- (voices)
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- Matthew Ross Davis
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- On the CD:
- Sevenroughs
- Contact
- mrd@artswire.org
Matthew Ross Davis
Currently, Matthew is working towards his Master of
Music in Opera Performance at the University of
Maryland School of Music, studying voice with
Fran¨ois Loup. Having studied computer music and
composition with Jon Polifrone at Virginia Tech,
his expertise quickly expanded into the areas of
graphic design and web site construction, as well as
system administration. After two years of corporate
culture, Matthew decided graduate school was the
right place to be, and now has plans to continue his
studies at Maryland in the Ph.D. program in
Musicology studying the vocal music of John Cage.
Matthew is currently baritone section leader and
soloist at St. Mark Presbyterian Church in Rockville,
MD, and has performed in the Paul Hill Chorale and
with Opera Roanoke.
"A brief history first - I moved to DC about three
years ago before I decided to go back to grad school,
looking for Web design jobs. I was very interested in
whatever new music scene I could find in this area, and
by asking around in local newsgroups, found out that
there was something called ArtsWire which held New Music
meetings every week on Diversity University MOO. I
logged in and met Tom, who also lived in DC - by this
time I had moved out to Greenbelt.
Joe Zitt I met through the John Cage internet mailing list, Silence, of which he is the moderator, though he also logged into the DU meeting eventually as well. In this way, ArtsWire was largely responsible for the manner in which we met - I'm not quite sure we ever would have if it wasn't for the net and the NewMusNet conference on ArtsWire.
Obviously, Tom and I had very similar interests, both being vocalists and interested in new music - me coming more from the avant-jazz scene, he from the John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Stockhausen, Deep Listening side of things. Joe was also heavily into sound poetry and Cage, obviously, being the moderator of the mailing list. Tom and I got together every now and then to do new music stuff - deep listening mostly. Our most common area of interest was Cage.
Then the opportunity came for Joe to relocate from Texas. A new improv list called Phiba-Improv (Philadelphia/Baltimore) popped up, and he know both Tom and I, and he ultimately decided this would be a great place to live. So he moved out here, got a job, and the idea of getting a vocal ensemble together (originally a quartet was the idea) quickly emerged.
All three of us were very excited about this kind of project, since it's the kind of music that we all loved and wanted to perform and develop. Our first "project" as a trio was to jointly organize (along with the help of folks up in Baltimore) the AtlantiCage celebration (see the link to it from my pages) in September, where we first performed as Comma (sans name) along with a friend from NYC, doing Cage's Four6.
We soon decided to move forward with the vocal ensemble, and gathered together at a Vietnamese restaurant in Georgetown to eat good food and talk about a name. We went through several, ruled out many, and the eventual train of thought went something like: "we're about voice...text...parts of speech...punctuation...comma?" Comma seemed to be perfect, because in several ways it was the 'textual' equivalent of Cage's idea of silence, plus it had some very interesting graphic design possibilities.
And that was about it. Does this help?"
