Dylan Mattingly was born in Berkeley, California and currently studies composition at the Bard College Conservatory of Music. Invisible Skyline is commissioned by Berkeley Symphony for the 2012-2013 Season. Invisible Skyline is scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, 1 percussionist (bass drum, kick bass drum, low tom, washboard, sandpaper blocks, and xylophone), harp, piano, and strings. It is divided into three Acts with only a brief pause between them. Duration ca. 25 minutes. Invisible Skyline is a story about stories—a strange, sometimes hyperbolic dream of an imaginary kabuki play in three acts.

Hungarian composer György Ligeti considered his Piano Concerto to be his “Artistic Credo”—the summation of his life’s work. Having survived successive brutal totalitarian regimes in his youth—Nazis and Stalinists—once he fled to the West in 1956 he rejected any sort of aesthetic system. Instead, he became a voracious consumer of musical styles, absorbing what was useful and leaving the rest behind. His first contacts in the West were with avant-garde musicians in West Germany like Stockhausen. He studied techniques of electronic and serial composition, and developed a densely textured style that were the hallmark of his works of the late 50s and 60s. Several of these gained wide exposure through their use in films of Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, Eyes Wide Shut). In the early 80s, however, he began to strive for a simpler harmonic language, closer to traditional tonality; but now rhythmic complexity took the place of the former harmonic complexity. Ligeti drew upon influences as diverse as Conlon Nancarrow, Thelonious Monk, and African pygmy chant to synthesize a new polyrhythmic language, which he worked out in a series of Etudes for piano. These were essentially preliminary sketches for his Piano Concerto, which boasts a monumentally challenging solo part that is often at odds with its accompanying chamber orchestra. Ever the perfectionist, after the premiere of the original 3-movement work in 1986, Ligeti decided the work was incomplete and added two further movements which were first heard in 1988.

Mental illness had plagued Robert Schumann throughout most of his adult life, but the summer of 1844 brought the first hints of the severe mental and physical breakdown that was to come. He still enjoyed periods when he was able to work, but more and more his life came to be dominated by his struggles with illness. Schumann’s Second Symphony is the product of one of those spells when his illness chose to be merciful, and it seems to be his attempt to represent in music his own progression through pain and despair to hope and renewal. After receiving its premiere under the baton of Schumann’s good friend Felix Mendelssohn, the work became the most highly regarded of the composer’s symphonies in the 19th century. Here we see Schumann reinterpreting traditional classical formal procedures in order to allow the symphony to depict an unfolding series of ideas or emotions; in other words, a story. Through the use of recurring melodies that evolve, combine, and change character over the course of the work’s four movements, Schumann evokes the same sort of character development that one finds in a novel. From its confident opening, through the uneasiness of the Scherzo and into the despair of its slow movement and culminating in a triumphant finale, Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 leads the listener through a powerful inner journey that is both personal and universal.