Dylan Mattingly’s Barbaric Yawp

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

—Walt Whitman

About Dylan Mattingly’s Sunt Lacrimae Rerum:

Revisiting Dylan Mattingly’s Achilles Dreams of Ebbets Field

It’s been well over four years since I attended the premiere of Dylan Mattingly’s Achilles Dreams of Ebbets Field. At the time, I wrote:

. . . the vital, fearless pianist Kathleen Supové invited Mattingly to compose a work for piano—anything he wanted, of any length. Could Supové, or even Mattingly himself, outsized dreamer though he is, have predicted just how big it would become?

July Miscellany, with music by Jaeger, Mattingly & Trapani & performances by Dhegrae & Contemporaneous

That’s Robert Louis Stevenson contemplating the proceedings, courtesy John Singer Sargent. The proceedings include, among other things, El café by Joaquín Torres-García and the Cabinet of Geology and Mineralogy from the announcement of a project by Mark Dion at Vassar College.

Spaghetti Western: Contemporaneous in the Spiegeltent

Contemporaneous in the Spiegeltent, warming up for the concert

It is a measure of the power of music, in the hands of Contemporaneous, that the silly season engulfing us decamped, wholly vanquished, within the first bars of Vicenti Alexim’s adroit arrangement of Ennio Morricone’s Il triello. The occasion was Contemporaneous’s appearance at Bard’s Summer Music Festival, the focus of which this year is “Puccini and His World.”

Visionary Magic on a Heroic Scale

Thursday, May 19, 2016, marked the premiere of Dylan Mattingly’s monumental work for piano, Achilles Dreams of Ebbets Field. Three years ago or thereabouts, the vital, fearless pianist Kathleen Supové invited Mattingly to compose a work for piano—anything he wanted, of any length. Could Supové, or even Mattingly himself, outsized dreamer though he is, have predicted just how big it would become?