Born in the Washington, D.C. area and based in New York City, composer and pianist Matthew Schultheis (b. 1997) is currently a C. V. Starr Doctoral Fellow at The Juilliard School, having completed his master’s degree there in 2022. For both degrees he studied with Matthias Pintscher. He earned his BM in composition, additionally studying piano full-time, at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
As a composer, Matthew has collaborated with the Tokyo Symphony, Juilliard, and Tonkünstler Orchestras; Ensemble intercontemporain; the Attacca, Mivos, and JACK Quartets; the new music ensembles of Indiana University and the University of Chicago; ECCE Ensemble; and New York Virtuoso Singers. His most recent festival appearance was at Bowdoin as the 2024 composition fellow. Matthew’s music has received three consecutive BMI Student Composer Awards among other honors; his first two works for orchestra, Columbia, In Old Age (2020) and Governing Forces (2023), received awards from Juilliard. In 2024 he made his orchestral conducting debut with the premiere of Mental Weather for the Grafenegg Festival’s “Ink Still Wet” workshop.
Matthew and violinist Lauren Conroy have performed as Magpie Duo since 2023, a project focusing on compelling, interconnected programs of music from the past 100 years. Aside from premieres of his own work, recent chamber performances at Juilliard have included Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, two programs of Philip Glass’s work with the Juilliard Dance Division, Anthony Cheung’s Tactile Values, and George Crumb’s Eleven Echoes of Autumn. From 2016–2019, as a member and soloist within the IU New Music Ensemble, he performed works including György Ligeti’s Piano Concerto, Bernd Richard Deutsch’s Mad Dog, and Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez’s New Short Stories.