Matt Sargent

The Center for 21st Century Music is excited to welcome Matt Sargent (website) to campus for a masterclass followed by a lecture on his compositions.

Matt Sargent (b. 1984) is a composer, guitarist, and music technologist based in upstate New York. His work grows from interests in resonance, computer models of intelligence, and the making/breaking of long-form patterns.

His compositions have been described as “bringing a sharpened sense of the transcendental into the 21st century.” (Paul Muller, Sequenza21) On his 2018 album, Ghost Music, Bill Meyer writes, “this music isn’t about following in anyone’s footsteps; it uses bare resources to establish a bounded and essential place.” (The Wire Magazine)

His albums include Tide (A Wave Press), Separation Songs (Cold Blue Music), Tide (for ten basses) (Marginal Frequency), and Ghost Music (Weighter Recordings).

In demand as an audio engineer and technical producer for contemporary music, Matt recently recorded Alvin Lucier’s Ricochet Lady (Black Truffle), Sarah Hennies’s Spectral Malsconcities (New World Records), Ensemble Signal / David Felder’s Les Quatre Temps Cardinaux (Coviello Contemporary), and Paul Catanese’s Century of Progress / Sleep, among others. He developed networked scoring software for Alvin Lucier and the Swiss-based Ever Present Orchestra, which facilitates performance of numerous large ensemble works composed by Alvin Lucier. In 2021, he co-composed A Murmur in the Trees, for twenty-four basses, with Eve Beglarian and bassist Robert Black. Praising his work on Robert Carl’s album, Splectra (Cold Blue Music), Fanfare Magazine writes, “he could find no better collaborator than composer and sound designer Matt Sargent.”

Matt is a visiting assistant professor of music at Bard College.