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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 banal.

 

Recent pieces have involved, amongst other things, documentary techniques; audience participation; repetition; music-theatre; hold-music; gamification and quotation.

 

Recent commissions have come from 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. One of four nominees for the Gaudeamus Award 2025, I'll present multiple works at the festival in Utrecht (NL), as well as a new work for NADAR ensemble, which will additionally be toured at partner festivals: Warsaw Autumn (PL), TRANSIT (BE) and New Music Dublin (IE)

My music has been programmed at festivals such as: SPOR Festival (DK); Darmstädter Ferienkurse (DE); Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK); Matera Intermedia (IT); St Magnus International Festival (UK); Visiones Sonoras (MX); MINU_festival_for_expanded_music (DK); EviMus (DE); Sound-Image (UK).

I am a member of composer-performer group Current Resonance, regularly contributing to meticulously curated intermedial events. I am also the chairperson for Aarhus Unge Tonekunstnere and was the treasurer of Ung Nordisk Musik Danmark between 2023-2024.

As of 2024, I teach composition at Sankt Annæ Gymnasium (MGK) in Copenhagen.

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Photography by @jadefrancesphoto 

Press and writing about Matthew's music

PRESS AND QUOTES:

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"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)

"This is a composer who will be doing really interesting things in the years to come.” - Yannis Kyriakides, composer - in a statement about the Gaudeamus Award 2025 nominees

"What I really liked is the scope of his compositions. It’s relatively rare that composers also have this theatrical talent. […] It was extremely varied, it was also fun! I really enjoyed the humour inherent in the pieces but it also has a really musically solid side.” - Moritz Eggert, composer - in a statement about the Gaudeamus Award 2025 nominees

"[...] 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

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