Interval 7.1 Blog 1 — MATA Festival

From curator Ray Evanoff:The upcoming Interval 7.1 concert on December 20 at Issue Project Room features the illimitable Mabel Kwan performing on an array of keyboards (piano, toy pianos, clavichord, midi keyboard). This concert excites me for a variety of reasons, but mostly, because of the people involved.The quality that impresses me most about Mabel as a player is her ability to accentuate a piece's intrinsic features. She is the rare performer equally at home playing the most delicate works by Cage and works of the fiercest complexity. Mabel doesn't have an agenda that she superimposes onto a piece; she draws out the music's innate characteristics and makes them shine. She is amazingly sensitive while still being ferocious, and she eagerly meets even the steepest challenge.This concert grew out of conversations between Mabel and I at the tail end of rehearsals on my piano piece A Series of Postures. While these rehearsals featured a lot of nitty gritty hands-on-keys problem solving, they often spun off into tangential conversations on working method, titling, our philosophies as artists, and a host of other, broader topics. This is another thing that I appreciate about Mabel: her thoughtfulness and curiosity leads her to ask questions well outside the scope of the pragmatic and execution-focused. When I work with Mabel, I don't feel like a composer working with a performer: I feel like one artist working with another.These tangents would inevitably lead to discussing work by people we hold in the highest esteem. At the top of that list for me is Evan Johnson. Evan's music blows me away in the lengths it is willing to go to say what it has to say. No piece of his demonstrates this more than his Positioning in Radiography for soloist on three distinct toy pianos.

Excerpt from Evan Johnson's Positioning in Radiography

It's hard to satisfactorily describe the hold this piece has on me. Partly it's the absurd disregard it has for its instruments: the work's impossibly nuanced and graceful material is completely at odds with the crude means through which it's delivered. Its profuse articulative details, dynamic specificity, and Baroque-inspired embellishments seem crafted for the piano's refined mechanism, not its mass produced and callously insensitive little sibling.But that's precisely the point. Evan's music finds beauty in conflict and strain, be it the strain of the body, the strain of the ear, or the strain of the mind. It allows beauty to shine by contextualizing it through setting it against the crass and the ugly, a luminous major third enlivened by the tension of muscle or the dirtiest of sounds. Just as Francis Bacon found inspiration in the contorted images of the classic medical textbook from which Positioning in Radiography derives its title, Evan draws upon the awkward, the marginalized, the undervalued to fuel his work. In doing so, he sublimates the insignificant and reinvigorates the classically beautiful in a sensitive, personal fashion that does both justice.I could make grand, sweeping claims about Mabel's pianistic abilities and the value of Evan's work; I think both are very special artists. But fortunately I don't have to. MATA has graciously provided a forum to showcase their unique talents. I implore you to take advantage of the opportunity on December 20 to experience them yourself!