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Biography
The music of Brooklyn-based composer Matt Frey creates intimately sentimental sonic worlds inflected with churning rhythms, minimalist-like textures, and extended moments of restless tension.
Frey recently completed a two-year Composers & the Voice fellowship with The American Opera Project. This comes on the heels of the release of his first album One-Eleven Heavy, a chamber opera dedicated to the victims of the 1998 Swissair Flight 111 crash and recorded with ensemble Hotel Elefant featuring soprano Jenny Ribeiro and Grammy-award-winning tenor Karim Sulayman. Frey's catalog of vocal works—comprising song cycles, music-theater works, and opera—include the musical Mary, written with playwright Melisa Tien and based on the life of controversial schoolteacher Mary Kay Letourneau; the chamber opera The Fox and the Pomegranate, a parable-like tale of love and infidelity which won the 2014 Pellicciotti Opera Prize; and the co-written oratorio Moby Dick: Extracts on Death and Other Curiosities, commissioned by Contemporaneous. Frey's vocal music has been performed and workshopped across the U.S. and in Canada at festivals and programs including Fort Worth Opera's Frontiers, the Crane School of Music, Opera From Scratch, the New Dramatists Composer-Librettist and PlayTime Development Studios, the John Duffy Composers Institute, and the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop.
Frey's instrumental music explores a more abstract approach to narrative, focusing on the concept of tension and release. Often using harmonic or melodic inspiration from popular or electronic music to infuse his compositions, his music has been commissioned and presented in collaboration with ensembles and companies such as the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, PUBLIQuartet (in collaboration with BODYART Dance Company), Synergy Percussion, the JACK String Quartet, Young Dancemakers Company, the West Point Woodwind Quintet, the NYU Symphony Orchestra, Cadillac Moon Ensemble, Echo Chamber, andPlay, and the Manhattan Wind Ensemble in venues including Roulette (Brooklyn), ISSUE Project Room (Brooklyn), 92Y TriBeCa (Manhattan), and the Bang on a Can Summer Festival at MASS MoCA.
With musical interests extending to performing (clarinet and piano), conducting, and arts management, Frey has been an employee of Carnegie Hall's Weill Music Institute (where he helped bolster a national music curriculum for elementary school recorder students) and has been known as an event curator and producer with West 4th New Music Collective (W4). He is a graduate of the Masters program in Music Composition at New York University and holds an undergraduate degree in Music Composition from Brooklyn College, where he studied with composers including Jason Eckardt, Douglas Geers, Joan La Barbara, Tania León, Robert Maggio, and Julia Wolfe.
There are no productions for this artist in the Season Schedule of Performances which currently only dates back to 1991.
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Artist Information
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