NEWS |
photo by Laura Cobb
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on the premiere of Stranger Love (May 20, 2023 at Disney Hall, LA; produced and presented by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, performed by Contemporaneous, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz):
When I was six years old, I knew I wanted to be a composer. I fell in love instantly with the magic of creating music, of altering time and experience, of forming worlds from nothing, and from that moment I had spent much of my life on a singular path, trying to build a life which I could spend doing what I loved. I went to music school, looked for commissions, did all the things it seemed should be done in order to make a career as a composer in the US. But about ten years ago, I realized that there were artistic experiences I wanted to create which would never be offered to me on that path, no matter how successful I was. I was drawn to wild, crazy, and massive dreams, the sort of huge life-altering music and art that was my absolute favorite thing in the world to experience. That was what I wanted to create, and I dreamed of this piece — Stranger Love — an ecstatic, seemingly-impossible celebration of being alive that lasts forever and ends in the stars. It was a dream that was beyond impractical — the piece is six hours long, has three re-tuned pianos in the orchestra, moves from opera to ballet to light show, and even was imagined to contain a break for everyone to go together to the taco trucks waiting outside. I didn't have the faintest idea how it could ever be brought to life, and I knew that in order to create it at all, I'd have to spend all my time and mental energy focused on it for a ridiculously long time. But I also felt in that moment that I couldn't be an artist and choose not to do the thing that I knew was the best thing I could offer to the world, the most meaningful way I knew how to distill my time and experience on the planet into something to share with others. So about ten years ago, I turned my life fully towards creating Stranger Love and trying to find some miraculous way to bring it into life. For these past ten years, it has been the gravitational force acting on my every minute, and it has been both a profoundly joyous experience and profoundly difficult, immersing me in both a unique happiness of knowing that I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing, and an accompanying inundating anxiety of the fear that I might never be able to truly share it, and that nobody ever asked me to do it. I've experienced in these years an oxymoronic coupling of a strange certainty that Stranger Love would one day find a way into the world, and an inability to believe that it could ever happen. In a strange evolutionary process, slow enough that at times I haven't believed it from the inside, I've found the people who would bring this dream to life, and though I'm frightened to write it, I find myself tilting away from the anxiety of failure towards a surreal acceptance that we'll all be able to share in this together soon, these tiny six hours.
On May 20, 2023, Stranger Love will premiere in LA at Disney Hall, in its full production, commissioned, produced, and presented by the LA Phil, performed by Contemporaneous, conducted by David Bloom, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, and — I THINK — with taco trucks outside for dinner between Act I and Act II.
See you there?
(read more about Stranger Love here)
When I was six years old, I knew I wanted to be a composer. I fell in love instantly with the magic of creating music, of altering time and experience, of forming worlds from nothing, and from that moment I had spent much of my life on a singular path, trying to build a life which I could spend doing what I loved. I went to music school, looked for commissions, did all the things it seemed should be done in order to make a career as a composer in the US. But about ten years ago, I realized that there were artistic experiences I wanted to create which would never be offered to me on that path, no matter how successful I was. I was drawn to wild, crazy, and massive dreams, the sort of huge life-altering music and art that was my absolute favorite thing in the world to experience. That was what I wanted to create, and I dreamed of this piece — Stranger Love — an ecstatic, seemingly-impossible celebration of being alive that lasts forever and ends in the stars. It was a dream that was beyond impractical — the piece is six hours long, has three re-tuned pianos in the orchestra, moves from opera to ballet to light show, and even was imagined to contain a break for everyone to go together to the taco trucks waiting outside. I didn't have the faintest idea how it could ever be brought to life, and I knew that in order to create it at all, I'd have to spend all my time and mental energy focused on it for a ridiculously long time. But I also felt in that moment that I couldn't be an artist and choose not to do the thing that I knew was the best thing I could offer to the world, the most meaningful way I knew how to distill my time and experience on the planet into something to share with others. So about ten years ago, I turned my life fully towards creating Stranger Love and trying to find some miraculous way to bring it into life. For these past ten years, it has been the gravitational force acting on my every minute, and it has been both a profoundly joyous experience and profoundly difficult, immersing me in both a unique happiness of knowing that I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing, and an accompanying inundating anxiety of the fear that I might never be able to truly share it, and that nobody ever asked me to do it. I've experienced in these years an oxymoronic coupling of a strange certainty that Stranger Love would one day find a way into the world, and an inability to believe that it could ever happen. In a strange evolutionary process, slow enough that at times I haven't believed it from the inside, I've found the people who would bring this dream to life, and though I'm frightened to write it, I find myself tilting away from the anxiety of failure towards a surreal acceptance that we'll all be able to share in this together soon, these tiny six hours.
On May 20, 2023, Stranger Love will premiere in LA at Disney Hall, in its full production, commissioned, produced, and presented by the LA Phil, performed by Contemporaneous, conducted by David Bloom, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, and — I THINK — with taco trucks outside for dinner between Act I and Act II.
See you there?
(read more about Stranger Love here)
The Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group premiered my new piece for two harps and two re-tuned pianos, Sunt Lacrimae Rerum (these are the tears of things), on September 19, 2021 at the Ojai Music Festival. I wrote the first major passage of this piece on September 9th, 2020, the day the sun never came up in the San Francisco Bay Area. The sky hummed with a dark orange glow, the only vestige of our star hidden by wildfire smoke high in the air. Already more than five months into the pandemic, which had stripped nearly every routine and accounting for the future, the feeling of becoming unmoored from the certainty of the rising sun, that engrained metaphor carried by a new day every 24 hours, cast an apocalyptic shadow unlike anything I’d experienced before or expect to experience again. And yet the music that I felt, the music that exists in the following pages, was ecstatic — music for dancing, the barbaric yawp, a scream of joy.
Art can be both descriptive and aspirational, it can be both a representation and an action which changes the world it enters, it can be of the past and for the future. In trying to look ahead towards a future that would contain this music, I had spent a great deal of time attempting to imagine from the pandemic’s windowless vantage point what artistic experience would feel necessary in that promised land. In the moment this piece began to erupt from me under the orange sky, it became suddenly, epiphanically clear that the music which I needed to exist was not an accounting of the suffering of this year — we have each of us lived it, and know to some degree its communal trauma — but rather an offering of the life we’re looking for, a transfiguration, the other side.
In this imagination, I was transported to the moment in Book I of The Aeneid (one of the most beautiful passages in all ancient literature), when Aeneas, having just fled the destruction of his home at Troy, early in his odyssey, lands in Carthage where he sees a frieze on the outside of Dido’s palace. This frieze depicts the events of the Trojan War from which he just left — he sees, encased in image, in art, the lives and deaths of his friends and family, his whole life turned to story. He breaks down in tears and says to his friend, Achates:
sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.
Solve metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem.
There is no perfect translation for this (so far as I’ve encountered), but I would render it as:
These are the tears of things, the stuff of life touches my soul.
Release your fear — our story carries some salvation.
Aeneas, seeing himself and his own life — alongside the broader vision of his civilization, his history — for the first time as narrative, encased in art’s perspective beyond the vision of his own subjectivity, an object with the capacity to be shared across time and space, cries for all things.
The way I imagine it, these are not tears of sorrow — or at least not sorrow alone. These are the tears of everything, of the everythingness present in each moment, the superabundance of life’s experience, an understanding which we fear overwhelming us should we turn towards it too often. These are the tears of life’s entirety, of waking to the dance of shadows cast by leaves outside the window, of a memory of dad explaining something to me at a baseball game, of each thought and feeling in the endlessly interlocking ecosystem of human experience.
And from this vision, in a statement of profound optimism, Aeneas sees salvation in the transfiguration of that stuff of experience into the stuff of art. I imagine that in the world to come — the world where this music will be born, where you reading this will see my world hazily through the shroud of memory — something art can offer is the joy of this experiential transformation, the ecstasy of being together once more in a world that carries a shared past into a present and future filled with the every thing of life.
Art can be both descriptive and aspirational, it can be both a representation and an action which changes the world it enters, it can be of the past and for the future. In trying to look ahead towards a future that would contain this music, I had spent a great deal of time attempting to imagine from the pandemic’s windowless vantage point what artistic experience would feel necessary in that promised land. In the moment this piece began to erupt from me under the orange sky, it became suddenly, epiphanically clear that the music which I needed to exist was not an accounting of the suffering of this year — we have each of us lived it, and know to some degree its communal trauma — but rather an offering of the life we’re looking for, a transfiguration, the other side.
In this imagination, I was transported to the moment in Book I of The Aeneid (one of the most beautiful passages in all ancient literature), when Aeneas, having just fled the destruction of his home at Troy, early in his odyssey, lands in Carthage where he sees a frieze on the outside of Dido’s palace. This frieze depicts the events of the Trojan War from which he just left — he sees, encased in image, in art, the lives and deaths of his friends and family, his whole life turned to story. He breaks down in tears and says to his friend, Achates:
sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.
Solve metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem.
There is no perfect translation for this (so far as I’ve encountered), but I would render it as:
These are the tears of things, the stuff of life touches my soul.
Release your fear — our story carries some salvation.
Aeneas, seeing himself and his own life — alongside the broader vision of his civilization, his history — for the first time as narrative, encased in art’s perspective beyond the vision of his own subjectivity, an object with the capacity to be shared across time and space, cries for all things.
The way I imagine it, these are not tears of sorrow — or at least not sorrow alone. These are the tears of everything, of the everythingness present in each moment, the superabundance of life’s experience, an understanding which we fear overwhelming us should we turn towards it too often. These are the tears of life’s entirety, of waking to the dance of shadows cast by leaves outside the window, of a memory of dad explaining something to me at a baseball game, of each thought and feeling in the endlessly interlocking ecosystem of human experience.
And from this vision, in a statement of profound optimism, Aeneas sees salvation in the transfiguration of that stuff of experience into the stuff of art. I imagine that in the world to come — the world where this music will be born, where you reading this will see my world hazily through the shroud of memory — something art can offer is the joy of this experiential transformation, the ecstasy of being together once more in a world that carries a shared past into a present and future filled with the every thing of life.
The incredible pianist Robert Fleitz spent over a year learning Achilles Dreams of Ebbets Field, my 2-hour work for solo piano drawing from the Iliad, my love of baseball, and coming of age away from home in NY. Watch his first performance online above.
On June 1, 2019 at Disney Hall in Los Angeles, the LA Phil and Jacaranda presented the world premiere of Gravity & Grace, my new work for organ and two-retuned pianos on the 11pm set of the LA Phil's Noon-to-Midnight.
The LA Weekly wrote about the premiere:
"The world premiere of Dylan Mattingly’s Gravity & Grace might have been the most gorgeous work of the day, and it was an exhilarating finale. The piece sounded at first like a simple but catchy 1960s-style garage-rock song, which was suffused with rich, vibrant sheets of organ from Joanne Pearce Martin mixed with sugary pop melodies from pianists Vicki Ray and Aron Kallay. The circus-y music continued to evolve slowly even as it seemed to repeat into a dub-like psychedelia. When the instrumentation subsided so that the focus was on the cotton-candy swirl of keyboards, Gravity & Grace morphed into one of the most poignantly entrancing passages of beautiful music in recent memory. Then the piece picked up again with a sprightly beat and increasingly intense flurries of organ and piano before closing forcefully. It was transcendent moments like this that rewarded the steadfast listeners who had been rushing around the hall for 12 hours and rummaging in the dark in search of such precious, lost treasures."
The LA Weekly wrote about the premiere:
"The world premiere of Dylan Mattingly’s Gravity & Grace might have been the most gorgeous work of the day, and it was an exhilarating finale. The piece sounded at first like a simple but catchy 1960s-style garage-rock song, which was suffused with rich, vibrant sheets of organ from Joanne Pearce Martin mixed with sugary pop melodies from pianists Vicki Ray and Aron Kallay. The circus-y music continued to evolve slowly even as it seemed to repeat into a dub-like psychedelia. When the instrumentation subsided so that the focus was on the cotton-candy swirl of keyboards, Gravity & Grace morphed into one of the most poignantly entrancing passages of beautiful music in recent memory. Then the piece picked up again with a sprightly beat and increasingly intense flurries of organ and piano before closing forcefully. It was transcendent moments like this that rewarded the steadfast listeners who had been rushing around the hall for 12 hours and rummaging in the dark in search of such precious, lost treasures."