MATTHEW SCHULTHEIS — COMPOSER

The music of American composer Matthew Schultheis (b. 1997) is driven by a love of visual art and literature, a preference for dramatic, rich, sometimes opulent textures, a reverence for present-day musicians’ inheritance of past musical idioms, and a fascination with the connections performers and listeners make between deeply familiar and newly-heard pieces.

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Born in the Washington, D.C. area and based in New York City, Matthew is a C. V. Starr Doctoral Fellow at The Juilliard School, having completed his master's degree there in 2022. He has studied with Matthias Pintscher since 2020. He earned his BM in composition, additionally studying piano full-time, at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. 

Matthew has collaborated with the Tokyo Symphony and Juilliard Orchestras; Ensemble intercontemporain; Attacca, Mivos, JACK, and Hausmann Quartets; IU New Music Ensemble, and Sound Icon. He has participated in summer festivals at Bowdoin, Brevard, New Music On the Point, SUNY-Purchase (with the National Youth Orchestra) BU’s Tanglewood Institute, and the EAMA–Nadia Boulanger Institute. Recent and upcoming commissions this year include works for solo piano (Jacob Skiles), chorus (New York Virtuoso Singers), solo viola (Sam Kelder), flute and percussion (Coriolis Duo), and violin and piano (Magpie Duo). In August 2024, he will conduct a new orchestral work with the Tonkunstler Orchestra as part of the Grafenegg “Ink Still Wet” workshop.  

Matthew’s music has received three consecutive BMI Student Composer Awards and additional honors from ASCAP, the Society of Composers, Inc., the Music Teachers National Association, and the IU composition department. Both of his works for orchestra, Columbia, In Old Age (2020) and Governing Forces (2023), received awards from Juilliard.

An accomplished pianist dedicated to performing new music, Matthew has frequently premiered his own works throughout his time as a student, in addition to giving recitals of music in the standard repertoire. He formed Magpie Duo with violinist Lauren Conroy in 2023; together they have performed recitals of 20th and 21st century music at venues in New York and Chicago. He has also appeared with the Juilliard Dance Division and Juilliard Percussion Ensemble in large-scale works by Philip Glass and Charles Wuorinen. He was a member and frequent featured soloist of the Indiana University New Music Ensemble from 2016–2019; as a soloist with that ensemble, he performed György Ligeti's Piano Concerto in spring 2018.