The MATA Festival returned to LPR this year, with music from April 19 through April 22. Last year's had a problem with order, a collection of good pieces that, when put together by the organizers, conveyed a disappointingly homogenous idea of new music. This year, variety was the thing, and it was refreshing to the ears and the reason for the festival's aesthetic success. I ducked through the doors just as the music began on the 21st, and was truly stunned and delighted to hear the quiet, scattered, focused chattering of Ensemble Pamplemousse. It was the beginning of their exciting and fantastic set, a series of pieces from Rama Gottfried, Natacha Diels, Andrew Greenwald and David Broome. The pieces were different, but they concentrated on similar values and ideas of order; pointillism, active listening and response from all the musicians, controlled binding of seemingly random events into a directed purpose, and especially the sense that anything could happen, even failure. The sound world the music came out of is that of Varèse, Brown, Stockhausen and Helmut Lachenmann. It's a style and concept that bridges the gap between the earliest conscious sounds humans made together and the most up to the moment exploration of musical possibilities. There may be discernable moments of tempo, rhythm, melody and harmony but those are secondary to the qualities of timbre and immediate communication with musical gestures; the briefest note on the violin is answered in the flute, and the space in time between the two looms like a singularity, the event horizon of each sound describing a moment with infinite possibilities, including infinite duration. Details in this music matter so much and are heard so clearly, a pitch held for a fraction of second longer than expected is heavy with meaning, an exhalation of breath is almost erotically moving.

Each of the composers worked within this aesthetic through different means. Diels' Symbiosis II combined strictly notated rhythms with variously specific and generally notated pitches and timbres. It was enthrallingly delicate. On Structure II, by Greenwald, very closely coordinates the instruments of the ensemble while offering them various opportunities of choice in pitch material and timbre in a score that is carefully organized in terms of density of activity through time, with specific moments for pauses. Rama Gottfried's Nest takes those techniques and to them adds sections of temporal freedom for the musicians and tosses in a Max/MSP patch played in a laptop, and David Broome's The Grid is just that, a piece notated as a matrix of boxes, from which the musicians choose different actions to perform. Conceptually and technically, these means are not new, but they are incredibly fruitful and still underexplored and it's exciting to see young composers making their way down this path. All musicians and composers fail while they practice or sketch out ideas, but very few are willing to make music that specifically allows for the opportunity of failure as part of its very structure, and the vivid concentration and relaxation it takes to play works like these kept the audience in rapt attention, waiting for the very next moment, wondering what might happen. And while it's easy to surprise listeners and upend their anticipation, these pieces added the prized quality that everything made sense, and that success was inevitable.

George Grella, The Big City
May 17 2010