The annual Music at the Anthology (MATA) Festival connects courageous composers and listeners through daring works from the global compositional community. Since Lisa Bielawa, Eleonor Sandresky, and Philip Glass founded the festival in 1996, the New York City staple has evolved to not only offer composers a flexible platform but also attract an audience bold enough to trade sonic risk for the reward of fresh perspective. MATA’s annual call for scores attracted 400 submissions from around the world, and from those selected, Executive Director Pauline Kim Harris curated four evenings of INTERGALACTIC INFINITY concerts.
Space, says Kim Harris, connects all of us. The festival’s INTERGALACTIC INFINITY: Music Between Spaces theme—encouraging sequined or metallic attire and allusions to film scores—provided a flexible and fun entry point for MATA’s eclectic audience and brought buoyant cohesion to a wide-ranging program. Previous MATA festivals attempted this coherence through lengthy printed programs or a comedian emcee; this year struck the perfect balance. Hosts Bruce Hodges and Steve Smith offered outstanding performances that deserve critical acclaim, guiding the audience through each piece, live composer interview, and digital program notes with humorous expertise.
The sold-out 2025 festival, presented in partnership with the stunningly beautiful and resonant ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn, started with the unparalleled nineteen-piece Sun Ra Arkestra, directed by NEA Jazz Master Marshall Allen. Composer Jessie Cox, commissioned by the Paul Fromm Foundation to write for the group, said that his first encounter with their voluminous energy scared him for a year. But he couldn’t escape the pull of iconic Afrofuturism and raucous joy: Enter the Impossible (2023) features Cox’s original work in conversation with Arkestra’s legendary pieces, trampling cynicism with a stampede of brilliant call-and-response, peaceful nods to sound bath and sacred meditation sounds, and an extended electronic valve instrument (EVI) MIDI solo to honor an Arkestra bandmate’s 101st birthday. Jessie Cox’s incorporation of the Sun Ra Arkestra’s classic “Space is the Place!” coexisted with his Sound Drape Painting (2025) world premiere. Inspired by artist Sam Gilliam’s drape paintings, the piece created a sense of textured spatial depth through paper against a drumhead and sympathetic resonance in a slightly detuned string quartet.
With the phenomenal FLUX Quartet on hand to perform each night, string quartets appropriately anchored the festival. Diallo Banks’ Sarmad for String Quartet (2025) created the sense of an expanded shruti box, enveloping the audience in meditative and varied textures of drone viola, gentle gong, and low supportive Hammond organ. Roscoe Mitchell’s 9/9/99 with Cards for String Quartet (2009/2011, Rev. 2021) is a notated card game that elicits improvisation and randomness from musicians who aren’t typically improvisers. FLUX Quartet shaped every small texture and idea with panache, concluding with a furious crescendo of fiddling. They brought that same precision to Petra Strahovnik’s Attack (2023), which mimics the assault of chronic pain from Long Covid through unceasing unison downbow attacks. Contrasting seven works by early career composers, George Lewis’ first string quartet String Quartet 1.5, “Experiments in Living” (2016) was the final program’s centerpiece.
FLUX Quartet also gave the world premiere of Salmak (String Quartet No. 6) (2023), Reza Vali’s tribute to the renowned 13th-century Persian music theorist and composer Safi al-Din Ormavi. Six movements alternate between Ormavi’s maqam modal tradition and contemporary Dastgâh modes, conjuring the timeless power of Persian traditions. No piece evoked benevolent ghosts—Steve Smith’s description of the room’s stellar acoustics—more than Vali’s haunting fifth movement before antiquity blazed into the final movement with a euphoric and high-frequency dance quartet in maqam modes. Another dialogue between past and present, Anuj Bhutani’s On Letting Go for Solo Cello and Electronics (2020) takes its name from Ancient Greek thinker Heraclitus’ philosophy, but electronic and emo/screamo influences allow for deep bass drops and the occasional accelerando into nothingness. Bhutani’s recently expanded composition allowed cellist Tyler J. Borden to journey through subtle variations with an exquisite sensitivity to local resonance, mirroring the changes in our inner and outer lives.
The festival featured an astonishing 18 early-career composers. That excellent label recognizes artistry regardless of career longevity, and Iranian composer Negar Soleymanifar exemplifies early-career contributions to her field. Her Prelude to the Ashes for Cello and Narrator (2023) is a poetic, lightly dramatized story of grief and getting unstuck. Kneeling on the floor, Soleymanifar narrated the central portion in Persian, underscored by Borden’s sensitive cello playing, before going offstage for an English translation that remained somewhat buried under the cello’s elegant expressions of pain.
Several works featured solo instruments to great effect. Anna Meadors performed her world premiere Encircle, Recirculate for Saxophone and No-Input Mixer (2025), creating gentle feedback loops that augmented a nostalgic saxophone atmosphere. FLUX Quartet founder Tom Chiu presented Brian Mark’s cosmic meditation Per Aspera Ad Astra for Solo Violin and Digital Delay Processing Pedal with Video (2020), accompanied by galactic video, and FLUX member Conrad Harris shredded Jee Seo’s crowd-pleaser On Fever II for Solo Violin (2017). Katie Porter gave Rodrigo Espino’s Responso el en Vacío for Contrabass Clarinet (2023) a staggeringly powerful world premiere, somehow accessing our deepest longings through gut-wrenching breaths, howls, and tubular rumbles of music.
All but 4 pieces on the festival were composed within the past 5 years, and pandemic experiences hovered throughout the compositions. Covid-19 can already feel like a stagnant memory. How can something so catastrophic fade so quickly? These compositions offered the audience a variety of containers to process. Kevin Ramsay’s Golden Euphorics for alto flute, Cb clarinet, piccolo A Trumpet, Violin, Cello, Piano, and Baritone (2023), originally commissioned for a house of worship, draws on his Covid hospitalization fever dreams for modern Psalms of justice: Deliver us, O Lord, that we may turn this river of blood into lava and flood these fools / Say less… God. / In the midst of madmen, say less.
Paul Novak’s stunning fantasia Seven Dreams About My Body for Microtonal Sextet (2024) offers the most poignant pandemic reflection possible, conjuring spirits of Ravel orchestration and a frustrated, beautiful, and occasionally raging need to find oneself again. In lighthearted contrast, Giordano Bruno do Nascimento’s “Vis – à – Vis (a) for 3 Performers and One Grand Piano, 3 Toms and Credit Cards” (2020) is a theatrical and hilariously exasperated treatment of social distancing restrictions and canceled contracts. Three pianists rotate through distanced playing on the keyboard and pluck the strings with credit cards, sounding like an enormous hammer dulcimer, before collapsing.
New technologies appeared alongside formal experiments. Inga Chinilina’s Shock Workers (2024) pitted saxophonist Wilson Poffenberger and violist Elsie Bae Han of RE:duo against a randomized set of motors hitting a snare drum and competing rhythmically. Despite the reference to Communist production strategies and inhumane competition, Poffenberger and Bae Han’s humanity still triumphed through playing that created a beautiful and cooperative interaction with the machine. Kylan Hillman applied his DataCrasher stutter effect program and nontraditional picking objects in Methods of Crunching for Electric Guitar (2024) to rock out. Nina Fukuoka’s stellar standout work, Polka is a Czech Dance for Flutes, Clarinets, Cello, Percussion, Piano, with Video (2023), combines her trilingual background, video game music, and love of B-horror camp into an unforgettable portrait of contemporary life. Careening through AI-generated videos of customer service call centers, sushi-roller commercials, and nature, Fukuoka’s instrumentation inclusion of crotales and candy Pop Rocks-sounds captures the bizarre and foreboding realities of our modern relationships to self, technology, and nature.
In an interview last year with Lauren Ishida at her appointment as MATA’s new Executive Director, Pauline Kim Harris said that her priorities emphasize creating connections through the discovery of new talent and sounds. That many composers attended extra performances in addition to their featured works, and that people were cheerfully divulging their backgrounds at intermission testifies to Kim Harris’ successful dedication to this vision. In addition to familiar faces from contemporary music, the audience included people who teach meditation, nanny, consult, and support BIPOC authors with no affiliation to music other than an experimental spirit. MATA succeeds as a place for compositional experimentation and fresh camaraderie among those open to expansive experiences.
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