Here’s one more excerpt from “Ulysses Dances,” the first movement of composer @DylanMattingly13 ’s ‘The Transmutation Notebooks,’ from his upcoming label debut, ‘The Wild Heart.’ The album, due June 26, was recorded with @econtemp , conductor @DavidMartinBloom , and vocal soloist @iarlaolionaird . Stay tuned for new music from the album to come next week!
You can watch the video for “Ulysses Dances,” made by Robert Edridge-Waks, on the Nonesuch Records’ YouTube channel.
#DylanMattingly #TheWildHeart #Contemporaneous #ContemporaryClassicalMusic #NonesuchRecords
So looking forward to playing a solo piano set at Garden of Memory again this year on June 21! This is a clip from my set a couple years ago — it's really wonderful to have the chance to pour out so much emotion through music and get to share something of the feeling of being alive in this way. There's nothing like Garden of Memory, where all these incredible musicians and somehow thousands of people in the audience come together to hear strange new music and wander through the gorgeous columbarium at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland and celebrate the longest day of the year! Can't wait to see you there!
Here’s a bit of “Ulysses Dances,” the first movement of composer @DylanMattingly13 ’s ‘The Transmutation Notebooks,’ from his upcoming label debut, ‘The Wild Heart.’ The album, due June 26, was recorded with @econtemp , conductor @DavidMartinBloom , and vocal soloist @iarlaolionaird , and includes both ‘The Transmutation Notebooks’ and ‘Sunt Lacrimae Rerum (these are the tears of things).’ You can watch the whole video for “Ulysses Dances,” made by Robert Edridge-Waks, on the Nonesuch Records’ YouTube channel.
#DylanMattingly #TheWildHeart #Contemporaneous #ContemporaryClassicalMusic #NonesuchRecords
My album “The Wild Heart”, which was recorded with the incredible musicians of @econtemp and the brilliant @iarlaolionaird is going to be released on @nonesuchrecords on June 26! It’s an extraordinary joy to be able to share my music with — music that I’ve been dreaming about, that’s lived alone in my imagination for 9 years — in such a full way, where I can feel that what I experience in my favorite moments of living — the sense that the world, the rosy fingers of dawn or the laughter of discovery, seems to be overflowing — can cross the negative space between us and exist, whenever you want it, as part of your life.
The music on this album is two pieces, “The Transmutation Notebooks” and “Sunt Lacrimae Rerum (these are the tears of things),” drawn from History of Life — the epic I’ve been working on for a decade about Darwin, Odysseus, and an imagination of the infinite life and love of all things across the vastness of time. It is wild, ecstatic music, music that I hope can remind us of the things we love most about being alive, can sweep over us like a wave and in that electric cold give us the chance to feel as much as possible, to stand in the tide and scream for joy in our tiny moment in the massive strange beautiful universe.
This is an excerpt from the gorgeous video made by Robert Edridge-Waks to accompany the first movement of The Transmutation Notebooks, “Ulysses Dances.” You can watch the whole wonderful video on the Nonesuch Records’ YouTube channel!
I’m so excited to share this with you and can’t wait for you to hear the rest!
‘The Wild Heart,’ the Nonesuch Records debut from composer @DylanMattingly13 , is due June 26. The album, performed by Contemporaneous (@econtemp ) with conductor @DavidMartinBloom and vocal soloist @iarlaolionaird , comprises the five-movement work ‘The Transmutation Notebooks,’ as well as ‘Sunt Lacrimae Rerum (these are the tears of things).’ The vinyl edition features the latter piece and two movements from ‘The Transmutation Notebooks’: “Ulysses Dances” and “Last Dance.” You can pre-order the album and hear “Ulysses Dances” now at link in bio.
The two pieces sprang from Mattingly’s six-hour epic composition ‘History of Life,’ which, as Jake Wilder-Smith says in his album liner note, “weaves together a wide array of traditions, styles, and source materials, chief among them Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ and Charles Darwin’s account of his five-year expedition aboard the HMS ‘Beagle.’” ‘Sunt Lacrimae Rerum (these are the tears of things)’ was written during the first year of the pandemic, while wildfires blazed in Mattingly’s native California.
Composer John Adams says: “Dylan Mattingly is a true original whose music fills the listener with a sense of overflowing abundance ... He’s a genuine American Maverick in the true sense of the term.”
#DylanMattingly #TheWildHeart #Contemporaneous #contemporaryclassicalmusic #NonesuchRecords
I finished this massive string quartet a month ago, and wanted to share something about it — more and more I feel transparent, like a window in which the people I love and the moon and the tiny geography of the pavement and each blade of grass and every heartbeat and every word in every conversation entirely creates me. Seeing life folding and rippling like water as it passes through me, I wanted to hold my finger in the river, to write something to sustain the memory of the feeling of this exact time and these exact people and this exact sound of wind on glass and this exact smell of this exact petal of lantana, this exact life of all the possible lives. Book of Starlight Wonder is a collection of memories and dreams from these past months while writing it and across my life, an attempt to hold the shape and color of this single thread in time, so that someone might see that it was once woven in this pattern.
It feels to me that every lucky second spent with the people who are the shape of my life is not just a passing note in a larger story, but the only story, and that there is nothing but the awareness of life with the people we happen to be beside under the warm buzzing sky, the people who could have been anybody but happen to be you and us and are as irreplaceable as the laws of the universe, the people who know what it’s meant to live this one exact life as nobody but ourselves.
I wish for my life to have existed only like this, for nothing to be different but nothing to be frozen, for every terrifying and beautiful second to be exactly as it is and was and to know every strange vein in every leaf of the future and love it just as it is. I want to give myself entirely to the people who create my life, to those who are This Life and not just life, to my favorite life, my only life, to all that is only the exactness of time with you and this exact jet trail in the white-blue triangle between the chimney and the pine trees and the exact shadow of the power line on the porch and the exact memory of the exact beat of every heartbeat and every exact smile, none of which has ever happened before and none of which will ever happen again.
As Winter turns in an instant to Summer, I’m remembering the wild spring three years ago in rehearsals for my opera Stranger Love, here in rehearsal for Act III attempting to turn Disney Hall into a spaceship, missing the extraordinary group of people who I was lucky enough to share in pouring so much being into one tiny massive dream of what joy might be possible in our little life.
Ηριγένεια φάνη ´ροδοδάκτυλος Ηώς — the springborn rosefingered Dawn appeared this morning over the Berkeley Hills!
(Berkeley not mentioned in the original oral tradition of The Odyssey, but I think Homer would approve)
