photo by Laura Cobb
Biography
Dylan Mattingly is a composer who creates music which offers ecstatic, transformative experience and provides an opportunity to alter the way we see our world and place within it. Many of Mattingly’s projects exist on a massive scale, the results of a dedication to the pursuit of bringing to life the most meaningful projects in the wild reaches of imagination — wherever that path leads — and building a path for the realization of these dreamworks from the ground up, often across many years. This practice was informed by the decade-long process of creating, developing, and bringing to life Stranger Love, an ecstatic 6-hour durational opera, which offers a grand celebration of being alive, which premiered on May 20, 2023 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, commissioned by the LA Phil and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. At the heart of all of Mattingly’s work is a commitment to joy, and to what Hannah Arendt refers to as amor mundi — an ever-renewing quest to find the capacity to love the world, in the complex totality of its experience.
Mattingly's opera Stranger Love was described as "a historic triumph of aspiration" by the San Francisco Chronicle, "singular, tender, euphoric, hypnotic" and "a kind of communal love to the cosmos" by The New York Times, "transfixing, sublime, and ecstatic" by San Francisco Classical Voice, and was listed by The New York Times as one of the "Best Classical Music Performances of 2023." Mattingly's music has been called "gorgeous" by the San Francisco Chronicle, "the most poignantly entrancing passages of beautiful music in recent memory” by LA Weekly, "the glistening sounds of heaven ... able to capture the totality of human experience" and "inviting us to let go of all of our inhibitions and to feel everything we are capable of ever feeling" by NewClassic LA.
Mattingly is the Executive and Co-artistic Director of the NYC-based new-music ensemble Contemporaneous, where much of his work has focused on creating an opportunity for other composers and musical creators to follow their own wildest dreams, dedicating the resources of the organization to the creation of large-scale new work and allowing artists a path to create the work they most want to create, regardless of scale and conventional practical constraints.
Mattingly’s music has been commissioned and performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Ojai Music Festival, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the Berkeley Symphony, the Del Sol String Quartet, Sarah Cahill, Kathleen Supové, the Albany Symphony, Contemporaneous, ZOFO Duet, John Adams, Marin Alsop, and many others. Mattingly was the Musical America “New Artist of the Month” for February 2013 and was awarded the Charles Ives Scholarship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2016. Mattingly has held residencies at the Ucross Foundation, Harrison House Music, Arts & Ecology, and holds a B.A. in Classics from Bard College, a B.M. in Music Composition from the Bard College Conservatory of Music, and an M.M. from the Yale School of Music. Mattingly lives in Albany, CA with his partner Hannah and dog Oly.
Mattingly's opera Stranger Love was described as "a historic triumph of aspiration" by the San Francisco Chronicle, "singular, tender, euphoric, hypnotic" and "a kind of communal love to the cosmos" by The New York Times, "transfixing, sublime, and ecstatic" by San Francisco Classical Voice, and was listed by The New York Times as one of the "Best Classical Music Performances of 2023." Mattingly's music has been called "gorgeous" by the San Francisco Chronicle, "the most poignantly entrancing passages of beautiful music in recent memory” by LA Weekly, "the glistening sounds of heaven ... able to capture the totality of human experience" and "inviting us to let go of all of our inhibitions and to feel everything we are capable of ever feeling" by NewClassic LA.
Mattingly is the Executive and Co-artistic Director of the NYC-based new-music ensemble Contemporaneous, where much of his work has focused on creating an opportunity for other composers and musical creators to follow their own wildest dreams, dedicating the resources of the organization to the creation of large-scale new work and allowing artists a path to create the work they most want to create, regardless of scale and conventional practical constraints.
Mattingly’s music has been commissioned and performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Ojai Music Festival, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the Berkeley Symphony, the Del Sol String Quartet, Sarah Cahill, Kathleen Supové, the Albany Symphony, Contemporaneous, ZOFO Duet, John Adams, Marin Alsop, and many others. Mattingly was the Musical America “New Artist of the Month” for February 2013 and was awarded the Charles Ives Scholarship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2016. Mattingly has held residencies at the Ucross Foundation, Harrison House Music, Arts & Ecology, and holds a B.A. in Classics from Bard College, a B.M. in Music Composition from the Bard College Conservatory of Music, and an M.M. from the Yale School of Music. Mattingly lives in Albany, CA with his partner Hannah and dog Oly.