Artist Spotlight: Matthew Duvall, Eighth Blackbird co-Founder, co-Director, and Percussionist

What to do when David Lang comes to you and says his production concept is setting the text of Gertrude Stein. We started receiving music, a few movements only, embedded with fragments of enigmatic musings on creating art and how art is experienced. Out of a complete context it seemed so bewildering. But we’ve known David for a very, very long time. The music he sent was pristine and elegant and unadulterated and brought us into a new world as has all our past work with him. And we’d previously engaged in the creative process with David with such depth that we knew not to presume anything about the outcome other than that it would be unanticipated and delightful. The full composition arrived as we prepared to produce the score in its entirety. We were so fortunate to be guided through the complete text by Anne Bogart. And the remarkable thing we anticipated of course unfolded before us. This music carried the no-longer enigmatic writings of Gertrude Stein into a completely new life. It became sentimental and funny and gripping. And then the experience reversed itself, and the text carried the audience to new ways of listening to the music and the totality of the experience. It taught us how to perform; how to act, to sing, how to play our instruments, and how to play as an ensemble. The tracks on this album far more than music learned and recorded. This music is the completion of a fully-formed creative narrative. Composition As Explanation is perhaps the most transformative music Eighth Blackbird has ever recorded.

– Matthew Duvall, Eighth Blackbird: co-Founder, co-Director, and Percussionist

Photo credit: Ryan Bennett