All Rights Reserved ©2008-2009 by Matthew C. Saunders

Email:  matthew@martiandances.com

Bio

www.martiandances.com

Matthew Charles Saunders, DMA

Born March 15, 1976,

Austin, Texas, USA.

Matthew Charles Saunders is a composer, conductor and music educator of growing regional and national reputation.  Dr. Saunders is currently Assistant Professor of Music and Director of Bands at Oklahoma Panhandle State University, where he serves as Chair of the Music Department.  His music has been performed by school and professional ensembles and performers in Ohio, Georgia, Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Connecticut, New York, Illinois and the United Kingdom, and is slated for upcoming performances in North Carolina, South Carolina, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Alabama.  Dr. Saunders has received commissions for his band, vocal and chamber music, and his current projects include pieces a song cycles for soprano Suzanne Fleming-Atwood and Carole Jean Ott, and incidental music for a one-act play about the Dust Bowl as well as a set of sonatinas for woodwind instruments, music for live electronics and a suite for unaccompanied trombone.  His Progress Through Knowledge for band and chorus was commissioned to commemorate the Centennial of Oklahoma Panhandle State University, and will be premiered there in October 2009.  His Passacaglia for flute and cello was selected as a winning piece in the 2009 New Music Hartford 60/60 Composition Competition, and he will be a featured composer on the February 2010 Composers Salon of the Oklahoma Composers Association.

Dr. Saunders earned the degrees of Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts in composition from the Ohio State University and the degree of Bachelor of Music in music education and trombone performance from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.  His composition teachers included Donald Harris, Jan Radzynski, Thomas Wells, Joel Hoffman and Wes Flinn, and he has studied trombone with Joseph Duchi and Tony Chipurn.    During his time at Ohio State, Dr. Saunders received the Ruth Friscoe Prize for his Sevens, the A. Peter Costanza Distinguished DMA Document Award, the Donald and Marilyn Harris Scholarship, a University Fellowship and was twice named Distinguished Graduate Student in Theory and Composition.   He also held the position of Composer-in-Residence with the Ohio State University Symphony Orchestra.  Dr. Saunders graduated summa cum laude from the University of Cincinnati, where he was the recipient of the Albert Voorheis Scholarship, received a rating of Superior for his senior trombone recital and passed his senior performance board “With Honors.”

Trained initially as a music educator, Dr. Saunders taught for six years in the public schools of Georgia and Ohio.  He remains committed to the development of young musicians, and his compositions are often conceived with high school-level performers in mind, but with an ear toward creating pieces which challenge the expectations and capabilities of young musicians.  His music is insistent in its rhythmic approach, and uncompromising in its musical sophistication, even when intended for younger performers.  Spirituality also plays a key role in Dr. Saunders’ work.  He has written a series of short choral pieces to scriptural texts, several longer sacred choral works and a cantata entitled Prayers in Time of War.  His upcoming projects include a cantata based on the Gospel of John.

Dr. Saunders’ concert band composition Variations on a French Carol is currently slated for publication by Imagine Music Publishing.

Outside composition, Dr. Saunders’ research interests include the wind band repertoire, the vocal music of Benjamin Britten, Classical-era form and its transformation after 1800 and the role of rhythm in musical meaning.  In addition, Dr. Saunders has a keen interest in the transformations due to be wrought on music and music education during the 21st century as the result of the democratization of recording and distribution technology.

A native of Texas, Dr. Saunders spent his youth and early adulthood in Ohio before coming to the Oklahoma Panhandle in 2007.  His interests outside music include fitness, the outdoors and science fiction.  Dr. Saunders has a voracious appetite for the written word, particularly history, physical and social science and modern literature.  He has been pleasantly surprised to find that composition and university teaching have afforded him opportunities to indulge his long-deferred desire to travel, and wishes his wife could accompany him more frequently.  Journeys  throughout the United States and a luminous trip to Saxony and the Czech Republic are cherished memories he hopes to be able to replicate in the near future.  Specific destinations he dreams about are the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Greece, Egypt, and Tanzania.  He would one day like to walk on the surface of Mars, but fears he may have been born too soon.

Dr. Saunders lives in Guymon, Oklahoma with his wife, Becky.  He finds the people to be wonderful, the sunsets incomparable, and the wide-open expanses of the High Plains awe-inspiring.  His dream projects include an opera based on Willa Cather’s Death Comes to the Archbishop, the Great American Symphony, another concerto for trombone, and a string quartet for the Belcea Quartet, but he writes only with performers and premieres in mind, as he works best on deadline.  Dr. Saunders is a fan of Skyline Chili, the filled long johns at the Tremont Goodie Shop, Graeter’s ice cream, and other not-so-nutritious delicacies, but he flosses every day.