Nonesuch Records releases the label debut from composer Dylan Mattingly, The Wild Heart, performed by Contemporaneous with conductor David Bloom and vocal soloist Iarla Ó Lionáird, on June 26, 2026. The Wild Heart comprises the five-movement work The Transmutation Notebooks as well as Sunt Lacrimae Rerum (these are the tears of things). (The vinyl edition features the latter piece and two movements from The Transmutation Notebooks: “Ulysses Dances” and “Last Dance.”) “Ulysses Dances,” the first movement from The Transmutation Notebooks, is available today; a visualizer created by Robert Edridge-Waks can be seen here:

“Dylan Mattingly is a true original whose music fills the listener with a sense of overflowing abundance," says composer John Adams. "Dylan’s default mode is intense, ecstatic: his music clangs and chimes, and its resonances seem to linger in the ear long after the physical sound ceases. Events can feel like they're moving in slow sync with the rhythms of the celestial orbs but then will break out into some euphoric pagan jig. He’s a genuine American Maverick in the true sense of the term.”

The two pieces on this album sprang from Mattingly’s six-hour epic composition History of Life, which, as Jake Wilder-Smith says in his album liner note, “weaves together a wide array of traditions, styles, and source materials, chief among them Homer’s Odyssey and Charles Darwin’s account of his five-year expedition aboard the HMS Beagle.” The Transmutation Notebooks takes its name from Darwin’s journals of his travels along the coast of South America. Sunt Lacrimae Rerum (these are the tears of things) was written during the first year of the pandemic, while wildfires blazed in Mattingly’s native California.

Mattingly says, “The goal of my music is to give us an experience of the things we love most about being alive in this world, in a way that reminds us how damn beautiful they are and how much we can love.” He continues, “We don’t have a lot of opportunity in life (or in art) to focus on, to yell for joy about, the things we really love about this world. This music tries to give us that chance as clearly and strongly as possible, to remind us that this is worth it, to allow us to be swept over by the massive force of waves, to be small in the face of a massive, beautiful universe.”

Speaking of his unique compositional style, the composer says, “everything on this album has at least one re-tuned piano, and the harp is re-tuned in The Transmutation Notebooks, too. Many of the notes have literally never been heard before. But because they’re on these instruments where we expect the tuning to be fixed, like a piano, our brain instantly accepts them, and says, ‘OK, I guess this is the world.’ In that instant act of transformation, your brain tells you that you’re hearing something entirely new, that you’re in an alien world.

“That puts us in this state of mind where we hear everything new. So then the music gives us the things we all love—I, IV, V chords (the music that’s at the heart of everything, the harmonic language we were born into)—but in this state of receptivity, we hear it as if for the first time. The things we love so much about the world feel suddenly present and alive, not a reference to some other time, or thousand times, we’ve heard them, but joyfully new,” he says.

Wilder-Smith says of The Transmutation Notebooks, “When Darwin arrived on the Galápagos, he observed that the same species, found on different islands, exhibited different traits, seemingly adapted to the unique features of their environment and giving rise to new forms of life. A similar process unfolds in Mattingly’s music. When musical material reappears across movements, it is always already in flux—already adapting, changing, evolving … Sometimes, you listen in real time as a rhythmic vamp, harmonic progression, or melodic turn responds to a changing musical environment … Other times we recognize a familiar phrase only when it reappears across movements, its features changed.”

Iarla Ó Lionáird—one of the leading contemporary vocalists of the traditional sean nós Irish song style—is featured on two movements from The Transmutation Notebooks. (Mattingly first heard the singer on Donnacha Dennehy’s Nonesuch recording of Grá agus Bas). Mattingly considers Ó Lionáird to be a “modern-day Homeric bard,” singing in an “imagined tradition of oral epic, as if it had evolved continuously over 2,700 years.” 

Mattingly began work on Sunt Lacrimae Rerum in the fall of 2020, as he looked out on a smoke-darkened day during the already fraught Covid period. He thought of Aeneas’ lines from Homer’s The Aeneid: sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt. / Solve metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem. (These are the tears of things, the stuff of lives touches my soul. / Release your fear: our story carries some salvation.) Wilder-Smith says, “In these ancient lines, the composer recognized ‘a statement of profound optimism’ in the face of personal and collective loss. So while Sunt Lacrimae Rerum may have emerged in a moment of great loss and uncertainty, it is no elegy … it strives to sound out a world not yet in existence, released from the haze of present anxieties and past defeats. “

Dylan Mattingly is a composer who creates music that offers ecstatic, transformative experience. Many of his projects exist on a massive scale, the results of his pursuit of projects from the wild reaches of his imagination. This practice was informed by the decade-long process of creating, developing, and bringing to life Stranger Love, his six-hour opera, commissioned by the LA Phil, that premiered in 2023 at Walt Disney Concert Hall. The opera was described as “a historic triumph of aspiration” by the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as “singular, tender, euphoric, hypnotic” and “a kind of communal love to the cosmos” by the New York Times, which included it in its Best Classical Music Performances of 2023. 

Mattingly’s music also has been commissioned and performed by the Ojai Music Festival, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the Berkeley Symphony, the Del Sol String Quartet, Sarah Cahill, Kathleen Supové, the Albany Symphony, Contemporaneous, ZOFO Duet, John Adams, Marin Alsop, and many others. He has been Musical America’s New Artist of the Month and was awarded the Charles Ives Scholarship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors. Mattingly has held residencies at the Ucross Foundation and the Harrison House Arts & Ecology Center. He holds a BA in classics from Bard College, a BM in music composition from the Bard College Conservatory of Music, and an MM from the Yale School of Music. Mattingly lives in Albany, CA with his partner Hannah and dog Oly.

Dylan Mattingly also is the executive and co-artistic director of the new-music ensemble Contemporaneous—a group of twenty-five musicians whose mission is to bring to life the most transformative music by living composers through performances, commissions, recordings, and educational programs. In the tradition of the ensembles founded by Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, and Steve Reich early in their careers, the ensemble has mastered a body of music whose idiosyncratic demands and epic proportions do not fit neatly into the institutional calendars of symphony orchestras or traditional opera companies. Described as “exact and detailed, but also lively and openly dancing” by the New York Times and “leading new music towards its better self” by I Care If You Listen, Contemporaneous particularly champions the creation of large-scale works and “dream projects,” which composers might not otherwise have opportunities to realize due to scale.

Based in New York City and active throughout the United States, Contemporaneous has premiered more than 200 new works, and has been presented by institutions such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Park Avenue Armory, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Walt Disney Concert Hall, PROTOTYPE Festival, Merkin Concert Hall, MATA Festival, St. Ann’s Warehouse, and Bang on a Can. The ensemble has worked with artists such as David Byrne, Donnacha Dennehy, Iarla Ó Lionáird, Dawn Upshaw, and Julia Wolfe.

Contemporaneous’ Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director David Bloom is a conductor equally at home in orchestral repertoire, opera, and new music, noted for his “dazzling precision and grace” (San Francisco Chronicle), “intelligence, elegance, and passion” (Opera News), “ferocious and focused” (New York Times) performances, and “breathtaking and inspired programming” (Shepherd Express). He dedicates his work to collaborating with artists and communities to inspire creativity, empathy, and joy.

Bloom has guest conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Washington National Opera, American Composers Orchestra, Opera Omaha, Central City Opera, Fort Worth Opera, Tri-Cities Opera, The Crossing, and Ensemble Connect, and worked with soloists Dashon Burton, David Byrne, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Helga Davis, Nathalie Joachim, Isabel Leonard, Courtney Love, Iarla Ó Lionáird, Hila Plitmann, Dawn Upshaw, and many more. He has performed in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Kennedy Center, Park Avenue Armory, and Big Ears Festival. He conducted the opening of Lincoln Center’s 2024 Summer for the City festival with a program of operatic standards and original songs with drag artists Sapphira Cristál, Monét X Change, and Thorgy Thor.

Iarla Ó Lionáird has carved a long and unique career in music both internationally and in Ireland. From his iconic early recording of the vision song “Aisling Gheal” as a young boy to his groundbreaking recordings with Dublin’s Crash Ensemble and New York’s Alarm Will Sound, he has shown a breadth of artistic ambition both as songwriter and performer that sets him apart in the Irish Music fraternity. Preferring not to be categorized, his performances and recorded output follow an ambitious arc that challenges musical identity, from traditional sean nós song to worldbeat, from alt-folk to opera. 

A twice-Grammy-nominated artist, Ó Lionáird has worked with a stellar cast of composers internationally including Donnacha Dennehy, Dan Trueman, Ludwig Göransson, Nico Muhly, Kate Moore, Linda Buckley, Gemma Peacocke, Gavin Bryars, Ailiís Ní Riain, James Moore, Annika Socolofsky, Pascal Le Boeuf, Caroline Shaw, Molly Herron, and David Lang; he has performed and recorded with luminaries such as Peter Gabriel, Nick Cave, Robert Plant, Colin Stetson, and Sinéad O’Connor. His unique singing style has carried him to stages and concert halls all over the world, from New York’s Carnegie Hall to the Sydney Opera House, London’s Royal Albert Hall, and beyond.