Press
“The concert began arrestingly with Portable by Paula Matthusen, performed by eight people, each toting a specially designed radio receiver or transmitter encased in a vintage suitcase, filing around a la Phil Kline’s Unsilent Night, in what would have been total darkness except for the players’ flashlights.
” —Lucid Culture, 2010
“Paula Matthusen’s “run on sentence of the pavement” seemed to promise the delightful diversion of a grand piano played, in part, by ping-pong balls bouncing around the piano’s inside. It was that, but much more — an encyclopedic reminder that a composer who knows how to listen can find music in the most amazing places.” —Nancy Malitz, Chicago on the Aisle, 2011
“Paula Matthusen’s vivid imagination was evident from the first sound heard during a concert of her works at Roulette in SoHo on Saturday night...” —Steve Smith, The New York Times, 2009
“A pleasant surprise in the Sunday morning program [for the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music] was Paula Matthusen’s piece, ‘of memory and minutiae’ (2006), a plaintive, haunting setting of a Norwegian prayer that fragments further with each repetition.” —Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 2009
“Matthusen’s music goes beyond the experimental and invites the audience to engage emotionally.” —Elien Van Riet, Eye of the Beholder, 2009
“Paula Matthusen cleans ears with her electroacoustic music. Her use of resonating materials and clear sounds penetrates the space in a variety of patterns.” —Pauline Oliveros, Leonardo Music Journal, 2009
“The whispering, scratching, plinking, and sighing of her run-on sentence of the pavement — for piano, ping-pong balls, and electronics — has an oddly sad, entrancing effect, especially when the stream of noise coalesces into slivers of song.” —Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 2004