Matthew Lee Knowles has been played on NTS shows including Fractal Meat On A Spongy Bone, with For Morton Feldman first played on 19 April 2022.

I completed my composition degree at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 2008, under Richard Baker and Paul Newland. My final portfolio received the Frank Prindl Prize for the highest mark. Whilst there I performed many times, wrote several theatre scores and instigated exhibitions and collaborations.

I am a composer, poet, piano teacher, pianist and events organiser. I have also written articles, conducted interviews, directed and written for the theatre and travelled across the globe as a performance artist/musician.

In 2008 Anton Lukoszevieze chose me to perform Stockhausen’s extremely challenging Goldstaub which required me to live without thought or food in isolation for four days then play the piano to open the SAN/BBC Cut & Splice Festival. Other performances include: Kondo’s Metaphonesis for solo piano, Cage’s Music for Amplified Toy Pianos and Ligeti’s Poeme Symphonique (both at King’s Place).

My music has being heard on French radio (2010, arrangements of Welsh folk songs for SATB) and Channel 4 (Documentary, dir. Deborah Anzalone). I have written for and worked extensively with ARCO ensemble and premiered a new piece live on Resonance FM. General highlights have been improvising at the piano to an audience of over 1000 in India, composing for a National Theatre workshop, performing on home made instruments for dancers in Spain, performing my own score at the piano for Gut Girls (The Space, dir. Alex Crampton) and winning a young composers award and cash prize for my composition Instances (2006).

Along with composers Neil Luck and Joshua Kaye I formed KLK, a spokenwordmusic trio, dedicated to performing text works mainly by myself. KLK has performed in several galleries and at arts events and an album will be released toward the end of the year on Squib-Box Records.

I have performed, premiered and acted as composer-in-residence (along with Claudia Molitor) for Notations and The Voice and Nothing More, both curated by artist Sam Belinfante. I have collaborated recently with Brandon Labelle, Billie Maciunas, Mikhail Karikis, Elisabeth Rimmington, Catalina Niculescu, William Lane, Giorgio Sadotti and Adam de la Cour. Myself and Neil Luck jointly performed an eighty minute set, as a headline act at Miniere Sonore in Sardinia, which made headlines in international newspapers and television channels. A condensed version of the piece was performed in London a few months later at Nonclassical in Hoxton. I returned to Sardinia this summer as librettist for a new opera called Shadow Prophets.

In 2008 my global performance event sixevents was introduced to 25 countries and in 2008 my follow up, sixtysixevents, a collaboration with Andy Ingamells, was performed in over 30 countries worldwide. In 2012 666events will once again become a global performance.

I have curated and created several large scale happenings since 2007, the largest of which lasted three hours and involved 150 people at the Louise T Blouin Institute. Street Scenes took over a London street for a whole day, Around This House was performed in a library and For The Birds in a cemetery.

I recently spent a week in Zurich rehearsing a commission from Ensemble TaG, for eleven players, which received two performances and a further commission followed for solo piano which has being premiered in London and Switzerland this year. Before that I spent a week in Germany for an arts festival, Atomino, where I performed several of my longer poems in commissioned costumes, from hand made booklets and collaborated with others artists and musicians.

I recently finished my first play, Kidnapped, and along with George Chambers, created my own art exhibition at Oxford University, Ejected Material.

Current projects include a collaboration with a dancer (Antonio J. de la Fe Guedes) and pianist (Yshani Perinpanayagam) to create a piece called Concerto For Dancer and Pianist in 18 Parts. For Alan Turing was finished in September and is a six movement, epic piano-solo, several hours in duration and I have been invited to perform this at a prestigious Alan Turing event next year. I am also working on a large composition for string quartet and piano, which when finished will be my most technically complex piece to date. I am also coming to the end of a major architectural public art commission, which will see my poetry/text permanently covering an entire building in Marylebone. This has been a collaborative project with architects over the previous two years and I was chosen for the job over globally prominent artists because of my equal links to poetry and music.