SHORTER BIO:
I’m a composer, performer and organiser originally from Yorkshire (UK), currently living and working in Copenhagen (DK). I often work at an intersection between music for instruments and voices; electronic sound; text; video; and performance. My music regularly engages with a re-contextualisation of everyday sounds, objects, and automatic, repetitive behaviours to reveal the latently musical in the familiar or even mundane.
Recent pieces have involved, amongst other things, documentary techniques; audience participation; repetition; music-theatre; hold-music; gamification and quotation.
Recent commissions have come from Gaudeamus Festival (for NADAR), KLANG Festival, SPOR Festival (for Duo Van Vliet), Aarhus Kammerorkester; Riot Ensemble / Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (for percussionist Sam Wilson); The Night With… (for The Hermes Experiment); Hebrides Ensemble / Edinburgh Book Festival; The Cumnock Tryst; and Cryptic Glasgow.
I was awarded the Gaudeamus Award 2025. I've twice been nominated for an Ivor Novello Award, most recently in 2024 with the evening-length music theatre piece CALLS TO THIS NUMBER ARE BEING DIVERTED in the Best Stage Works category.
My music has been programmed at festivals such as: SPOR Festival (DK); Darmstädter Ferienkurse (DE); Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK); Gaudeamus (NL); Warsaw Autumn (PL); TRANSIT (BE); Matera Intermedia (IT); New Music Dublin (IE); MINU_festival_for_expanded_music (DK); Ung Nordisk Musik 2022 (IS); The Cumnock Tryst (UK); Visiones Sonoras (MX); SPOT Festival (DK)
Alongside Joss Smith, I am the co-artistic leader of the new, Copenhagen-based ensemble Ear Transplant, which launches in January 2026. I was a member of composer-performer group Current Resonance, regularly contributing to meticulously curated intermedial events between 2021 and 2025. I am also the chairperson for Aarhus Unge Tonekunstnere and was a board member and subsequently the treasurer of Ung Nordisk Musik Danmark between 2022-2024.
As of 2024, I teach composition at Sankt Annæ Gymnasium (MGK) in Copenhagen.
Press and writing about Matthew's music PRESS AND QUOTES:
"Matthew Grouse's music is bursting with inner life and technical surplus. With a sharp analytical and perhaps satirical outlook, he introduces everyday technologies, google-searches read aloud and banal actions placed on an equal footing with traditional instruments, in works that manage to engage and retain the listener." - Dansk Komponist Forening NYE VEJE committee (translated from Danish)
"There is too much good to say about Matthew Grouse's new work of music theatre CALLS TO THIS NUMBER ARE BEING DIVERTED. [...] Structurally, musically, technically and comedically the work is a super coherent piece that carefully earns the trust it needs to take the audience on a descent into hellish absurdity. [...] Grouse has made a horror story we can’t pretend is not real." - Macon Holt, independent critic (regular contributor to Seismograf and Passive/agggressive)
"Matthew Grouse’s artistic identity is grounded in the transformation of the everyday and mundane into material for composition, with both precision and wit. His music moves between the absurd and the fragile with great conviction, combining humour, irony, and intellectual engagement in impressive compositional forms. (He) revealed a remarkable technical command across all media, while offering sharp social commentary on the realities of digital communication today. (Matthew) demonstrated striking control of large-scale form, inventing his own musical materials and instruments in the process. Between what one can call soft and hard concept driven work, Matthew creates a truly contemporary voice.” - The jury's statement when awarding Matthew the Gaudeamus Award 2025 (the jury consisted of Isabel Mundry, Yannis Kyriakides and Moritz Eggert)
"[...] the performance has particularly sent Grouse in the direction of the grotesque, even the grotesquely funny." - Henrik Marstal, Seismograf
"...contemporary music that recognised no boundaries whatsoever." - Keith Bruce, The Herald
"...The most striking (piece was) Matthew Grouse’s Left Right, Left Right, performed by percussionist Sam Wilson." - Andrew Clements, The Guardian
"...a quirky electro-acoustic melange of mundane ritual." - Ken Walton, The Scotsman
