“This is why I do [these] laborious processes, because the idea of chance favours the prepared mind. If you are laying yourself out for that long, then you’ve got more time for these ideas to come to you.”
Matthew Lee Knowles
Matthew Lee Knowles is a composer based in London with a penchant for durational performance and transcribing words into music. Highlights of 2025 include performing an eighteen song show ‘I Can See Your Daemon’ with La Chiva at Lauderdale House; the premiere of a twenty hour organ composition titled ‘For Samuel Beckett’ with Kat Farn; organising and performing a forty hour performance of Satie’s ‘Vexations’ with Francesco Pio; the premiere of ‘For John Tilbury’ by Kate Ledger at St. Pancras Clock Tower; performing a “piano biopsy” at the Philharmonie Luxembourg as part of Rainy Days Festival, curated by Catherine Kontz; and performing a new piece for darts thrower and pianist composed by seventy-five composers at his fortieth birthday party. Matthew is currently working on ‘For Chihiro Ono’ — a 457 page, ten hour composition for violin and piano — and preparing a series of concerts for 2026 with Kate Ledger to celebrate Morton Feldman’s centenary.
Patrick Ellis met Matthew, who was armed with a large pile of scores, at a café in Shoreditch to talk about his admiration for John Cage, affinities with Andy Ingamells and Neil Luck, translating text to music, laborious and painstaking processes, and much more…
header photo by Véronique Kolber
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Patrick/PRXLUDES: Hi Matthew, thank you for taking the time out to join me today. This year marks your twenty-first year living in London. During your early years as a student in London, what were some of your pivotal influences and musical concerns?
Matthew Lee Knowles: All I can really remember from when I was studying was that I discovered Cage and Feldman halfway through my degree [at Guildhall]. I had one teacher before I really got into Cage and Feldman, and then that change[d] how I worked — so I had to move to another teacher. I remember hearing pieces that I liked which I wanted to take things from — a lot of Laurence Crane’s music (Sparling), Arvo Pärt — but it took a long time to realise those influences were actually doing something, because I don’t think most people really acknowledge that so much. Influences can be really big things, but for most of the time, they are actually tiny things. These can include people that you bump into in the street, or those tiny things that shift your life slightly; those can make the biggest difference.
Back when I was a student, I had on my desk a written quote from my teacher that said “be clear at all costs” — and that really resonated with me. I don’t really care if the idea is good or not, as long as it’s clear. Sometimes, it can be on the cusp of being painfully clear and painfully unclear, but that’s okay.
You mentioned earlier about Cage and Feldman having an impact on your work. How did you stumble across them?
I discovered 4’33” when I was around 12 or 13, before I knew anything about anything. I performed it at a summer school with my tenor horn and I started laughing halfway through the performance; I didn’t understand what was going on, I just thought that it was a crazy piece, and then years later I actually found out more. I think Cage gave me permission to do a lot of the things that I wanted to do. My life at Guildhall after discovering Cage was very much like the South Park episode ‘Simpsons Already Did It’ —I would take sketches to a teacher and they would tell me “Cage has already done that”.
I was talking to a young composer recently and I said: “Everything that you are going to make when you are studying has probably been done before — you should still do it, but do it with an awareness that it has been done.” Of course, you can have an awareness that it has been done — but you should still do it to see what you can add.
Years ago, I took a piece to Malcolm Singer, and told him “what I’m going to do is take every chord that you can possibly play within an octave and make this organisation” — I was showing him my method, and he simply said, “Tom Johnson has already done this and it’s called The Chord Catalogue.” -laughs- In fairness, that was an example of something that I ended up not doing. I remember I had a friend staying over at my house once, and I had left the music playing overnight — and in the morning they were really not happy with me, because it had gone onto Tom Johnson’s Chord Catalogue and it had driven them absolutely mad.
So discovering Cage on a deeper level that removed any previous inhibitions and moved you into more of an experimental direction?
Completely! To give you an idea of just how much I was reading and listening to materials about Cage, I once did an interview at Guildhall and the interviewer stopped me at one point and said: “Okay, we know what Cage thinks, but what do you think? Because with every single answer, there is a quote from Cage.” So I was completely obsessed, but I needed to do that; I did think it was a form of permission, but you never know with these things. Would I have done it differently? Did I need that permission? This is why these things for me are not really worth talking about, because you only have one life — you can’t compare it to anything else — so what’s the point?
On the subject of that, I remember Andy Ingamells writing on Twitter years ago that he used to get criticised about his work, having it written off as “stuff that people did in the 1960s”. He argued that he was doing it again because the ideas might not have been absorbed properly the first time around. Would you say that was the same with you?
Inevitably — but it doesn’t really matter to me. I was on a plane to India in 2008 and I wrote a little piece in a notebook called I’m Through Defending Cage — not that I was angry with him, but I faced it so much. I think that the piece was just about stabbing a pencil through a page of manuscript. There was a lecture that I attended and the speaker was slagging off Cage and Mica Levi was in front of me, and they just turned around to look at me and whispered “are you okay?”.
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You and Andy Ingamells have worked together a few times in the past, such as sixty_six_events. How did you both meet and when did you begin to work together?
We met in Lithuania on a course — which also had Neil Luck and Morgan Hayes involved. There is a photo of us all together. Andy and I really got along so we started doing a lot of performances together and collaborating regularly. Back then, we didn’t really think about recording things or documenting our work; I did so many performances with Neil Luck, but there is little record of them at all. With Andy and I, we wrote so many pieces together — some for public performance, some private pieces — but he is an amazing friend and artist.
Could you tell me more about that piece — sixty_six_events?
I don’t know why, but I have always been obsessed with the number 6. My novel was titled 36. Sadly I can’t say that I have written six pieces in my life… -laughs- When I was at Guildhall, I did a project called six_events, utilising early Facebook to get people all around the world to do these actions. The first few of these were really simple: get onto a bus, [or] walk down the road, documenting it. That was great, because I made a lot of friends — many of whom I still know today — and this was back in 2008.
After that, I did sixty_six_events, and then 666_events two years later, and two years after that I did 6666_events — and by the time I finished that, I was spent, that was too much. They were just ordinary tasks. I think for sixty_six_events, I went into Islington early in the morning and put satsumas on every single fence post — that was fun.
Would you perhaps say that you were the odd one out at Guildhall during your time there?
Oh, definitely. I would like to think that I have been feeling like that — but then probably every composer does. Michael Finnissy said that he felt as though he was on the wrong side of the track all the way…
In terms of what you were making, did you feel like Andy and Neil were some of the first people to have close shared interests?
I don’t want to make assumptions, but I don’t think that my work is amazingly crafted or has a high level of intelligence. Of course, everything at Guildhall [at the time] was really well written. It was funny because there were four of us at the start, and then one person didn’t get their visa, and then the other people were doing joint studies; so it didn’t really feel as though there was a community.
I don’t know what exact moments changed my work and outlook as a composer, but it is a pretty good bet that both Andy and Neil changed me and my music drastically. Had I not met either of them, then I don’t know what I would be doing now. One memorable collaboration with Andy was when we were squirting lemon juice into each others’ faces [Andy Ingamells’ A Performance is Never Rehearsed, A Performance is Never Repeated].
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Since those early years, you have been incredibly prolific. Amongst your works are your series of “For” pieces, which are dedications to friends and colleagues. Do you view those pieces as gifts or dedications, or both?
I had a reaction that was quite telling recently. I wrote a piece for someone and I had sent it to them, and their response was “I’ve got a concert coming up, I could do this”. Now, most composers would be like “fantastic!” — my gut reaction was “oh, you don’t have to do that”. I rationalised it later and decided that it was a good thing. But it would be like me giving you a present and then you putting it somewhere else, and then me being like “no, no, you enjoy it!”. So that spooked me a little bit, but that probably says that these pieces are gifts.
I write a lot of these kinds of pieces and I worry sometimes that people might think I’m just chugging them out like a factory but each piece is written for a person who has changed me in some way, it’s the highest honour I can think of bestowing.
The vast majority of those works are piano pieces, but there are a few for other forces. One that immediately comes to mind is For James McIlwrath, which is an instructional piece — could you tell me about that piece?
Because I write so much and so obsessively, I do have the tendency to forget things; when I am working on something, I want to get it done, working ten hours a day, once my teaching is out of the way. I wrote a piece that was for a hundred voices [Separating The Quick From The Dead]. The score for it is gigantic and each part is unique; and a few weeks later someone asked me about it and I was like, “what?” and they said “you know, that piece for a hundred voices?”.
But with James, he is just one of the best performers. He has such an incredible presence. He is so good at it, and he will do almost anything. In the performance instructions, I asked him to eat a bit of glass — I couldn’t exactly imagine how it would be done, but he just went ahead and did it… -laughs- It really spooked me to watch that. It was done with such amazing conviction. That was a case of wanting to do something that would be able to show him doing his thing, but also honouring him and giving the piece as a gift. In that piece, you have to extinguish a match by spitting on it. I remember doing that during the lockdown, it’s quite fun. I did a performance once with Andy years ago, and there were matches that we had to blow out, but there were smoke alarms as well — so we were creating smoke and that was awkward.
A lot of work you’ve done recently has been in short form video, which perfectly fits in line with what social media is at the moment. When you come up with these videos, are they ideas that you’ve had for a while — or something that you make on the spot?
It’s the same with how I work in every medium. I get an idea; sometimes that will take years, but other times it will be like “right, let’s do that now”. Sometimes I do things that I put a lot of effort into and it gets nothing — other times I make something quickly and that ends up faring better. But with the videos and posts, I make jokes, all sorts of things…
I remember the series of posts where you watch a film and then you ask people to comment on your post with a number between a given range.
I keep a list of all the films I’ve seen — there’s currently 2397 on there — and then people post a number and I give them the corresponding film; or I take every frame from a music video and get people to say a number and then give them that frame. It encourages people who want to interact, but don’t know how to interact. It gets me talking to people; there are so many people on social media, and who are they? So it’s a way where you can immediately have this connection. There are so many people today who know each other because of me and of those big happenings and projects. But those friendships have been so longstanding now that it is hard to pinpoint.
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Your organ work For Samuel Beckett was recently performed by Kat Farn at the end of August; to generate the material you translated Beckett’s Waiting For Godot letter by letter into different pitches. Could you explain your process of translating text into music?
It’s a process that I’ve used several hundred times. The first time that I ever did it, I was a teenager and I was still learning how to write down music. I was perhaps around twelve or thirteen; there was a CD and I had manuscript paper, and then I looked in the booklet and went “oh, there’s an E” — and then I just wrote down every letter until I had completed the whole booklet. I have been using variations of this process for around 27 years; I have done it several hundred times, and I never use exactly the same process, because that would be incredibly dull. I have to do new things. So when I was working on a piece in the past where some people were polite — “oh, that’s a successful idea, why don’t you keep on doing that” — no, I want to try something new.
Sometimes my processes of translations are set up in advance, but then in most cases, I just see what happens. When I did the interview for the Samuel Beckett piece, I mentioned that Harrison Birtwistle compared composition to walking through a town — you are going through the main road, and you see something down another road and you think “oooh” and so you turn down there. Afterward, you might go down another one or you might return back to the main road. That’s what it’s like.
This is why I do [these] laborious processes, because the idea of chance favours the prepared mind. If you are laying yourself out for that long, then you’ve got more time for these ideas to come to you. For me, it is sometimes quite frantic, as I often don’t really know “how” I have written a piece — I go down one street, but then I go down another one, and then another one, then I go into someone’s house… -laughs- Then go down into the basement, and they have a portal to another dimension, and it’s kind of frantic. If I completely understood the process I was using or stopped to document it, then it would be a different piece.
As a composer why are you interested in text particularly, and not so much mediums like film or visual art?
Because language has evolved for so long, it has all of these incredible rules, patterns, and failures. The biggest one of these processes took four and a half years. I’m currently working on translating Hamlet into music, which is one of the most painstaking things that I have ever done — it’s driving me insane! I like painstaking processes, but this is killing me. -laughs- So far, I have completed around 300 pages, and I am about halfway through. There [are] an infinite number of ways to turn text into music. So many people have said to me “you should tell people about this, you should put it in the score, because it’s really interesting” — maybe it is an interesting thing for me, but I almost don’t think it’s the most important thing. If it is the most important thing, then perhaps the piece hasn’t been successful. Any piece should stand on its own without having to go “ooh, look at this process”, because it’s not a gimmick.
So I say this but, when the organ piece [For Samuel Beckett] was performed, I talked to a lot of people and everyone was genuinely interested and it did change the way they listened. There was one couple who went in for a few minutes, then came out and said “that was a bit traumatic” — and I replied, “Well, I wrote the piece, so we can have a chat” and they went, “oh my god, I’m so sorry!”. We then went on to talk about it for around 20 minutes, and I took them through the whole process and then they decided to listen again. So they went in, stayed for another half an hour, then left and told me that it was one of the greatest musical experiences of their life.
I don’t think it’s any different from processes that other composers use. We all have our processes and our ideas and methodologies. I was talking with [my] nanna about bingo — and told her that one of the ways that I used to write music was that I had a bingo machine on my desk where the balls would come out and I would use those.
What are some of the quirkiest things that you have used to generate material?
I’ve used lots of toys, crosswords, sudoku puzzles, newspapers, loads of different mathematical processes. However text is the most commonly used method, as are random generators — random number generators, random note generators. I’ve also just taken stuff and randomly cut it up; I don’t think that is particularly quirky though.
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For your 40th birthday, you did a piece with a dartboard and invited 75 composers to write a bar of piano music. Have you done things like that before where you have invited other artists to contribute material?
I did one project that was performed at Guildhall — Andy Ingamells in fact did a performance — which was called I Know. It was performed there in 2009; Andy had written some text and then I had the pianist speaking those as chords written by loads of different people were played. I got people to set the same poetry for piano and voice in 2014 in a piece called War Ain’t no Picnic. I have always done things like that, even privately — just corresponding with other composers where we send each other music. [For example] with Leo Grant, we both wrote the left hand and the right hand of a few piano pieces; we didn’t perform it, but it was one of those things that just happen[ed] in the background.
There was another project where I was collaborating with people from all over the world, where someone would write the next bit of material. That is the kind of collaboration that I like, where it is at a distance. Someone asked me a few years ago if I wanted to join them in a [recording] studio and write a song together, and I said to her “no, I don’t want to do that”, and then she never spoke to me again — I felt really bad because actually, I should have done that, it would have been really good and I could have learnt a lot. So when someone else recently asked me the same question, I said yes, because it is completely not how I work and it scares me — but what is the worst that could happen? If I am going to collaborate with someone, like writing an opera or something similar, then I don’t want endless meetings. I am very much like “okay, you’re going to write a libretto, give me it when it’s done and I will write the opera” — and then, several months later, I’ll send it to them.
I have been doing a lot of performances with La Chiva. We have written over 30 songs, and when we are organising concerts, they ask “should this song go here or here?” — I literally don’t care. I would do it randomly; I have no feeling or input on it. And I also don’t like rehearsing or performing or talking to people in interviews… -laughs-
To talk more about your 40th birthday piece, Kate Ledger was the pianist who participated in the work; how did you meet her and when did your working relationship begin?
Now this is a cool story. I wrote For Alan Turing in 2011, and then during the lockdown, I made a post about the work on Instagram and Kate sent me a message on Instagram saying “I have to play this!”. I know enough from speaking to people that often when people say things like that, it doesn’t end up happening, but she was serious! And so a few months later, she played the whole thing — all seven hours of it.
We then did an album together — most recently the darts piece for my birthday. She has also done other works of mine [ACT UP back in June, For John Tilbury in November]. It’s the fact that she’s an incredible pianist that makes it all the more amazing. I once wrote a piece for a piano duo, and the other person has to say what your dynamic is; I would say anything — triple p, nine ps, nine fs, mezzopiano, whatever — and Kate would play it perfectly but whatever she said for me would get exactly the same dynamic. -laughs- Not only that, she is an incredible friend as well. I’m so happy to have her in my life.
Were you friends beforehand?
No, that was the beginning. It’s interesting that I have these close friends; Kate has performed two of my long piano pieces and many short ones, and then last year another great friend — Kat Farn — found my work during a lecture. When she came across my work, she told herself “I need to find out who this is”, and then she contacted me. Since then, I have written a lot of organ music; a lot of this is organ music… -gestures at the large pile of manuscript paper that Matthew has written over the course of 2025- …just because of her. If Kat had been a flautist, then I also would have happily written a lot of flute music. I’ll go wherever things take me.
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During the last few years you have built up several close collaborators and you have had some of your larger scale works performed. How does that all feel?
It’s good. But it is weird for me though, because I don’t feel like I need it. I don’t mean that in an arrogant way, because I write the pieces and they are there — so to actually have them performed is nice and I enjoy it — but I don’t know how much I need it as a composer. I love it as a person, I like the attention and when people say nice things. But deep down, as a composer, it’s a weird feeling.
So essentially the pieces are made as a result of the process that you enjoy doing and the performance of it is a bonus?
I generally don’t push for these things. A lot of this music hasn’t been heard or even seen; occasionally, I will write a piece and then send it to someone, but I won’t make any effort to pursue it further. I also won’t send works to competitions or festivals, the pieces just sit there and exist.
I understand that your longest durational piece is For Clive Baker…
Finished in 2021 and around 26 hours in total. I am in talks with someone at the moment about getting it performed, or at least trying to get it performed next year. But I’m cautious, because if I were to choose having it done as soon as [possible] but under-rehearsed, or in 40 years time but really well, I would pick in 40 years time absolutely no question. But it is really hard to arrange. I want to pay people, which means raising a shitload of money to find a performance space, a great performer, and the facilities to record it.
That being said, the potentially longest piece is For Samuel Beckett, which can be up to 27 hours. There’s [the] piece that I’m working on at the moment which will be 9 or 10 hours that I have been thinking about for a year, turning Hamletinto music. If I write one page a day (and there’s 300 pages in total), then that’s going to take a while. I do feel in a good place about doing that though. The thing with laborious processes is that I need them to justify what I’m doing. If I go -click- “oh, there’s a 40 hour piece”, then there is no limit to what you can do — then it doesn’t work [for me], I want to know how someone has made something, but at the same time, I think I can tell when something has been artificially churned out. For me, it’s a way of trying to hold the piece in hand. If it’s a twenty hour piece, that takes a lot of time for me to think “how does this work?”. You need to go through that process of having the space to be able to justify it in your own head, work out what it is, and get ideas along the way about what it is going to be — and that doesn’t come from pressing buttons. I have used automated processes in the past. I’ve gotten ChatGPT to generate a text for me, but if it was music generated, I would feel fraudulent…
How would you feel if you took an AI-generated novel and then you used your process on that? Do you prefer your source material to come from another human who has been through a laborious process as well?
I am always drawn to using sources that excite me. For instance, The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker, which later got adapted into the film Hellraiser — because I really, really like that, and [if] I am going to spend a long time, I need to feel a connection [to the material]. I did try to write a song once using AI generated lyrics, but it was just not [good].
Have you ever infiltrated any of your processes?
Earlier I was talking about the street analogy, but to add to that, it would be like falling down a man hole and then going, “oops… Well, I might as well do something about it”. So if you take For Clive Barker, which is 1,058 pages of music, you see many pages in that there is a different process going on — and that simply happened because I just got bored. I needed to move on from the original process, [and] that was my way of going “how do I handle 26 hours of music?”. If I continued using the same process, then I would go insane.
When I wrote that piece, I was also going through chronic pain with my back and my shoulders, even holding a pencil caused pain. Thankfully, Help Musicians UK gave me funding to hire an assistant, and I hired Peter Wilson — who is now a very good friend of mine. With the Hamlet piece that I am doing at the moment, it’s a work which could of course be done in seconds, but I’m going to spend thousands and thousands of hours working on it. Even though there are other options, as far as I’m concerned, there isn’t another option; it doesn’t make any sense.
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In a few weeks’ time [at time of interview] you are going to Luxembourg for 2025’s Rainy Days Festival. What is the project that you will be doing over there?
It’s a piano biopsy where I [am] taking apart an old piano to make music from it. I have written an essay about it — mainly questions about what it could be — but I have never done it before. For the piece I am going to have lots of tools (including hammers, saws, etc.), but I don’t know if I am going to go in like Miley Cyrus on a wrecking ball… -laughs-
It will be in the foyer of Philharmonie Luxembourg, and just before that I will be performing at a Scratch Orchestra event. I was asked if I wanted to take part, but made clear that there would be no payment — however, it was being led by Michael Parsons [ed. one of the founding members of the original Scratch Orchestra] and I felt like saying I will pay you to take part.
I suppose that whilst I was at Guildhall, knowing about all of these incredibly amazing composers… Now many of the ones that I really like are now [my] friends. There was one day where a friend bumped into a composer who I really admired (I’m not going to say the name), and apparently they were saying some lovely things about my music. And then someone else bumped into another composer and they did the same thing. They were talking about my music. I find it nice, but it’s kind of weird. I’m not terribly successful as a composer, but I feel that there is a good level of respect for the honesty which I have and the work that I produce, which feels good.
Do you view respect and admiration from peers as being more important than “success”?
Do you want to be known by a thousand people or respected by one? It’s the typical thing of if what I have done just helps one person, then it would have been worth it. There are some successful composers who are saying “oh god, it’s been a year since that Hollywood film that I scored, where I made £10 million from…” — but it’s like, well you have that though and that’s amazing! So, this is what happens when you get to any level; you get numb to the rewards. -laughs- I don’t think that I’ve had any major success that gets me numb to it though, which is probably good. But I am happy with what I’ve got, because it could be a lot worse.
Perhaps what I have just said is an example of being numb to my successes. There are composers out there who don’t get anything played and they don’t have any connections — so to even be a footnote in a book is wonderful. I wrote an article years ago, and I think that I opened it by saying “the reason we write is to be remembered”. Having said that, I don’t know why I write now…
I suppose that composing has just been a part of your life for so long by now that it is second nature.
It is my life.
You’ve also made paintings as well…
Hundreds and hundreds…
Have any influenced your music? Such as using a shape, wave, or form as part of a score?
It doesn’t need to — it’s the same thing. If I am writing poetry, or if I am writing music, making art or graphic scores, then it’s made in the same way. I’m using the same brain. It’s as though there is one office in my brain that’s the “creative centre” and that’s where it all comes from. And it all influences everything else as well. With a lot of the paintings, I’ve used drip procedures, where I would have a bag hanging from a rope with a tiny little pin-prick; and then I would put the paint in and it would slowly drop — one drip at a time — over days and weeks. I would just sit and watch these, it was fascinating! To put those colours in, and then to see them come out similar to how toothpaste comes out of a small tube.
Once I set fire to my floor — I used to put plastic on canvas and then burn it, lots of really active materials. I had also put myself in bed with hallucinations for a few days, because I used to use so many spray glues. I would go through the house and use house paints, oils, whatever, and put it all together, just making stuff. If I added up all of the paintings, sculptures and all of the other things that I have made, you probably wouldn’t believe the number! I was just always making things; so all of those, with the pieces that I have written (including the graphic scores and the poems), I just don’t know where to start with how many there are. I just have this endless compulsion to create.
Have any of the spaces that you have lived in or circumstances had an effect on the output of your work?
Not really. Even when I lived with someone once who was quite traumatic, I was still incredibly productive. One of my favourite books is 120 Days of Sodom by The Marquis de Sade; and there is a film called Quills, which is about him starring Geoffrey Rush and Kate Winslet. Long story short, the protagonist keeps getting things taken away from him — his equipment so that he can’t write, etc. — and by the end of the film, he is still writing. He keeps writing even when he is using his own blood and by the end of the film, he is using his own shit on the walls to write. So whatever happened to him and whatever was taken away from him, he was still able to write. I don’t know what it would take to stop me writing. I could be happy making graphic scores from dust and sunlight.
I’ve found that with some artists who are more emotionally enveloped with their own work, their output correlates with their life. As in, if they are going through a tough time, they might stop writing for a bit.
I’m the complete opposite. In some ways I don’t understand that: you are going through this horrific thing, and you have this incredible tool to deal with that, why aren’t you using it? But I do understand that, looking at it the other way, other people might not understand how I can have almost no emotional attachment to my work. As I get older however, it makes more sense, I have an overwhelming feeling that I am not a real person, don’t ask me to explain it, because I can’t! Anyway the idea of writers block… what? -laughs-
Maybe you don’t have that because you’ve built up this skillset of different tools to composing and being creative? You also don’t have a singular way of working. Earlier, we were talking about you translating material; whilst that is your material, it is ultimately coming from another source too.
I used to write my own texts all the time, writing a lot of it; I was spending up to a year going through newspapers and writing down certain words or editing a novel, taking out all of the questions or every time there was a word such as “like” or “the”. And all of those would be easy to do by computer, you would simply ask the computer to go through the novel and take out those words. I mostly wrote these roughly first and then I copied it up, so I would go through a novel and every time the word “like” comes up, I would write that down. I would be doing this endlessly, so it’s completely obsessive. One of my heroes from those days was Kenneth Goldsmith, who did things like transcribing weather reports for a whole year.
You’ve brought quite a number of scores to this interview, Matthew – looking through all these makes me wonder what your most performed work is…
There’s a piece called The Story of a Magnificent Banquet for spoken word, and that is probably my most performed piece. I used to do it with Neil Luck and Josh Kaye [with our ensemble KLK] and it’s a horrific piece that quotes the Marquis de Sade. The piece is on a long reel [of paper], starts off kind of nice, and gets worse and worse until it is talking about some really deliciously horrible stuff — and you end up with all of the paper down by your feet. We turned that into a performance where Josh would read out the text, and then Neil and I would drink an entire bottle of red wine in the time that it took to do that performance (which was around 8 minutes). -laughs- We’ve gotten to a point where we can’t do that anymore. I also once [accidentally] kicked a glass into the audience and afterwards I went up to them to apologise, but they hadn’t noticed because they were so transfixed on how horrible the text was.
There was a string quartet that I wrote back in 2006, called Nothing Implied…
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Is that the one that 840 commissioned?
That was Dirac, from 2014. [My] string quartet from 2006 had newspaper headlines, and the players were told to either go and play in the middle of the range, the higher register, or lower range — which I got from Morton Feldman — and then to instrumentally respond to the headlines. Each of the headlines were quite quirky and fun, some of them were just horrific. You could kind of tell when these people were playing that the audience knew the quality of the headline being played, even though they couldn’t see them.
There was another piece where I did something similar; I spent hours going through hundreds of suicide notes, and then I put those into a piece for piano, cello and clarinet, which was going to be for an edition of 840, but then the lockdown happened. In that piece the players would instrumentally chant the suicide notes, “read” them through their instruments and inevitably, without trying, convey the infinite despair inherent in the text.
With all of these scores, I wonder how you archive this all?
I don’t really care about that much, to be honest. Of course, I keep copies of pieces as well as sketches and drafts, but even with my website, there should be more effort there; perhaps there should be a more comprehensive catalogue, so if anyone wants to play it then it would be easy to find. But I just don’t have any interest in that. I also don’t keep a list of performances, when they have happened, or what is going to happen. All that really matters to me is the act of making.
Someone had sent me a message asking me what processes I use — whether it was a software or digital generator — and I simply replied “I just use pencils”. I have no other methodologies. Having said that, I was able to write the long organ [piece] in about four months, because I didn’t sketch it first (because I knew that it was going to get performed over the summer); which is fine as I [knew] what I was doing. But if I did it by hand, then it would have taken more than a year.
Do you prefer to work by hand?
Yes. Even with the first pieces that I wrote at Guildhall, there would be pages of notes and sketches as part of each work — but I don’t really need to do that now. At first, I used to feel guilty about not making sketches and just writing the piece. In the early stages of becoming a composer, I think that it is good to show your workings; but once you have done it for such a long time, the pre-compositional work gets done in your head so quickly that there is no point doing that, because it has been worked out.
One thing that I’ve noticed over the years is that I do regularly get really lovely messages from people — but it is almost always about the quantity of my output and the ability to write that I think is what people find inspiring. It pushes them to do something. Sadly it is rarely about the quality of the music… -laughs- A few months ago I was writing and I just stopped and then I thought “why am I doing this?”, and then I felt myself getting emotional — so I went back to writing. -laughs- I think with these kinds of things if there is a reason, it’s either going to be so profound that it’s going to hurt me, or it will be something that’s really boring.
It could be that the original reasoning has faded away. Maybe that is why your composing is an ever-evolving process…
Because if I am writing, then I don’t have to think. I used to have CBT therapy; it was a while ago now, but if I had to think about something, I would freeze and be absolutely silent. There were all of these walls in my mind where I just couldn’t connect anything to anything else. Since then, I’ve managed to work through that a little bit; I used to be a lot worse. I guess about five years ago, I started to have real problems with what I was doing — how I was thinking about it, how I was not thinking about it — so it was a decision that I made, but it made me think “well, this has slowly happened that I’ve thought less and less and less” — to the point where now I really don’t think that much. Did I think about the lead up to this interview? Not really. Did I do things to make me stop thinking about this interview? Yes — I spent hours printing out all of these scores, that could have been used for time where I would be thinking about what I was going to say.
It’s like when Alan Watts was asked to explain what the meaning of life was and he just hit a gong. He said to the audience in a lecture about Zen Buddhism, “If you really wanted to understand, then I would just sit here and say nothing for 90 minutes — but you’ve paid money, so I should say something”. But had he said nothing, then it would have had more meaning and been more impactful. In the case of here, if I was going to sit here and say nothing, then that might have been a bit awkward. I had one therapist once whose method was to just wait for me to say something; the first time, I walked in and I asked how they were, and their response was “ah, so you initially asked how I am, let’s talk about that” — not a good therapist.
Are there any processes or procedures that you are wanting to try, but you just haven’t gotten around to it?
Using text is just so infinite. I think it’s safe to say that no other composer has ever worked with text as much as I have. I don’t mean using a libretto, what I mean by that is using text for notes — I think composers like Ferneyhough had done it, but they used computer programmes and complex mathematical analyses.
He [Brian Ferneyhough] started out manually, but then as soon as the tech became available he was like “bye”. I suppose we are in an age where there are so many of these tools readily available, and yet you are still choosing not to use them, because you want a combination of the “struggle” and the journey that happens during a laborious process.
There’s a famous story by Alan Watts, which was then used in a South Park animation, which follows the idea of: you are born, then you go to school, then go to university, then you need to get a job, then you need to be promoted, and then you get to the end, and you are 75 and what have you got to show for it? And you realise that it was all a hoax — you were tricked.
When you start dancing, you don’t think “okay, I’ve got to get over there, as that’s the most important thing” — no, it’s the dance that’s the most important thing. And then he uses the very important analogy of a piece of music: if it was the end that was the most important thing, then the best conductors would be the ones that played the fastest, but that’s not what you go for. It’s the journey, not the destination. So if I hadn’t done the journey, then for me that wouldn’t be the most convincing thing.
I did have a conversation recently with a pianist, and they said “what about the audience in this?” — but that’s not something that I think of at all. Which actually goes back to something that Feldman once said: “If your music needs an audience, then music doesn’t need you”. That resonated with me. There’s lots of things he said that stuck with me and changed me (probably not for the good in some ways). When he talked about the person that wrote music with the intention of it never being performed, Feldman himself said that he admired her insanity and impracticality; he also talked about people who are willing to live for music, and he said “who’s willing to do that?”, and I remember reading that and I thought “how can I try to write music continuously?”. It’s weird that I try to think as little as possible — but then the whole point of writing these pieces is to clear a space so I can think, but not the *I* that I know about.
It’s as though you are emptying one part of the brain for another…
I once made a graphic score that read “I am a stupid composer”, and I showed that to people and they were like “oh Matthew, no…” — but I said to them, “I think that you have misunderstood, this is a good thing”. It’s the idea of being stupid in a zen way.
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Learn more about Matthew Lee Knowles and his practice:
- https://matthewleeknowles.com/
- https://www.youtube.com/@MatthewLeeKnowles
- https://www.instagram.com/matthewleeknowles
References/Links:
- Laurence Crane – ‘Sparling’ (1992)
- John Cage – 4’33” (1952)
- South Park: Season 6, Episode 7 – ‘Simpsons Already Did It’, au. Trey Parker and Matt Stone
- Tom Johnson – ‘The Chord Catalogue’ (1986)
- Andy Ingamells – ‘A Performance is Never Rehearsed, a Performance is Never Repeated’ (2010)
- Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1953)
- Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart (1986)
- Hellraiser (1987), dir. Clive Barker
- The Marquis de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom (1785), trans. Will McMorran, Thomas Wynn
- Quills (2000), dir. Philip Kaufman
- Matthew Lee Knowles, ‘The Story of a Magnificent Banquet’ (2008)
- Matthew Lee Knowles, ‘Dirac’ (2014)
- Alan Watts, Life and Music, animated by Trey Parker and Matt Stone (2008)
