repeatedly in the strings. Over this, strands of melody form and disperse. After a build to a brass-driven section, the aggressive motif is again overtaken by the strings, and the chords return "wrong." The last 30 seconds are my favorite part.

Revolutions

Unmastered track from my senior composition recital at St. Olaf College, Feb. '08.

Violin: Anna Bakk. Cello: Hilary James. Piano: James Coghlin.

Don't Leave Me Blank

Unmastered track from my senior composition recital at St. Olaf College, Feb. '08.

Piano: James Coghlin. Flute: Clifton Nesseth. Soprano: Mattia Maurée.

Lullaby: Bird Song

Lightlessness (2014)
1. Entrada
2. Prestississimo
3. Elegy
4. Fugue

While this string quartet traces a few narratives of my own, it is not a direct story. Entrada opens with a heartbeat, and small gestures bloom into the contrapuntal material that pervades the later movements. Prestississimo opens with the creepily out of tune melody from an antique musical samovar. It establishes its own pulse, but the cello quickly takes over and leads the eventual collapse into an out-of-control free-for-all on the original theme. Elegy attempts to pick up the pieces, but can’t seem to find a resting place without at least one dissenting voice. After Fugue’s fugue runs most of its course, it tries to regain some of the energy of the second movement, and this time it achieves a sort of synthesis. The final three chords are as if to say, yes, I meant to say that.

Performed 4/22/14 in Jordan Hall
Violin: Nancy Zhou, Ryan Shannon
Viola: Lu Yu
Cello: Sonia Mantell

4. Fugue

3. Elegy

2. Prestississimo

Lightlessness (2014)
1. Entrada
2. Prestississimo
3. Elegy
4. Fugue

The private narratives behind Lightlessness intersect with the common experiences of depression and loss of control. One reading of the piece is that the rules of traditional counterpoint keep failing, with one final attempt in the fugue of the last movement. Elegy is the emotional and lyrical core of the piece, trying to pick up after the collapse at the end of the second movement. It's about the moment in depression when there's enough feeling to know just how bad things feel, and the end of the movement seems to want a longer pause to let the emotions settle. But no, Fugue steps in to impose external order, and then as the energy picks up, other emotions and arguments jump in. The opening heartbeat, having repeatedly transformed, is finally able to speak out in the final three chords.

Violin: Nancy Zhou, Ryan Shannon
Viola: Lu Yu
Cello: Sonia Mantell
Performed in Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory, Boston

For score, recording, performance requests, and questions, email mattia@mattiamauree.com
www.mattiamauree.com

1. Entrada

Smackity
Bang Bang
Three-and-a
Four Or Or

(movements are performed attacca)

Premiered May 8th in Jordan Hall, Boston, by 4racas: pianists Shaoai Zhang and Nicholas Loh, and percussionists Miles Salerni and Robert O'Brien

Program notes: This is an intriguing instrumentation, because it has specific limits balanced with nearly unbounded timbral possibilities. While I'd been meaning to write more for percussion in general, Berio's Linea was my first encounter with this type of ensemble, and within about five seconds I was hooked. The Bartók was also an inspiration, especially in virtuosity for the percussionists. Smackity opens with varied rhythmic gestures strung together and tossed between the various keyboards. In Bang Bang, two repeated hits are slowed down and re-orchestrated, speeding up to reveal their original impetus. Three-and-a references the timber of Berio's opening, and stacks a lot of thirds without really taking the hint from the metronomic leading tones. In Four Or Or, everyone finally gets to dance, but they don't seem to be taking that hint, either.

Smackity Bang Bang

Brief and angry solo violin piece using only the notes A-flat, A, B-flat, B.

It's Over

"Sigh No More," based on an excerpt from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, for Lean & Hungry's production on DC's NPR station (WAMU 88.5). Singer featured is Jan Marie (here's her website: http://www.ojanmarie.com/).

Sigh No More featuring Jan Marie

Performed by Quorum Boston, December 2018.

The Anonymous Soldier (Militus Anonymos)

"Tombs to the Unknown Soldier" have become integral to the vast landscape of war memorials across the world. National calls of ‘Never Again’ echo through time, place and history.  Yet, the nonsensical acts and consequences of violence continue. In spite of these memorials and calls to end violence, it is easy to forget those who survive and continue to live with the brutal physical, spiritual, moral and psychological scarring of its aftermath. This is not a blameless oversight, as leaders and citizens find reasons to justify militant catastrophes. War memorials do not on their own force those responsible for war and violence to remember its devastation, horrors, pain, harms and suffering. It at times masks the thin veil covering humanity's capacity for violence. Irresponsible hero worship valorizing militarism has a violent cost. When the dead are "honored" as an easy excuse to produce weapons, legal and political structures, and the social conditions that further harms. Simultaneously, survivors are often isolated while nations are quick to forget those that remind people of what they had done. Where greed, self-interest, amoralism and a lack of empathy pass for accountability – the living beneficiaries of war and the enablers of violence are exonerated.
 
While the opening chords are aesthetically pleasing, their inverted bassline feels increasingly less stable. The “structure of violence” is both a steady bass pedal and an unstable time signature, which feels unmoored as lines float above it in their own time. As ideas trail off and return, they do not so much fight for dominance as for a chance to be heard completely. Energy builds through the climax, where the bass line has moved even farther from home. You can acclimate to almost anything. The elements of disconnect between the melody and text, is less about closure and catharsis and more a dedication to the perils of recovery and the hardest work you can do.

The title addresses the silent anonymity experienced by the survivors of systemic, societal and state violence. That anonymity is its own form of violence. The causes of social and political violence are cyclically related to why we rush to forget what we are capable of, what we have done, and what we continue to do. Silence begets more violence, and it makes healing nearly impossible. Survivors become responsible for their own recovery, often without communal resources or support required to make sense of their devastation. The Anonymous Soldier lives at the juncture of extreme violence and social amnesia. This is also relevant to broader systemic violence that harm anyone considered outside the dominant structure. Full remembrance, societal accountability and social responsibility are of the most important ways to keep a society from continuing to commit systematic violence upon itself and others. Words are insufficient, metaphors are inadequate, but they are one way to make the political personal and physical again, instead of cold and abstract stone.


The author (who wishes to remain anonymous) and I are working on some slight edits. Program notes by both of us. The text from this performance is in the comments.

The Anonymous Soldier

Tenor Jonathan Price, Pianist Diane Braun, Poetry by <a href="http://jnradway.com/">John North Radway,</a> Music by Mattia C. Maurée

iii.

So she is gone, and my heart screams in the night,
but when I wake I sing it back to sleep.
These strings have moved mountains, stilled the wind,
enchanted animals and won me smiles—

why should they not sound in the mouth of hell?
The world fell at my feet like pliant leaves
that my plaintive notes pulled from autumn trees.
There is no hall so dark I could not light it,

no god so cold I could not melt his will,
no icy season’s queen I could not stir
to whisper in his ear to let her go,
let her go, let my love rise with my music

and follow me again, and dance behind me.
Hers are the feet I want to move like water,
as if I were the moon, impossible to shun
and winning welcome in the darkest places.

Orpheus - iii - Pride

Tenor Jonathan Price, Pianist Diane Braun, Poetry by <a href="http://jnradway.com/">John North Radway,</a> Music by Mattia C. Maurée

ii.

A sun like a dying torch
sputtered above the field
where they gave themselves in the grass
and said that they were one.

The guests looked on, the trees, the crescent moon,
a smattering of old familiar faces
and maybe a hymn or two was sung,
maybe even the sunlight wept, but no one heard.

He forced his chords of joy onto the air
and the air obeyed, hushed its sighing.
No one heard the serpent grip the bride
or her heartbeat rush like water through the loam

down into the dark. Those glinting fangs,
that hungry mouth knew nothing of the grave
and wondered as the stones began to fall
what god of the grass was raging,

and took the tears for rain, and never saw
the emptied body, supine, white.

Orpheus - ii - Death

(And yes - Proem is a word!)

Tenor Jonathan Price, Pianist Diane Braun, Poetry by <a href="http://jnradway.com/">John North Radway,</a> Music by Mattia C. Maurée

i.

After the ebb a weed or two remained,
a gutted shell, a crab’s rent leg, a man
come to mourn at the shore.
The mudflat stank of things that almost were.

He lay upon that waste
with nothing more or less to fear
than anhedonia of galaxies
and the north wind’s disinterest.

Almost a hero, almost a god,
nearly a lover, he’d nearly known bliss
and the song the world had written just for him
hummed in his ears, half sung.

He rose, but the way was gone.
He wandered like an unstrung lyre’s song
hunting for a string to run along,
a pulse without a body but the world.

In sympathetic motion, cold, alone,
the glyphs of heaven rose and set,
monsters set in endless rows
and dragged across a cypher ocean.

He’d crawled through hell with fire raging in him.
He’d stumbled back with a heart of lifeless sod
and dust on his tongue, singing one low note
that even shadows could not follow.

Orpheus - i - Proem

Strands of ethereal beauty with an undercurrent of intensity.

Mattia Mauree

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