Matthew Shlomowitz
Popular Contexts, Volume 8: Five Soundscapes for a Contemporary Percussionist (2016), for percussion and samples
In his Popular Contexts series composer Matthew Shlomowitz builds a kind of art muzak from recycling referential material found on Freesound.org and other online sources, combining them with stylistic clichés, musical ready-mades, with a sense of enquiry, play, and silliness.
Read more (pdf)
Popular Contexts 8 i.
Popular Contexts 8 ii.
Popular Contexts 8 iii.
Popular Contexts 8 iv.
Popular Contexts 8 v.
Matthew Shlomowitz (b. 1975) is a composer of concert music and performance pieces. Raised in Adelaide, Australia, he now lives in London. He is Associate Professor in Composition at University of Southampton, and co-directs the new music ensemble Plus Minus with Joanna Bailie. He taught on the 2017 Tzlil Meudcan Summer Course (co-ordinated by Ensemble Nikel) in and will teach on the 2018 Hatched Academy (co-ordinated by Ensemble Offspring).
He has composed works for groups such as asamisimasa, bESIdES, Calefax, Ensemble Offspring, EXAUDI, Ives Ensemble, Nieuw Ensemble, Quatuor Diotima, Ricciotti Ensemble, Speak Percussion, Wespoke New Music Company and soloists Claire Edwardes, Juliet Fraser, Mark Knoop and Håkon Stene and Stephane Ginsburgh.
He has three ongoing projects: Popular Contexts, a series combining recordings of recognisable real world sound with instrumental music; Letter Pieces, which combine physical actions, music and text; and Public Lectures about Music, a series of lecture-pieces addressing ideas such as aesthetic judgement and emotional responses to music. In 2017, his opera Electric Dreams was produced by Kunstuniversität Graz in cooperation with ORF musikprotokoll, as winner of the Johann Joseph Fux Competition for Opera Composition.
