I'm Matt Carlson and I'm a student composer in my senior year at Cornish College of the Arts. I was born in Seattle and have been living here my whole life. I've been writing original music since I was about 12 but have only been composing for 2 years. I consider myself a multi-instrumentalist, first getting training on bass before I taught myself drums and guitar, then going on to take lessons in classical and jazz piano as well as electronic music production and synthesis.
I would say my main compositional influence is the American experimental tradition from Ives to Varese, Cowell, Cage, Feldman, Partch, Nancarrow, Young, Reich, Glass, and Zorn. I'm also quite influenced by the free jazz of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Eric Dolphy as well as the electronic composition of Ferrari, Xenakis, Stockhausen, and Subotnik.
Currently my interests are not so much in expressing myself emotionally as much as in exploring the way sound effects our sense of time and subtly changes the way our mind operates. When working on a piece I think of it as creating a little world which has its own rules and works in its own peculiar mannerisms. I'm also interested in dealing with issues of the listener's expectations in music: why do we carry the given assumptions we do when listening to a piece of music? How much do our expectations shape our opinions?
My future plans are to go on to graduate studies and music and continue composing and performing. I'm quite involved in the free improvisation community here in Seattle as a synthesist and pianist. I would like to be able to support myself through my music and teaching, but in the mean time I'm O.K. with my day job.