Matthew Recio, DMA

Artistic Director of Vox Venti

An avid vocal composer, Dr. Matthew Recio collaborates with poets, writers, and artists across the globe to bring text to life in the concert hall and on the theatrical stage. He was the 2019-2021 Vanguard Emerging Opera Composer with Chicago Opera Theatre, where he wrote his one-act opera The Puppy Episode with esteemed librettist Royce Vavrek, winning him the American Prize Award in Opera Composition. Passionate about raising marginalized voices, he was proud to have been a resident composer with the LYNX Project’s Amplify Series, where he collaborated with poet John-Carlos Schaut to lift nonverbal autistic voices in the art song sphere, and he has also collaborated with Queer In(n) to create a vocal work, featuring an adaptive libretto by Dr. Marquese Carter, inspired by the life of trans activist and Chicago icon Mama Gloria, who passed shortly after the work’s premiere. Other song projects include his work for Fourth Coast Ensemble’s WordSong commissioning series, an ensemble where he was also a featured winner of the Chicago SongSlam series for How We Hush. Matthew had his Ravinia debut with his commissioned work, Might be Equal, for tenor Ryan Townsend Strand’s acclaimed album “Letters to Jackie.” He has collaborated with Chicago-based choir Stare at the Sun on multiple projects, most notably an immersive choral cantata, The Hollow, that explores themes of isolation, depression, emergence, and renewal, with libretti by Alejandra Villareal Martínez. With equal passion for instrumental composition, he has been represented at the Midwest Composer Symposium, the UNK Music Festival, and the Hammer and Nail Dance collaboration. His chamber works received recognition at the IMTA young artist composition competition and the Quartet Nouveau competition. He is a published artist under the Dale Warland Series through G. Schirmer/Hal Leonard.

A summa cum laude graduate and Charles F. Hockett Scholarship recipient of Ithaca College (B.M., composition), Matthew completed his D.M.A. in composition, with a minor concentration in choral conducting, at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, where he was also a Jacobs fellowship recipient and associate instructor in aural skills. His principal teachers included Dana Wilson, Claude Baker, Aaron Travers, Don Freund, David Dzubay, Eric Ewazen, P.Q. Phan, and Sven-David Sandström.

Matthew is on faculty in the musical studies department at the DePaul University School of Music.