Paula Matthusen is a composer, currently based in Miami and Brooklyn. She writes both electroacoustic and acoustic music and realizes sound installations. In addition to writing for a variety of different ensembles, she also collaborates with choreographers and theater companies. She has written for diverse instrumentations, such as run-on sentence of the pavement for piano, ping-pong balls, and electronics, which Alex Ross of The New Yorker noted as being “entrancing”. Her work often considers discrepancies in musical space-real, imagined, and remembered. Tonight she presents a collection of older works as well as premieres with performances by James Moore, Jody Redhage, Todd Reynolds, Kathryn Woodard, and Dither.
Her music has been performed by Alarm Will Sound, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), orchest de ereprijs, Ballett Frankfurt, noranewdanceco, Kathryn Woodard, Diesel Lounge Boys, James Moore, and Jody Redhage. Her work has been performed at numerous venues and festivals in America and Europe, including Merkin Concert Hall, Diapason Gallery, Sonic Arts Research Center, the Construction Company, Das TAT, the Aspen Music Festival, Bang on a Can Summer Institute of Music at MassMoCA, Sonorities, Third Practice, ArtBots, the Gaudeamus New Music Week, SEAMUS, NWEAMO, and the Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival. She performs frequently with the electroacoustic duo ouisaudei, Groundwave New Music Collective, Object Collection, and recently winter company. Awards include a Fulbright Grant, two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers’ Award, First Prize in the Young Composers’ Meeting Composition Competition, the MacCracken and Langley Ryan Fellowship, and a Van Lier Fellowship. Matthusen has also held residencies at create@iEar at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, STEIM, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Matthusen recently completed her Ph.D. at New York University – Graduate School of Arts and Science, and is now Director of Music Technology at Florida International University.