Equal parts composer, educator, and performer, Matt Curlee has been a member of the Department of Music Theory since 2007 and holds Eastman’s Eisenhart Award for Excellence in Teaching. As an advocate for, and avid practitioner of improvisational music, Curlee has a particular interest in ear-brain interactions and the intuitive processes that unify composition, improvisation, and performance. This area of study has fed directly into his work at Eastman, where he has designed advanced skills curricula for the undergraduate honors theory program and for conductors, and has worked with many populations of students to develop real-time cognitive skills for performance.

As a composer of concert music, Curlee’s recent work has focused on the interplay between the abstract spaces of fundamental physics and musical space. Recent commissions have included works for New Conductors’ Orchestra NYC, the Eastman Percussion Ensemble (EPE), 3D Percussion, RPS Collective, the US Air Force Band, and many other solo performers, ensembles, and collaborators of all kinds, including visual artists, dancers, animators, scientists, and filmmakers. An EPE performance of Curlee’s 2024 percussion sextet “Little One” was filmed by the award-winning Continuous Motion Productions and released as an EP that garnered over 15,000 streams in its first month on Spotify. His music is frequently performed across North America, Asia, and Europe, and his work for TV/film has been featured on ABC, Hulu, Apple TV+, Disney Plus, and Prime Video. Curlee’s setting of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s seminal short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” created in collaboration with theatrical percussionist Nikki Joshi, was produced as a short film in association with Arts Canada and the Rebanks Family Foundation.

In 1995, as an undergraduate at Eastman, Curlee was one of the youngest organists ever to win the prestigious Grand Prix de Chartres. After several years of touring in the US and Europe, appearances with orchestras, inaugural performances on new instruments, and two releases as a solo artist, he increasingly gravitated towards collaborative music making. In 2002, with four other Eastman alums, he founded Neos, a contemporary jazz chamber ensemble built around the pipe organ. Neos toured and recorded for several years, Curlee serving as its artistic director and principal composer, and ran a commissioning program that generated new music from composers around the world.

When not writing, performing or teaching, Matt likes to be found on the side of a mountain or deep in the woods.