A native of the San Francisco Bay Area composer, improviser, and pianist, Matthew Goodheart explores a variety of contemporary music forms, from free improvisation to strictly notated chamber music. His broad foundation, technical innovations, and compositional sensitivity have allowed him to develop a solid reputation as both a solo performer and collaborative artist.
In the early '90s, he met saxophonist and composer Glenn Spearman and began a long association and friendship that terminated with Spearman's death in 1998. Through Spearman, he was introduced to a great assortment of local and international musicians, including Lisle Ellis, Donald Robinson, Raphé Malik, Wadada Leo Smith, Marco Eneidi, Larry Ochs and many others. He also met several of the faculty of Mills College, and decided to enroll there. While earning his M.A. in music composition, Goodheart studied with Alvin Curran, Chris Brown, Annea Lockwood, George Lewis, Christian Wolff, and many others. He also continued his classical piano studies with Claudio Arrau student and master-teacher Goodwin Sammel.
The last decade has seen a great variety of projects from Goodheart. He has recorded several CDs, all of which have received high critical praise. He has also continued performing contemporary piano works, including Maggi Payne's Minutia, José Maceda's Music for Four Winds and Two Pianos, Morton Feldman's Atlantis and For Bunita Marcus, and Glenn Spearman's Untitled Work for Solo Piano. He performed his works throughout the US, Canada and Europe, including the Klasppstuhlfest and Festival Frei Improvisiertor Musik in, Germany, the International Spectral Music Conference, in Istanbul, Turkey, the Illuminations New Music & Arts Festival, Michigan, the Opus 415Festival in San Francisco, and many others. Ever evolving, he has become focused increasingly on chamber composition. The last three years have seen an ongoing series of “studies,” focusing on the use of microtonality based on “individualistic instrumental properties” to create evocative and idiosyncratic harmonic and timbral worlds.
In addition to his artistic career, he has published a number of articles, and has taught privately and at a variety of institutions, including Mills College, the University of California at Berkeley, and the East Bay Center for Performing Arts. He has also received a number of awards, including a feature at the New Langton Arts Awards Show, an Individual Artist Grant by the Marin Arts Council, a residency at the Djerassi Resident Artists' Program, and the A.H. Miller Award.