Bio

Phillip Matty (b. 1999) is a British composer and artistic researcher whose work explores the intersection of sound, structure, narrative, and perception. His practice is informed by an interest in simulacra: the ways in which sound can imitate, distort, or construct a sense of reality. Through timbre, texture, transformation, and spatialisation, his music explores the shifting relationship between the sound we hear and the sonic object it appears to represent, often questioning the boundaries between the real and the simulated.

His work spans concert music, theatre, and installation, with projects presented through CODA Festival, Bled Contemporary Music Week, and York New Music Weekend. His installation practice has explored field recording, spatial sound, and the relationship between recorded and imagined environments, including most recentlyWhere the Performance Never Happened at Bled Contemporary Music Week 2026. 

His chamber opera Willow was selected for CUOS Shorts 2025. Phillip has also composed for theatre, working with director Niall Phillips on a production of The Women of Troy. 

Phillip has won several awards including the 2025 Bliss Trust Award for Composition, whose past recipients include Thomas Adès, Lawrence Dunn, James Weeks, and Cheryl Frances-Hoad. He also won the 2024 Clare College Carol Composition Competition and  the 2025 Clare College Composition Competition for orchestral writing.

As a composer and researcher Phillip has been selected to participate in festivals, courses, and residencies including CAMPFR’s Composing for Stage course led by Philip Venables, the 32nd Young Composers Meet with Orkest de Ereprijs, The New Symposium (institut .abeceda), and enuntiatio.praefatio.formulae I, a residency programme for artistic research in music. He given public lecutres on his research on timbre, simulation, and electronic sound at the Bled Contemporary Music Festival as part of the e.p.f residency. 

Phillip has studied at the University of Cambridge, where he completed an MPhil in Music (Composition) with Distinction under the supervision of Richard Causton, and at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, where he gained an MMus in Composition with Distinction under Andrew Hamilton and Andrew Toovey. Before specialising in composition, he completed an MMath at the University of York, where he was deeply involved in the university’s musical community.  He has continued to develop his skills and knoweldge with composers including Richard Ayres, Bee Tuan Koh, Geoff Hannan, Ed Bennet, Sean Clancy, Wilbert Bulsink, Tadeusz Wielecki and others.

From Autumn 2026 Phillip is pursuing a PhD in Composition at the University of Birmingham under the supervision of Michael Zev Gordon, developing his research into composition as simulacra.