Earliest musical memory?
On the cul-de-sac where I grew up, for a time: circling a streetlamp on my tricycle singing "Oh, What A Beautiful Morning!" endlessly until I was dizzy. This also feels like my earliest queer memory, somehow.
What are the themes that inspire you most in your music?
Enchantment
Is there a moment that brought you to now, being a composer — one that changed your course or confirmed it?
Not a single moment, no. A weird mixture of happenstance, successes, failures, precociousness, precariousness, fear.
What are the 5 words you would use to describe your compositional style?
Here's four (I'd like to think I don't have access to a complete, totalizing description of my own style or self!): Reticent, opaque, effervescent, flirtatious.
If you had a mantra/philosophy/phrase for where you are right now, what would it be?
To misquote E.M. Forster: Only Disconnect. (from the internet! Distractions are killer to the creative process, and social media has seriously negative effects on mental health and well-being in general....)
What do you find the most rewarding about composing? What’s the toughest?
Toughest is always starting the piece and building the contours of the world, discovering which rules animate and govern the life-forms which populate that world, how to make the whole thing pulse and flow. Most rewarding is playing within that world once things are up and running.
What would be excited to see or hear more of in the field of composition?
More joy and more warmth and more generosity of spirit.
Sneak a preview of Matthew's entry in the GSC finals, played by the Graham Sommer Trio:
Matthew Ricketts | Still There
