|
Charles Matz
Academic History
Even as a young man, Matz was interested enough in the Middle
Ages to become a member of the Mediaeval Academy of America
following the activities of the scholars associated with that
group through their publication Speculum. The undergraduate
studies of Matz were interrupted by his military service in
World War II. After receiving his BA from Rutgers University,
Matz lived in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne, working with
Gustave Cohen, who had brought new life to the performance
of medieval drama in France even before the war. On returning
to the USA, Matz studied with Roger Sherman Loomis, scholar
of Arthurian legend, at Columbia University where he continued
his medieval interests. Following a period of work in the
publishing business and having himself published a novel,
Legend of Madeleine, Matz collaborated as iconographer
with the stained glass artist Rowan LeCompte for the realization
of most of the nave windows in the newly constructed Washington
Cathedral. In the late 60s, Matz developed an opera libretto
based on Norman Mailer's American Dream. Matz returned
to academic life at the University of Notre Dame, where his
interests centered on Recusant literature. Matz again lived
in Europe for an extended period, in Paris, in London, where
he worked as a presenter for the BBC Third Programme, and
in Italy, in Venice, neighbor and acquaintance of Ezra Pound,
Peggy Guggenheim, and Gian Carlo Menotti, and where he taught
at the Istituto Universitario delle Lingue Moderne, at its
Feltre campus, while participating in the avant-garde literary
activities in other Italian universities, like Padua, Pavia,
Venice, and galleries in Rome, Milan, Bologna, often with
the collaboration of Italian painters like Yasmin Brandolini
and poets like Andrea Zanzotto. Matz created a contemporary
form of multi-lingual oral poetry, based in part on traditional
forms from the European Mediterranean area and Africa: Performance,
and Humility Poems. This oral poetry mutated in turn to performance
events, then to poetic theater, and finally in the last decade
to music theater. Performances of these pieces, including
Antonin Artaud, Columbus, the Moor; The
City of the Sun; Jux mit Fuchs; and The New
Generation have been given in Italy, Spain, Poland, the
UK, and the USA. Poetry and extended pieces of Matz have been
set to music by several European, Canadian and American composers,
including David Ryder, Antonio Segafreddo, Paolo Furlani,
Thomas Deszy, Carlos Nicolau, Ernesto Ferreri, Daniel Koontz,
and Daniel Foley. These songs have been widely sung in concerts
of contemporary music in Europe and in America. In the 1960s
Matz founded a group now called The CAM Art Company, now directed
by Antonio Lai da Teulada, creating new approaches to theater,
cinema, video, music, and dance. Matz contributed articles
on contemporary artistic concepts to Opera News, Vogue,
Testuale, and Digraphe-Mercure de France. At
Long Island University, Southampton College, Matz taught Comparative
European Literature, Italian Language, Dante, Utopian Literature,
Prosody, Contemporary English Language Fiction, Modern British
and American Poetry, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound.
back to Charles Matz
|
