2021-22 Season Review

Thank you all for such a spectacular year! Below are some highlights from our 2021-22 Season.

As we look forward, we hope you will join us in supporting our mission to foster new sounds, new ideas, and new voices. Your continued support is vital to our mission. For 25 years, MATA has been a home for early-career composers, sound artists, and other music creators. Through our annual festival, artist residencies, and educational initiatives, MATA has fostered the work of hundreds of experimental artists. Help us continue to serve the freshest voices in new music by making a tax-deductible donation today!

MATA Benefit Concert

This year’s Benefit Concert honored MATA’s long-time Board President, Jim Rosenfield (2007-2021) and former Executive Director, Missy Mazzoli (2006-2010). Artists edi kwon, Roshni Samlal, Rebekah Heller, Fay Victor, and Darius Jones all gave immersive, genre-bending performances. And as an added bonus, 2021-22 MATA Presents composer Flannery Cunningham presented the world premiere of her piece “dowsing//divining”!

MATA Festival

The 2022 MATA Festival featured a variety of works from composers all around the world. Curated by the MATA Festival’s first-ever Artist-in-Residence, Darius Jones, and performed by members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, each night of performances had a unique focus. Night 1 emphasized the combination of word and sound and invited the audience to ruminate about home, make the mundane more meaningful, witness an imagined dialogue between two Black geniuses, and experience how sound becomes communication; Night 2 utilized the magical process of transformation, creation, and combined perspectives as its through line; Night 3 focused on acoustic sounds, with each composer showing what is possible with the manipulation of acoustics and instrumental physics, defying visual expectations and embracing the beauty of compositional imagination; and Night 4 featured the world premiere of Darius Jones’ piece “Colored School No. 3”, which is inspired by an old building in Brooklyn that was originally a public school used exclusively for the education of Black students during segregation, and challenges the listener to ask, “What is America?”

“Jones’ final composition, a deeply American piece, still crystallized the best of what the MATA can continue to be: an environment that supports its collaborators, welcomes its audience to participate, and makes it possible to take risks.” - Lana Norris, I Care If You Listen

MATA Presents

The 2021-22 MATA Presents season included four projects by composers Elijah J. Thomas, Meaghan Burke, George Tsz-Kwan Lam, and Flannery Cunningham. Elijah’s project, “For Harlem”, was a site-specific tone poem dedicated to the vibrancy of Harlem, Manhattan. Meaghan created a binaural sound installation entitled “Fenster”. George Tsz-Kwan Lam’s project was an immersive soundwalk through Chinatown, Manhattan entitled “Family Association”. And Flannery presented her piece, “dowsing//divining” for viola, cello, mezzo-soprano and electronics.

MATA Jr.

This season’s MATA Jr. program is well underway and we can’t wait to see what our young composers will create for Recap Percussion Quartet with the help of their mentors, Nina Fukuoka and Fernanda Navarro! The participants this year are Jianing Yang, Mahak Sadeghzadeh, Pradhyumn Pradeep, Julian Moreno, Sage Shurman, and Jordan Millar.