Matt The Musician
Nowadays most people associate me with Austin Classical Guitar, GuitarCurriculum, and The Rosette.
But it is my love of music that started off this whole journey of community service. I was trained in classical guitar and voice at Interlochen Arts Academy, Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and the University of Texas, I performed all around North America, released three CDs, and won some national awards. Most importantly, I love music, I love to perform, and nowadays I am composing more and more. Here’s a little introduction to some my music-making.
Matt The Performer
One of my favorite things about classical guitar is that you can play all by yourself. Here’s a fun video from a few years back playing one of my favroite peices of all time, Elegy, by Johann Kaspar Mertz. Enjoy!
Of course, playing with others is a total blast. Here’s a concert I played recently of a ten-song cycle I composed called Journey. I’m playing guitar and singing, my friend Joe Williams is playing bass, and master percussionist Justin Hines rounds out the ensemble. I had so much fun going deep when I wrote this piece - inspired by the Hero’s Journey paradigm.
Matt The Composer
The first big bit of music I wrote was Classical Guitar for Young People. For that book I wrote 18 student pieces with the goal of creating a methodology for young students that would focus on joy and expressivity in learning. It was my first book and, all these years and nine other published books later, it’s still my best-seller! One incredibly gratifying thing is how many videos you can now find on YouTube of students and teachers playing music from that book! New ones appear each week. Here’s one of the favorites, called Light & Dark, performed by someone I don’t know, but who writes: “I use Matthew Hinsley's book with a lot of my students. This is one of my favorites because it easily allows for expressive dynamics.” So nice!
Of course, I also wrote a ton of music for GuitarCurriculum, especially in the early days when Travis Marcum and I were creating it. Here’s one of my favorite videos from the day we had our Silicon Labs lunchtime guitar class of engineers visit our Mendez Middle School kids to play the same piece together - a reimagining I did of Hush You Bye for guitar ensemble.
And in recent years I’ve had the great joy of writing larger concert works. In 2024-25 I wrote Journey, which I linked to above. In 2025-26 I wrote a tribute piece for Travis Marcum for two classical guitars, bass, electric guitar and violin, on the occasion of his twentieth year with us at ACG as our Director of Education. And this year, 2026-27 I’ve written another 10-song cycle called Friendship for Guitar, Bass, Violin, and Percussion. I can’t wait to share it with the world!
To close out this post, I’ll share a fun performance of the timeless song, What A Wonderful World, I had the honor of giving with Angelica Campbell and Justice Phillips. I’m singing and they’re playing guitar. Angelica and Justice were both students in our guitar programs in AISD over the years who grew up, went to UT for music, and then joined our full time team at ACG.
Truly, it’s a wonderful world.