Beyond the Bio

A “bio” – the stark term for the dense forest of text which accompanies a headshot in a concert program – can be a stuffy, cold list of accomplishments that simply serves to validate why you’re stuck listening to this particular musician (or composer) for that evening’s concert. However, I’m not above the bio – you can find mine right up there. Some opt to lace theirs with irony – “Kurt Urnote writes cacophonies of sound which assault his listener with utter nonsense. He has a cat.”  Some elevate theirs with transcendent superlatives –  “Praised for her abundantly lyrical, effusive strings of pristine sound-jewels, Kim Poser creates music which makes the world a better place, while bringing even the most lowly of land-mammals to unrestrained bursts of emotional ecstasy. She has a cat.” My attempt to be a more personable, accessible musician is below.

The fact that you’re reading this post, on this website, of this musician, is thanks to Blink-182. That’s right – without the California-derived pop-punk band with a song called “Dysentery Gary”, I would not be getting my PhD in Music Composition. My next-door neighbors growing up were twins my age, who I idolized to a fault, and so when they asked me to play guitar in their Blink-182 cover band, it was only a week before I came home from school to find a guitar on my bed. My natural inclination was to lie it flat on my bed and wildly strum it with both hands, an experimental purity which has since taken me years of study and thousands of dollars to rediscover.

The catch: I had to take *classical* guitar lessons if I wanted to get an electric guitar. Of course, I didn’t know what the difference was at first, but I soon caught on that I wouldn’t be playing “Adam’s Song” or “What’s My Age Again” anytime soon. During my reluctant duty to the prim technique and refined sensibilities of the classical style, I saved up enough allowance to buy a starter electric guitar and quaint little amplifier. With the help of whatever tablature (how guitarists cheat at reading music) book I could find and the crowd-sourced glory of “ultimateguitar.com”, I soon learned what a power chord was, and how to make my electric guitar sound “crunchy” (distorted). 

By 7th grade I was turned on to the holy grail of teenage male musical aesthetics – AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, etc. The first chord of “Back in Black”, played for my friend Chris and I in my Mom’s car in a Chili’s parking lot, shook me all middle-school long. While my tastes were regressing even further, hitting Rock bottom with Motley Crue and Def Leppard, I co-founded my first (im)mature musical statement with friends Scott Graves and Luis Rangel – Black Cat. Whitesnake… White Lion… Blue Oyster Cult… all you need is a color and an animal.

Holed up in our drummer Scott’s room, we churned out our anthems: Rock N’ Roll Summer (“chicks in bikinis, drinking martinis”…), Scorchin’ Heart, Rockaholic. Our parents sponsored a recording session for us, and we figured it was only a matter of time before “Acoustic-matata” and “Rock N’ Roll Summer” were making the radio rounds. Culminating in sold out performances at 8th grade lunch, Black Cat was a defining moment of my youth, and although we parted ways soon enough, I discovered two pals for life (both are still musicians!), and decided that music was it.

9th grade was a sudden, extreme turning point. Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue”, Mahavishnu Orchestra’s “Birds of Fire”, a rediscovery of The Beatles, and a few classical guitar albums by the master of tone David Russell featuring Spanish and Latin-American music all yanked me out of the cultural abomination of 80’s hair metal and into the sophistication and depth of jazz and classical. Most significantly, I found Bach. What began as a technical challenge bestowed by my classical guitar teacher Steve Kostelnik (who I partly credit with this mental and aesthetic renaissance) to learn a few measures of J.S. Bach’s Prelude in E Major from the Third Violin Partita BWV 1006 turned into an obsession with learning the dense and cosmic work of this musical master. Sure, the titles weren’t as catchy as “Kickstart My Heart” and “Pour Some Sugar on Me” (M. Crue’s Opus 17 and D. Leppard’s Opus 56, respectively), but it was no longer about chicks in bikinis, or their said drinking of martinis, or any other gross misunderstanding of musical success.

Through the intense motivation of Sensei Steve, my focus narrowed to a sharp point on classical guitar performance, with jazz being treated at the time as another viable path but really serving to act as a respite from playing the same two measures of music for four hours straight. I began entering classical guitar competitions, and after a few embarrassments I understood what it would take to play at a higher level. Waking up early before school and shunning after-school shenanigans (because music validates anti-social tendencies), I managed to win prizes in a few competitions (there’s a priceless photo of me walking onstage in the finals, looking like a deer in headlights).

Yet I didn’t exist in total musical isolation – my best bud Zac Heckmann and I would bring our guitars to school and try to one-up each other with the latest song or technique we’d discovered, be it an alternately-tuned guitar-slapping show piece by Michael Hedges or Don Ross or an original tune with some cool new chord we’d be obligated to teach the other. From riding our guitar cases down the stairs (just don’t) to moseying around the neighborhood playing for anyone who would listen, our camaraderie coalesced into a duo called The Tiphats. Our musical collaboration peaked with a locally-televised performance before a City Hall meeting (I still don’t know how that happened), and although our musical paths eventually diverged, the joy of performing and creating with other musicians would stay with me.

By the time college applications loomed, I had a clear understanding of what I wanted to do. Applying to several schools, it came down to a choice between the financial and geographic frugality of staying in Austin (albeit with one of the country’s great teachers, Adam Holzman), studying with my then guitar idol Eliot Fisk in Boston, accepting a generous offer to study with William Kanengiser in Los Angeles, or studying with Brazilian guitarist-composer Sergio Assad in San Francisco. After viewing a sunset behind the Golden Gate Bridge from Coit Tower, my fate was sealed. Following a road-trip across half the country, my mom reluctantly tore herself away from me at the door of my dorm, and I was left living in a new city for the first time in my life without knowing anyone.

By the time I had acclimated, my lessons and performances were going really well. Notably though, amidst all the crazy piano and orchestral arrangements I was subjecting myself to, I managed to write a substantial piece named “Elegy” that year, and when I showed it to my teacher Sergio, he gave me some advice which, although I only half-accepted at the time, would end up being key. “Matt, you know, there are many guitarists out there who can play fast, and loud, and perfectly. At a high level there will always be someone faster, louder, or more perfect than you. But being a composer – that’s something few people can do well”. Something like that.

I mulled his advice over, while continuing to compete with and perform the most difficult pieces I could get my hands on. A solo guitar arrangement of the Overture to the Barber of Seville? Of course! I just need my middle and ring finger to alternate eight times a second. Let’s start arranging a Bach Keyboard Partita and perform it next month. Maybe I’ll graduate early! Which competitions will I do this summer? Okay, gotta rehearse this easy little piece with this singer. Got a practice room early, I can warm up on this easy little piece. Here it goes. Ah, this is easy! This… wait… why does that feel so weird? I’ll just try again… and… okay, try again… and…

It didn’t hurt. Rather it felt like a network of strings which had always been taut and well-coordinated had unravelled in my right hand. I cancelled the performance and expected to wake up in a few days with everything back to normal, but this sensation, only when I played guitar, never went away. In fact, as I practiced harder and harder, it got worse and worse, to the point where I had to show Sergio. When I described what I felt and showed him how the piece I had played perfectly for him a few weeks ago now sounded like arhythmic garbage, he seemed gravely concerned and his suspicion was a word I’d never heard before: “dystonia”.

The months of frustration and disappointment that followed discovering that I had developed this task-specific, neurologically-based affliction will have to be a separate post, but the summary is as follows: it got better, and then it didn’t. Then it got worse. For a long time. My teachers Sergio and later David Tanenbaum were incredibly supportive, allowing me to develop a niche repertoire which didn’t push my right hand too much, and the rest of my time at the Conservatory wasn’t without some musical and personal joy. As a fellow guitarist-composer, meeting Renaud Côté-Giguère (a name at odds with the American keyboard) was inevitable, and we soon developed a close friendship and collaborative spirit, forming The Green Dolphin Duo, a name which has always been too strange to change. Immediately after my developing dystonia, we were offered by our school the chance to perform at The Kennedy Center, and although I was a nervous dumpster fire on multiple levels, having Renaud as a duo partner and travel companion ensured that the experience went as well as possible.

Somehow I got my degree, but the hand wasn’t getting better, even when I thought “oh, I just need a few months of slow, careful practice to work this out!”. After a few months of slow, careful practice, like building a card tower, one wrong move, one temptation to play an old piece, would crumble the tower, and I would feel like utter garbage. It felt like my identity was fading, and after moving back to Austin and wading through a job as a swim teacher for a year, I realized I needed to make a decisive move in my career, rather than hold out hope for a recovery which seemed more unlikely each day. Ultimately I would find the treatment program I needed, and nowadays I’ve been able to work my way back into performing, but the decision I made to redirect my musical focus through another outlet would reveal what I saw as a major setback to be a blessing in disguise.

I finally decided to apply to my hometown college, The University of Texas at Austin – only this time for music composition. Although I had a couple of nice guitar pieces to pad my portfolio, it was apparent that I wasn’t a “real” composer yet – I had no works for other instruments! So I threw myself into writing a solo piano piece, which I somehow learned and recorded myself (and thus it arguably suffered from my technical setbacks as a pretend-pianist), wrote a choral setting of the “Kyrie” text from the standard Catholic Mass because what on earth was I thinking and why, and set a friend’s textual musings for soprano and string quartet. I somehow slid my way into the studio at UT, and, well, here I remain at the time of writing this.

I started my composerly studies with a strange mutually-feeding back-burner approach to what I was doing: “oh, I’ll just study composition until I figure guitar out”. Conversely: “oh, it doesn’t matter if I figure guitar out, because I have composition”. Part of this was a defense mechanism to again not feeling like a “real” composer, and finding that I could now hide in either identity from the pressure of the other. To this day my challenge has been leaning into both disciplines and realizing that whatever I do as a musician deserves my complete dedication, and, as a wise man is about to say, a pot in between burners never boils. And soggy undercooked pasta is not a viable career option.

My first large-scale effort in composition was a string quartet, ultimately entitled “Loss”, after both losing my ability to play guitar and a somewhat concurrent break-up. It had all the makings of a naive early effort – from the melodramatic title to the convoluted, sometimes unplayable rhythms. It also introduced me to the wonderful world of hunting down performers to play your music, and when you finally secure your victims, you can never thank them enough for the suffering that learning your needlessly hard music inflicted on them. But it represented a foot-in-the-door for composing “real” music.

After self-consciously avoiding writing for the guitar for a couple of years, I found myself revisiting the instrument with my “Guitar Concerto”. Having never written for such a large group, let alone with 25 minutes of music, writing this piece was a year of constant doubt and insecurity, wondering if the flute could really do that (answer: fine, but why), asking myself why the world even needed this piece. But I was proud of the end product, and the encouragement of this piece from both my compositional and guitaristic peers showed me that I didn’t need to separate the idea of being a “composer” and a “guitarist” and even a “guitarist-composer” (some feel the prefix diminishes the suffix).

As I conclude this post, I’ve recently written a guitar quartet for the newly formed Austin Classical Guitar Quartet, and am coming off a school year that featured two forays into guitar and live electronics (“Delayed Gratifiation” and “Halation”). Rather than being a guilt-complex, perhaps my guitar heritage is a strength to lean into. Yet I’ve also found that I have legitimate musical statements to make without my guitar, and that being a “real” composer isn’t about having an encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary compositional techniques or writing masterfully for every possible combination of instruments, but about finding a personal creative voice and using whichever outlet best allows this voice to communicate to one’s audience. Although I ended up where I am now partly by chance, I feel that I’m exactly where I needed to be, and will leave school with the diversity of background and experience that I had always envisioned for myself. Here’s to the coming years to figure out exactly how this experience will develop into a rewarding career as a musician.

I don’t have a cat.