American
Born: Chesapeake Bay, U.S.
Matt Sargent is a musician based in Buffalo, N.Y. He holds a Presidential Fellowship at SUNY Buffalo, where (as of 2013) he is working on a PhD in Music Composition. 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 David Felder, Cort Lippe, Robert Carl, Ingram Marshall, Ken Steen, and David Froom.
Sargent's music has been described as "so simple and so natural, and yet sets up a complex set of interactions." (Sound Expanse) A Chesapeake Bay native, his interests are often focused on the movement of bodies of water, tides, and possible musical analogues to these natural processes. In addition to the documented spaces and environmental recordings heard in much of his electroacoustic work, natural materials also enter his acoustic music in tangible ways: pine sap drops as melodic material in his Soft Song (for solo cello); river stones lightly scraped on wood in his solo percussion work, Riverbed.
Sargent frequently collaborates with musicians, choreographers, filmmakers, and visual artists. In August 2012, he was music director for American Grain, a multimedia performance at Silo City in Buffalo, N.Y. From 2007-2012, he founded and co-directed the Hartford Sound Alliance, a composer/performer ensemble dedicated to the creation, performance, and promotion of new music via composition, improvisation, sound installation, and interdisciplinary projects. Along with collaborator Bill Solomon, he organized the 2011 Hartford New Music Festival, a three-month series of sound art and contemporary music. Most recently, Sargent was the 2013 composer-in-residence for the Generous Ensemble and the Private Works Festival (Hartford, CT), for which he composed Separation Songs, an extended-length piece for two spatialized string quartets, using real-time computer generated variations on the shape note hymns of William Billings.
His work includes sound installations and generative works at the Goldwell Open Air Museum (Rhyolite, NV), the Machine Project (Los Angeles), the Hemphill gallery (Washington D.C.), Hartford Art School, and Yale University's Haskins Auditory Labs, solo concerts and featured works presented at the Wulf (Los Angeles, CA), Norwegian Academy of Music (Oslo, Norway), SEAMUS 2012 National Conference (Appleton, WI), Midwest Graduate Music Consortium (Chicago), Elastic Arts Foundation (Chicago), Full Force Dance Theatre and the Charter Oak Cultural Center (Hartford, CT), June in Buffalo, and the Neighborhood Music School (New Haven, CT), and artist residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Goldwell Open Air Museum, and the University of Nevada Las Vegas (composer-in-residence, Spring 2011).
In addition to composing, Sargent remains active as a guitarist, audio technology specialist, and educator. He has held teaching positions at Capital Community College (music technology and composition), where he designed and directed the college's music technology studio, Hartford Conservatory (recording arts), Hebrew High School of New England (instrumental music), and Middlesex Academy for the Performing Arts (guitar). [1]
For more information on Matt Sargent, visit http://www.mattsargentmusic.com/.
[1] Biographical material adapted from http://www.mattsargentmusic.com/bio.htm. (Accessed 07/09/2013)