This year saw the 20th Anniversary of the MATA Festival, which puts on new music concerts around the city for three weeks every spring. Founded by Philip Glass, Eleanor Sandresky and Lisa Bielawa, Music At The Anthology seeks to promote the work of unaffiliated composers, presenting a highly curated selection drawn from hundreds of entires. Time and circumstance have prevented me from ever attending even one of their shows, although I jealously kept up with reviews and press releases. This year, those same factors made it possible for me to attend one of the concerts at The Kitchen, which had the attention-grabbing name Bad Romance.
It was also my first time at the current location of The Kitchen, a legendary performance art space last incarnated in SoHo. One of my favorite memories of the astonishing rise of the Beastie Boys was when they played a set there as a hardcore band. Because we were young and snotty, we saw it as a moment of epater le bourgeoisie and we laughed about it for a long time. There was nothing funny about seeing Steve Reich’s Different Trains there, however, although it was equally unforgettable. The new space, a large black box with extremely high ceilings, is certainly flexible enough to put on any show along the continuum mapped by those two concerts. It was also perfect for this MATA concert as several of the pieces we saw had strong theatrical elements.
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| Piano Six Hands |
The first was Aaron Graham’s Old Voltage for piano six hands, which had Miki Sawada and Paul Kerekes on the outside of the bench hammering away like a Conlon Nancarrow piece for player piano while Isabelle O’Connell, sitting in the middle, played lyrical, almost romantic, melodies infused with tango rhythms while delivering a spoken word monologue about "hallucinations, crowds, dances, memories and lovers." The contrast between O'Connell's part and the others was increased by the way Graham has prepared the piano to dull the sound of the upper and lower registers. Beyond the curiosity value, there was power and beauty to spare in the music, which was composed in 2015 and made its American premiere at MATA.
Jenny Hettne‘s While She Was Dreaming for violin and and tape was also an American premiere. Performed with dazzling confidence by Pauline Kim Harris, its combination of glitchy sonics with a violin part that ranged from dense bursts to folkish simplicity added up to a work I would like to hear again - stat. Hopefully this performance will lead to more of this Swedish composer's work being heard in the city, as it seems to be a fairly rare occurrence.
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| Garapic, Rogers & Evans Playing Light-On-Light |
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| Two Pianists Below, Many Samurai Above |
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| Charlotte Mundy In Basic Black |
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| El-Ansary (left) Acknowledges The Applause |
Ken Ueno’s ‘Tard, another MATA commission, was wisely placed last on the program. Like Hendrix at Monterey, no one would have wanted to follow it. For this world premiere performance, Ueno was joined by the outgoing Artistic Director of MATA, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun, on vocals, along with Evans and Garapic on percussion. Each of them had an enormous bass drum, which were visual statements in their own right. Ueno and Du were both wearing whimsical garments (pants on the former and a shirt for the latter) made of multicolored puff balls, which were the only hints of levity in this bleak and searing piece. Unless, that is, unless you count the listing on Ueno's website, which credits him as "non-breather" and Du as "screamer." Those descriptions became clear shortly after Ueno took his place at a table set with a glass bowl filled with water and a small towel.
As soon as Evans and Garapic began wailing on their massive drums, creating an equally massive sound, Ueno bent at his waist and put his face in the bowl of water. He remained there for at least two minutes as Yun vocalized in composed agony. She and the drummers continued when Ueno pulled out of the water and stood silently glaring at the audience with what seemed to be barely controlled fury. The only let up in intensity was when Evans and Garapic switched from the drums to striking metal water bottles together, creating a sound not unlike the cloud chamber bowls David Byrne used in parts of his score for the Catherine Wheel. According to the program notes, presented as an email exchange between Ueno and MATA Executive Director Todd Tarantino, the original conception included contact mics on the bowl and a camera under it so the composer’s submerged face could be projected. Intriguing thoughts (“Hmmm” was Tarantino’s entire response) but it’s hard to imagine those bells and whistles making the work substantially more effective.
As soon as Evans and Garapic began wailing on their massive drums, creating an equally massive sound, Ueno bent at his waist and put his face in the bowl of water. He remained there for at least two minutes as Yun vocalized in composed agony. She and the drummers continued when Ueno pulled out of the water and stood silently glaring at the audience with what seemed to be barely controlled fury. The only let up in intensity was when Evans and Garapic switched from the drums to striking metal water bottles together, creating a sound not unlike the cloud chamber bowls David Byrne used in parts of his score for the Catherine Wheel. According to the program notes, presented as an email exchange between Ueno and MATA Executive Director Todd Tarantino, the original conception included contact mics on the bowl and a camera under it so the composer’s submerged face could be projected. Intriguing thoughts (“Hmmm” was Tarantino’s entire response) but it’s hard to imagine those bells and whistles making the work substantially more effective.
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| Ueno Glaring, Du Screaming |
