Matt Keegan. Photo: Peter Hislop
Music / Matt Keegan “Vienna Dreaming”, The Street Theatre, April 17, programmed by the Canberra International Music Festival. Reviewed by CLINTON WHITE.
IT’S not often jazz would be associated with so-called programmatic music. That nomenclature usually would tag works such as Beethoven’s 6
th symphony, or Albert Ketèlbey’s “In a Persian Market”.
But jazz saxophonist, Matt Keegan’s composition, “Vienna Dreaming”, takes all that a giant leap further. The 50-minute, multi-movement suite is a musical biography of his Austrian great-grandfather, Heini Portnoj (1895-1984).
Heini was a pianist, composer, and band leader. “Vienna Dreaming” tells the extraordinary story of his work in Austria between the two World Wars, falling in love with and marrying Keegan’s great-grandmother, Annie, fleeing Austria for Singapore with his family when the Nazis came to power, fleeing Singapore when the Japanese invaded and, finally, arrivi
Dream realised in compelling live gig
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Dream realised in compelling live gig
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1996 and the past and future Democratic Party
Matt Keegan,
IN FALL 2020, artist Matt Keegan produced an artist book called
1996, a compendium of ephemera, essays, and interviews circling around the year in question, which Keegan sees as a tipping point for the American left the moment its capitulation to neoliberalism was complete. It also happens to be the first birth year for Gen Z, whose members have recently begun populating Keegan’s art-school classes. In trying to come to grips with shifts in American electoral politics, ensure that key histories are passed on to posterity, and chart changes in queer identity, the book provides a nonfatalistic, idiosyncratic musing that brings together materials as varied as a play about Roger Ailes, a ’90s cruising diary, crusty magazine clippings, and an old video-store membership card. Keegan joins me for a discussion of past’s effect on the present and the state of the union overall.