Research
Research interests
- Performance lectures
- Polytonality
- Instrumental music with recorded sound
- Short form composition
Current research
I am currently working on a series of pieces called "Explorations in Polytonality and Other Musical Wonders". Each of the volumes that I have made so far features a suite of short pieces. Each piece investigates a technical approach within music composition (e.g., polytonality, metric modulations); historical textures (e.g., organum, heterophony); and historical forms (e.g. rondo, round). The project investigates new potentialities for these techniques, textures, and forms, with particular focus on approaches out of circulation within contemporary music making.
Publications
External roles and responsibilities
Biography
Matthew Shlomowitz is a London based composer, raised in Adelaide, Australia. He co-leads Plus Minus Ensemble and the Soundmaking podcast, and teaches at the University of Southampton. As winner of the Johann Joseph Fux Opera Composition, his opera Electric Dreams was staged at 2017 ORF Musikprotokoll, with a second production in 2023 at Grand Théâtre de Genève. Other recent pieces include "Glücklich, Glücklich, Freude, Freude", written for keyboardist Mark Knoop and the SWR Symphonieorchester premiered at 2019 Donaueschinger Musiktage; "Hey Hey Its Tuesday', a collaboration with video maker Laura Spark for Speak Percussion that premiered in Melbourne in 2021; and "Minor Characters", a one-hour show written with composer/singer Jennifer Walshe for Ensemble Nikel premiered at 2023 Darmstadt Summer Course.
Matthew has a number of compositional projects. Letter Pieces are open score works combining physical action and music. The pieces in his Popular Contexts series combine recognisable recordings with instrumental music. He has made a number of performance-lecture works addressing aesthetic issues, such as Lecture About Bad Music. In 2020 he started on a new series titled Explorations in Polytonality and other Musical Wonders; the first volume is a set of piano pieces for Mark Knoop (released on Bandcamp), and the second is for the Apsara recorder trio.
Matthew co-directs the new music group Plus Minus, and runs a podcast called Soundmaking with Håkon Stene. He has taught on the Tzlil Meudcan Summer Course, Ensemble Offspring Hatched Academy, Luxembourg Composition Academy, Klangspuren Composition Lab and Darmstadt Summer Courses. He has written articles, such as "The Automaton Approach" (MusikTexte), "Where Are We Now?" (Tempo), and It's not about you: do we still need an artistic voice (Tempo).
At University of Southampton Matthew teaches composition across undergraduate, masters and PhD programmes, and also offers an undergraduate Humanities wide module called From Teddy Boys to Drag Queens: Music and Subculture.
Prizes
- Johann-Joseph-Fux-Opernkomposition prize by Land Steiermark. (2015)