Sun-Drenched Music
Matthew Aucoin on Dylan Mattingly
In our summer issue, Matthew Aucoin writes about the orchestral composer Dylan Mattingly, a thirty-five-year-old “whose career might be thought of as a radical experiment in doing precisely the opposite of what would help a young composer secure a footing in the world of contemporary music.” And yet, Aucoin continues:
his commitment to impractical and borderline impossible projects has proved more than worthwhile. He has summoned into being a region of musical experience that’s all his own, a welcoming, abundant, sun-drenched landscape that teems with tinkling, deliriously retuned pianos and raucous grooves that last long enough to offer a taste of infinity.
Below, alongside Aucoin’s essay, are five articles from our recent archives about contemporary composers.
A Taste of Infinity
Matthew Aucoin
Practical advice can be bad for the soul of an artist. And if you happen to be a composer of orchestral music or operas, you have chosen the most impractical of professions: the art you practice is among the world’s least commercially viable. You surely ended up on this path that is no path because early in life you had a transformative experience with music by some artist who impractically, improbably managed to create a transcendent communal experience out of pure sound.
And yet, throughout your years of musical training, you will be beset by reasonable, well-intentioned, utterly depressing advice that, if you heed it, will deflate your artistry and make your music sad and small. Every composer has encountered this kind of counsel, which can metamorphose into an insidiously persuasive inner voice: Make sure you write a nice short orchestral piece as a calling card. You know, a quick little fanfare, the kind of thing that’ll get played a lot, that can be squeezed in before the concerto in the first half of a concert. See if you can give it a topical title. Don’t make it too hard. Don’t make it too dissonant—but careful, don’t make it thoroughly consonant either. Come to think of it, don’t make it too anything.
Among my composer colleagues, one of the few who has steadfastly refused to heed this terrible little voice is Dylan Mattingly, whose career might be thought of as a radical experiment in doing precisely the opposite of what would help a young composer secure a footing in the world of contemporary music. Mattingly, who was born in 1991, spent much of his twenties at work on a single six-hour music theater piece called Stranger Love, which he completed in 2017 but which was not performed in its entirety until 2023. His follow-up to that piece was another six-hour work, titled History of Life. The ludicrous scale of his music and the intense demands it places on musicians ensure that Mattingly sightings on concert programs remain infrequent.
And yet I think that his commitment to impractical and borderline impossible projects has proved more than worthwhile. He has summoned into being a region of musical experience that’s all his own, a welcoming, abundant, sun-drenched landscape that teems with tinkling, deliriously retuned pianos and raucous grooves that last long enough to offer a taste of infinity. A new album called The Wild Heart offers a slice—though admittedly only a small, frustratingly incomplete sampling—of this Whitmanic artist’s fertile, dazzling world within the world.
Stranger Love could be thought of as an opera, though even that all-embracing term feels insufficient for its scope. It might be more accurate to say it’s an opera, a ballet, and a utopian symphonic work wrapped into one. The piece features a libretto by Thomas Bartscherer; its concept is jointly credited to him and Mattingly. The full work has been performed only once, on May 20, 2023, at Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, in a production directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. Though that performance was produced (and the work commissioned) by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the ensemble that performed, indefatigably, was Contemporaneous, the new-music group that Mattingly helped found as a student at Bard. His cofounder, David Bloom, conducted with the practically superhuman energy, precision, and generosity of spirit that the work demands.
That performance of Stranger Love remains one of the three or four happiest experiences I have ever had in a concert hall. It prompted an ecstasy comparable to the sensation I had at fifteen seeing Radiohead live for the first time. Mattingly’s achievement might be even more impressive than that of Thom Yorke & Co., since those neurons of total, self-nullifying musical pleasure don’t fire as readily in my thirties as they did when I was a teenager.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
From the Archives: Contemporary Cool
Philip Clark on Liza Lim’s archaic avant-garde music (2026)
Adam Shatz on Henry Threadgill’s search for new systems of composition (2023)
Matthew Aucoin on how Thomas Adés breaks the rules (2021)
Ted Reichman on Haley Fohr’s haunting voice (2018)
Francine Prose on a David Lang opera inspired by a Thomas Bernhard novel (2016)
