MATA Festival Unveils 2023-2024 Season & Welcomes New Executive Director, Pauline Kim Harris

 

For 26 years, Music at the Anthology (MATA) has been a home for early-career composers, sound artists, and other music creators. Through its annual festival, artist residencies, and educational initiatives, MATA has fostered the work of hundreds of experimental artists since its founding by Philip Glass, Eleonor Sandresky, and Lisa Bielawa.

This fall, MATA continues its 2023 season of programming - featuring world premieres by Jane Boxall, Shara Lunon and Golnaz Shariatzadeh - while welcoming a new Executive Director, Pauline Kim Harris. Harris follows in the footsteps of previous Executive Directors including esteemed composers and musicians Claire Chase, Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly, David T. Little, Lauren Lociano, and many more.

"For me, MATA is the pulse of new music in New York City and the bridge that connects global new music communities," Harris said, on taking up her new position. "My aim is to elevate the live performance experience by fostering collaboration and a space of equal commitment among composers, performers, and audiences. It is crucial to emphasize that production is just as vital as the creative process itself. Together, we can enhance and empower one another in the most human way, as a united community with open minds and open hearts."

MATA Board President Philip Webb commented: "I am thrilled to have Pauline join us at MATA. Her legacy of performing, composing, and presenting in the heart of the new music scene drew us to her. With an entire career that has been an embrace of experimentation and risk-taking, she is the perfect person to lead MATA into our second quarter-century."

Under Harris's leadership, MATA enters the fall season with a call for scores for the 26th MATA Festival, to be held in New York City from May 20-23, 2024. The deadline for scores is Sunday, October 1, 2023. A new Ensemble in Residence for this year's festival will be announced in January 2024. Throughout fall 2023, MATA brings new music to New York area stages through MATA Presents, a signature concert series featuring artists who embody MATA's spirit of innovation and adventure in music.

Composer and percussionist Jane Boxall's program Replaying the Tape will make its world premiere on Saturday, November 11, 2023 at 7:00PM at Greenwich House Music School's Renee Weiler Concert Hall in New York City. A versatile soloist, session player and artistic collaborator, Boxall has brought her genre-bending take on new music to concert halls, art galleries and school programs worldwide. In Replaying the Tape, she appears alongside poet Penny Boxall and paleontologist Dr. Frankie Dunn in a program incorporating live percussion, electronics and poetry, with a unique premise. The program takes its name from evolutionary theorist Stephen J. Gould, who once said: "Replay the tape a million times... and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again." Merging their skill sets to explore this idea, the three performers will conjure an imaginary menagerie of animals that might have existed had the dice-throw of evolution fallen differently. Besides new music composed by Jane Boxall and original poetry by Penny Boxall, the program weaves in visuals, choreography and taped field recordings from Dr. Dunn's archaeological digs - using artistic elements to make the science of paleontology more present, and more accessible, for new audiences.

On Tuesday, November 14, 2023 at 8:00PM, MATA presents Shara Lunon - poet, vocalist, composer and improviser - in the world premiere of her complete program Bitter Fruits at the Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn. This electronic song cycle taps into Lunon's background as both an inheritor and innovator of Black American Musical traditions. In Bitter Fruits - named for the hard-won gains reaped by marginalized people in the United States - she explores survival techniques developed in response to oppression and injustice within our government, society, and communities. For this performance, Lunon plays a light-reactive custom synthesizer in the form of a 10-foot braided wig representing generational traditions of Black and Indigenous Americans. Through reactive photocells connected to an Arduino Uno microcontroller board, the assembly invokes two distinct sonic effects reflecting two sides of the artist's life experience: a buzzy oscillator representing the suffocating voice of being unheard - or unable to fully express truth and honesty in her Black experience - and a contrasting soft-toned mode representing the strength of resilience, harmony in community, and hope. The program also features performances by Lesley Mok (percussion, electronics), Chris Williams (trumpet, electronics), Kalia Vandever (trombone, electronics), Lester St. Louis (electronics) and 13th Law (bass, guitar, electronics). Workshopped during the pandemic as a solo piece at The New School, the program has never before been staged publicly as a full ensemble piece.

On Monday, December 11, 2023 at 7:30PM, MATA presents the world premiere of Golnaz Shariatzadeh's work fabric of sorrow - commissioned by MATA Presents 2023 and performed as part of the program Thomas Giles Plays Golnaz Shariatzadeh & New Works by the Iranian Female Composers Association at Brooklyn's National Sawdust. Dedicated to those who have lost their lives in ongoing struggles since the Iranian Revolution, the work draws on fragments of Persian music in its expression of grief, loss, stasis, nostalgia, dream states and hope. Taking the stage as featured performer is Thomas Giles, a celebrated saxophonist and teacher who has premiered more than 200 new works to date.

On the following evening, Tuesday, December 12, MATA hosts its annual gala benefit. Please check the MATA website for further details as they become available.

In her inaugural season as Executive Director, Pauline Kim Harris brings a wealth of experience as a violinist, composer, curator, and advocate for contemporary and experimental music. Acclaimed as part of the violin duo String Noise, Harris is also known for her many high-level creative collaborations, gracing the stages of esteemed new music festivals including Music at the Anthology.

In addition to her role at MATA, Harris was recently named Director of Artistic Planning at the Grammy Award-winning Experiential Orchestra. She also serves as a co-curator at Carnegie Hill Concerts, a trailblazing chamber music series dedicated to pushing boundaries and reimagining the contemporary music landscape. A recording artist under Sono Luminus, Decca, Chandos, Nonesuch, New Focus, and other prestigious labels, she also previously served as the first Music Director for Bill T. Jones Arnie Zane Dance Company.

As a key pillar to her tenure as Executive Director, Harris envisions forging partnerships with organizations and individuals who share MATA's commitment to diversity, equity, inclusivity, and belonging. Her perseverance, grit, curiosity, and unquenchable thirst for learning and growth make her an ideal advocate for maximizing opportunities in that sphere. With her visionary leadership, MATA looks to strengthen its role as the heartbeat of new music in New York City and beyond.

Program Information

Saturday, November 11, 2023

MATA Presents Jane Boxall in Replaying the Tape
Renee Weiler Concert Hall (Greenwich House Music School) | New York, NY
Link: www.matafestival.org/jane-boxall

Tuesday, November 14, 2023

MATA Present Shara Lunon in Bitter Fruits
Roulette Intermedium | Brooklyn, NY
Link: https://roulette.org/event/shara-lunon-bitter-fruits/

Monday, December 11, 2023

MATA Presents fabric of sorrow in Thomas Giles Plays Golnaz Shariatzadeh & New Works by the Iranian Female Composers Association
National Sawdust | Brooklyn, NY
Link: www.nationalsawdust.org/event/golnaz-shariatzadeh-and-thomas-giles-new-works-by-the-iranian-female-composers-association

Tuesday, December 12, 2023

MATA Benefit
Link: www.matafestival.org/2024-mata-festival-gala-benefit

May 20-23, 2024
26th Anniversary MATA Festival
Link: www.matafestival.org/2024-mata-festival

About MATA

Music at the Anthology (MATA) is an incubator for adventurous emerging artists experimenting with composition, multimedia, collaborative performance art, and every imaginable sound in between. We present, support, and commission the music of early-career composers, regardless of their stylistic views or aesthetic inclinations. Founded by Philip Glass, Eleonor Sandresky, and Lisa Bielawa in 1996 as a way to address the lack of presentation opportunities for unaffiliated composers, MATA has since developed into the world's most sought-after performance opportunity for young and emerging composers.

The first MATA Festival took place in 1998, and showcased Jonathan Hart Makwaia, singing his own compositions, alongside performances by Lisa Moore and Ted Baker. Since then, MATA presents an internationally-recognized annual festival each spring in New York City of new music by early-career composers selected from a free global call for submissions; MATA Presents, commissioned projects presented at venues and non-conventional spaces throughout New York; and MATA Jr., an evening of music by pre-college composers, mentored by emerging composers, and performed by top performers in new music.

MATA's festivals and events are critically acclaimed and broadly respected: The New Yorker has hailed MATA as "the most exciting showcase for outstanding young composers from around the world." The New York Times has called it "nondogmatic, even antidogmatic;" The Wall Street Journal said that it "tells us a lot about how composers are thinking now." Composers that have been presented by MATA early in their careers include future Rome, Alpert, Takemitsu, Siemens, and Pulitzer Prize-winners, Guggenheim Fellows, and MacArthur "Geniuses." In 2010 MATA was awarded ASCAP's prestigious Aaron Copland award in recognition of its work. Learn more at www.matafestival.org.

Photo Credit: Jane Boxall by Matt Corlew, Shara Lunon by Rosa Vastola, Golnaz Shariatzadeh courtesy of Golnaz Shariatzadeh, Pauline Kim Harris by Matt Dine.