PRISM Quartet’s Matthew Levy: Profiles in Education

Credit: Willa Rohrer.

The director of the groundbreaking saxophone ensemble reflects on the teachers who changed his life, his own career as an educator, his Selmer horns and more.

Matthew Levy didn’t pick up the saxophone with the intention of pursuing a career in classical music. Growing up in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, Levy was more attracted to popular, horn-heavy R&B and funk bands like Earth, Wind & Fire, Parliament-Funkadelic and the Commodores.

His life was changed by his music teacher. While attending Central High School, the future co-founder and director of the renowned PRISM Quartet studied music theory with Italo Taranta, chairman of the school’s music department. Taranta played the masterworks of the Western classical music canon for his classes, detailing the craftsmanship and powerful emotions in the music.

“His passion for music really excited me,” Levy recalls. “He inspired me to pursue music.”

Levy had just one reservation about Taranta’s teaching style: his strict judgment of other styles of music. He would encourage his students to bring in recordings of music they liked from other genres and play them for the class. “Then he would play something like Beethoven’s Eroica symphony and say, ‘No, this is better,’” Levy recalls with a laugh. “He put music in a hierarchy, with classical music at the top. I don’t agree with that view.”

A Prismatic Approach to Genre

In fact, Levy’s belief in the transformative power of all music has been a guiding principle throughout his career. Over its four-decades-long history, PRISM Quartet has earned global acclaim for its stylistically diverse and experimental work—an “ever-adventurous” chamber ensemble, as the New Yorker put it. The quartet, formed by Levy and three fellow students at the University of Michigan in 1984, has commissioned more than 300 works, significantly expanding the classical saxophone repertoire.

The ensemble has increasingly strived to cross the streams of cutting-edge classical music and other genres. PRISM Quartet has collaborated with jazz masters for its Heritage/Evolution series, and explored the connections between Black and Jewish Americans with composers from classical, jazz, funk and klezmer traditions for Generate Music, an ambitious project celebrating the quartet’s 40th anniversary.

Those experiences have made a lasting impact on Levy’s work as both an artist and an educator, he says. Levy is currently on the faculty of Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance. “The process of collaborating with composers, especially composers who are also performing artists, has led to an invaluable exchange of knowledge in both directions,” he explains. “Working across different musical traditions speaks to the idea of the saxophone as a bridge between genres.

“I try to bring that into my teaching,” he continues, “because I think playing non-classical music is integral to being a complete ‘classical’ musician. A lot of contemporary classical music is not solely rooted in the Western canon; it draws from folkloric music, jazz and so on. So if you’re not versatile, you’re going to struggle.”

Playing a Typewriter

Levy enrolled at the University of Michigan specifically to study with Donald Sinta, a revered saxophonist and educator who served as the first elected chair of the World Saxophone Congress.

Sinta was an “extremely demanding” teacher, Levy says. “One of his focal points was developing beauty of sound and perfect intonation. He focused on mastery of voicing, using your oral cavity to shape the sound and pitch. The instrument itself is kind of like a typewriter—23 keys within a mechanical structure dating back to the industrial revolution. But what happens in your mouth, as a kind of extension of the instrument itself, is at the epicenter of your sound and your identity as an artist.”

While at Michigan, Levy connected with Reggie Borik (soprano), Michael Whitcombe (alto) and Tim Miller (baritone) to form the original incarnation of PRISM Quartet, with a mission of performing and commissioning contemporary music for classical saxophone. Levy is the sole remaining original member, though the quartet has only seen four member changes during its long history (including an eight-year stint on soprano by Tim Ries, who went on to tour with the Rolling Stones). The current PRISM lineup—Levy, Timothy McAllister (soprano), Zachary Shemon (alto) and Taimur Sullivan (baritone)—has been together for 17 years.

All four members endorse Selmer saxophones, with Levy being the last to convert. For many years he played a silver-plated Yamaha Custom tenor that he loved, but ultimately it made sense to unify the group’s sound with coordinated instruments. “The instruments are matched, like a consort of Renaissance instruments,” Levy explains. “That affects how we fit in to each other’s sounds and the balance of overtones and timbre.”

Levy now plays a Selmer Paris Supreme alto, Selmer Paris Series III tenor (with a gold-plated neck), Selmer Paris S90 mouthpieces with a 190 facing, and Ishimori ligatures (solid silver on tenor and gold-plated on alto). He typically uses Vandoren “Blue Box” 3 reeds, though he’s been experimenting lately with Légère French Cut synthetic reeds. “I never used to play synthetic reeds because they always sounded plastic and inorganic,” he says. “But the French Cut model is amazingly good, and the benefit is you don’t have to spend your life looking for a good reed.”

Timothy McAllister, Taimur Sullivan, Matthew Levy and Zachary Shemon (from left) are PRISM Quartet. Credit: Jon Rohrer.

Blending Voices

While still at Central High, Levy followed Italo Taranta to Settlement Music School, where he would later teach and where his 5-year-old daughter is now beginning her own musical studies.

Taranta led a madrigal singing group at the community music school, which Levy joined despite his reluctance as a vocalist. The experience was illuminating with regard to blending voices, and would resonate decades later when PRISM embarked on a collaboration with the Philly-based chamber choir The Crossing.

“Some of the challenges of choral singing are nearly identical to those of playing in a sax quartet,” Levy says. “It’s all about meshing sound, being in tune, balancing properly. For any accomplished chamber group, the hallmark of their artistry is how they blend, develop homogeneity and communicate. A major part of that is matching every aspect of performance practice—matching tone, having an identical sound concept and identical concepts of articulation and vibrato.”

That dedication to the ensemble over the individual is a personality trait, not just a musical decision, Levy continues. “You’re subsuming your identity within the ensemble. You have to recognize when you’re in a supporting role. We could take the four top classical saxophone players from across the planet and you might find their playing is so mismatched that they wouldn’t necessarily form a good ensemble. They may be virtuosi, but it’s about a unanimity of concept, where everyone is on the same page, like a great basketball team.”

Crossing the (Revenue) Streams

Levy left the University of Michigan with an invaluable store of musical knowledge, but he and PRISM have had to educate themselves on the other diverse aspects of the music business. The quartet launched its own label, XAS Records, in 2016, while Levy maintains his own recording studio and arts consulting practice.

The ensemble’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic was to unify those various strands under the umbrella of PRISM Quartet Institute (PQI). The program offers cultural and educational organizations a menu of seminars, workshops and classes spanning five separate tracks: Teaching and Pedagogy, Business and Entrepreneurship, Recording and Technology, Composition, and Mentorship. PQI began as a virtual initiative during lockdown but has expanded to a hybrid model combining Zoom and in-person teaching. “Students in this day and age shouldn’t rely solely on being performing artists,” Levy says. “They need to coalesce a whole range of skills that can help them have interesting careers that are multifaceted and combine diverse streams of revenue.”

Levy is particularly excited about working with pre-college-age students, and PRISM has guided students at a variety of institutions. The members have held residencies at the Interlochen Center for the Arts’ High School Saxophone Institute; coached aspiring players at Temple Music Prep; led all-ages programs at the Free Library of Philadelphia; taught with PQI for the nonprofit organization Crescendo Detroit; and taken on other opportunities.

“I love teaching kids,” Levy says. “I’ve learned that the hardest thing to do is to correct a bad embouchure or bad habits that have been so ingrained over many years that the student is wedded to a self-defeating way of playing. If you can start early with kids and get them set up properly, they’re going to move really fast.”

Looking back on his relationship with Donald Sinta and other key teachers, Levy hopes that he can play a similar role in his students’ lives and musical development. “The connection between teacher and student is all-important,” he says. “I try to be a model of what’s possible for my students, but also talk about the creative process beyond playing the instrument. I encourage them to embrace all of their musical interests so that they can find a way forward.”

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