6PM in the Parkway Central Lobby

Join the Music Department and Thomas Schuttenhelm (Artistic Director, Network for New Music) for an evening recital of solo guitar music, culminating in a performance of the ambient work Fifth Illumination by composer Matt Sargent.

Fifth Illumination is a solo for electric guitar, inside a vibrating world of seven pre-recorded e-bowed guitar parts. During each performance, the score builds uniquely using the composer's notation software. (The performer also uses this software to prepare the seven pre-recorded parts.) Notes are introduced to the guitarist in real time on animated staves, slowly fading into view and then away again, using opacity as dynamic. The result is something like the slow turn of a hanging mobile: slow loops, falling in and out of shadows and always changing in perspective. Written during the darkest and slowest months of the pandemic, spring 2020, Fifth Illumination was especially composed as a rather private piece, played frequently in my home studio before audiences reconvened for live concerts such as this. As a result, it is a piece that takes time. There are gaps and pauses, moments of patience and loss, and quiet rooms for reflection.

About the Performer

Thomas Schuttenhelm is a composer, performer, scholar, and Artistic Director at Network for New Music. His work interweaves creation, interpretation, and reflection into a single artistic practice. As both composer and performer, he inhabits a continual cycle of creation and re-creation – each informing and transforming the other. This interplay gives rise to music that bears the imprint of lived performance and the curiosity of the creative imagination. His scholarly work extends this exchange, situating artistic practice within broader aesthetic and cultural contexts. Across these roles, Schuttenhelm cultivates connections between disciplines, between communities, and between the imaginative and intellectual dimensions of music-making.

About the Composer

Matt Sargent is a composer, guitarist, recording engineer, and music technology specialist based in upstate New York, where he is an assistant professor of music at Bard College. His music grows from resonance, memory, the making/breaking of patterns, and computer models of musical thought. Working between the concert stage, the recording studio, and the code box, Sargent’s audio technology has been called “a veritable fountain of intensifying, kaleidoscopic spumes” (Peter Margasak, Bandcamp). Over the last decade, his work has focused extensively on musical algorithms and real-time notation systems, which can be heard in his compositions and technical collaborations with other artists.