Streamed live from KMFA’s new Draylen Mason Music Studio, the genre-blurring string quartet Invoke alongside wildly creative Thomas Echols will fashion a lush musical journey with guitar, strings, and electronics. Sunday, April 18th, 2021 at 5pm CT. Register Online Here. Free, Donations Welcome.

 

We are so excited to present our first Austin Now event of the Spring 2021 season, CALL AND RESPONSE with Invoke and Thomas Echols, presented in partnership with KMFA, on Sunday, April 18th at 5pm CDT. 

For the Austin Now series our Artistic Director, Joe Williams, has asked outstanding artists from our city to get together and create something beautiful using the collaboration of different mediums in whatever way they feel represents the times we are living in now.  

CALL AND RESPONSE is an exploration into memory, meaning, and the not-so-obvious threads that connect us all over Austin. It was developed in collaboration with members of the community and participants were asked questions about what music means to them. Their responses helped steer the program we will see Sunday.

We got the opportunity to connect with one of the incredible members of Invoke, Zach Matteson, and he shared some beautiful things about his journey as a musician and the journey of Invoke coming together.

“I started the violin at age 5. As I grew up, music was something that was always constant in my life: chamber music with siblings/friends, community choir with my dad in middle school, and eventually community orchestra in high school. In orchestra, I really fell in love with the rush of being completely surrounded by music, creating something together as a group. Maybe it was the “rush” that making music provided (or the fact that nothing else in school had interested me) but I decided to try and get a college degree in music. I went to University of Maryland to get my degree in music performance (for a variety of reasons) and it was there that I met the other members of Invoke during my Junior year.”

“At UMD, we worked with dance choreographer, Liz Lerman, to get the orchestra dancing while performing “Appalachian Spring,” among other things…there was a definite energy in the air of “what’s next?” and “what can we do to subvert expectations.” It was in this environment that Invoke (Nick, Geoff, Karl, and myself) came together. Initially, we started as a straight forward new music quartet, interested in performing works by living composers that we knew, but it quickly developed into the bluegrass crossover/composer collective/new music ensemble/string quartet group that you see today. That “rush” is still there, and I love the fact that it’s something I get to create with my best friends everyday.”

Music has the magical capability of bringing up deep rooted emotions or creating new sensations and feelings depending on the sound, situation, and mood of the piece. We asked Zach how performing music makes him feel when he is alone versus when he is with his colleagues. Zach shared,

“For me, “overwhelm” is the closest word I can think of when playing music. So much is happening on every level of your senses — it’s like a 20 ft. wave of pure feeling that you’re trying to harness into intelligible sounds that someone can comprehend. It can be really intimidating in that way when you’re by yourself (especially when you’re trying to start) but for me the challenge of trying to harness those feelings has been an extremely satisfying endeavor. I think it’s made much easier when you have people around you helping out. That’s probably the reason I enjoy playing chamber music so much, a shared struggle to create something really powerful that can speak to people on every level.”

Invoke’s musical style is described as “not classical but not not classical.” We have been so intrigued by what this means and cannot wait to hear this style in action! Zach addressed our curiosity and shared what that description means for Invoke, 

Everyone in Invoke comes from a “classical” background. We all went to school for western art music, studied western theory, etc…That being said, I think our musical interests extend far beyond that, ranging from Gamelan, to Hair Metal, to Bluegrass, and more. So when we’re writing music together, or individually, we really enjoy highlighting as much of those external influences as possible and we’re not afraid to break out of the traditional “string quartet” mold to do so. If the piece needs Nick to play gamelan for 20 minutes, we’ll do it. If we need all of us on fretted instruments like banjos and mandolins, we’ll do it. But, most of the time, you can see that thread leading back to the “classical” training that we all had so that’s where the “not classical but not not classical” comes from.”

We are so pumped to see this collaboration and deeply thought out creation come to life on April 18th! We hope you can join us and enjoy it just as much as we will! 

RSVP Online Here, Free, Donations Accepted.