Virtuoso percussionist Matthew Gold talks with Youssef Amin about percussive feelings, emotional surfaces, and the wilder sides of 21st-century American and European music, noise, and drumming.
Percussionist Matthew Gold appears across the U.S. and internationally presenting concert programs, master classes, and lectures as both a chamber musician and soloist. Based in Williamstown, MA and New York City, he is a member of the Talea Ensemble and the Talujon percussion group. Mr. Gold is an Artist in Residence in Percussion and Contemporary Music Performance at Williams College where he directs the Williams Percussion Ensemble, I/O Ensemble, and the annual I/O Festival of New Music. He serves on the faculty of the Composers Conference and Contemporary Performance Institute at Wellesley College, and is an Artist in Residence at the Walden School’s Creative Musicians Retreat. Mr. Gold has appeared as a soloist with such ensembles as Sequitur, the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival, and the Orchestra of the League of Composers, has been a featured artist on recent festivals including Le Festival Les Musiques in Marseille, and Festival Musiques Démesurées in Clermont-Ferrand, and has appeared with the New York Philharmonic on its “Philharmonic 360” program at the Park Avenue Armory. He performs regularly with, among others, the Mark Morris Dance Group, the New York City Ballet, and the Albany Symphony.
Heralded as “a crucial part of the New York cultural ecosphere” by the New York Times, the Talea Ensemble is comprised of nineteen of New York City’s finest classically-trained musicians, with a mission to champion musical creativity, cultivate curious listeners, and bring visionary new works to life with vibrant performances that remain in the audience’s imagination long after a concert.
Recipients of the 2014 Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, Talea has brought to life more than 30 commissions of major new works since it was founded in 2008. Partnering with institutions like the Austrian Cultural Forum or the French American Cultural Exchange, Talea has helped introduce NYC audiences to important works of such esteemed composers as Pierre Boulez, Georg Friedrich Haas, Beat Furrer, Pierluigi Billone, or Georges Aperghis.
Praised for their “verve and immaculate virtuosity” by the Washington Post, the Talea Ensemble is sought after both in the U.S. and Europe for its range, precision, risk-taking, and superior performance quality. Recent festival engagements include performances at Lincoln Center Festival, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, the Fromm Concerts at Harvard University, Warsaw Autumn Festival, Wien Modern, Chicago’s Contempo series, Royaumont Voix Nouvelles, Vancouver New Music, and many others. Talea’s recordings have been distributed worldwide on the Wergo, Gravina Musica, Tzadik, Innova, and New World Records labels, and been radio-broadcast on ORF (Austria), HRF (Germany), and WQXR’s Q2.
Talea assumes an ongoing role in supporting a new generation of composers, and has undertaken residencies in music departments at Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, New York University, and many others.
www.taleaensemble.org
Youssef Amin is a second-year M.A. student of Psychology at New York University. He is research assistant at the Max Planck — NYU Center for Language, Music and Emotion (CLaME), and currently working on attention decoding in music using both behavioral and MEG protocols. His background in music includes a Bachelor of Music in Piano degree from Ithaca College under the tutelage of Vadim Serebryany.