The Great Journey

As he approaches his 80th birthday, composer Colin Matthews speaks to Michael White about his 50-year contribution to British musical life

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Some years ago, Colin Matthews — a lifelong Londoner — bought himself a composing retreat on the Somerset/ Dorset borders and half-seriously confessed to fears that the view of cows from his windows ‘might turn me into an English Pastoral composer before my time’.

He needn't have worried. It didn’t. And though he's about to mark his 80th birthday with a new Oboe Concerto - the mere thought of which triggers associations with Vaughan Williams, Finzi and blue-remembered hills - he tells me it won't be anything of the sort. Written for London Symphony Orchestra principal oboist Olivier Stankiewicz, it’s going to be ‘spiky, quite forceful, not noticeably English at all’. So there.

But looking back on his career, as happens when someone hits 80, you might ask: if Colin Matthews isn’t English Pastoral, what is he? And there’s no easy answer. Like most British composers of today, he resists definition - perhaps because, as he says, ‘We don’t have the shared aesthetic you're expected to have if you're a composer in Italy or France. We're magpies, picking from wherever we can. And I don’t think anything I write stands out as English. If anything, the background is mainstream European: Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, that sort of world, though I’m not sure how I fit into it. Slightly left of centre, I suppose. Sometimes I'm relatively tonal, but it’s not my natural language.’