Matthew Schultheis / Ink Still Wet 2024

Born in Washington D.C. and based in New York City, Matthew is a C. V. Starr doctoral fellow at the Juilliard School, where he has completed his master's degree in 2022. Since 2020, he has studied with Matthias Pintscher. He earned his BM in composition at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he additionally studied piano full-time.

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.

As 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 of the standard repertoire. He was a member and frequent featured soloist of the Indiana University New Music Ensemble from 2016 to 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 also functions as a conductor, having directed many of his own works, as well as those of his colleagues.

The music of American composer Matthew Schultheis is driven by a love for 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 build between deeply familiar and newly-heard pieces.

«This playlist provides a sampling of the songs that have stuck with me most, excluding contemporary classical music of the past 50 years. There are extreme differences in genre between many of them, and some are highly dramatic and even visceral in tone, but they all have an instrumental or lyrical ingenuity to them that has sparked my curiosity and inspired me in my own work. A few jazz selections were similarly included for their extraordinary harmonic color, and various miniatures by Chopin, Brahms, Debussy, and the Second Viennese School were chosen for the wealth of material they offer in extremely compact forms.»

Matthew Schultheis about his playlist