PRESS
2024
MATA Festival review - showcase for experimental music returns to principles
— Financial Times, May 21, 2024
2024
Cellist Yves Dhar opened the 26th annual MATA Festival at Fotografiska on May 15, exploring the intersection of music and technology.
— Poison Put to Sound, May 21, 2024
2024
Beethoven meets AI as music enters a new technological moment
— San Francisco Chronicle, February 19, 2024
2024
“Inventive, stylistically non-dogmatic new music”
-The New York Times
— Black Tie Magazine, February 22, 2024
2024
5 Questions to the Executive Director of MATA, Pauline Kim Harris
— I Care If You Listen, February 20, 2024
2024
MATA announces details of their 26th Annual Festival in New York City
— Musical America, February 16, 2024
2024
Tickets are now available for the 26th Annual MATA Festival in New York City
— Broadway World, February 16, 2024
2023
Thomas Giles plays Golnaz Shariatzadeh and New Works by the Iranian Female Composers Associasion
2023
“Examines ideas of erasure and displacement and engages with tokenism, code-switching, and other forms of quotidian survival techniques”
2023
MATA At Roulette Intermedium presents Bitter Fruits by Shara Lunon
2023
MATA At Roulette presents Shara Lunon, a poet, vocalist, composer, and improviser
— New Music USA , November 14, 2023
2023
Plan your trip and everything else to do in New York City
— City Guide NYC, November 14, 2023
2023
Dedicated to presenting, promoting and documenting NYC’s experimental music and artists
— NYC Noise, November 14, 2023
2023
Welcome the new MATA ED, Pauline Kim Harris & Read Through the 2023 - 2024 Festival Line-Up
— Broadway World, August 23, 2023
Acclaimed as “the most exciting showcase for outstanding young composers from around the world”
– The New Yorker 2023
2022
“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 May 16, 2022
2019
“A premiere destination for encountering new sounds and fresh ideas, the MATA Festival has become New York’s most cosmopolitan new-music series”
– Steve Smith, The New Yorker, April, 2019
2018
“Everything was of our time; everything was now”
“When the MATA Festival is at its best…it presents a broader range of contemporary musical ideas than any other such event.
– George Grella, New York Classical Review, April 11, 2018
2017
“current, expansive, and moving.”
– Lana Norris, I Care if You Listen, July 25, 2017
“With its worldwide reach and focus on not just new compositions but new performers, MATA is the most in-depth new music series in New York.”
– New York Classical Review, April 19, 2017
2014
“The city’s leading showcase for fresh international talent”
The New York Times lauded the “assured direction” and “passionate performance” of David Fulmer and ICE in our sold-out April 19th performance of Oscar Bianchi’s “Matra”.
“Easily one of the best concerts of the year.”
– Bruce Hodges on our April 20th, 2014 matinee by Neue Vocalsolisten
“Wednesday’s program featured Uusinta, a versatile, virtuosic instrumental group from Helsinki” [who performed with] “playful ease and anything-goes attitude”
– The New York Times, April 17, 2014
2011
“The performance was as much an urban happening as an outdoor concert, and though the weather was steamy, an eager audience in rowboats did not seem to mind.”
“For this summer, there was the prophetically named Swelter; the grim humidity had broken and made way for a brilliantly sunny afternoon. Conceived by three Australian sound artists named Julian Day, Luke Jaaniste and Janet McKay, some three dozen brass players, assembled in small sub-groups, were stationed around the Central Park Lake. The audience gathered around the shoreline and in rowboats out in the water. The brass calls really resounded across the shining surface.“
– National Public Radio, June 22, 2011 (Coverage of SWELTER)
“This inventive, stylistically nondogmatic new-music festival…”
“…a veritable Tower of Babel of contemporary classical music. A bellwether of shifting tides in the genre’s current scene–having helped launch the careers of Nico Muhly, Lukas Ligeti, and Annie Gosfield–MATA moves beyond the pale of mainstream institutions, a diverse summit of cosmopolitan voices continuing a lively musical conversation.
“The MATA Festival, now in its 13th year, has always been nondogmatic, even antidogmatic. Its focus is young composers, never a monolithic bunch even when they share nationalities and musical backgrounds, and even harder to pigeonhole once you bring them in from around the globe, as MATA’s directors have always done.”
“NYC’s trendiest new-music fest”
– Time Out NY
MATA interval is “…edge of the cutting-edge.”
MATA is an “…energetic organization, which attracts some of the country’s best young compositional talent…”
– The New Yorker, January 17, 2011
2008
“Given the hot market for music by composers who disregard the classical-pop divide, MATA’s directors have wisely reasoned that it makes no sense to lay low between festivals, so last season, the organization began presenting MATA Interval, a series of bi-monthly concerts at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn that has kept the franchise in view and virtually doubled the amount of music presented under MATA’s imprimatur.”
“Having presented chamber groups and soloists in its first decade, the five-day festival passed a milestone on Tuesday night when it imported the energetic Boston Modern Orchestra Project and its conductor, Gil Rose, for its first orchestral offering.”
“Eclectic, genre-defying programming”
– Bloomberg Press, April 1, 2008
2016
“The MATA Festival…continues to demonstrate a maturity that belies both its years and the age of the composers it presents…an unsurpassed range of contemporary music…stimulating”
“This fascinating program proved that MATA continues to showcase a broad spectrum of music by young, underrecognized voices from around the world…. [a] valuable platform.”
“MATA is New York’s leading showcase for talented young composers from around the world.”
– The New Yorker, April 12, 2016
2013
The New York Times called the programming of the 2013 MATA Festival “intriguing” and the works performed “played with a poise and precision that sought and found the[ir] unique character. ”
“you-won’t-see-this-anywhere-else performances”
“Each concert was a non-stop rollercoaster ride of challenging new works that defied practical considerations. The players of the various invited ensembles—including Israel’s Meitar and NYC’s own Talea Ensemble—seemed to completely revel in it, ”
“The place to catch up on international cutting-edge talent. ”
At fifteen, Music at the Anthology is practically venerable but still fresh. After a kickoff (with drinks) at Paula Cooper Gallery on April 17, it’ll move to Roulette in Brooklyn for three nights of music you’ve never heard by composers you don’t know, played by two crackerjack ensembles. Discovery is the whole point.
– New York Magazine, April 14, 2013
2010
MATA is a “…vibrant annual celebration of young composers…”
– Steve Smith, New York Times, April 15, 2010
“Celebrating a decade of nourishing young composers, the MATA Festival provides them with an annual platform for their work, often by some of the most cutting-edge musicians on the scene. Of this year’s four nights at (Le) Poisson Rouge, I caught the middle two. If there are any conclusions to be drawn, other than the level of skill telegraphed by both composers and performers, it would be that no stylistic trend prevails. Composers incorporate everything under the sun—and we are the happy beneficiaries.”
– Bruce Hodges, MusicWeb International, May 11, 2010
“This year, variety was the thing, and it was refreshing to the ears and the reason for the festival’s aesthetic success.”
– George Grella, The Big City, May 5, 2010
2007
“This roughhewn former public bath on bustling Fourth Avenue provided an ideally funky setting for MATAs experimental aesthetic.”
– Steve Smith, The New York Times, March 22, 2007
2004
“Since the Bang on a Can Festival moved uptown a decade ago, it has become a more polished enterprise and lost some of the funkiness and sense of adventure of its salad days. But more and more, the MATA Festival has picked up the slack.”
– Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, May 2, 2004
“The MATA Festival, once presented at the Anthology Film Archives (the name is an acronym for Music at the Anthology), has migrated from the East Village to Chelsea, but its freewheeling spirit has remained intact.”
– Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, May 14, 2004
2003
“MATA Festival named #1 Classical Music Moment of the Year!
– The New York Times, December 28, 2003
“Zany new music, but quirkily compelling.”
– Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, May 14, 2003
2015
“There’s nothing quite like MATA, which every year organizes the city’s most exciting showcase for outstanding young composers from around the world”
“Playful” … “Haunting” … “Wickedly Entertaining”
At fifteen, Music at the Anthology is practically venerable but still fresh. After a kickoff (with drinks) at Paula Cooper Gallery on April 17, it’ll move to Roulette in Brooklyn for three nights of music you’ve never heard by composers you don’t know, played by two crackerjack ensembles. Discovery is the whole point.
“tells us a lot about how composers are thinking now.”
“ear-opening, satisfying music for every contemporary taste and philosophy”
– The Brooklyn Rail, April 2015
2012
“This year’s MATA Festival proved beyond a doubt that it’s still a strange world. Representing 19 composers from four continents, MATA is the contemporary classical equivalent of the U.N. General Assembly.”
– Village Voice, April 23, 2012
2012
The Programming of the 2012 MATA Festival was hailed as “a testament to MATA’s enduring mission and to the high standards maintained by its current directors, David T. Little and Yotam Haber”
“Truly Visionary”
MATA is “the city’s leading showcase for vital new music by emerging composers.”
– The New Yorker, April 2012
“If you like knowing ahead of time exactly what a concert will bring, if you feel that the phrase “string quartet” evokes silver-haired listeners in gilt halls, if “recorder quartet” suggests to you fifth-graders piping, if you think composers should have both birth and death dates after their names, and if you prefer your music to be soothing and soporific—then you probably should avoid the face-off between the crackling JACK Quartet (strings) and the avant-garde Quartet New Generation (recorders) that anchors the Music at the Anthology (MATA) Festival.”
– New York Magazine on the opening night of the 2012 Festival
2009
MATA is “making New York a better place for new music“.
– Jeffrey Edelstein, MusicWeb International, April 3, 2009
“There were many incredible discoveries [at the 2009 MATA Festival]—from a piano and string quartet composition by MATA artistic director Chris McIntyre (whom I normally associate with trombone improv-type things) to a surreally meditative percussion work (those words already something of an oxymoron) by Cenk Ergün done by So Percussion (a group I normally associate with kinetic postminimalism). Then there were amazing pieces by international composers I had never heard of before—a dreamy and occasionally nightmarish solo piano piece by Kate Moore, an Australian now based in the Netherlands, and a joyous orchestra sing-a-long by Irish maverick Andrew Hamilton which came across as something of a Gavin Bryars’s Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet arranged by Conlon Nancarrow.”
– Frank Oteri, newmusicbox.org, April 4, 2009
“[Le Poisson Rouge] is a perfect home for the MATA festival: the club’s programming philosophy overlaps with MATA’s mission of presenting young composers who write in any style that suits them.”
– Allan Kozinn, New York Times, April 1, 2009
2002
“Plenty of things scare us, but that doesn’t stop us. In fact, if it scares us, we get more excited about it and try to figure out how we can do it.”
– Lisa Bielawa, as quoted in New York Magazine, April 1, 2002
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