From June 11-14, 2025, MATA presents its 27th annual MATA Festival, this year in partnership with ISSUE Project Room at the limited capacity 22 Boerum Pl. theater. Featuring four concerts across four nights, this year’s festival explores the concept of INTERGALACTIC INFINITY: Music Between Spaces – music that connects with the diaspora of ancestry and heritage, around ideas of imagination, mysticism, liberation, science fiction, history, fantasy, and technoculture. The New York Times has hailed the MATA Festival as “nondogmatic, even antidogmatic,” while The Wall Street Journal reports that it “tells us a lot about how composers are thinking now.”
This year’s festival opens with Jessie Cox’s evening-length opus Enter the Impossible, written for and performed by the unparalleled Sun Ra Arkestra, with FLUX Quartet and Sam Yulsman. Enter the Impossible is imagined as a space flight, journeying through different musical spaces, including many pieces from Sun Ra Arkestra’s large collection of works, such as “Say” from their recent record Swirling, or the classic Space is the Place, among others. The concert also includes the world premiere of Cox’s “Sound Drape Painting,” inspired by Sam Gilliam’s drape paintings and exploring new ways of hearing musical form and movement through the sonic. Cox explains: “Music as aesthetic experience proposes, or is a site to imagine, ways of spacing – how we come to inhabit and make space and time.” FLUX Quartet will also perform the New York premiere of jazz saxophonist, flutist, composer, poet, and visual artist Oliver Lake’s “One Move” as well as the world premiere of MATA Festival 2025 Early-Career Composer Diallo Banks’ “Sarmad” for string quartet. “Sarmad” is structured around the concept of yati, a principle in South Indian music that shapes musical phrases through systematic variation.
The MATA Festival has been a much-anticipated fixture of the New York and worldwide new music scene since its founding in 1996 by Philip Glass, Eleonor Sandresky, and Lisa Bielawa, who established “Music at the Anthology,” now called MATA, as a means of providing early-career composers a platform for finding community and creating performance opportunities. Nearly 30 years later, MATA still serves as an incubator for adventurous emerging artists experimenting with composition, multi-media, performance art, and every imaginable sound in between. Its annual MATA Festival has become one of the most sought-after opportunities for young and emerging composers.
Curated by MATA Executive Director Pauline Kim Harris, the 2025 MATA Festival features works by 18 composers in the early stages of their professional careers, selected by Harris and a panel of eight esteemed composers and artists – Titilayo Ayangade, Tom Chiu, Felix Fan, John Glover, Conrad Harris, Max Mandel, Paula Matthusen, and Kal Sugatski – from a free, global call resulting in over 300 submissions.
Pauline Kim Harris has crafted four unique concert programs for the Festival that combine the works of these early-career composers with major works by six legendary artists – Jessie Cox, Oliver Lake, George Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, and Reza Vali. The 2025 MATA Festival performers include Sun Ra Arkestra, FLUX Quartet, Ensemble LPR conducted by Tito Muñoz, TROPOS, RE:duo, and the MATA Mavens to include Majel Connery, soprano; Oshay LeGare, baritone; Titilayo Ayangade, cello; Laura Cocks, flutes; Louis Arques, clarinets; Sam Nester, trumpet; Han Chen, piano; Erika Dohi, piano; Paul Kerekes, piano; Sam Yulsman, piano; and Josh Perry, percussion.
Full program information is available at http://www.matafestival.org/mata-festival-2025.
