Matthew Ricketts (born 1986) is a Canadian composer of contemporary classical music. He is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow as well as the recipient of the 2020 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2016 Jacob Druckman Prize from the Aspen Music Festival, the 2015 Salvatore Martirano Memorial Composition Award, a 2013 ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award, and eight prizes in the SOCAN Foundation's Awards for Young Composers. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Biography.
Matthew Ricketts was born in Victoria, British Columbia. He attended McGill University’s Schulich School of Music, where he studied composition with Chris Harman, Brian Cherney, and John Rea. He earned a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, where he studied with George Lewis and Fred Lerdahl. He is currently a Core Lecturer at Columbia.
Ricketts's music has been performed by the Aspen Philharmonic Orchestra, Esprit Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, as well as by ensembles and soloists including JACK Quartet, Quatuor Bozzini, the Chiara String Quartet, FLUX Quartet, soprano Tony Arnold, and the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (NEM). He was Composer-Collaborator-In-Residence at East Carolina University from 2016 to 2018.
In May 2017, the opening of Ricketts’s "Highest Light", a Montreal Symphony Orchestra commission, was performed by French astronaut Thomas Pesquet aboard the International Space Station, in a live broadcast during the world premiere performance in Montreal.
Ricketts's chamber opera "Chaakapesh: The Trickster's Quest," with a libretto in Cree by Indigenous Canadian playwright Tomson Highway, premiered in September 2018 as the opening of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra's 85th season, and was followed by a tour of indigenous communities in Northern Quebec. The tour was documented in the 2019 film "Chaakapesh".
Other works.
Ricketts is also active as a writer, librettist, and poet. His operatic collaboration with composer Thierry Tidrow, "Less Truth More Telling", was produced in 2013 by the Dutch National Opera and the Royal Conservatory of The Hague.
References.
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