Stream of Stars

An ensemble of exceptional and passionate young musicians, Contemporaneous is a New York-based ensemble devoted to the promotion of the most exciting music of our up-and-coming generation: energetic and fresh music that describes our world and captures our existence. Stream of Stars, the group’s debut album, consists entirely of world premiere recordings of works written specifically for Contemporaneous by its founding co-artistic director, Dylan Mattingly.

Stream of Stars opens with Atlas of Somewhere on the Way to Howland Island, an epic and beautiful poem for chamber orchestra that is an emotional depiction of Amelia Earhart’s final journey. You can hear Earhart’s journey in the music: her engine revving, crossing the endless blue, a stop in Tahiti, an elegy at the tragic end to the flight. The finale, though, features an incredible build to an overwhelmingly jubilant climax that sends Amelia’s spirit out into the stars. Six Night Sunrise (Music of Barges and Metallic Stars), for violin and piano, is a sonic picture of a single, intimate moment shared between the Pacific and the stars (and you). The last work on the album is Lighthouse (Refugee Music by a Pacific Expatriate), a down-to-Earth yet intricately sophisticated ode to the Pacific Ocean in a unique and riveting joyride for amplified string quintet.

A native of Berkeley, California, Dylan Mattingly (born 1991) has worked with John Adams, Kyle Gann, Joan Tower, and George Tsontakis. Among the performers who have played his music are Symphony Parnassus, Del Sol Quartet, Da Capo Chamber Players, Sarah Cahill, Soovin Kim, Mary Rowell, Geoffrey Burleson, and Other Minds. Upcoming premieres include new works for the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra and Berkeley Symphony. Recently, he was a finalist in Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s “Project 440,” a crowdsourcing commissioning project sponsored by WQXR. Blogger Susan Scheid writes, “by my lights, Dylan Mattingly, young as he is, has, with Atlas [the first work on this album], earned his place in the pantheon of contemporary American composers.”