Matthew Ricketts

Matthew Ricketts (b. 1986) is a Canadian composer originally from Victoria, British Columbia. He studied theory and composition at McGill University with Brian Cherney, Chris Paul Harman and John Rea, and is currently pursuing a DMA at Columbia University with George Lewis and Fred Lerdahl. His music has been featured on festivals and concerts across North America and in Europe, including Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Nebraska, New York, Austin, Aspen, Boston and Paris. Matthew is the recipient of 8 prizes in the SOCAN Foundation’s Awards for Young Composers, a 2013 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, the 2015 Salvatore Martirano Memorial Composition Award, the 2016 Mivos/Kanter Prize and the 2016 Jacob Druckman Prize from the Aspen Music Festival. Upcoming commissions include a new piece for the OSM's organist Jean-Willy Kunz, pianist Julia Den Boer, The Aspen Philharmonic Orchestra (Robert Spano, conductor) and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra (Kent Nagano, conductor). Matthew will be the Composer/Collaborator-in-Residence at East Carolina University's NewMusic Initiative, 2016-2018. In addition to composing, Matthew maintains an avid interest in poetry and prose and has contributed original text for multiple librettos, spoken word works, choral music and song cycles, including the opera Less Truth More Telling with music by Thierry Tidrow (Den Haag and Amsterdam, 2013) produced through the Dutch National Opera and the Royal Conservatory.