Matthias McIntire is a composer, performer, and educator active across a broad spectrum of contexts. His compositions reflect his eclectic background in performance (violin, viola, voice, and electronics), Western classical and new music, as well as jazz, fiddle, free improvisation, field recording, foley art, and electronic music.
Matthias creates varied work for acoustic instruments, with and without electronics. His music has found inspiration from a variety of sources including personal expression, reflections on the complexity of the human psyche and emotions, connection and collaboration with others, a love of nature, the act of making and using his own field recordings, birds, the urgency of climate change, a love of all things colourful, the spaces between musical genres he has studied, feelings of mystery and magic in the world, and his time spent time traveling, to name a few.
Matthias is the recipient of numerous awards and grants: the 2021 Karen Kieser Prize in Canadian Music (University of Toronto); grants from the Toronto, Ontario, and Canada Councils for the Arts, as well as the University of Toronto, U of T Scarborough, and Ontario Graduate Scholarships; he was selected as 2020-21 Composer Fellow for the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra; he was the 2016 Winner of the Lyra Society (Philadelphia) Costello Composition Competition – to name a few.
His compositions have been presented in Canada, the United States, and Europe by ensembles/venues including New Music Concerts (Toronto), the Canadian Music Centre (Toronto), Fall for Dance North, TEDx U of T, The University of Toronto, Array Space (Toronto), the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra, the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance (Nova Scotia), New Art/New Media (Ottawa), Ottawa Chamberfest, the Center for New Music (San Francisco), One Found Sound (San Francisco), the Curtis Institute of Music (Philadelphia), the University of Seattle (Washington), New Music for Strings (Iceland), among others.
Matthias holds a DMA in Composition from the University of Toronto under the supervision of Christos Hatzis and Eliot Britton. He also holds Masters and Bachelors degrees in Violin Performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the Glenn Gould School (Toronto), respectively.
Matthias is currently the Composer-in-Residence at the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance (Lamp) in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia where he is working on his first string quartet for the Verona Quartet, dreaming up collaborations with pianist Tong Wang and Bang-on-a-Can cellist Arlen Hlusko, researching Cape Breton fiddle music for an upcoming trio for F-Plus, and organizing Lamp’s 2023 Composition Academy with composer Roydon Tse and Lamp Artistic Director Burt Wathen.