“For Christopher Fox” 27/2/22 (2022)

Matthew Lee Knowles (b. 1985) — “For Christopher Fox” 27/2/22 (2022) for organ

Matthew Lee Knowles (b. 1985) is an English composer, poet, pianist, performer, and teacher who is based in London. His compositions are diverse—from highly conceptual instructional music, quizzical and direct to complex and virtuosic work, specific and scattered, with graphic notation along the way, through durations of a few minutes to several hours, for solo instruments and large ensembles. Compositional methodologies range from Cageian chance operations to hexachordal rotational transpositional arrays, collage, quotation, and homage. Interests include sequence, repetition, allusion, exact and crippled symmetry, theme and variation, duration, freedom, subtle and blasé theatre, silence, extreme editing, superimposition, impossibility, endurance, pointlessness, ridiculousness, mathematics, mesostics, codes, authority, the everyday, newspapers, cosmology, physics and generally just being an experimentalist. Some of his intriguing activities include the composition of “140 Spectacles for clarinet, piano, and silent orchestra,” a five and a half hour work with an accompanying 3,000 word essay; the writing and recitation from memory in 2015 of a 2,000 word joke; the composition of “For Alan Turing,” an unbroken seven-hour piano work (premiered in early 2021 by Kate Harrison-Ledger); and the composition of “For Clive Barker,” the world’s longest non-repetitive piano work (26 hours).