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About
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.
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 University.
Ricketts' 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 2016-2018.
In May 2017, the opening of Ricketts’ piece 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' 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 indigneous communities in Northern Quebec.