Matthew Shlomowitz

Biography

He was raised in Adelaide, Australia, and studied with Božidar Kos at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and with Brian Ferneyhough at Stanford University. He also studied privately with Michael Finnissy in the United Kingdom.

Since 2002 he has lived in London where he lectured at the Royal College of Music and for the Syracuse University London Program. He taught composition at Durham University during the 2008/09 academic year and was a Programme Collaborator for the Borealis Festival in Norway.

Music

He is co-director of Plus minus ensemble and the performance series Rational Rec and is a member of InterInterInter, a group that creates events mixing performance and audience activity. He was also a co-founder of Ensemble Offspring. He has been represented by the New Voices scheme at the British Music Information Centre and by the Australian Music Centre.

The bulk of his compositions are for chamber ensembles and often involve unusual instrumental combinations. Free Square Jazz, for instance, is for recorder, electric guitar, double bass and drum kit and Line and Length is scored for soprano saxophone, oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet & bassoon.

A number of his works are interdisciplinary such as the music-video pieces Train Travel and Six Aspects of the Body in Image and Sound (co-created with Rees Archibald) and an ongoing series of works for visual performer and musician called Letter Pieces. Certain works fall more comfortably into the genre of "performance pieces" such as Northern Cities and When is a Door Not a Door? Other works blur the boundaries between concert music and performance piece such as Five Monuments of Our Time, an orchestral work that requires the conductor to perform a series of choreographed gestures often ludicrously unrelated to the music being played. Such apparent absurdity and humor is not unintended; it has been said that,

... he seems to have a special feeling for those inadvertently comical situations in which we all sometimes find ourselves: a peculiar kind of miscommunication where we don’t so much get our wires crossed ... as get entangled in them

Some of his music shows the structural constraints analogous to the rules of Oulipo; familiar sounds from popular and everyday culture are also a regular feature of his music palette.

Musical Style

He has described his own music as being "something like the bastard love child of Brian Ferneyhough and Philip Glass."

Musical works

Selected musical works, including commissions and major works, are: