Preludes

Details

  • various
  • Piano

Recordings

Score Excerpts

Program Notes

The Preludes are an ongoing series of piano pieces, the earliest of which dates from 1994.

Reviews

Review of Preludes and Bagatelles

The latest release from renowned composer Michael Matthews, featuring his dramatic 14 Preludes, selections from his collection of Bagatelles, and the epilogistic Postlude. Expertly performed by acclaimed Belgian pianist Daan Vandewalle, the pieces on this disc encapsulate Matthews’ brilliance with solo piano composition and highlight his versatile craftsmanship, which he is able to alter to accommodate a wide variety of moods, emotions, and aspects of musicality.

In Emptiness, Over Emptiness

Details

  • 12
  • Soprano, Tape, Live Electronics

Recordings

Score Excerpts

Sound Samples

  • Therese Costes – soprano

Program Notes

I wish
Plants in the fields
Could talk –
They must have tears!
They must have songs!

   Tekkan Yosano (1873-1935)

To hatch a crow, a black rainbow
Bent in emptiness
over emptiness
But flying

   Ted Hughes – Two Legends (1970-72)

This work was commissioned by the International Computer Music Association for their 1994 conference in Aarhus, Denmark. On that occasion the world premiere was given by soprano Therese Costes.

While existing as a separate concert piece, In Emptiness, Over Emptiness is also a part of a larger music theatre work, Madrugada. This larger work is based on texts by Patrick Friesen, and tells of the spiritual quest of an unnamed traveler, who over the course of the work has a series of symbolic encounters with wise yet enigmatic and challenging ciphers: a reader of cards, a rhyming savant, a mute healer, a barker of the carnival of life. Hovering over and moving through this world is an Old Woman, leader of the spirit/demons, a gatherer of bones, the animating spirit of human life. In In Emptiness, Over Emptiness, her opening song in Madrugada, the Old Woman sings awareness and language into the characters.

The tape part of In Emptiness, Over Emptiness was realized in my studio in Winnipeg. I would like to acknowledge the University of Manitoba Faculty Research Grant and Research Development Funds for their assistance in the acquisition of equipment.

Layerings

Details

  • 14
  • Vibraphone and Tape

Score Excerpts

Sound Samples

Program Notes

In Layerings prerecorded sounds of vibraphone and other percussion instruments are processed and mixed to create a tapestry of sonic material from which and into which the vibraphone emerges and merges during the course of the performance. I have attempted to create an integrated sequence of textures in which the vibraphone and tape parts weave through and around one another. The dynamic level is generally quiet, with the tape part functioning as both accompanist and contrapuntal partner.

Layerings was written between 1991 and 1993; it was commissioned by percussionist Beverly Johnston with financial assistance from the Canada Council. Ms. Johnston premiered the work at the Music Gallery in Toronto on March 11, 1994.

Scattered Mirrors

Details

  • 8
  • Piano

Recordings

Program Notes

When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.

T.S. Eliot, excerpt from Little Gidding (Number four of Four Quartets – 1942),
©1963, 1964 by T.S. Eliot

One of the great human quests is that for oneness with the eternal; the moment at which time intersects with the timeless. This topic is a recurring theme in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, and is closely tied to his lifelong desire to unite and unify the fragments and discontinuities of the world. At various times in our lives we may have intimations, fleeting glimpses of this state. In this work I have reflected upon such brief epiphanies of time, visualizing the mirrors as both the skewed glimpses of the eternal and as the scattered fragments which unite to form these glimpses.

This work was commissioned by pianist Shirley Sawatzky, who gave the premier performance in Pinewa, Manitoba on October 29, 1993. The commission was made possible with financial assistance from the Manitoba Arts Council.

The First Sea

Details

  • 9
  • Bass Clarinet and Tape

Recordings

Score Excerpts

Program Notes

The First Sea is an attempt to express the feelings associated with discoveries, with the expansion of consciousness. The Pablo Neruda poem from which the title is taken speaks of moving from a time when:

“mine alone were those solitary places,
mine alone that elemental pathway,
mine alone the universe.”
to the moment at which:
“The prison of the forests
opened a green door,
letting in the wave in all its thunder,
and, with the shock of the sea,
my life widened out into space.”

Excerpts from The First Sea are from Memorial de Isla Negra by Pablo Neruda, copyright 1964 by Editorial Losada, S.A., Buenos Aires; translations copyright 1970, 1979, 1981 by Alastair Reid.

The work was commissioned by Bass Clarinetist Lori Freedman, who gave the premier performance at the Music Gallery in Toronto on February 25, 1989. The commission was made possible with financial assistance from the Manitoba Arts Council.

The tape part was realized at the University of Manitoba Computer Music Studio, using a Kurzweil K250 sampling keyboard, and the Yamaha DX7IIFD, TX802 and TX816 synthesizers; sequencing was done on Performer.

Fantasy

Details

  • 12
  • Solo Violin

Recordings

Score Excerpts

Sound Samples

  • Victor Schulz, violin

Program Notes

The first version of Fantasy was written during the winter of 1984; I was living and teaching in Korea, and had just returned from a visit to Canada, during which I had met and attended a concert by violinist Jack Glatzer. It was this meeting which first caused me to consider writing a work for unaccompanied violin. After returning to Canada in 1985, Fantasy was revised and expanded. As the title implies, it is a work in a rhapsodic, improvisatory style, with several recurring elements, the most prominent of which is a grace note figure first stated at the opening.

Fantasy was premiered by Jack Glatzer at the Winnipeg Art Gallery on March 24, 1986. It has since been recorded by Victor Schultz on the Manitoba Composers Association compact disc recording Jeté – Music for Violin.

Reviews

New Currents in Sound

“The development of recurring germinal ideas lends unity to the overall effect of the piece; it emerges as a work of sustained, poetic integrity.”

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Elegy

Details

  • Piano

Suite

Details

  • Guitar

Of Time and Sky

Details

  • 20
  • Piano

Recordings

Score Excerpts

Sound Samples

  • Peter Vinograde, Piano

Program Notes

Although the title, which comes from a poem by Pablo Neruda, was chosen after the piece was completed, its imagery captures the multi-dimensional way in which I approached the music. The work is a essentially a series of developing variations on an idea which is stated in the left hand at the outset. During the course of the piece this material is compressed and expanded in both time and space, and layered upon itself so that these variations unfold at different rates of speed and encompass different registers. With this approach I have tried to give the listener a sense of various “times” and “skies” coexisting. The work was written during the winter of 1990, shortly after my return from a six-month stay in England. It was commissioned by the Danish pianist Poul Rosenbaum with financial assistance from the Manitoba Arts Council.

Reviews

Matthews' creation absorbing

“Though of a modern idiom, there’s nothing cloudy or abstract about Winnipeg composer Michael Matthews’ Of Time and Sky. It’s an absorbing 20-minute work, whose elements of colour, harmony and direction are both animated from within and deeply expressive, with a well-balanced formal framework that makes it very satisfying to take on.”

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