Recital: Emmett Mathison '22, Contemporary Improvisation

NEC: Burnes Hall | Directions

255 St. Botolph St.
Boston, MA
United States

NEC's students meet one-on-one each week with a faculty artist to perfect their craft. As each one leaves NEC to make their mark in the performance world, they present a full, professional recital that is free and open to the public. It's your first look at the artists of tomorrow.

Emmett Mathison '22 studies Contemporary Improvisation and has worked with John Mallia and Efstratios Minakakis.

This performance is open to in-person audiences, and can also be viewed via livestream.

Watch Livestream from Burnes Hall

Artists

  1. Emmett Mathison | Bona Dea, for Human Voice and Cyborg

    voice:
    Anna Abondolo
    Chihiro Asano
    Litha Ashforth
    Delfina Cheb Terrab
    Zion Dyson
    Heather Milberger
    Sahana Narayanan
    Katie Purcell
    Anneke Stern
    Kathleen Wallace
    Madeleine Weigers
    Yifei Zhou

     

    Program note

    “All that is unhuman is not un-kind” – Donna Haraway

    Bona Dea is a vocal work introducing the kypsekardia, a device which sends one person’s heartbeat into another person’s chest. Each singer receives the heartbeat of the person across from them via haptic feedback; this pulse is their “metronome mark”. Discrete organisms become a hybrid unit, a distinct somatic module. Their union is not symbolic, but corporeal and audible. The human-relational paradigm enabled by the union of one heartbeat and another catalyzes the synthesis of a new organism through which to transmit sound. Bona Dea embraces the model of the cyborg. The cyborg contains its opposite within itself. It is a living-and-dying-sleeping-and-waking-producing-and-decomposing embrace of signal and sunlight. Bona Dea is a cyborg networked by kypsekardia. The contours of the noosphere, our global cyborg, are becoming more and more rigid, more prone to the “nature-culture” conceptual binaries that resist emergent intelligence. But the human is neither isolated nor distinct from the world which seems to stand around it. It is a biotic component among components, a tektologic feedback orgy. Bona Dea imagines new models for a minded planetarity: becoming our machines and each other under the sun of the Late Holocene, hearing each other's thoughts, singing songs with a lichen.

    Immortality for all among the stars!

  2.  

    Thank you to my parents and my sister,
    who raised me and flew in from Los Angeles to be here today;

    to my friends, who inspire me;

    to my composition teachers, John Mallia and Stratis Minakakis,
    and to Seth Osburn, my first piano teacher.

    Thank you Anna, Chihiro, Litha, Delfi, Zion, Heather, Sahana,
    Katie, Anneke, Kat, Madeleine and Yifei for singing on this piece -
    I am honored to work with all of you.

    Thank you to Samuel Burck, Nico Daglio-Fine, John Mallia,
    and Syamantak Payra who generously shared their electrical engineering knowledge
    and their time to help me design the kypsekardia,
     and without whom this project would not have come to fruition.

    Thanks to all friends and family who could be here today,
    and all who couldn’t.
    I love you!

    Peace and long life.

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