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.
Stranger Love’s singular form is inextricable from its beautiful title: the protagonist of the piece is love itself, and the music traces love’s orbit as it widens and grows ever stranger. It is organized in three acts: in the first, we follow a young couple, Tasha and Andre, through a cycle of the seasons, from one spring to the next. Their love blooms in spring, thrives in summer, and encounters threats—doubts, temptations, distance—throughout autumn and winter, before beginning the cycle anew with the “jubilee” of a second spring.
So far, the piece might as well be called Tasha and Andre, but Act Two makes clear that we’re not only following the shared arc of two human lives; we’re following love’s pathways beyond the boundaries of a human relationship, and in this audacious act, love’s orbit unhitches from the human vessels we thought were the main characters. We witness the course of another year, another cycle of the seasons, this time from a more-than-human perspective: Tasha and Andre are absent; the music is mostly instrumental, with occasional wordless contributions from a small vocal ensemble; and the singers are replaced onstage by three pairs of dancers.
In the third act the perspective widens even further: the music is entirely instrumental, and there are no human characters onstage, only (per the creators’ instructions in the score) “a constellation of lights scattered throughout” the performing space. Whatever force is carrying us on its shoulders, this friend or stranger called love, its orbit has enlarged beyond earth’s gravitational field. We seem to be witnessing the love of one shooting star for another.
The acts grow shorter as they expand outward: the first act lasts almost four hours, the second an hour and a quarter, and the third, which sounds as if it were written in a single burst of euphoria, just over twenty minutes. Each act is also arguably written in a different genre: the first act, with its named characters, its sung lines of text, and its traceable storyline, is recognizably an opera; the second act is a kind of ballet; and the third is a symphonic movement, a new ode to joy. We progress steadily from the messy human realm of opera through the increased abstraction of dance into the still more abstracted space of instrumental music, each act and each musical form depicting or enacting love in a new incarnation. Mattingly and Bartscherer have acknowledged Plato’s Symposium as a guiding influence: the first act corresponds to Alcibiades’ speech about love “in a human and personal frame,” the second has a relationship to Aristophanes’ “archetypal account of human love,” and the third is inspired by the vision of divine love that Socrates attributes to the priestess Diotima.
The creators’ inspiration might be Platonic, but their form is recognizably Dantean: a three-part journey from the human realm to a divine one. Dante ends each of the DivinaCommedia’s three canticles with a reference to the stars, and Mattingly has a habit of describing his work the same way: he has called the piece “an ecstatic, impossible celebration of being alive that lasts forever and ends in the stars.”
Dante’s spiral moves upward and is pitilessly hierarchical: the pilgrim’s earlier states of being are disavowed and revealed to be both incomplete and full of sin as he ascends toward supreme beatitude. Mattingly’s love supreme, by contrast, seems to move not upward but outward, toward some unimaginable horizon. Like Dante, he moves from a human frame to an unframable cosmic viewpoint, but his tone is gentler and more democratic. The euphoria of Stranger Love’s third act is not so different from the joy those humble humans experience in Act One: there is a kinship between the giddy, tinkling vibrations that open the piece and the ones that conclude it. The camera has panned to an inconceivably wide angle, and yet by the end, despite the inconceivably wide angle, the human world has not been dismissed or negated.
The work’s form-breaking form could be sustained and made bearable to experience only by Mattingly’s exceptionally beautiful music. The tingling, luminous texture depends on the composer’s use of three pianos, each of which is tuned differently from the others. One is in standard tuning (that is, A440 or A442), another is detuned by a quarter-tone (fifty cents), and a third is tuned down by an even smaller interval, just thirty-one cents. You don’t need to understand the physics of it to enjoy this three-headed keyboard creature’s gleeful shimmer, an effect not of dissonance but of abundance and depth, an embodiment of the possible coexistence of multiple ways of being. It is a cosmic arcade piano, one that sounds like an early Bruce Springsteen song blasting out across a boardwalk and heard from a couple of piers away, the sound gently warped by the warm evening breeze. This is a sound that brims with hope, but it’s also full of distance: the sound of a piano ricocheting off a differently tuned one, then another, seems to be the sound of a single piano calling out across time and space, across generations. This nostalgic distance is constitutive of the sound’s texture and is required to sustain its sense of hopefulness.
Throughout Stranger Love, other musicians—singers, string and wind players—are sometimes asked to bend their pitches in similar ways; at such moments, the ensemble becomes a cheerfully squawking or squabbling ecosystem of sound. The other day I walked by a field and noticed that the intonation of several birds in different trees, peaceably coexisting but each sticking to its own tune, varied by roughly the same micro-intervals as Stranger Love’s pianos.
Mattingly’s work recognizably emerges from multiple strands of American minimalism: Stranger Love contains affectionate nods to Meredith Monk’s lunar syllablescapes and the wild-eyed, gleefully scraggly sixteenth notes of John Adams’s Shaker Loops (1978). But something in me revolts at the notion of associating the word “minimal” with music of such teeming superabundance. Mattingly frequently crafts soundscapes of rhythmic and textural intricacy that are nonetheless fairly stable harmonically. This sets him apart from past minimalists. Many commentators have noted that Adams’s music, starting in roughly the late 1980s, became more complex, by which they generally mean more harmonically varied and less dependent on repetitive rhythmic structures. What’s notable about Mattingly’s music is that he frequently forges textures of dizzying complexity within repetitive rhythmic structures and relative harmonic stasis.
Composers who write operas often face pressure from commissioners to imitate the breathless pacing of a Broadway show; there’s a widespread fear that if the onslaught of event after event ever flags, a new opera might lose the attention of the least engaged, most distracted members of its audience. Mattingly understands, though, that temporal dilation is one of the most potent tools an opera composer can wield and that many of the most cherished moments in the history of the form derive their power from a steady gathering of energy in the preceding minutes or hours. (Think of the brass-crested waves at the end of Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold, which finally break after having stealthily accumulated across nearly three hours.) Sometimes in music, a great expanse of time is required to give full expression to a sensation that in life might last just an instant. In the third scene of Stranger Love’s first act, Tasha and Andre realize that they are helplessly in love. Mattingly summons the vertiginous, falling sensation of new love with a whirling, circular motion in winds, pitched percussion, and his celestial honky-tonk trio of retuned pianistic Muses. This music summons the sensation of being stuck on a merry-go-round that’s spinning too fast after you’ve eaten too much cotton candy, and the composer, mercilessly and correctly, keeps his foot on the gas for an extended duration.
Later in the piece, Mattingly takes audacious risks of pacing in sections of both extreme density and extreme sparseness. There are shockingly lengthy passages of great velocity and rhythmic intricacy, the kind of music that’s delicious to listen to but that might reduce even hardened new-music performers to tears. In the “Spring” section of Act Two, a hilariously difficult passage of vocal hocketing—a ping-pong-like back-and-forth rhythmic pattern passed between singers—is layered across shifting time signatures and repeated for minutes on end. (This seems a little cruel: any rhythmic precision among the singers is likely to disintegrate by the second or third bar.) There are also passages of extended, held-breath stillness. The “Summer” scene of Act Two features more than twenty minutes of languorous, voluptuously dissonant sustained chords in the strings, cut through by the still more pungent plaintiveness of oboe, trumpet, and acutely keening clarinet. It is high summer, we are in a field of tall grasses and choiring insects, and our multifarious protagonist, love, now takes the form of the sun, whose power we experience from the perspective of the field warmed by its inexorable radiance.
The one significant flaw of Stranger Love is the text of the sections spoken in Act One by a narrator called Uriel. I sympathize with the creators’ decision to communicate indispensable narrative information through speech rather than song: Mattingly’s rhapsodic musical idiom possesses no conversational register; there’s no equivalent to the wry tenderness of Mozartean recitative or Kurt Weill’s world-weary Sprechstimme. The trouble is not with the presence of spoken material but with its tone. In the opera’s first scene, Bartscherer’s introduction of the main characters makes them sound pretty insufferable:
We begin at a garden party. Tasha is a novelist who’s had considerable success with her first book. Andre is a theologian and a doctoral candidate known for his dedication to the spirit of skepticism.
Subsequent spoken sections are studded with oddly pedantic references to writers both ancient and modern: Anne Carson, Octavio Paz, Ovid. (“The Latin poet Ovid, who wrote a famous book about love, wrote an even more famous book about how everything changes.”) I admire these artists, but I winced every time they were referenced; even the sound of their names felt intrusive and dissonant, like a piercing rush of feedback from a mic or King Marke bursting in on the lovers’ sanctuary in Tristan und Isolde. Mattingly has created a luminous, self-sufficient musical world, and these fusty if mercifully brief spoken interludes ought to be rewritten so that they no longer break the music’s spell.
At the intermissions of Stranger Love’s one performance, a consensus formed among the Disney Hall concertgoers—the kind of consensus that can’t be trusted, based as it is on a piece’s most obvious qualities as well as on listeners’ desire to find common ground; intermission conversations tend to coagulate into a cautious centrism. In this case, the consensus was: this is a very interesting piece, to be sure, but it’s much too long. I disagreed. When Stranger Love finally reached the other shore of its six-hour odyssey, I yearned for it to keep going.
There are currently no plans for the piece to be performed in public again, and other than brief excerpts, no recording is available. Our world is a mess, and Stranger Love might be too good for it.
What is a composer supposed to do after writing a work whose bonkers ambition rivals the most preposterous acts of opera making in recent history, a work that can be mentioned in the same breath as Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Licht cycle? Some composers might lie fallow for a few years, or they might dash off a few little piano mazurkas, the kind of thing they could hand to a friend and hear performed a month later.
But that’s not Mattingly’s way. In 2017, shortly after putting the final touches on Stranger Love, he and Bartscherer began dreaming up their next musical cosmos, History of Life, another six-hour work of music theater. This piece sets the ambitious goal of weaving the tale of the aged Odysseus’s journey home, the explorations of Charles Darwin, and the story of an adolescent girl on the Cape Verdean island of Santiago in the nineteenth century “into an enormous musical tapestry that comes to encompass the whole bewildering narrative of organic life on Earth.”
Stranger Love has been performed just once, but there hasn’t been even a single complete performance of History of Life. However, Mattingly has quieted his inner completist and created a roughly hour-long suite of music derived from it, which he calls The Transmutation Notebooks;the name comes from the journals in which Darwin sketched his theory of evolution. The Wild Heart includes this suite, together with Sunt Lacrimae Rerum (2020), a piece for two harps and two retuned pianos.
Though the continuity between Stranger Love and these more recent works is instantly apparent—the extended, sunny major-key textures, refreshingly carbonated by unconventionally tuned pianos—there are also subtle differences. A clue to this evolution might be found in Mattingly’s program note of Sunt Lacrimae Rerum, which was composed in the fall of 2020, in the aftermath of “the day the sun never came up” in the San Francisco Bay Area, a day kept chokingly dark by wildfire smoke. Even before those wildfires, 2020 had already been a crushing, airless year, and Mattingly decided that rather than give voice to the world’s all-too-obvious misery, he would seek to write “music for dancing, the barbaric yawp, a scream of joy.”
In one sense, this was nothing new for him: Stranger Love is among the most joyful pieces I know. But the joy of Stranger Love (which was composed between 2012 and 2017) bubbles up, effloresces, blooms into being with perfect naturalness. The music on The Wild Heart, written during the first Trump presidency and the Covid pandemic, bespeaks a different kind of joy, a joy clung to and retrenched into with effortful defiance, a joy that willfully refuses everything that isn’t joy, a joy that verges on desperation.
The phrase “sunt lacrimae rerum” is drawn from the passage in the first book of Virgil’s Aeneid in which Aeneas, newly arrived in Carthage after fleeing the devastated Troy, encounters an artistic depiction (either a painting or a frieze) of the war he has just escaped. His life, already rendered into art, has preceded him. He is intensely moved and breaks into tears as he addresses his friend Achates. This little phrase has confounded and divided translators for centuries, since it contains two ambiguities: “sunt” can mean “there are” or “they are” or “these are,” and “rerum” can mean either “of things” or “for things.” A literal rendering would be something like “these are the tears of things” or “there are tears of things,” but Robert Fagles opted for “the world is a world of tears”; Robert Fitzgerald rendered it “they weep here/For how the world goes,” while John Dryden and other translators ignored the phrase altogether. Pope Francis, however, in an encyclical published the same year that Mattingly wrote Sunt Lacrimae Rerum, summoned these words as an image of the planet’s sorrow at the abuses it has suffered at human hands: “The world is itself crying out in rebellion. We are reminded of the well-known verse of the poet Virgil that evokes the ‘tears of things,’ the misfortunes of life and history.”
Mattingly, unsurprisingly, has a sunnier reading: “These are not tears of sorrow—or at least not sorrow alone. These are the tears of everything, of the everythingness present in each moment.” I read the phrase as Virgil’s quiet aesthetic manifesto, a definition of art itself. Aeneas speaks these words as he observes an artistic rendering of his life, and what he says is that these—the images before him—are the tears of things, the tears of matter. The beautiful implication is that the carvings on a temple or the paint on a cave wall might be the stone’s lachrymal exhalation, a transmutation of matter into a form that, while still material, stands one degree closer to spirit, like a first pressing of olives into oil.
Mattingly’s Sunt Lacrimae Rerum begins with a gentle, twinkling fanfare, like some beneficent monk beaming and bowing as she welcomes us into the piece’s precincts. The music soon leaps into a fast, much-repeated groove that reveals Sunt LacrimaeRerum to be a gleaming shard cast out of the same fire that forged Stranger Love. The two harps are in standard, equal-temperament tuning, but the two pianos are retuned in subtle, nuanced ways, so—just as in Stranger Love—three separate intonation systems are present at any given moment. This piece, whose composition began in a week with no sun, is a welcome bottling up of sunshine. And thanks to its spare but quintessentially Mattinglyesque instrumentation, it serves as a good introduction for newcomers to his music’s essential materials.
I have caught glimpses of History of Life whenever it’s been possible: a relatively brief excerpt at Roulette, in Brooklyn, in 2022; an outdoor performance of the first act at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in 2024; and a private performance of selected excerpts last year in New York City. My sense, from these performances as well as the music on The Wild Heart, is that History of Life is a gentler, softer-textured, less aesthetically ambitious and less internally varied work than Stranger Love. It is hugely pleasurable to experience but not overwhelming; it is familiar and comforting rather than revelatory.
Given the rhapsodic, everything-all-at-once language with which Mattingly is inclined to discuss his music, it can be hard to distinguish one piece’s aesthetic aims from another’s. But a close look at Mattingly and Bartscherer’s program note for History of Life reveals noticeable differences from their earlier creation: the later piece is described as
a folk revival, a rock concert, a communal feast, and a meditation on all that has lived and all that has died in this world…. More than just a performance, History of Life is a celebration—like a wedding or a wake.
I think we should take that description at face value. This is celebratory music, music that’s ideally suited for an outdoor festival with campfires blazing and plenty of room for everyone to dance.
The Transmutation Notebooks, the suite derived from History of Life, opens with “Ulysses Dances,” a movement that displays the improbably intense voltage Mattingly can wring from a melody that traverses just three notes. The second movement, “Notes for Another Life,” features a prime example of rhythmic intricacy within harmonic stasis: early on, in a gentle and unambiguous G-major harmony, a harp, two vibraphones, two guitars, and a mandolin divide each 4/4 bar into increments of twelve, fourteen, eleven, eight, ten, and nine respectively; the cumulative effect is a tender, incalculable shimmer. The suite’s highlight might be its third movement, “The History of Life in Reverse,” which fulfills the promise of its title by elaborating a simple, chiming piano figure into ever more infinitesimally detailed textural worlds: we seem to be staring backward through evolution, tracing a folk tune (a few minutes in, by which I mean a few thousand years back, we encounter the bardic thrumming of a Homeric harp) as it steadily dissolves into a musical image of billions of tiny, wriggling aquatic beings, our most distant ancestors. In the movement’s final minutes, we stare into the dazzling, blinding plenitude of the ocean.
In addition to asserting that the piece is, at heart, a kind of rock concert, the creators of History of Life make the grander claim that it “bears witness to the vast, beautiful, violent, many-voiced history of life on Earth.” With this in mind, it’s a little surprising that it seems considerably milder than their previous creation, whose subject was love. In that work, Mattingly thrillingly dared to musicalize even the bleakest incarnations of love’s power: the desolate periods when love seems to be far away, occluded, on the dark side of the moon. But though Mattingly and Bartscherer’s description of History of Life gestures at the reality of violence and suffering, they don’t seem to reckon with much violence, darkness, or difficulty in the piece itself, which feels (based on the substantial portions that I’ve heard) like an admittedly awesome extended jam session. And though they point to life’s polyvocality, the one voice that consistently shines through is Mattingly’s irrepressibly cheerful one; the counterpart to joy, in this work, is not darkness or a confrontation with life’s injustices but rather a gentle, melancholy tenderness. This would be fine in many cases, but it’s a problem in a piece whose title and stated aims could hardly be more capacious.
It might be argued that, just as love is the protagonist of Stranger Love, life itself is the protagonist of History of Life, and that from life’s perspective, the sufferings and deaths of innumerable individual beings aren’t especially painful. This seems, however, like a risky perspective for an artist to assume, one that could easily turn inhumane. When exactly does a relishing of the best of life turn into complacency? When might advocacy for joy tilt into a joy addiction?
But Mattingly has plenty of time to explore once again the full spectrum of human and musical experience. He remains blessedly unwilling to climb into any prefabricated box, and for this reason, his generous, virtuosically impractical work is unlikely to find a regular home—for now—at the world’s opera houses or symphony orchestras. But it is out there for those willing to find it. And Mattingly is one of those rare artists who are willing to forge ahead, then stop somewhere waiting for you.