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 Orchestra; Attacca, Mivos, JACK, and Hausmann Quartets; IU New Music Ensemble; Ensemble intercontemporain, and Sound Icon. He has participated in summer festivals at Bowdoin College, the Brevard Music Center, New Music On the Point, SUNY-Purchase (with the National Youth Orchestra) and the EAMA–Nadia Boulanger Institute. Upcoming projects in the 2022–23 season include commissions from Ensemble intercontemporain, Giancarlo Latta of the Argus Quartet, and the New York Virtuoso Singers.

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. In 2021, his first work for orchestra, Columbia, In Old Age, received the Palmer Dixon Prize from The Juilliard School for most outstanding work of the year.

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 was a member and frequent featured soloist of the Indiana University New Music Ensemble from 2016–2019. Performances as a soloist with that ensemble include György Ligeti's Piano Concerto (2018), the American premiere of Bernd Richard Deutsch's Mad Dog (2017), and Carlos Sánchez-Gutiérrez's concerto New Short Stories (2019). He is also active as a conductor, having directed many of his own works as well as those of his colleagues.