In 2023, Giacomo Fiore commissioned a new work for his just intonation National steel guitar and live electronics from New York composer Matt Sargent. Their collaboration resulted in a concert of new works for guitar, all of which are computer-generated variations on the Shaker hymn, Simple Gifts. Composer and performer Chris Pierandozzi Everingham opens the evening.

Matt Sargent (b. 1984) 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.

Italian-born guitarist and musicologist Giacomo Fiore has premiered more than three dozen new works for justly-tuned, electric, and classical guitars, and released several recordings for Other Minds, Populist, Cold Blue, Pinna, Spectropol, Paper Garden Records, and his own impressum. 

Originally from Missoula, Montana, Chris Pierandozzi Everingham is a composer and performer studying music as a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz. Before moving to California, Chris studied at the University of Montana and performed with the Missoula Symphony as their contrabassoonist. Chris also studied music as a performer-composer at CalArts before coming to Santa Cruz. Chris’s music utilizes just intonation systems in combination with indeterminacy and explorations of duration and temporal memory; some of these compositions have also integrated tools created in MAX MSP to realize just intonation harmonies. The primary mode of experimentation in Chris’s music revolves around listening and perception over time, especially with intonation changes over the course of extended durations. As a performer, Chris uses bassoon, bass guitar, and electronics to realize his own works and works of collaborators, including written compositions and improvisations.