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Colin Matthews

Composer

Matthews, like Britten, has the gift of creating crisply memorable material …

— Edward Greenfield, The Guardian

To Compose without the Least Knowledge of Music … (1991). Wind sextet

A realization of Ein musikalisches Wurfelspiel (A Musical Dice Game) ascribed to W A Mozart, K. 516f

The rules of A Musical Dice Game – first published in 1793 and ascribed to Mozart as K. 516f (with more than a little likelihood of authenticity) – allow for the throw of the dice to determine the order of 176 bars of given musical material, so organized as to produce each time by chance a 16-bar waltz.  Obviously the rules have to be strictly obeyed if the waltz is to come out right.  Although I have obeyed the rule – except for the fact that I used randomly-generated numbers instead of throwing the dice 176 times to get my eleven variations – I’ve also applied further random operations in variations 4, 6, 8, 10 and 11; allowed for the dice to fall sixteen times in succession on “8” in variation 7; and subjected the instrumentation to chance in variation 10.

Categories: Chamber

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

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Useful Links

Faber Music
NMC Recordings
The Holst Foundation

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