Matthew Guard

Matthew Guard is a conductor, curator, arranger, and editor who has spent fifteen years exploring a central question: what might vocal music be capable of if the concert itself were treated as a creative form?

Guard believes that the collective human voice has an extraordinary capacity for emotional expression, but that its possibilities are often constrained by inherited conventions of presentation. As Founder & Artistic Director of Skylark, the six-time GRAMMY®-nominated professional vocal ensemble he founded in 2011, he has used the group to explore alternatives. His concerts may be shaped by literature, history, visual art, architecture, a museum collection, or the natural world. Repertoire and sequence, text and narrative, scholarship and collaboration can all become part of the form. Guard arranges and edits music, commissions and collaborates with composers, adapts texts, and creates new editions when a project requires material that does not already exist.

Each project is a different experiment in the same investigation. Clear Voices in the Dark places Francis Poulenc’s Figure humaine, composed in Nazi-occupied France, alongside American Civil War songs, constructing a dialogue across two periods of national crisis. For A Christmas Carol, Guard abridged Dickens’s text and worked with composer Benedict Sheehan to create a continuous “story score” in which narration and choral music are inseparable; the project has been performed with Christine Baranski at the Morgan Library & Museum and The Breakers. At the Hispanic Society Museum & Library, Guard has created programs in response to the institution itself, drawing on its architecture, art, history, and collection of Renaissance musical manuscripts. Sub Rosa: Secrets Revealed, created with composer Gregory W. Brown and bestselling The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, explores hidden symbols and codes in music. In each case, the creative act lies not only in how individual works are performed, but in the relationships constructed among them. That approach has begun to travel beyond Skylark: Houston Chamber Choir has performed Guard’s Once Upon a Time program.

This practice extends into musical scholarship. Working from a facsimile of the composer’s autograph manuscript at Moscow’s Glinka Museum, Guard and soprano and Russian diction specialist Fotina Naumenko created a new performing edition of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil. They laid out the score to preserve the phrase structure of the handwritten original and rendered the Church Slavonic in IPA alongside an English translation carried in the body of the score. The edition is now performed not only by Skylark but by other ensembles, including Westminster Choir College, the Bethlehem Bach Choir, and the Conspirare Symphonic Choir.

Guard is now extending the same investigation beyond the conventional concert. Film projects growing from Clear Voices in the Dark and A Christmas Carol explore how music, narrative, history, and place can operate on screen. Harvard University has also commissioned Guard and Benedict Sheehan to expand A Christmas Carol into a new choral-orchestral version, extending an idea first developed with Skylark into a larger musical and dramatic form.

Under Guard’s direction, Skylark has earned six GRAMMY® nominations and made more than fifteen studio recordings, now distributed by LSO Live. The ensemble has performed at institutions including the Morgan Library & Museum, the Met Cloisters, and the Hispanic Society Museum & Library. Guard has led residencies and workshops at Harvard, MIT, Wellesley College, and Phillips Exeter Academy, and his work and Skylark’s performances have been covered by The New York Times, the Associated Press, the BBC, NPR, and The Times of London.

Guard’s path to this practice has been unconventional. He studied government at Harvard College before working as a strategy consultant at Bain & Company and later earned an MBA from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. He also works independently as a producer and editor of choral recordings. He and his wife, Carolyn Guard, Skylark’s co-founder, co-founded Babiators, the children’s eyewear company named to Forbes’ list of America’s Most Promising Companies. Carolyn continues to lead Babiators today.