Matthew Martin

Composer / Performer

Matthew Martin Matthew Martin read music at Magdalen College, Oxford and later studied at the Royal Academy of Music, London where he won all the major organ prizes and the DipRAM - the Academy’s Premiere Prix in performance. An award-winning composer, he is the Director of Music and a Fellow at Keble College, Oxford where he conducts the choir and teaches academic music within the College and University.

Matthew’s music is rapidly gaining him an international reputation. His “spikily dynamic style of composition” (BBC Music Magazine) has led him to be commissioned to write for many prominent ensembles, most recently The Tallis Scholars, the choirs of Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s Cathedral, St John’s College and Clare College, Cambridge. In 2014, he was commissioned by The Genesis Foundation to write a new setting of the Stabat Mater for The Sixteen. He won the Liturgical category in the 2013 British Composer Awards and, in 2014, a disc of his choral music was released by the choir of Magdalen College, Oxford on the Opus Arte label. He recently had a new Trumpet Sonata commissioned by the 2015 Cheltenham Music Festival as well as a set of Lamentations premiered The Tallis Scholars and a cycle of Sonnets of Petrarch for Marcus Farnsworth performed during the 2016 Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester. Composition plans for 2017 include a large-scale work for The Gabrieli Consort, a re-imagining of Guerrero’s Ave Virgo sanctissima for Ora Singers and a festive anthem to mark opening of the new organ in Manchester Cathedral. Matthew’s works are published by Faber Music.

From 2001 to 2004 he was a pupil of the late Marie-Claire Alain in Paris; in 2005 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music. Matthew has held positions at New College, Oxford, Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster Cathedral where he was the Assistant Master of Music from 2004 until 2010. Since 2001 he has been involved with the annual Edington Festival of Music within the Liturgy where he is director of the Nave Choir. From 2000 until 2002 he was Director of Music at the University Church, Oxford. From 2011 until 2015 he was Organist at The London Oratory.

Matthew is well known as a soloist and has performed at the Cheltenham, Spitalfields and South Bank festivals, as well as more recently further afield in Miami and Uppsala, Sweden. A regular organist for The Sixteen, his first solo recording on the historic Ralph Downes-designed organ of The London Oratory has been received with critical acclaim.

Biographical Details

Works by Matthew Martin

Festival performances of works by Matthew Martin

Call for Scores submissionWorld premiereLondon premiere

LFCCM 2024

LFCCM 2023

LFCCM 2022

LFCCM 2021

LFCCM @ Home

LFCCM 2019

LFCCM 2018

LFCCM 2017

LFCCM 2016

LFCCM 2015

LFCCM 2013

LFCCM 2012

LFCCM 2008

Works performed by Matthew Martin

London premiere

Festival performances by Matthew Martin

London premiere

LFCCM 2017

Recorded performances of works by Matthew Martin

LFCCM 2015