Meet the Grantees The Vex Collection

What would music sound like today if the double-reed had been the dominant instrument voice for the last 200 years? With one foot in jazz and another in a speculative future, The Vex Collection seeks to answer this question via their dynamic, complex music centered around a myriad of double-reed instruments. Utilizing instruments from across the globe, alongside homemade double reed instruments made with 3D printing, PVC, carbon fiber, and other unique methods, The Vex Collection defies easy categorization.

Formed in 2018 by friends and collaborators Mat Muntz and Vicente Atria, The Vex Collection released their self-titled debut album in 2022. In 2025, they received an Artistic Projects grant from Chamber Music America. Ahead of their CMA-supported performance at Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, CMA spoke to Mat and Vicente about their new work, the history of the double reed, and how speculative fiction informs their work.

How did you two meet? And what inspired you to start The Vex Collection? 

Mat: We met in 2013, when I was on a one-year break in the middle of my jazz bass degree at Manhattan School of Music and Vicente was studying philosophy at Columbia. We started playing as a trio with saxophonist Xavier Del Castillo and used that format to begin exploring ideas about composition and ensemble playing outside those presented in our respective jazz educations.

In 2018, Vicente came to me with a vague plan to make a new band featuring Korean double reeds and Scottish highland bagpipes. Pretty soon the plan had expanded to include 3-D printed microtonal wind instruments, dancers, video projection, modular synthesis, me learning to play a Croatian bagpipe, and a four-part fugue for bagpipes and taepyeongso. Once we felt we had devised something sufficiently ambitious, eye-catching, and impossible to pull off, we submitted a proposal to The Shed’s inaugural Open Call commissioning program, optimistic but more or less accepting that this project was just too weird to get picked up. We were fortunately wrong about that, and The Shed ended up booking us, which meant we had about 10 months to figure out how to bring our absurd ideas into reality. That was the beginning of The Vex Collection.

What can listeners expect to hear at Brooklyn Conservatory of Music?

Vicente: A journey through the forgotten wilderness of unbridled bagpipes and Korean double reeds. A mixture of ritual and experimentation, structure and chaos.

Mat: “Earthling Folk Music” reconstructed milennia in the future by alien musicologists who have mistakenly compressed all of human culture and history into a single point in spacetime.  

Can you describe your composition process for this group? Do you always start with instrumentation? Or has this changed over time? 

Mat: A lot of our early music — things we played for our premiere concert at The Shed which became our first album — was written before we had built or even designed our instruments. Trying to reverse-engineer instruments to fit already-composed music ended up being pretty stressful, so after that I focused much more on instrumentation up front. When performing live, I may have to switch between 2-3 different bagpipes and bass in the course of a single piece, so decisions on form and orchestration started to be determined by logistics. But now that we’re arranging for the studio again, it’s refreshing to widen our options beyond what is practical or physically possible in a live setting.

How were you first introduced to the world of double reeds? 

Mat: When I was a kid, I became obsessed with the sound of the Great Highland Bagpipe. I begged my parents for a few years, and they finally agreed that I could play bagpipes if I could find someone to teach me lessons in the Seattle area (probably thinking this would get them off the hook). There just so happens to be a surprisingly deep and serious competitive bagpipe band scene in Washington, and I ended up involved in that for a few years as a teenager. I ultimately left it behind to be a jazz bassist, but something about that sound stuck with me. Many years later, I heard the primorski meh—a rare island bagpipe from Croatia—and it reawakened my bagpipe obsession. By that point I had started exploring microtonality, and the utter strangeness of the meh’s tuning (from the perspective of Western art music) seemed to obliterate the boundary between traditional and experimental sounds.

Hear the primorski meh on Muntz’s Phantom Islands

In addition to each of you, your performances next week feature gamin and Brad Shepik, can you tell me a little about your collaborators for this performance? 

Vicente: With gamin we have a longstanding collaborative relationship, starting in 2018. She has been a crucial part of The Vex Collection from its origins, and even before, when I studied piri privately with her. I think Mat and I are incredibly lucky to have found such an incredible musician with whom to build this project, from the ground up. On the other hand, although Brad and I haven’t played together until now, I’ve known about and been inspired by Brad since I was in my teens, from his work with Pachora. So I’m excited to discover what kinds of music we can create together.

The Vex Collection uses many homemade double-reed instruments. Can you discuss your process for designing these new instruments? Do you base them on existing instruments? Or is it a more experimental process? 

Mat: The design process for our experimental instruments began with abstract musical goals (i.e. a microtonal melody pipe with a lot of pitches, a resonant drone based on a harmonic series, something that could produce acoustic beats and/or difference tones, etc.) which gradually materialized into actual instruments through research and experimentation. During this process, we realized that past cultures had already solved many of the problems that were vexing us, so we organically began to model our instruments on ancient double reeds. This is described in detail in the liner notes of our debut album, but the clearest example is the “Micro-Aulos”, a modular double-pipe based on the Ancient Greek aulos. The ability to switch out and recombine pipes was the best way to create a hyper-microtonal wind instrument capable of playing 31 tones per octave while remaining somewhat playable.

Listen to The Vex Collection’s debut album.

Your biography mentions this project envisions a “speculative future: one in which the primacy of the double reed never waned.” Can you discuss this idea a bit more? Do you see any parallels between your work and other speculative projects (eg: speculative fiction)?  

Vicente: For sure! I’m constantly inspired by literature and film, and as relates to this project, by science fiction in particular. I think we try to do in music one of the things science fiction does in literature — to shed light on our own ways of understanding the world by re-contextualizing aspects of our society or culture. For me, imagining an alternate world for the music we are writing helps expand and deepen my own relationship to it. Sounds are no longer just sounds, but rather reflections of ideas or sensibilities. And I hope that this translates, somehow, back into the music.  

Can you talk about any other upcoming projects or collaborations you’re excited about? 

Mat: All of the music we’re performing with gamin and Brad will be going onto our second album, which features an expanded ensemble including Anna Webber on saxophone/flute, Josh Modney on violin, Mariel Roberts on cello, and Magdalena Pacheco on additional percussion. Keep an eye out for that, coming soon as a joint digital/vinyl release on Innova Recordings and the Chilean label Transamericas.  

How has CMA helped enable and develop this collaborative ensemble? 

Mat: CMA’s Artistic Projects grant program was instrumental in allowing us to carry out this performance/recording project. We’ve been planning our second record since finishing production on our first one back in 2020, and securing funding has been our primary hurdle. In this project and in our individual practices, Vicente and I are often creating work that doesn’t fit neatly into genre categories, so it’s great that the Artistic Projects is open to hybrid and non-traditional projects like The Vex Collection. 

The Vex Collection performs on Saturday, November 22 at Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, Get your tickets now!

Check out The Vex Collection’s debut album on Bandcamp.

www.vicenteatria.com
www.matmuntz.com

CMA’s Artistic Projects program is supported by the Howard Gilman Foundation.