MATA Festival to Celebrate 25th Anniversary in 2023 Featuring Found Sound Nation as Ensemble-in-Residence

For 25 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. The 2023 MATA Festival, happening over four evenings from May 31 - June 1, 2023 at Roulette Intermedium, marks its 25th anniversary.

The 25th Anniversary Festival will be curated and performed by 2023 Ensemble-in-Residence, Found Sound Nation (FSN), a creative agency that uses music-making to connect people across cultural and societal divides.

Each of the four evenings will feature small ensemble works that engage with ideas around individual and community transformation and collaborative music-making, reflecting the core values and approaches to music creation that Found Sound Nation promotes. These works will be performed by the FSN Ensemble, a selection of hand-picked musicians chosen from an extensive network of artists that specialize in genres ranging from contemporary classical and experimental music, to hip-hop, jazz, as well as folk and other traditional musics from cultures around the world.

Of the milestone anniversary, MATA Executive Director Amanda Gookin says, "Found Sound Nation's deep dedication to cross-cultural collaboration, open heartedness, and willingness to experiment with any sound in any genre speaks volumes to the integrity, creativity, and respect they bring to their music-making. They are a very unique collaborator for MATA this season and I cannot wait to hear the sounds they will bring to the 2023 MATA Festival."

Performance Details:

25th Anniversary MATA Festival
May 31 - June 3, 2023
Roulette Intermedium | Brooklyn, NY
Tickets: On sale in spring 2023
Link: www.matafestival.org/2023-mata-festival

About Found Sound Nation

Found Sound Nation (FSN) believes that collaborative music creation is a deeply effective way to become aware of the beauty, trauma, and hidden potential in our communities.

Our work emphasizes a mobile approach to creating and producing music, combining traditions of musique concréte, hip hop, audio journalism, and contemporary composition. FSN has collaborated with music festivals worldwide, led audio production workshops around the world, from Haiti to Indonesia, and worked extensively with Carnegie Hall running music composition workshops for incarcerated youth in the Bronx and Brooklyn. For the last 10 years, FSN has partnered with the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and Bang on a Can to produce OneBeat, our most ambitious initiative. OneBeat is the gathering place for the musical leaders of the 21st century, convening young professional musicians from around the globe, through a constellation of programs, to develop initiatives that use music as a tool for the betterment of our communities.

Founded by Christopher Marianetti and Jeremy Thal in 2010, Found Sound Nation began its work as part of the groundbreaking new music organization Bang on a Can, created in 1987 by composers Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon and David Lang. In 2015, FSN incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, and continues to partner with Bang on a Can on various projects. Learn more at www.foundsoundnation.org.

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: Alexia Webster

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