Professor Matthew King

For me, music is a universe of marvels, with virtually infinite wonders to be discovered. But being a composer today is not easy, confronted, as we are, by the disconcerting multitude of genres available to us instantaneously, and by the complex expectations and attitudes we encounter in performers and audiences. The old dogmas and ideologies have passed away, and we are surrounded by a raft of sonic possibilities whilst, hovering above us, remain the titanic spectres of the past, whose achievements we cannot escape! Composition today is living with these tensions. 

I am a composer, pianist, educator and YouTuber (https://www.youtube.com/@themusicprofessor). My primary compositional activity, since 2019, has been a series of 50 + single-movement piano sonatas, recently focussed on more environmental, landscape pieces like the Pastoral Sonata of 2023 and the Osprey Sonata of 2025, both collaborations with Nye Parry. My elaboration of unfinished symphonic sketches by Wagner, Richard Wagner in Venice, was premiered and recorded in 2021. Ivan Hewitt, in the Telegraph, described the piece as “truly uncanny in the way it transports us into an authentically Wagnerian world”. My chamber operas The Snow Queen, The Pied Piper, and Hear our Voice have all been performed in the UK and subsequently in European productions in Salzburg, Nuremberg, Ljubljana and Prague. In 2018 my piano concerto was premiered by Derek Paravini in San Diego.  My collaborations with librettist Alasdair Middleton include the cantata, Il Pastorale, l’Urbano e il Suburbano (premiered in 2015 at Aldeburgh), the music theatre piece, Schoenberg in Hollywood (premiered by members of the Guildhall Vocal Department at Milton Court in 2015) and the Community opera, On London Fields, which won a Royal Philharmonic Society Prize in 2004. 

It is a privilege for composers to work with live performance. I have had the good fortune to work closely with many fine musicians including the late Jane Manning, the countertenor Michael Chance, the violinists Alina Ibragimova and Rachel Podger, the cellist Natalie Clein, the oboist Christopher Redgate, the horn player Richard Watkins, the Savant pianist Derek Paravicini, the Fitzwilliam and Brodsky quartets, the LSO, the Mahler Players, the Aurora Orchestra, the Brook Street Band, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, the Orchestra of St. Johns, Florilegium, and the Canterbury Cathedral Choir as well as orchestras in Europe and the United States.