Southern Fall/Winter 2022

a day in the life
Dr. Matthew Evan Taylor ’03
Matthew Evan Taylor was the music man on campus. No matter the
scene — the music theory classroom, the pep band on the basketball
court, or the first concert fundraiser he founded at Birmingham-Southern
— music found its way throughout Taylor’s college experience, one step
in his path to being a nationally-recognized composer and musician.
Taylor declared his saxophone performance major as guided
unwaveringly by the late Dr. Ron Hooten, former director of bands, and
Hugh Thomas Professor of Music Dr. Lester Seigel ’79. He began to grow
his knowledge and talents in performance, composition, and theory.
Now serving as assistant professor of music at Middlebury College in
Middlebury, Vt., Taylor’s work in education allows him to explore music
in an innovative way with undergraduate students and supports his work
as a composer. He has completed a wide range of solo and collaborative
projects, one recent project being “Life Returns,” a piece of music
commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018.
Due to pandemic-related restrictions, the “Life Returns” premiere
— originally scheduled for spring 2020 — was delayed and instead
previewed digitally through “Postcards to the Met,” a cycle of etudes
released monthly, capturing the all-remote conversation between Taylor’s
composing process and his ensemble’s response.
“It’s almost like a documentary, letting people see into my creative
process in a stylized way,” Taylor says. “I’ve written some notes, typically
poems, about the piece, and then we have an interview with it. The
audience gets to watch an interaction between me and a musician I most
likely have never met, and it was all done remotely and at a distance.”
Twelve compositions — a dense amount of writing for Taylor — spread
across 12 months culminated in the full project, which finally premiered
in March 2022 at the Met. Taylor performed alongside the Metropolis
Ensemble and Rajna Swaminathan’s RAJAS ensemble in one of the first
concerts at the museum since its reopening.
He saw the project become “sonically autobiographical” throughout its
creation. Over his years of performing, teaching, and composing, Taylor
has seen his music become more personal and the separation between self
and his music harder to sustain.
“Overall, what the whole project was about was how you maintain
community during a time of high isolation, and how you harness that when
you are finally able to meet together,” he says. “With the types of elements
I was interested in and how I was expressing them through music, it turned
out to be a pretty personal piece.”
To take a glimpse into his creative process, we asked Taylor to break down
one day during an artist residency. He most recently attended the Avaloch
Farm Music Institute in Boscawen, New Hampshire, and usually attends one
to two residencies a year to develop new pieces and collaborations.
Use your smartphone camera app to scan the QR code and explore
“Matthew Evan Taylor: Postcards to The Met,” a 12-part series.
16 / ’southern