Matthew Scott Phillips is a Graduate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (B.A.) and of Birmingham Southern College (M.M.) where he is currently an adjunct professor of music. He has written for orchestra, chamber groups, independent film, live theatre productions, and multimedia presentations, and his music has been played from Brazil, to the United States, to Germany and the Czech Republic. The content of Matthew’s compositions are centered around expressions of emotional states, the struggle to understand intellectual and philosophical concepts, the contrast between musical elements symbolic of individualism and those symbolic of social imperative, and of the conflicts between various aspects of the human psyche. Matthew is the winner of the 2011 Alabama Music Teachers’ Association Composition Commission Competition. He has studied with Jan Vicar, Dorothy Hindman, Charles Norman Mason, Ronald Clemmons, Michael Angell, and Traci Mendel, and was also among thirteen other American composers chosen in the summer of 2006, to study and compose music in the city of Prague under the tutelage of Ladislav Kubik. He has composed over 70 instrumental and vocal works including 3 string quartets, 5 symphonies, 3 piano trios, and a host of orchestral overtures, and smaller instrumental works for mixed ensembles. His repertoire includes music composed in serial, freely atonal, traditional, polytonal, pantonal, modal, and electroacoustic styles. In addition to composition, Matthew has twice been a judge of the National Young Composers Competition, has given lectures on the music of Smetana, Chopin and Rachmaninoff, and taught classes in music fundamentals, musicology, theory, technology, and composition. He is also an active member and former Vice President of the Birmingham Art Music Alliance, an avid bass player in the Birmingham live music scene, and a qualified audio technician and occasional stage hand. Matthew lives in Birmingham Alabama, in the United States