Mathew Rosenblum was born in New York City in 1954. His works have been performed throughout the United States and Europe including the 1990 ISCM World Music Days in Oslo, De Ijsbreker in Amsterdam, the Tonhalle in Düsseldorf, the Bing Theater in LA., and at the Sonic Boom Festival, the Kitchen, Merkin Hall, and Miller Theater in New York City by ensembles including the California Ear Unit, Newband, the Rascher Saxophone Quartet, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Chicago Contemporary Players, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Sequitur, Speculum Musicae, and others.
Recent commissions and performances include a Multi-Media Chamber Opera (2003) commissioned by Sequitur in conjunction with the Opera Theater of Pittsburgh and the Meet The Composer Commissioning Music/USA Project, Under The Rainbow (2002) for flute and computer generated sound commissioned by Patti Monson, Shadow Waltz (2002) commissioned by Eric Moe, and Möbius Loop (2000) for Saxophone Quartet and Chamber Orchestra commissioned by the Rascher Saxophone Quartet and premiered in Düsseldorf Germany in March 2000.
In the fall of 2001 he was a core participant in the American Composers Orchestra's Orchestra Tech Festival and Conference in New York City where his piece Nü kuan tzu, for singers, samplers, and chamber orchestra, was one of twenty works featured on the festival. Other honors include two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Music Fellowship Grants (1994, 1998), two Fromm Foundation Commission (1993, 2004), a National Endowment for the Arts Music Fellowship Grant (1992), a New York Foundation for the Arts Artists Fellowship Grant (1989), and an American Composers Alliance 50th Anniversary Recording Award (1987). He has also received awards and fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts (1981), the Institute of Contemporary American Music (1981), the Rockefeller Foundation (1980), BMI (1978), the MacDowell Colony (1987,1989), the Djerassi Foundation (1987), and Yaddo (1987).
His music has been recorded by Newband, the California EAR Unit, the Prism Players, pianist Loretta Goldberg, flutist Patti Monson, pianist Eric Moe, and cellists Theodore Mook and Michael Finckel for the Mode, Opus One, Albany, and CRI Emergency Music labels, and is published by C.F. Peters Corporation.
He received degrees in composition from the New England Conservatory of Music and Princeton University and is currently a Professor of composition at the University of Pittsburgh and also co-directs the Music on the Edge new music series in Pittsburgh.
The double concerto, pace Brahms, is a creature of the Baroque era, really a special version of the concerto grosso with a concertino of only a couple of players blending with and emerging from the ripieno. The restructuring of large-scale composition around sonata form deprived composers of the natural recurrences of melodic strands that fueled the concerto grosso, making solo concertos a more logical way to achieve timbral contrast within the continual-development process of the more modern forms; yet, some Classical-era composers could not let go.
Virtuosity, in its traditional sense, is musical performance at its most outgoing; the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s Saturday concert — “Double Trouble,” a quartet of double concerti — revealed a plethora of extroverted strategies. The plurality of styles was a showcase for the flexibility of conductor Gil Rose’s group, switching channels with ease, burnished and rhythmically rigorous in a program marked by wide-ranging gregariousness.