UPDATED BELOW
When you’re a young composer, perhaps your most formidable problem is not just learning your craft but getting your compositions played. To solve that problem two Bard College undergrads — Dylan Mattingly, a neophyte symphonist, and David Bloom, studying to be a conductor — put together a band of fellow Bard musicians.
Sixteen years later — in a miracle of devotion, hard work, and talent — that band still thrives. Dubbed Contemporaneous and now based in New York City, it has appeared at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Park Avenue Armory, and Walt Disney Concert Hall, among many other venues, and has performed hundreds of works by contemporary composers.
Mattingly’s own compositions have since been commissioned and presented by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Ojai Music Festival. His music has been been conducted not only by Bloom but by John Adams and Marin Alsop; performed by pianists Sarah Cahill and Kathleen Supové; sung by Dawn Upshaw and Iarla Ó Lionáird. Now Mattingly makes his debut on Nonesuch Records with the release of “The Wild Heart.” Have a listen to some excerpts.
POSTSCRIPT: Aug. 2 — A major assessment of Mattingly’s music is about to appear in the New York Review of Books. It’s written by Matthew Aucoin, himself a composer with huge cred. Aucoin declares that
[Mattingly] has summoned into being a region of musical experience that’s all his own, a welcoming, abundant, sun-drenched landscape that teems with tinkling, deliriously retuned pianos and raucous grooves that last long enough to offer a taste of infinity. … “The Wild Heart” offers a slice … of this Whitmanic artist’s fertile, dazzling world within the world.
Read the entire NYRB piece here.