Matt Sargent is a composer, guitarist, and laptop artist based in Hartford, CT. He is a graduate of the Hartt School of Music (MM in Music Composition, 2008) and St. Mary's College of Maryland (BA in Music and English, 2006). His principal composition teachers include Robert Carl, Ingram Marshall, Ken Steen, David Froom, and Erich Stem. He has also studied classical guitar with Orlando Roman and Andres Hidalgo.
His composing grows out of an appreciation of natural resonances, acoustic spaces, field recording, and outdoor listening. These influences often enter his music in tangible ways, such as the use of pine sap drops as melodic material in his Soft Song (for solo cello), or the spatial arrangement of players and audio speakers (often spread hundreds of feet apart) in many of his ensemble works, such as Evening Song and Riverbed Echo.
Matt frequently collaborates with musicians, writers, filmmakers, and visual artists. Since 2007, he has codirected the Hartford Sound Alliance, a CT-based multimedia collective of composers, sound engineers, performers, and video artists, that presents concerts, installations, improvisation performances, and workshops at universities and art spaces across New England, including an upcoming series of multimedia concerts, entitled The Sync Effect, with video artists Gene Gort, Devan Mulvaney, and Liz Stephens.
Other recent collaborative projects include Space Between, a series of intermedia pieces (including canvases, videos, and live performance works) created in collaboration with visual artists John M Adams and J.T. Kirkland, which was premiered at Artomatic 2009 (Washington D.C.), a set of new works currently in development with visual artist Ken Weathersby (involving speakers and mp3 players installed into canvases), and a newly commissioned electroacoustic piece for the Full Force Dance Theatre (to be premiered in April 2010).
In 2009, Matt joined the board of directors of the CT electronic music non-profit organization, SEMI (Studio for Electronic Music, Inc.). In June of 2010, he will be in residency at the Goldwell Open Air Museum in Death Valley (Beatty, NV), along with trumpeter/composer Chris Kallmyer, to develop a new work at the site of the Rhyolite mine and ghost town.
Some of his notable recent performances and installations include Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), One Brooklyn Bridge (Brooklyn, NY), Zeigteist @ Outpost 186 (Cambridge, MA), the Warehouse Theater (Washington D.C.), An Die Musik (Baltimore, MD), Strand on Volta (Washington D.C.), the Chapel (Seattle, WA), Geneva Conservatory (Switzerland), Santa Caterina Cathedral (Alba, Italy), Brandeis University (Waltham, MA), Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH), the Hartford Art School (West Hartford, CT), the Patricia Sitar Arts Center (Washington D.C.), WHUH Radio (University of Hartford, 91.3 FM), Artomatic (Washington D.C.) and ArtSpace (Hartford, CT). His music has been performed by numerous professional ensembles, including the Talujon Percussion Ensemble, Yale Brass Trio, and the Hartt Percussion Ensemble.
In addition to composing, Matt maintains a busy schedule as a performer and educator. He is an adjunct professor at Capital Community College (Hartford, CT), where he teaches music technology and music business, while also co-curating the Concerts@Capital music series. He regularly performs across the Northeast with singer-songwriter Kat Mulvaney and the Hartford-based indie pop band I'm the Pilot. He can also be found as a teaching artist working with youth musicians at the Charter Oak Cultural Center (Hartford, CT).
