NEW MUSIC SERIES, EVERY THURSDAY
6-10 sliding scale donation, no one refused for lack of funds
8pm Wade Matthews solo
9pm Wade Matthews plus guests tba
American improviser, composer and author, Wade Matthews, has been living in Madrid, Spain, since 1989. Besides his solo concerts, he performs in duo with Toulouse-based dancer Valrie Mtivier and with Norwegian percussionist, Ingar Zach, as well as one-offs with innumerable improvisers in concerts and festivals throughout the world (New York, Paris, Madrid, London, Berlin, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Beirut, Montevideo, Los Angeles, Oslo, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Toulouse, etc.). Recent activities include two performances at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the Annual Festival of the International Society for Computer Music, and at the Reina Sofa Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid.
Electronic music influences all of his work, including his purely acoustic use of woodwinds, which he
approaches as acoustic synthesizers, emphasizing the nature of sound as matter unto itself rather than as simply material from which to generate phrases. He is especially interested in the permeability of sound and sonic discourse to its surroundings and has extensively explored numerous aspects of site-specific improvisation, both musically and in his essays. His electronic work is generated purely through the use of synthesis, with no recourse to sampling, a decision based not so much on aesthetic criteria as on a particular sense of how he wants musical process to interface with instrumental praxis.
Matthews
earned his Doctor of Musical Arts from Columbia University in New York, where he studied composition and electronic music with Mario Davidovsky, writing his dissertation on improvisation guided by electronic sounds. Previous studies include woodwinds with Joe Allard at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. In 2003 he received a commission from the French Government (Commande d’Etat) to create a work exploring the possible relations between acoustic instruments and various techniques of phonography. The work, titled Lieux, was premiered at the festival Rencontres de Musique et Quotidien Sonor in southern France in May, 2004.