Matt Curlee creates music that reflects connections between the natural world and the human psyche.
As a composer for film, television, and other media, Matt writes across a wide range of instrumental styles - orchestral, hybrid, solo piano, tension, horror, jazz, neo-soul, sound design, and trailer - delivering professional, editor-friendly packages on quick turnaround. His work has been featured on ABC, Hulu, Apple TV+, Disney Plus, Prime Video, and other networks across the US and Europe. He brings the same narrative sensitivity to collaborations with filmmakers and other storytelling artists, building musical ideas, processes, and narratives that embody the narrative rather than simply scoring it.
As a composer of concert music, his 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 — visual artists, dancers, animators, scientists, and filmmakers. An EPE performance of Matt's 2024 percussion sextet "Little One" was filmed by the award-winning Continuous Motion Productions and released as an EP that garnered over 80,000 streams in its first 4 months on Spotify. His music is frequently performed across North America, Asia, and Europe. Matt'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.
From 2008 to 2026, Matt served on the music theory faculty at the Eastman School of Music, where he held the Eisenhart Award for Excellence in Teaching. As an advocate for, and avid practitioner of, improvisational music, Matt has a particular interest in ear-brain interactions and processes that unify composition, improvisation, and performance. This area of study fed directly into his work at Eastman, where he designed advanced skills curricula for the undergraduate honors theory program and for conductors, and worked with many populations of students to develop real-time cognitive skills for performance.
In 1995, as an undergraduate at Eastman, Matt 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, Matt 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 prefers to be on the side of a mountain or deep in the woods, camera in hand.
