Blog - Substack - Echoes, Paths and Edges

Echoes, Paths and Edges is now an ongoing blog on Substack, a place where I think aloud through the ideas, sounds, and questions shaping my work. What began as a radio series has grown into a more expansive space for reflection. Part creative diary, part research notebook, part critical commentary.

The blog traces the shifting sound-world of contemporary classical music from the mid-twentieth century to today, but always through the lens of my own practice. I write about the echoes that inform my musical language, the unexpected paths opened through experimentation, and the conceptual edges where composition stretches into philosophy, perception, and the hyperreal.

Posts range from focused reflections on individual works to broader explorations of timbre, simulacra, spatial listening, and the aesthetics emerging from my residency research. It is a place for provisional thoughts and developing ideas, insights that sit between analysis and creative speculation.

If you’re interested in how composers think, question, and construct new sonic realities, Echoes, Paths and Edges offers a window into that process as it unfolds in real time.

Radio Show - CAMFM - Echoes, Paths and Edges

From 2024 to 2025 I curated Echoes, Paths and Edges, a radio show on CamFM, a series devoted to charting the shifting terrain of contemporary classical music. Across its run, the programme explored the rich sound world of the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, concentrating on works written after 1950. Each broadcast traced its own constellation of echoes, paths and edges: echoes where tradition is refracted or unsettled, paths where composers carve out new structural or aesthetic routes, and edges where sound presses against their own limits.

The series became a space for close listening and critical curiosity, drawing together music that challenges, unsettles or reorients the listener. Episodes examined how composers negotiate the changing language of contemporary music, how timbre, form and gesture respond to the pressures of modern life, and how familiar materials can become strange when placed in new contexts.

As an archive, Echoes, Paths and Edges marks a period of intensive engagement with the music of the past seventy years, offering a record of the ideas, questions and listening practices that shaped my thinking during its broadcast years.

Show 1 - New Beginnings

In the premiere episode of Echoes, Paths and Edges, Phillip Matty curates a unique selection of contemporary classical works that stretch the boundaries of sound and form. Featuring Sean Clancy's innovative use of contrapuntal techniques, Caroline Shaw's modern take on a traditional Scottish song, and Laurence Crane's meditative String Quartet No. 2, each piece invites listeners to experience music from new perspectives. From the ethereal organ tones of Ivan Vukosavljevic to Jennifer Higdon's lush orchestral textures, this episode explores how today's composers reinvent and reimagine musical landscapes. Tune in for a journey through resonant sound worlds and rediscovered traditions, with music by Caroline Shaw, Brett Dean, Alexander Goehr, and many others.

Show 2 - A Journey through perception

This week on Echoes, Paths, and Edges, Phillip Matty curates a selection of works that explore how music shapes our sense of space, memory, and emotion. Opening with Terra Invisus' Blur and Natasha Barrett's Presence / Nærvær, the episode delves into sonic depictions of place, from the rush of urban life to the intricate soundscape of Oslo’s Akershus Fortress. Samuel Reinhard’s For Piano and Shō introduces a meditative stillness, while Hania Rani’s Nostalgia offers a deeply personal reflection on memory and inspiration. Midway through, Steve Reich’s Violin Phase and Louis Andriessen’s Garden of Eros create a compelling contrast, with Reich’s minimalist patterns unfolding alongside Andriessen’s poetic tribute to his brother. Closing with Kaija Saariaho’s Nocturne, written in memory of Witold Lutosławski, the episode ends on a note of quiet beauty, highlighting music’s power to express what words cannot.

Show 3 - Resonance

This week's episode of Echoes, Paths and Edges delved into music that reflects on the self and the past, weaving a tapestry of sound that spanned introspective minimalism, evocative folk traditions, and intricate modern textures.The program opened with David Lang's meditative This Was Written by Hand, followed by Toru Takemitsu's ethereal And Then I Knew 'Twas Wind. Thomas Ades' Asyla brought electrifying orchestral layers, while Missy Mazzoli's Dissolve, O My Heart offered a fresh perspective on Bach's legacy. Emily Linane's fading evoked haunting folk traditions, and Pierre Boulez's Sur Incises showcased bold, expansive textures.Each piece resonated with the episode's theme, connecting echoes of the past to the innovative threads of contemporary classical music.

Show 4 - Instruments Unbound

This week on Echoes, Paths & Edges, Phillip Matty explores the transformative potential of minimalism and the fusion of acoustic instruments with electronic soundscapes. Featuring works by Brian Byrne, Howard Skempton, Molly Joyce, and more, the episode captures the essence of restraint, evolution, and the fluid boundaries of musical expression.

Show 5 - Reflections

This week’s episode of Echoes, Paths, and Edges explored music that reflects on connection, healing, and the beauty of sound. From serene hymns to dreamlike meditations and raw emotional soundscapes, each piece captured profound moments of introspection and gratitude.The program began with Trio Mediæval’s tranquil Nu Solen Gar Ned, transitioning into Janet Beat’s innovative Dancing on Moonbeam, a pioneering work of electronic textures. Gabriel Jackson’s Star-Song shimmered with celestial beauty, while Howard Skempton’s In Tandem brought bold rhythms and harmonies. The evening also featured Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s evocative Ad Genua, Stef Conner’s reflective Hymn to a Head, and Ushio Torikai’s poignant Rest, composed in the wake of 9/11. Jamie Elless closed the program with Three Days, a deeply personal exploration of loneliness and collaboration. Each work resonated with the theme, offering glimpses of resilience and beauty in the face of adversity.

Show 6 - Fragments

This week on Echoes, Paths, and Edges, we explore music that moves between light and shadow, clarity and abstraction. From the shimmering figurations of Louis Andriessen’s Image de Moreau to the haunting resonance of Jürg Frey’s mémoire, horizon, each piece offers a unique perspective on depth, texture, and transformation. We’ll also hear spectral explorations from Georg Friedrich Haas, the poetic lyricism of John Tavener’s Sappho Fragments, and the bold rhythmic energy of Andriessen’s Facing Death, inspired by bebop legend Charlie Parker.

Show 7 - Together, Apart

This week's episode of Echoes, Paths and Edges explores the shifting boundaries between connection and isolation, memory and transformation, and vast sonic landscapes. From Judd Greenstein’s Together, a piece born from pandemic-induced separation, to Brett Dean’s Three Memorials, reflecting on loss and remembrance, each work challenges how we perceive time, space, and collective experience. Featuring music by Dai Fujikura, David Bedford, and Sarah Hennies, this episode invites listeners to step into sound-worlds where distance and togetherness intertwine.

Show 8 - Voices in the Ether

This week on Echoes, Paths and Edges, we explore the voice as an instrument of transformation. Blurring the lines between speech, song, and texture. From Missy Mazzoli’s Vesper Sparrow, weaving Sardinian vocal techniques with haunting poetry, to Julia Wolfe’s raw and visceral Guard My Tongue, each piece invites us into a world where voices dissolve into the ether. Featuring works by Aine Mallon, Hania Rani, Merrill Garbus, Joanna Marsh, and a special new commission in memory of John Tavener, this episode delves into the intimate, the fragile, and the transcendent.

Show 9 - Stillness and Motion

This week on Echoes, Paths and Edges, we explored the interplay between stillness and motion in contemporary music. From meditative soundscapes to propulsive rhythmic structures, the playlist features works by André 3000, Midori Hirano, Britta Byström, Steve Martland, Sarah Neutkens, and more. Two hours of immersive listening, where delicate textures meet dynamic energy, blurring the lines between classical composition, electroacoustic experimentation, and ambient sound design.

Show 10 - Textures and Transformations

This week’s episode explores the interplay between voices and shadows in contemporary classical music. From the celestial trumpet of James MacMillan’s Seraph to the raw intensity of Pēteris Vasks’ Voices, we journey through textures of light and dark, sound and silence. Lachenmann’s String Quartet No.2 deconstructs traditional quartet playing with extended techniques, while Gerard Pesson’s Nebenstück filters Brahms through a distorted lens of memory. We also feature Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Piano with Javanese Gamelan, merging Western and Javanese traditions, and Jasmin Kent Rodgman’s petrichor, a fleeting, atmospheric meditation.

Show 11 - Following the Line

This week, we trace the many ways composers create and manipulate musical lines. Whether through erratic bursts of energy, finely woven textures, or fluid, lyrical gestures. From Gerald Barry’s jagged, unpredictable phrases to Egidija Medeksaite’s intricate musical tapestries and Luke Severn’s poetic interweavings, this episode explores how linear motion shapes our perception of musical structure and emotion. Following sonic threads through tension, clarity, and transformational moments.

Show 12 - Turning Points

Music has the power to mark transitions, capture moments of change, and reshape our sense of time. This week we explore compositions that embrace cycles, transformations, and pivotal shifts. Works that evolve through repetition, fracture, and renewal. We begin with Krzysztof Meyer’s Au-delà d'une absence, an imagined continuation of Shostakovich’s legacy, before moving to Shostakovich’s own String Quartet No. 7, a deeply personal work of remembrance. Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Dispelling the Fears wrestles with anxiety and catharsis, while Yfat Soul Zisso’s Spiral captures the tension of an idea that struggles to take shape. Steve Reich’s Grand Street Counterpoint turns minimalist interlocking rhythms into a driving, meditative structure, and James MacMillan’s A Deep but Dazzling Darkness contrasts light and shadow in an exploration of faith and doubt. Andrew Hamilton’s I and I unfolds with organic precision, while Ben Nobuto’s Egress closes the program with a meditation on departure and resolution. Each of these works marks a turning point, whether through gradual evolution, sudden contrast, or cyclical return. Through their journeys, we hear how composers shape sound to reflect the shifts and transitions in our own lives.

Show 13 - Breath and Boundary

This week we trace the line between the organic and the manipulated, the sacred and the industrial, the remembered and the reimagined. Our selections dive into works that challenge how we perceive musical space, time, and form — from Meredith Monk’s otherworldly Spaceship to Catherine Lamb’s microtonal meditation Pulse/Shade. The programme opens with sci-fi opera, passes through field recordings and abandoned water tanks, and ends with expansive textures that ask us to lean into the quiet and the unresolved. Highlights include Julia Wolfe’s Reeling, where folk song is swallowed by mechanical rhythm, and Leslee Smucker’s fixed hills, which turns a water tank into a resonant instrument of memory. David Lang and Sarah Neutkens bring cycles of reflection, while Catherine Lamb offers a space where harmony unfolds like breath. We also hear a rich collection of bonus tracks from composers working across traditions. From Nico Muhly’s response to the Wilton Diptych to Bára Gísladóttir’s unstable contrabass concerto Hringla. A spotlight on Jakub Jankowski’s Clairières reveals a deeply textured orchestral world inspired by shafts of light and slow unfolding.

Show 14 - Shadow and Shelter

In this week’s show, we explore music that dwells in spaces of mystery, memory and mercy. Across these five works, darkness and clarity, complexity and simplicity, conflict and care all co-exist in shifting, ghostly balance. Terry Riley’s Dark Queen Mantra opens the programme with a vast, shimmering landscape of guitar and string quartet, drawing on Spanish images and elusive memories.

Arvo Pärt’s Da pacem Domine follows, a string quartet arrangement of his hauntingly spare prayer for peace, originally written in response to the 2004 Madrid attacks. Jennifer Higdon’s Duo Duel electrifies the air with its virtuosic percussion battle – dazzling, sometimes playful, sometimes furious. Martin Lohse’s Passing I evokes floating time and drifting tonality, offering a brief moment of crystalline meditation before we close with Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet – a long, slow, heartbreaking layering of music around a looped voice, unwavering in its gentle faith.

As we approach the close of Eastertide, tonight’s music asks: What does it mean to be consoled, to remember, or to endure?

Show 15 - Emergence and Obscurity

This week, we wandered into ten works that stretch and scatter the sonic image. From Anna Meredith’s glitched-out sextet fragments to Errollyn Wallen’s hushed meditation on mortality, this was a show about layered surfaces and emotional undertow. Highlights include Bryce Dessner’s eerie Murder Ballades, drawing folk tradition into the concert hall, and David Lang’s witty bass clarinet solo Press Release. Greenwood’s Miniatures from Water brought modal drone into dialogue with Western chamber writing, while Tabakova and Finnis offered two meditations on memory and light. This was music that doesn’t shout, but resonates. Music that flickers, flicks, and flows.

Show 16 - Between Light and Distortion

This week’s episode curated a series of works that each distort the idea of presence, whether through the solitude of a voice, the ceremonial symbolism of light, or sonic gestures that vanish before they settle. We began with David Lang’s when I am alone, a spectral solo adaptation of a choral work, and moved through Bryce Dessner’s Tenebre, which inverts the traditional descent into darkness to become a journey toward illumination. Julia Wolfe’s Pretty countered with a fierce, unvarnished energy, a noise-driven rejection of prettiness in favour of power. Manoury’s Partita I offered a technological counterpoint, fragmentary and echoic, followed by Oliver Leith’s Hand Coloured, a charmingly uncanny re-colouring of the medieval past. We concluded with Sept Papillons by Saariaho: seven butterfly miniatures that meditate on fragility and the fleeting nature of sound. Together, these works traverse a range of sonic simulacra: the digitally enhanced, the remembered, the hand-altered, and the ephemeral, where imitation, echo, and erasure become tools of profound expression.

Show 17 - Lamentation, Listening, and Loss

This week’s episode is a quiet act of remembrance. We open with the death of Per Nørgård, marking the loss of one of the most distinctive voices in late 20th-century music, whose spiralling infinity series and deeply spiritual language altered the DNA of contemporary composition. From his Maya danser, we trace a path through lamentation, ecstatic listening, and forms of spiritual and emotional struggle. You’ll hear Liza Lim’s Sufi-inspired The Heart’s Ear, the raw passion of Turnage’s Contusion, and the delicate communities of sound in Cassandra Miller’s The City, Full of People. The programme closes with the profound stillness of John Tavener’s Funeral Canticle, written in preparation for his father’s death. The whole show is an arc – from mourning to transformation, from grief to fragile grace.

Show 18 - Sacrifice, Song, and Sonic Vision

This week’s episode traverses a broad sonic and spiritual terrain, centring on themes of sacrifice, transformation, lullaby, mysticism and experimental soundscapes. We begin with Sofia Gubaidulina’s monumental Offertorium, a violin concerto that embodies musical offering in the fullest sense – a disintegrating and resurrecting theme woven through an orchestral fabric of rich symbolic resonance. The piece is at once intensely personal and cosmically spiritual, drawing connections between the sacrifices of Christ, the composer, and the performer alike. From there, the programme drifts through spectral landscapes and dreamlike meditations: Toivo Tulev’s Leave, alas, this tormenting evokes ecstatic mysticism, while Joel Puckett’s Avelynn’s Lullaby brings parental tenderness into the contemporary canon. Ligeti’s razor-sharp Hungarian Rock injects rhythmic vitality before we plunge into the textural intensity of Daniel Bjarnason’s Over Light Earth, inspired by Rothko and Pollock. Ratkje’s A Whisper, or a Prayer, or a Song offers glimmering fragments of hope, and Pascal Dusapin’s In nomine for violin closes the programme with a searching, introspective tone. These are works that ask not just to be heard, but to be absorbed – pieces that linger, shift, and shimmer beyond their own borders. Contemporary classical music, here, is less about closure and more about evocation: the invocation of lost voices, ritualistic gestures, and sonic traces that resist settling.

Show 19 - Sacred, Profane and Transcendent Voices

This episode journeys deep into the human voice. Not just as a medium for words, but as pure expression, a powerful tool for feeling and thought. From Panufnik’s universal peace chant to James MacMillan’s anguished crucifixion scene, from the intimate love song of David Lang to Ligeti’s shimmering labyrinth of vocal texture, we find ourselves in a rich musical landscape where the voice is more than a carrier of text; it’s a dramatic force in its own right. Some composers use it to illuminate stories. The suffering of a dying king, the pure love between two people. While others treat it as pure material, sculpting it into shimmering clouds or intricate polyphony. Whatever their approach, these works show us something profoundly human: our ability to express hope, doubt, agony and peace through pure song. This episode invites you to listen closely, not just to the notes, but to the spaces between, to the feeling beneath the words, and to appreciate how the human voice can become a mirror for the soul

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