United States Various, ‘Interval: In Between Silence and Stasis’: MATA Festival, BlackBox Ensemble / Leonard Bopp (conductor). Dimenna Center, New York, 23.5.2026. (DS)
Since 1996, the MATA Festival, founded by Philip Glass, Eleonor Sandresky and Lisa Bielawa, has been a mainstay in the world of emerging composers. MATA remains true to its original purpose: providing an opportunity for young composers to have a place to perform their works in an environment that releases the guardrails of artistic rigidity – a rare find in the current music world of New York City.
That doesn’t mean the festival lacks a focus. Every year, the composers that are chosen must meet over a theme, idea or influence. For this year’s festival, the work of Morton Feldman on his 100th anniversary was the beating heart of the four days of performances.
I was present for the last evening, ‘Local Music’ – in the sense that Feldman meant it. Composers explored isolated, quiet sounds, spending time in the locality of a vibration or pitch. As in Gillian Rae Perry’s A Place in Between, sonorous pitches seemed to hover around the mallets gracefully handled by percussionist J. Clancy. Floriana Provenzano’s work for stringed oil barrel, cello, piccolo and clarinet sounded nothing like what you would expect of those instruments. Instead, they became tools to deliver ever diminishing squeaks, crackles and drones. Panopticon by Jessica Shand also ventured skillfully into the space of barely sonorous while musicians took turns, reacted and sometimes smoothly layered onto each other with jolts, flourishes or drawn-out lines.
Lailah Arafah’s Local Paths – for cello, violin, flute and clarinet – stood out as one of the more concise compositions with a clear structure of material set in complex dialogue. Starting like a flutter of memories from the flute, it continued as an examination of the locality around texture: silence against flurries of accented material or expressions of antithesis with space between lengthy notes set against clusters of miniscule sounds.
Shifting more into conceptual sound art, Kristupas Bubnelis’s instrumental ensemble piece Please Leave Your Message after the Tone (a title that hints cunningly at the distance sound can cover) explored the ideas of spatial distance represented by sound along with the robust shaping that sound can seemingly create for our senses, despite it lacking a visual component. The work effectively verged on the tactile though it fell into the trap of allowing the ebbs and flows of sonic material to last a bit too long – lengthening time to isolate sounds really only works well in highly calculated duration.
The last composer of the evening was Erich Barganier. Inspired by Feldman’s 3 Voices, his Clocks as Mandalas as Labyrinths developed a mesmerizing landscape of material around the motif of a clock ticking – instrumentation would fall behind the clock, in line with it or extend beyond the ticking. One ephemeral and atmospheric section seemed to hover without time, and yet the work had a faster tempo than other compositions that evening which opened the concept of isolation in new ways – that is, it does not have to be slow.
But slow it must go with Morton Feldman. The musicians of the BlackBox Ensemble performed two of his works, mid-program, with exceptional sensitivity and artistic integrity. Conductor Leonard Bopp demonstrated a keen insight into balancing out the miniature and quietly exclamatory emergence of sound that permeates Feldman’s works. The ensemble excelled at pulling out the modular developments underlying For Frank O’Hara. It suddenly ends, as if sucked into silence. Their performance of I Met Heine on the Rue Fürstenberg was equally contemplative with hints of the humorous as notes seem to fall against each other before scattering, once again, into their own localities.
Daniele Sahr
Gillian Rae Perry – A Place in Between
Floriana Provenzano – I Am Never Anywhere / Anywhere I Go
Laila Arafah – Local Paths
Morton Feldman – For Frank O’Hara; I Met Heine on the Rue Fürstenberg
Kristupas Bubnelis and Elias P. Brown (Electronics) – Please Leave Your Message After the Tone
Jessica Shand – Panopticon
Erich Barganier – Clocks as Mandalas as Labyrinths