About Matthew Brown

Californian virtuoso of a cappella choral settings

Matthew Brown was born in Southern California in 1978. He studied with Morten Lauridsen, Frank Ticheli, Donald Crockett, Frederik Lesemann, Randy Newman and Tamar Diesendruck and others at the USC Thornton School of Music where he completed his masters and doctoral studies in music composition. In 2003 he received the Hans J. Salter Endowed Music Award and in the following years won several awards at various competitions, such as the Jimmy McHugh Composition Prize, the VocalEssence Welcome Christmas! Carol Contest (2007), the VocalEssence Essentially Choral Commission (2010) as well as the C4 Composition Competition (2011).

The musical oeuvre of the American composer, who is also in great demand as a singer, pianist, arranger, conductor and lecturer, includes both chamber music and orchestral works as well as a few pieces for piano or marimbaphone solo. His compositions focus, however, on a cappella vocal music, mostly for four-part mixed choir. It is especially these works that have become very popular not only in the USA but also throughout the world. Numerous vocal ensembles, some even professional, such as VocalEssence, Young New Yorkers' Chorus, Cincinnati Boychoir, Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Chamber Singers & Cappella, Master Chorale, De Angelis Vocal Ensemble, Horizon Music Group or the Antioch Chamber Ensemble under the direction of Joshua Copeland, studied Brown's choral music gems intensively and performed the (world) premieres of these works.

The fact that the composer is equally at home with secular and sacred music shows not least in the a cappella settings of Brown which were included in the publishing programme of Schott Music in 2014. Whether medieval-mystical texts by Hildegard von Bingen, antiphons like the well-known 'O Magnum Mysterium' or 'Sitivit anima mea', love poems by the English Renaissance poet John Donne, late-Romantic verses by Lord Byron for example, or poems by the Victorian writer Francis William Bourdillon: the range of Brown's selection of texts is as varied as it is many-faceted. Sometimes it seems as if the text and music in Brown's works, some spherical, some archaic or romantically idealized and some interspersed with harsh, harmonic frictions, are interwoven to form an inseparable whole.