Out & About
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The street outside the Paula Cooper Gallery was dark and deserted Tuesday night, giving no indication of the vibrant, sometimes loud, sometimes quiet, all joyous activity inside.
Sixteen composers and musicians performed for an audience of 200 guests who had come to the gallery to raise money for Music at the Anthology Inc., a nonprofit founded in 1996 by Philip Glass, Eleanor Sandresky, and Lisa Bielawa to present and commission works by young composers from around the world.
In its 10 years, MATA has commissioned 39 works and presented more than 120 performances, primarily through the annual weeklong festival it holds each spring. This year’s will take place March 30–April 5 at the Brooklyn Lyceum. (It was originally held at the Anthology Film Center, which is how it got its name).
The concert was a revelation for those familiar with new music as well as for the uninitiated. Pianist Jenny Lin performed the playful “East Broadway,” a piece written for toy piano, by composer Julia Wolfe, who was a co-founder of the music collective Bang on a Can. Lukas Ligeti — the son of the Austro-Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti — performed a work he composed, “Great Circle’s Tune,” that included dozens of electronic percussion sounds.
Then came the melodic, soulful “Hip-Hop Study and Etude in F Minor,” played on violin by its composer, Daniel Bernard Roumain, who was accompanied by Wynne Bennett on piano. Other works on the program included: “Thracian Sketches” for solo clarinet by Derek Bermel; excerpts from “Kafka Songs” by Ms. Bielawa, and “The Manufacture of the Tangled Ivory, Part II” by Annie Gosfield.
The performers’ biographies in the event’s printed program offered a sense of the diversity of talent MATA presents under the direction of executive director Missy Mazzoli and artistic director Christopher McIntyre. For example, Carla Kihlstedt is a violinist, singer, and composer who founded the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, a group of musicians opposed to rock music; she has recently collaborated on “Necessary Monsters,” a song cycle based on “The Book of Imaginary Beings” by Jorge Luis Borges.
Vocalist Theo Bleckmann — whose partner, Preston Bailey, is a celebrity wedding planner — performs in Meredith Monk’s vocal ensemble and has recorded an album of show tunes, “Las Vegas Rhapsody,” as well as an album of songs about love and war, “Berlin.”
The audience for this sound pageant included Mr. Glass, the president of MATA’s board, Jim Rosenfield, and Mr. Bailey, who is working on weddings in Africa and the Middle East and recalled playing the piano as a child in his Baptist church.
While applause was consistently enthusiastic, the MATA board believes that the point of the organization is not necessarily to please crowds.
“If you love everything, MATA is doing something wrong,” board member Ellen Hughes told The New York Sun.
agordon@nysun.com