2022 MATA Festival
Night 2 Artist Bios

Cameron Graham

Cameron Graham is a British artist, composer and drummer. His works use acoustic and hand-built instruments, video simulation and scene drop-ins, 3D prints, DIY icons, electronica and film. He makes open-ended audiovisual dreamworlds that nurture fictional iconographies – worlds, metaphors and icons. His work sits between the composed and the installed, creating experiences of kilter, self-exposure, woozy familiarity, light spiritual reverence and narrative intoxication. His music has been performed by a number of orchestras, ensembles and soloists. His artworks and other audiovisual projects have been exhibited in Moscow, Paris and St. Etiennes. He was a Styria-Artist-in-Residence fellow in 2020, also receiving an AHRC funded PhD studentship from 2018 to 2022. He currently teaches composition and multimedia at the University of Surrey. In 2022-23, he is creating a large-scale intermedia project for the UK-based GBSR Duo, constructing an open-ended digital platform project based in a virtual caravan park, along with creating an audiovisual project for the pianist Zubin Kanga featuring ROLI seaboards, a confessional interview, digitally rendered arcade machines and virtual simulation.

Program Notes

“Life in Pink”

A nostalgic, swooning love song. Split in two. Churned, stretched, wet and warmed.

Vicente Hansen Atria

Vicente Hansen Atria (b. Santiago, Chile) is a Brooklyn-based composer and drummer. His music riffs on a wide range of idioms, from renaissance dances to Korean sanjo, creating lucid, futuristic sonic worlds. Past, recent, and ongoing collaborators include Sun Ra Arkestra, Ensemble 2e2m, Jay Campbell, Wet Ink, gamin, Matthew Welch, Yarn/Wire, Jack Quartet, Bozzini Quartet, International Contemporary Ensemble, and TAK. As an improviser and composer, his music has been showcased at a wide variety of venues, such as The Shed, The Stone, Dizzy’s Club at JALC, Jazz Standard, DiMenna Center for Classical Music, Symphony Space, and Miller Theatre, as well as Sala SCD (Santiago, Chile), Bimhuis (Amsterdam), L’Auditori (Barcelona), and Tempo Rubato (Australia), among others. In 2019, he was co-commissioned to participate in The Shed’s first Open Call series, for which he co-wrote an evening-length piece for bagpipes, taepyeongso, and custom 3D-printed instruments with Mat Muntz. In 2020, he was awarded the prestigious Chilean Ministry of Culture Fondo de la Música to record an album of acoustic microtonal music with his chamber-folk septet, Orlando Furioso. Recently he was awarded the competitive ACF Create grant to compose a second book of music for the same septet. He is currently pursuing a DMA at Columbia University, where he has studied with Fred Lerdahl, Georg Haas, and George Lewis. Vicente is currently leading Orlando Furioso, as well as performing with collaborative trio Family Plan, and designing instruments with Mat Muntz for The Vex Collection, an alt-historical ensemble.

Program Notes

“Beauchamp-Feuillet No. 2” is the second in a series of dense solo pieces. While they are all inspired by different musics, they share a rhythmic and corporeal vitality that is reminiscent of various ancient folk dance traditions. In this spirit, I named the series after a system of baroque dance notation, imagining that these sounds, too, can be thought of as a guide for movement. No. 2 is inspired by the Serbian tradition of gusle troubadours (guslar) and epic poetry. It tries to capture the lightning ornaments and broad phrasing of the gusle in the much heavier instrument that is the cello, which presents interesting challenges for the performer. Similarly, it reimagines the bold intonation of the guslar in various flavors of double stops, which all derive from an invented microtonal mode. [The commission and online premiere performance of this piece is made possible by American Composers Orchestra with lead funding from Augusta Gross and Leslie Samuels].

June Young (Will) Kim

Composer and baritone June Young (Will) Kim was born in 1996 in South Korea and has lived in Canada, the United States and Germany. Since 2020, he has been particularly interested in exploring relationships between the visual and musical arts to create pieces where the two have a synergistic relationship rather than one being a byproduct or a mere trace of the other. His music is published by Edizioni Suvini Zerboni and has been performed by ensembles such as Quartetto Prometeo, Syntax Ensemble, members of the Berlin Philharmonic, members of the International Ensemble Modern Academy and Ensemble Paramirabo. He received his Bachelor in Composition from Indiana University Bloomington in 2018. Funded by the DAAD scholarship, he then received his Masters in Composition from the Hochschule Für Musik und Theater München, studying with Isabel Mundry. Between Feb. - Aug. 2021, he was a student of Valerio Sannicandro’s mentorship program. He also received a II Level Masters in Composition from Conservatorio di Milano between March - Oct 2021 studying with Marco Stroppa, George Benjamin, Unsuk Chin, Klaus Lang and Alberto Posadas. Since 2021, he is pursuing a Certificate of Advanced Studies at HMDK Stuttgart, as a student of Marco Stroppa. As a lyric baritone, he studied with Peter Volpe at Indiana University Bloomington and is currently studying contemporary voice performance with Angelika Luz at HMDK Stuttgart. He is currently based in New York (USA) and Stuttgart (Germany).

Program Notes

“Black, Emerald” is the 3rd piece in my series of works for an amplified canvas. Continuing my search for a relationship between the visual and musical domains of art, they influence each other at an equal level rather than one being the byproduct or mere trace of the other. The colors black and emerald were chosen because I wanted to explore Hans Hofmann’s Push/Pull theory in this piece. To reflect this in the musical domain, a soft and steady timbre is assigned to the instrumental ensemble whenever the emerald color motif is painted on. I also explored Salvatore Sciarrino’s concept of “Little Bang,” which describes that the human perception continually imposes cause and effect relationships between phenomena; that in two consecutive events, the former will be perceived as the generating event (Big Bang) and the latter as the product (Little Bang). Here, compound shapes created by black musical gestures are initially the Big Bangs and the emerald musical gestures are Little Bangs. I wanted to overturn this relationship towards the latter of the piece, to make the emerald gestures the Big Bang and the black gestures the Little Bang.

Jess Rowland

Jess Rowland is a sound artist, performer and composer. Much of her work explores the relationship between technologies, popular culture and other absurdities, investigating "the weirdness of reality and how we all deal with it". In addition to teaching sound at Princeton University and SVA NYC, she continues to present her work internationally. She held the position of the 2018-2020 Arts Fellow at the Lewis Arts Center, and received her training at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies under the mentorship of Adrian Freed. She has been affiliated with auditory neuroscience labs at New York University and elsewhere researching music perception, and she has published in the fields of auditory neurosciences and music technologies, including her work into flexible, embedded audio technology for composition and art practice.

Program Notes

“Music for Cellphone and Piano” uses teleconferencing and cellphones as prepared instruments for piano performance. The pianist's cellphone is connected to a nearby computer via video conference call. The video of this screen is then projected along with the performance. The cellphone becomes a musical instrument exploring the piano and an agent for visual design and movement: We are inside the sound and vision of telepresence; we can explore these strange new worlds; it is good to know where we are and see what we think.

Naftali Schindler

Naftali Schindler's music is inspired by the varied types of music he loves, which encompass musical cultures from across the globe. He is also an aspiring throat-singer in the Tuvan manner and enjoys performing in gamelan ensembles. Naftali is a graduate of the Master of Musical Arts program at the Yale School of Music, where he studied with Aaron Jay Kernis, Martin Bresnick, Ezra Laderman, and David Lang. Prior to that, he studied composition and music theory at Boston University, graduating summa cum laude. His teachers at BU included Martin Amlin and Theodore Antoniou. He presented his work in master-classes given by Lukas Foss, Samuel Adler, and David Liptak, among others. Naftali's music has been performed across the Americas, Europe and in Israel, including performances by Margaret Leng Tan, Beth Griffith, Steve Parker, Ruben Seroussi, Tel Aviv Wind Quintet, Yale Philharmonia, and the BU Symphony Orchestra, among others. He has been commissioned by Alea III, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Hagai Yodan, Apple Orange Pair, Brian Ellingsen, and The Travers Siblings, among others. He is a member of Pi Kappa Lambda and Shabtai, and is a recipient of the John Day Jackson and the Rena Greenwald Memorial Prizes and has been featured twice on Fifteen Minutes of Fame by Vox Novus.

Program Notes

“Chants, Pastorals, and Antiphons of the New Moon”

When harpist Colleen Potter Thorburn commissioned this piece, she helped spur my creativity by reminding me that the harp and horn are very ancient instruments. I thought of how in the ancient temple in Jerusalem, two of the main instruments were the kinnor (a type of harp) and the hatzotzra (a silver horn). That led me to Psalm 104 which was sung in the temple at the beginning of each lunar month. That in turn led me to think of various ancient singing traditions I've been immersed in, from Jewish-Yemenite singing to various central-Asian singing traditions. The fact that I was inspired by that music doesn't mean the listener will necessarily hear those traditions in my piece and I don't intend that. The listener will hear, however, the harpist chanting snatches of Psalm 104 in the ancient Yemenite pronunciation of the Hebrew text. The piece is shaped as a very free developing rondo. The core of the piece consists of a chanting main theme and an antiphonal second theme. These themes, plus some new "pastoral" material, are developed between recurrences of the chanting theme. The piece is framed by shofar (ram's horn) blasts on the horn. The interval of the fourth (central in Yemnite singing) is important in the vertical sonorities of the piece as well as in the long-term tonal arrangement.

Hakan Ulus

Hakan Ulus (b. 1991 in Germany) is a composer, researcher and professor of composition and music theory at the Gustav Mahler Private University in Klagenfurt, Austria. He studied composition in Salzburg, Leipzig, Frankfurt and Huddersfield. His music is performed internationally by Ensembles such as Ensemble intercontemporain and Klangforum Wien. He received several prizes and stipends such as the impuls international composition prize, the stipend of the Academy of Arts Berlin, and the Staatsstipendium Komposition from the Republic of Austria. He lives in Vienna and Klagenfurt.

Program Notes

The title of the work refers to the novel Auslöschung (1986) by Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. As in many of Bernhard's novels, overcoming the provenance conflict is the main theme: eradicating provincialism, it is a plea for cosmopolitanism. In the "Bernhard blocks", text fragments from the novel are used, whereby it is not textual understanding that is important, but rather the inner-musical energy of the texts. The performance indication is "as fast as possible, incomprehensible, hissing, indistinct, breathless, fragile." The text dissolves into sound. The great inner tension of the text fragments is paired with the mysterious letters of the Qur'an (ḥurūf muqaṭṭaʿa), which exhibit the same energy. The musical energies of Bernhard's texts and the Qur'anic recitation are thus the most important two influences for the work. “Auslöschung II” is conceived as a poly-work on three levels: It is part of my Bernhard cycle, which consists of the four works Beton (2017/18) for a female voice with sound objects, four clarinets, and electronics, Auslöschung (2019) for bass with sound objects, Auslöschung II for 10 voices, and Karōshi for soprano with sound objects.

Mengmeng Wang

Mengmeng Wang is a DMA composition dissertator at University of Wisconsin-Madison and studies composition with Professor Laura Schwendinger. She is the winner of Mead Witter School of Music Concerto Competition and Mullen Sacred Music Prize, etc. She has won awards at 1st eARTS Digital Audio China Competition and the 4th Chinese National Music Exhibition and Performance, etc. She was a residency composer of Atlantic Center of the Arts in 2018. Her music was performed in SEAMUS 2021 digital conference, Chicago Composers Consortium Electro-Acoustic Concert, Atlantic Center of the Arts, Glasgow (UK), Ithaca (NY), June in Buffalo (NY), CCE concert at UW-Madison, Beijing Modern Music Festival, etc.

Program Notes

There are moments when I hear a familiar sound and suddenly begin to miss someone, or when I am missing someone, a sound pops up in my mind. Regardless of how it begins, when these emotions stir in my mind, I cannot always just grab my phone and call this person. It is not nice to call if the person is busy or involved in something, or perhaps they are living in another time zone where it’s currently midnight. Maybe this person I am thinking about has passed away. These feelings of longing transform into sounds which were spilling out of me this summer. Then, as I followed the sounds, the piece found me. The idea of this piece is based on the soundscape of urban noise.

International Contemporary Ensemble

With a commitment to cultivating a more curious and engaged society through music, the International Contemporary Ensemble – as a commissioner and performer at the highest level – amplifies creators whose work propels and challenges how music is made and experienced. The Ensemble’s 35 members are featured as soloists, chamber musicians, commissioners, and collaborators with the foremost musical artists of our time. Works by emerging composers have anchored the Ensemble’s programming since its founding in 2001, and the group’s recordings and digital platforms highlight the many voices that weave music’s present. Now in its third decade, the Ensemble continues to build new digital and live collaborative environments that strengthen artist agency and musical connections around the world. Read more at www.iceorg.org and watch over 350 videos of live performances and documentaries at www.digitice.org.

Artists:
Beauchamp-Feuillet No. 2
Solo Cello - Jay Campbell

Life in Pink
Tenor Saxophone - Travis Laplante
Percussion - Clara Warnaar
Violin - Pauline Harris
Cello - Mariel Roberts
Tape - Maciej Lewandowski
Flute - Laura Cocks

Music for Cell Phone and Piano
Piano - Blair McMillen

Chants, Pastorals, and Antiphons of the New Moon
Harp/Voice - Nuiko Wadden
French Horn - Kyra Sims

The sounds I can hear when I miss you
Prepared Solo Violin - Pauline Harris

Black, Emerald
Amplified Canvas - Clara Warnaar
Cello - Mariel Roberts
Piano - Blair McMillen
Live Electronics - Maciej Lewandowski
Flute - Anna Urrey

Staff:
Jennifer Kessler, Executive Director
George Lewis, Artistic Director
Ross Karre, Executive Producer
Eddy Kwon, Director of Individual Giving
Ryan Muncy, Director of Institutional Giving*
Keisha Husain, Business and Finance Manager
Bridgid Bergin, Director of Production & Communications
Isabel Crespo Pardo, Production & Communications Coordinator
Isabel Frye, Video Editor and Media Archive Coordinator
Jacob Greenberg, Director of Recordings**
Levy Lorenzo, Sound Engineer**
Joshua Rubin, Program Director of LUIGI and Emeritus Co-Artistic Director**

* Ensemble musician
** Part-Time Artist Staff