Colin Matthews

Summary

‘Stravinsky's question “Who needs it?” should be on every composer's desk.’

Colin Matthews is one of the first composers I thought of when planning this book, for he has been central to British musical life for the last thirtyfive years. This is partly because his own music might be said to inhabit the middle ground between high modernism and tonal traditionalism, and so might be loosely classified as ‘mainstream contemporary’; it's also because he's such an influential figure in the promotion of music by other British composers.

In comparison to most of their contemporaries, however, he and his older brother David (see next chapter) had an unconventional musical education. It began formally with piano lessons, encouraged by their parents but pursued with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and was fuelled by an absorbing interest in the symphonic music they heard on the radio rather than the performances of Gilbert and Sullivan operas to which their parents took them. Colin told Paul Griffiths,

I think both of us have the same attitude – that if we’re interested in something we have to follow it right through. … Both of us felt that, if we were going to take an interest in music, then there was no point in doing anything else except write it.

But they attended a school whose curriculum didn't include music, and so there was no music master to teach them when, still in their teens, they started to compose. For many years, in fact, they were each other's only composition teachers, and Colin had not yet left school when they helped the musicologist Deryck Cooke to realise his second and third performing editions of Mahler's Tenth Symphony (which Colin had privately transcribed, in full, from a copy borrowed from the BBC Library). He later worked as an assistant to Benjamin Britten and with Imogen Holst, and he maintains positions with the Britten estate, the Britten–Pears Foundation, the Aldeburgh Festival and the Royal Philharmonic Society. He also administers the Holst Foundation, with whose financial assistance he founded the recording label NMC in 1988.

He remains executive producer of NMC's recordings of new British music, which average one release per month, and one of my reasons for interviewing him was to find out how he combines what could be considered a full-time administrative career with the demands of composing.