• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • Biography
  • Works
    • Upcoming performances
    • Past performances
  • Recordings
  • Listen
  • Gallery
  • News & Views
    • Articles
  • Contact

Colin Matthews

Composer

Matthews invests much of his music with enormous energy and momentum …

— Stephen Pettitt, artspages.com

Ceres (1972). 9 instruments

Ceres was composed in 1972 while I was teaching at the University of Sussex, where it had its first performance.  Its title refers both to the folksong material on which it is indirectly based (‘John Barleycorn’), and also, as a play on words, to the ‘series’ derived from that folksong.  But it’s really an ‘anti-series’, since at the time I was reacting very strongly against serialism, and had recently discovered the delights of process music.  Ceres is, essentially, a pure process piece in which a mosaic of melodic fragments is built up and taken apart, with a simple melodic centre.  The work (which lasts about 11 minutes) is virtually static, thoroughly diatonic, and very quiet.  For a performance which I directed at the Royal Northern College of Music in 1985, it was slightly renotated, but not recomposed.

Categories: Ensemble

Primary Sidebar

Search Works & Recordings

Filter Works

Work categories: START AGAIN

4 February, 2021 - Eleven Studies in Velocity
Royal Academy of Music
Livestreamed from the David Josefowitz Recital Hall

27 April, 2021 - Seascapes (World Premiere)
Nash Ensemble
Wigmore Hall, London

View all performances

Useful Links

Faber Music
NMC Recordings
The Holst Foundation

© 2021 Colin Matthews · Website by Bookswarm

Menu
  • Home
  • Biography
  • Works
    • Upcoming performances
    • Past performances
  • Recordings
  • Listen
  • Gallery
  • News & Views
    • Articles
  • Contact