Matthew Peterson is a composer who dynamically moves between bold contemporary operas, colorful orchestral works, playful and virtuosic solo pieces, and shimmering, innovative choral works. His multifaceted music seethes with life. Here there is seriousness, humor, power, tenderness, will - the grand and sublime as well as the fragile and delicate.
Matthew Peterson was born in 1984 in Grand Forks, North Dakota, an upbringing that established a strong love for nature and the outdoors, but where a child with a great interest in music had to take every opportunity to express himself. Matthew became a multi-instrumentalist, playing in big bands, cover bands, youth orchestras and singing in choirs. Listened to Beethoven, hymns and grunge rock. At the age of 20, he started creating his own music and has since composed works where the musical breadth of his childhood can be sensed as a table tune in a personal tonal language that established Peterson as one of Sweden's most celebrated composers.
After studying with, among others, Sven-David Sandström at Indiana University School of Music, thanks to a Fulbright scholarship he was given the opportunity to study at Gotland School of Music Composition and after that remained in Sweden. Peterson lives in Dalarna with his partner and two children and combines country life with impact in the capitals of culture at festivals, premieres and assignments for various organizations in the music industry. He is the head teacher of composition at Lilla Akademien in Stockholm and has also taught at Indiana University School of Music and the Gotland School of Music Composition.
Peterson has received a number of awards, among these are the Music Publishers' Award 2023 for the choral work An Inner Sky, the Carin Malmlöf-Forssling Composer Prize 2023 from the Royal Academy of Music, the Sven-David Sandström Choral Composition Award 2022 and "Classical of the Year" at the Dalecarlia Music Awards 2021. In 2014 he had his big breakthrough when he won both the ASCAP Nissim Prize for best orchestral work, the jury's and the audience's prize in the Uppsala composer competition for And all the trees of the field will clap their hands (for chamber orchestra) and the Fort Worth Frontiers Award for his true crime operaVoir Dire.
Recordings of Peterson's music have been released on European Gramophone, RedHouse, Naxos and Footprint, and are available on various streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music, as well as on Youtube and Soundcloud.
Matthew Peterson's music has been commissioned and performed by leading ensembles worldwide, including the Minnesota Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Washington National Opera at Kennedy Center, The Swedish Radio Choir, Eric Ericson's Chamber Choir and the Stockholm Saxophone Quartet.
2024-2026 Mattew Peterson is composer-in-residence with the Dalasinfonietta, and current commissions include a percussion concerto, a work for the the Swedish Radio Choir's 100th anniversary, an opera, and a large-scale work for the Swedish Radio Choir and the Dalasinfonietta.
