IN SHORT
Kaatsbaan Cultural Park’s 2024 Festival & Contemporaneous present an early look at Act 1 of an upcoming work entitled History of Life by composer Dylan Mattingly and writer Thomas Bartscherer. A new epic, History of Life is a wild, enthralling 6-hour musical event — 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 — that bears witness to the vast, beautiful, violent, manyvoiced history of life on Earth. The performance at Kaatsbaan Festival 2024 will feature vocalist Isaiah Robinson.
MORE ABOUT THE PROJECT
A new epic, History of Life is a wild, enthralling 6-hour musical event — 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 — that bears witness to the vast, beautiful, violent, manyvoiced history of life on Earth. Through music and words, in story and song, History of Life offers the rare opportunity to abide in wonder and to look upon the world as though seeing it for the first time.
In History of Life, acclaimed Irish vocalist Iarla Ó Lionáird (The Gloaming) resurrects the role of the Homeric bard. As both singer and storyteller, he embodies an imagined tradition of oral epic, as if it had evolved continuously over 2700 years, from the time of Homer to the present, incorporating new stories and new sounds with every retelling. Beginning with the Odyssey and exploding out in all directions, History of Life weaves together three central stories — Odysseus’s long journey home as an older man; Charles Darwin setting out as a young naturalist on the HMS Beagle; and the coming of age of Luzia, a girl born on the Cabo Verdean island of Santiago in the first half of the 19th century — into an enormous musical tapestry that comes to encompass the whole bewildering narrative of organic life on Earth.
Ó Lionáird, himself the bearer of the long tradition of Irish sean-nós singing, is joined by a band of twelve musicians, playing an array of instruments that includes two hurdy-gurdies, two re-tuned upright pianos, two guitars, re-tuned harp, toy piano, harmonium, mandolin, strings, and percussion. A group of six fellow-travelers, like the regulars in a pub, host the evening, sharing the space with the audience, humming along or breaking into dance, taking in the music as though they’ve known it all their lives: they create the world in which History of Life is received. Over the course of three acts and two intermissions, the Regulars, the audience, and all the performers share a meal.
Sung and spoken in over a dozen languages, including English, ancient Greek, Old Provençal, Dante’s Tuscan, Cape Verdean Creole, and Irish, History of Life draws on folk traditions both real and imagined to create a sound that is altogether new and yet strangely and deeply familiar. It offers a vision of what is beyond our capacity to imagine: the vastness of history, seen not only as a succession of dates and names, of monarchs and empires and extinctions, but as the superabundant multitude of singular moments of experience — the near-infinite seconds of yearning and hunger and love and anger and wonder, the sheer vitality of every person and animal and plant that has ever lived. Minimalist in form and maximalist in content, by turns exuberant and meditative, majestic and tender, History of Life feels like both an age-old ritual and something entirely unlike anything else.
About Dylan Mattingly & Thomas Bartscherer
Dylan Mattingly is a composer who creates music which offers ecstatic, transformative experience and provides an opportunity to alter the way we see our world and place within it. Many of Mattingly’s projects exist on a massive scale, the results of a dedication to the pursuit of bringing to life the most meaningful projects in the wild reaches of imagination — wherever that path leads — and building a path for the realization of these dreamworks from the ground up, often across many years. This practice was informed by the decade-long process of creating, developing, and bringing to life Stranger Love, an ecstatic 6-hour durational opera, which offers a grand celebration of being alive, which premiered on May 20, 2023 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, commissioned by the LA Phil and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. At the heart of all of Mattingly’s work is a commitment to joy, and to what Hannah Arendt refers to as amor mundi — an ever-renewing quest to find the capacity to love the world, in the complex totality of its experience.
Thomas Bartscherer is the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard. His interests include literature and philosophy in antiquity, the reception of ancient motifs in modern and contemporary culture, and the history and practice of liberal education. He also writes for performance: Stranger Love, an opera he created with composer Dylan Mattingly, will premiere in Los Angeles in 2023. He is the editor of Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Arts and Humanities; Erotikon: Essay on Eros, Ancient and Modern; and When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory and Practice (forthcoming). He is currently editing the new critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind. Prof. Bartscherer studied at University of Chicago (PhD) and has held fellowships at the École Normale in Paris and the University of Heidelberg and visiting positions as Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University and as Senior Fellow at the Freie Universität’s Center for Advanced Film Studies.
This performance is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs.
