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NINE WINDS DISCOGRAPHY:
NWCD0186 Matthew Goodheart - Sonoluminescence
from Goodheart's homepage at Evolving Door Music:
A native of the San Francisco Bay Area composer, improviser, pianist, teacher and author Matthew Goodheart explores a variety of contemporary music forms. His broad foundation, technical innovations, and compositional sensitivity have allowed him to develop a solid reputation as both a solo performer and collaborative artist.Goodheart began his musical journey at an early age. By the age of three he began to experiment with the family piano, and improvisation was a natural outlet. At the age of seven he began traditional classical piano lessons, but was eventually dissatisfied with only playing other people's music. At the age of twelve, he began studying with composer, improviser, author and theorist W. A. Mathieu, and continued those studies for the next twelve years. In his early teens he began to perform regularly, both as soloist and with various music groups. At the age of fifteen he spent six weeks in Bangalor, India, where he performed a solo concert of his own music. At the age of 17 he was commissioned to write music for a contemporary theater production based on Kafka's The Hunger Artist , which included both musical elements and sound-design. The summer after high school, he was the resident sound designer and composer for the West Coast Playwrights Festival.
He spent 2 years at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, studying performance and sound-design. In addition to numerous student productions, he also worked professionally with the Marleen Pennison Dancers, and was commissioned to create a site-specific sound installation for En Garde Arts. Dissatisfied with the narrow focus of a performing arts degree, he returned to California and enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley as an English Literature major. He was promptly commissioned by the theater department there to create a score for the expressionist play A Night In Old Market . While at Berkeley, he also began to delve deeply into jazz and began studying with the notable jazz pianist and educator Susan Muscarella. He graduated from Berkeley Phi Beta Kappa, with highest honors.
Soon after leaving Berkeley, 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, Raphˇ 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. In addition to his Thesis concert of chamber works, Goodheart also gave a traditional recital of the works of Beethoven, Bach, and Debussy. Upon graduation, he was given the Flora Boyd award for piano performance.
During his enrollment at Mills, Goodheart continued his professional life. In addition to numerous performances solo and with Spearman and his associates, he also performed at the San Francisco Alternative Jazz Festival, the Young Pianist's Summit, with the Cecil Taylor Orchestra at the San Francisco Jazz Festival, and recorded his first CD Sonoluminescence . He also formed a friendship with jazz scholar Frank Kofsky, and assisted him with the musical examples in his book "John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s".
The last seven years have seen a great variety of projects from Goodheart. He performed at a variety of festivals, including Fire in the Valley, Garden of Memory Festival of New Music, Illuminations New Music & Arts Festival, and the Glenn Spearman Festival. He has toured the US and Canada, recorded several CDs, including projects Wadada Leo Smith and Dominic Duval, all of which have received received high critical praise, including critic's picks among "the year's 10 best" in Cadence, Coda, JazzIz, and JazzTimes magazines. He has also continued performing contemporary piano works, including Maggi Payne's Minutia , Josˇ 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 , a massive four movement piece written specifically for Goodheart. His regular group, the Goodheart-Allen-Powell Trio has toured the US, played several festivals including the Berkeley Arts Festival and the Olympia Experimental Music Festival, and released their first disc I Can Climb a Tree, I Can Tie a Knot, I Can Have a Conversation . There are plans for a second recording.
Just this last year saw the creation of two major works; Do Birds Ever Dream of Falling , a solo piano work created and performed at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral, and Ricercare , a chamber work for 8 instruments and 2 vocalist, at Mills College. Both of these pieces were site-specific, exploring the sonic particularities of their performance spaces.
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, and an alternate position for residency by the Djerassi Foundation.
In addition to his performing schedule, Goodheart is an active writer and teacher. In addition to teaching in his private studio in Berkeley, he teaches piano at the University of California at Berkeley, advanced composition and theory at the UC Berkeley Young Musicians' Program, improvisation at the Bill and Pat Dixon School of Music, and piano, composition, and theory at the East Bay Center for Performing Arts.
This year also saw the publication of his article "The 'Giant Steps' Fragment" in Perspectives of New Music. Another article of his on the rise of the free-jazz movement in the early 1960s was featured in the UNCOOL festival of New Music in Poschiavo, Switzerland. He has also lectured and given masterclasses at a variety of schools, including the University of California at San Diego, and the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York.
