2023 MATA Festival
NIGHT 1 Artist Bios

Yiheng Yvonne Wu

Yiheng Yvonne Wu is a composer and interdisciplinary artist whose work ranges from conventionally notated pieces to staged experimental works. Recent scores blend notated material with guided improvisations to create room for intimate interactions among players. Interdisciplinary projects have incorporated ASL, poetry, dance, and installation. In her newest concert-length project, Breath/Carries/Ritual, movement, sound, and personal stories intersect and transform each other.

Wu has received commissions from the La Jolla Symphony, Arraymusic, Michael Mizrahi, Figmentum, and the Bardin-Niskala Duo, among others. Her music has been performed by the MIVOS string quartet, a.pe.ri.od.ic, Bent Frequency, and Ensemble SurPlus and featured in the WasteLAnd concert series, the University of Tennessee Contemporary Music Festival, New Music on the Bayou, SoundSCAPE, and Aspen Music Festival. Collaborators have included Jennifer Torrence, Ayako Kato, Bonnie Whiting, Jessica Aszodi, Rachel Beetz, Dustin Donahue, and Todd Moellenberg. She was awarded the 2018 Judith Lang Zaimont Prize by the IAWM and the 5th Mivos/Kanter String Quartet Composition Prize.

Born (1981) in Taiwan, Wu immigrated to the US as a young child. She studied music at Yale University (B.A.) and the University of California, San Diego (M.M., Ph.D). Previously at Beloit College, where she founded the InterArts Ensemble, and now at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, Wu mentors students working across genres and has been actively redesigning music theory curricular to reflect diverse musical practices. Wu is determined to find a healthy balance among her job, family life with husband and two young daughters, and her own music and wellness.

Program Notes

Sound-Body/Sound-Space uses a graphic/text score to structure an improvised performance. For any two players, the score creates a space in which the musicians are intimately connected as they interpret, listen, and respond to each other in real time. The players sonify an imagined journey through a shape shown in the score, which includes verbal cues, such as “imminently unfurling,” “comfort becomes distrust,” and “low-gear pedaling through air,” along the path. One player, the Sound-Body, portrays a sound-organism that can take on varying behaviors, densities, sizes, colors, and textures. The other player, the Sound-Space, portrays the sonic substance through which the Body travels. It takes on varying viscosities, like properties of gas, liquid, and solids, abstracted into musical properties. To both players, gravity and the laws of motion apply along with the associated phenomena of friction, speed, momentum, and collisions. As every performance is unique, the piece is about the duo navigating and wrestling through the journey together.

Performers: Chris Williams, Aurora Nealand

Akari Komura

Akari Komura (b.1996) is a Japanese composer-vocalist. She grew up in Tokyo and spent her teenage years in Jakarta, Indonesia. From an early age, Akari has been involved in performing arts through playing the piano, singing, and dancing modern ballet. Her interest in the somatic practice and embodied consciousness is central to her creative process. Akari imagines her score as an invitation for the performers to contemplatively engage with listening and soundmaking.

She is interested in curating a participatory performance space that invites a community of musicians and listeners for a collective transformative experience. Akari's artistic exploration is oriented towards heightening physiological and psychological perception attuned to the ecological sonic soundscapes. The works of Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, and Hildegard Westerkamp are especially influential in her artistic practice.

Akari’s breadth of work spans multimedia/electronics, vocal music, chamber ensemble, and interdisciplinary collaborations with dancers, visual artists, and architects. Her works have been presented at the Atlantic Music Festival, Composers Conference, Resonance 104.4 FM (UK), International Composition Institute of Thailand, Nief-Norf, Montreal Contemporary Music Lab (Canada), Radiophrenia 87.9FM (Scotland), and soundSCAPE (Italy).

She holds an M.M. in Composition from the University of Michigan (recipient of the EXCEL Enterprise Fund and Sonic Scenographies Research Grant) and a B.A. in Vocal Arts from the University of California, Irvine. Her major teachers include Evan Chambers, Roshanne Etezady, Stephen Rush, and Frances Bennett. Akari is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Composition at the University of California San Diego.

Program Notes

For 2023 May 19th:● 27th:◐ June 3rd:◯ 10th:◑.

Originally created as telephone & mail-art, the piece integrates sonic perception with visuals and text. Through the enactment of the score, the musician and listeners are invited to attune to the revolving energy in the moon phases.

Performers: Meg Rohrer

Che Buford

Che Buford (he, they) is an NYC-based artist whose work explores creating new narratives within the world of music while engaging in themes of memory and place. Che performs as a violinist in various musical settings such as, traditional orchestras, chamber music, solo, improvisational performance, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Their own work explores the possibilities of timbre and acoustical phenomena and connects them to elements of place, memory, poetry, and the quotidian. Che has had the privilege of creating with artists such as Longleash Trio, The Rhythm Method, New York Philharmonic, Katherine Needleman, mal sounds, Steph Davis, Veda Hingert-Mcdonald, and Deborah Jack. Che holds a degree from Boston Conservatory as a presidential scholar in violin performance where he studied with Rictor Noren. In the fall, He will begin his DMA in composition at Columbia University. When Che isn’t interacting with music, he enjoys taking long walks, cooking vegan food, and thrifting.

Program Notes

I have been here before draws inspiration from the feelings of deja vu, unconsciousness, and dreaming. I wanted to convey musically this state of transitioning from being unconscious to conscious and finding yourself in a familiar state of being that one has experienced before.

The opening of the piece is marked “Blurred, Lost, Finding Clarity.’’ It explores the resonance that the vibraphone is capable of while discovering a simple 4 note melody. It develops with louder dynamics, bigger chords and resonant tremolos that represent awakening and consciousness.

The second section, marked ‘’Losing consciousness.’’ The music gets gradually slower while the tonality tries to find stability. It then goes into this fast, rhythmic, almost psychedelic mood that represents a state of hallucination and confusion. The meter changes constantly while the notes gradually get blurrier and increase in tension as it repeats multiple times with the pedal down.

The ending of the piece goes back to the ‘’unclear, lost,’’ feeling from the beginning. The music uses similar material and gestures with slight alteration. I hope for this piece to allow one to look inwards and be reminded of their experiences of deja vu.

Performers: Amy Garapic

Maja Linderoth

Swedish composer Maja Linderoth (b. 1989), based in Oslo, Norway, has a background in both medicine (Uppsala University, (SE)), and composition studies and is interested in perception: how we process sound information, make sense of what we experience, and perceive musical form. Furthermore, she is interested in working with musical time, the relationship between different sound events, and how one event can be influenced by what is happening before and after it. She is also fascinated by the meeting between sound and other mediums, such as pictures, movement, film, and scenography.

After several years of piano and music theory studies at the municipal music school in the Swedish mining town of Norberg, where she grew up, Linderoth’s composition studies commenced at the Gotland School of Music Composition, Visby (SE), followed by receiving a

bachelor’s degree in composition in 2018 from the Norwegian Academy of Music, Oslo (NO), and Universität der Künste, Berlin (DE), having studied with Eivind Buene, Trond Reinholdtsen, Henrik Hellstenius, Kaija Saariaho, and Daniel Ott, among others. Supported by the Ulysses Network, Linderoth also studied at the IRCAM ManiFeste – l’Académie in Paris, (FR), and at the workshop Composition, Alternative Performance and Performance Art at Snape Maltings, (GB).

She has collaborated with several renowned ensembles, including Quince Ensemble, the Norwegian Soloists’ Choir, and the Oslo Philharmonic, and has had performances in Europe, the USA, and New Zealand. At 2022’s ISCM World New Music Days, Linderoth was awarded the ISCM Young Composer Award for her “freshness, originality, and direct address.”

Program Notes

In Mouthpiece, composed by Maja Linderoth, the mouth of each audience member constitutes a concert hall. Each attendee is given a pair of earplugs and an apple, followed by instructions given in a film. An intimate play with sensory perceptions occurs, where one will be zoomed in and focusing on sensory experiences while also focusing on the combinations of the sounds created in the mouth’s "concert hall" and the materials viewed in the film. Unusual combinations will occur, which playfully interact with the interpretations that one usually makes of these sensory inputs. The piece also unfolds in such a way that each audience member is both perceiving and participating in creating their experience of the piece at the same time. In addition to this, each audience member both has an individual experience together with others in a shared space and interacts with each other during the piece.

Linderoth aims to explore how our senses work together. Different visual cues and text instructions can influence the experience of sound, and vice versa. A picture of a snowy landscape can alter the sound of chewing on an apple. Does it only sound like an apple still, or does it perhaps sound like walking on snow now?

In addition to experimenting with sensory perception, Mouthpiece also addresses the challenges that everyone faces in society regarding being open and thinking critically. It highlights how we process information and how our perceptions can be influenced. In our society today, information is often presented in short excerpts. What’s more, our perception is frequently skewed by how something is presented, i.e., the words being used, the angle, the type of excerpt, the context, etc. Furthermore, online, information can also correspond to previous content that one has searched for before and is therefore now recommended through an algorithm, narrowing the degree of openness towards other scenarios.

Isabel Crespo Pardo

Isabel Crespo Pardo (they/them) is a NYC-based latinx vocalist, improviser-composer, and interdisciplinary artist. Rooted in conceptual clarity, their work entangles music, visual art, text and performance, constantly evolving to reflect the intra/interpersonal spaces they inhabit. Reveling in soft chaos, they embrace openness and specificity to create poetic work(s).

For Crespo, art is a place to gather, to exercise intuition, rigor and delight. They are deeply invested in building generative structures and intentionally inviting others into focused explorations. Most recently, they premiered 6., a durational interdisciplinary piece featuring close collaborators Loré Yessuff, Eden Girma, Kwami Winfield, Chris Williams, and Lester St. Louis, at Roulette Intermedium as part of their 2022 Van Lier Fellowship. Making use of screen printing, sculpture and sound, the performance activated contemplation of community and improvisation. In June 2022, they a co-created site-specific piece with edi kwon in the catacombs of the Green-Wood Cemetery. Inspired by this historic space, they created a ritual of transformation through improvisation, movement, poetry, and the use of found objects. In June 2022, they premiered desbordándome, an evening-length large-scale embroidered graphic score composed for sinonó, their trio featuring Lester St. Louis (cello), Henry Fraser (bass), and themself (voice). In this piece, they explore themes of change, interconnectedness, and failure, as well as the expressive and sonic potential of words. sinonó will release their debut album in 2024. Their compositional voice can also be heard on ‘el rostro (des)cubierto,’ an upcoming album set for release in June 2023 on Lobby Art Records. More at isabelcrespo.com

Program Notes

la línea será considers the process of locating oneself in a shifting context. While composing it, I thought of discovering and creating identity, wrestled with its impermanence, and reflected on how much agency we have in how we are perceived. This piece is on my upcoming album, el rostro (des)cubierto, out on June 30th via Lobby Art Editions.

Performers: Isabel Crespo Pardo (voice), DoYeun Kim (gayageum), Lester St Louis (cello), Henry Fraser (upright bass)

Kristofer Svensson

Kristofer Svensson is a composer and kacapi musician whose work is situated in a context in which artistic, contemplative, and meditative practices merge. Tuning harmony in Just Intonation, a characteristic feature of all their music, and often letting tones emerge from silence through noise, thematizes the aperture and transparency of sound as well as the equanimous ground of emptiness from which sounds emerge. Texts gathering Svensson's thoughts on the relationship between Buddhism and music can be found on their website: intimatingemptiness.blogspot.com.

Svensson's album of compositions for the kacapi, ‘Andra Segel’, was released in 2020 on the kuyin label, and a trio album (‘two skies’) with Maya Bennardo and Erik Blennow Calälv was released in 2022 on the thanatosis label.

Svensson’s compositions have been performed by soloists and groups such as Quatuor Bozzini, andPlay, Contemporaneous, Mats Persson & Kristine Scholz, Musica Vitae, Miyama McQueen-Tokita, Norbotten NEO, Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, and Maya Bennardo. The latter’s recording of Svensson’s solo violin piece ‘Duk med broderi och bordets kant’ was chosen as one of the ten best contemporary classical releases of 2022 by Bandcamp’s Peter Margasak, who described Svensson’s piece as “one of the most astonishing pieces of music I’ve heard all year.”

Svensson studied composition with Fujieda Mamoru and the kacapi with Ade Suparman and Dody Satya Ekagustiman.

Program Notes

Av hav is the starting point for a free, modal improvisation that explores a set of pitches distantly and closely related to each other in a justly tuned harmonic space.

Performers: Kristofer Svensson, Madison Greenstone, Josh Modney

Dion Nataraja

Dion Nataraja is a composer, experimental vocalist, and scholar from Indonesia, currently pursuing a PhD in music composition at UC Berkeley. His musical and scholarly works have been focusing on the intersection of areas such as spectral music, Javanese gamelan, improvisation, instrument building, and decolonial theories. The composer-pianist Anthony Cheung described Dion's music as “a true intercultural music for our time.” By the gamelan composer-performer Wahyu Thoyyib Pambayun, his music has been described as “succeeded in expanding the musical language of the Javanese gendèr.” He has attended masterclasses and studied with musicians of various genres, such as Nick Brooke, Allen Shawn, Steve Lehman, Darsono Hadiraharjo, Midiyanto, Edmund Campion and Ken Ueno. In 2020, he was awarded as a finalist of Talea Ensemble’s emerging composer competition, and in 2022, he was awarded as a OneBeat fellow. His music has been included as a part of Brown University’s “Asian Musical Modernisms” course syllabus, as well as in concerts such as PGVIS Symposium 2021 titled “Traditions in Transition,” Jogja Noise Bombing 2022, Salihara Jazz Buzz 2023, among others. As a scholar, he has published his writing in Jurnal Kajian Seni of Gadjah Mada University, and he has given lectures in venues such as California Institute of the Arts, Salihara Arts Center, Perpromi, and October Meeting. At the moment, he is focusing his work on Sandikala Ensemble, a Yogyakarta-based ensemble that develops experimental techniques and new gamelan instruments with the aim of expanding contemporary gamelan music’s horizon.

Program Notes

Kafka, Postmortem

It was the enigmatic and contorted and paradoxical line that drew me to Kafka. Like a place of non-arrival: “The Messiah,” Kafka said, “will only come the day after his arrival.” Both space and temporality is obfuscated in his writing; the expectation of a destination is perpetually disavowed.

I am deeply interested with this gesture, as I am now intensively working with language and music that frequently signals nationalism. Gamelan, as well as the Javanese language, popularly evokes the images of the grandiose Javanese past, of the (supposedly holy) ancestors, of a “spiritual refinement.” But I want to refuse such a genuflection: I desire to construct a negative image of the gamelan tradition. This negativity does not mean destruction, but rather, a creation of a dwelling space where one could put oneself in a critical distance from the tradition, with all its weight, with all that it signifies. Similarly with the Javanese language: reciting Kafka in Javanese is an act of translating Kafka’s aesthetic of non-arrival. It complicates the positionality of the language. It defamiliarizes the aristocratic connotation, and at the same time breathes life into a language diminishing in its usage (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s emphasis of translating canonical text into minor language is central to this formulation). It is an act of double negation. I am constructing this critical distance, but I can only do so because I am building on the rich history and legacies of the gamelan masters: K.R.T Wasitodiningrat, Ki Nartosabdo, Pontjopangrawit, Pande Made Sukerta, Aloysius Suwardi, I Wayan Sadra, Dewa Alit, and many others.

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As we have learned from Edward Said, each society creates its own Others. It is imperative, I believe, to think of gamelan from the perspective of the ones being othered by Indonesia. To refuse a simple valorization of a non-Western tradition: the task is to endlessly interrogate any tradition so that its dark side could emerge. The aim is—allow me to recite an old adage from Marx—a ruthless criticism of all that exists.

—————

Indonesia’s Others are the places whom he colonizes. It was East Timor, whom he colonized in 1975, and by their struggle, gained independence in 2002. West Papua, which was occupied by Indonesia in 1962, is still under his brutal rule. It is controlled under the twin imperial devil: Indonesia and the US. Military brutality and racism—eerily similar to European colonialism—are rampant. In 2021, Steven Yadomahang, a deaf Papuan was manhandled by Indonesian military; they violently forced him to lay on the ground and stepped upon his head with their military boots. Ten months ago, only ten months ago, Indonesia’s ex-president, Megawati, made a statement about how West Papuans who came from intermarriage with non-Papuans Indonesians are somehow better, accompanied with an abject remark about genetic manipulation. It was a public speech. Everybody in the audience—including important Indonesian politicians—clapped and laughed.

But nobody bats an eye. It is a duty to incessantly launch critique towards the national project so that the voices suppressed by contemporary empires could emerge. Attention from the international community is needed more than ever.

I am profoundly thankful to my friends in Sandikala Ensemble—a contemporary gamelan ensemble I initiated four years ago—for being willing to put up with my ideas and willing to perform complicated musical materials. This project could only exist because of their magnificent talent. These individuals are:

1) Yustiawan Paradigma Umar, co-founder of Sandikala Ensemble and gendèr player 2) Suseno Setyo Wibowo, gendèr player

3) Roni Driyastoto, rebab player

4) Mustika Garis, rebab player

I am also truly thankful for Mbak Peni Candrarini, for being willing to contribute her wonderful voice for this piece; for Redian Pragina Jali, who elegantly translated these Kafka parables into Javanese; Jonathan Lee, who created the magnificent video for this project; Aine Nakamura for performing and dancing in the video; as well as Jess Tsang and Amy Garapic for performing on the percussions.

Performers: Dion Nataraja, Peni Candra Rini, Amy Garapic, Jess Tsang