Matthew Carney

From Young Composers

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Matthew Carney is a classically trained musician/composer and plays the piano and violin. He started composing classical pieces when he was about ten or twelve; but, now his musical aspirations have gotten more serious. He has no formal compositional training but has had six years instruction on the violin and five years instruction on the piano. He is self-taught studying the scores of the masters and reading Berlioz's, Rimsky-Korsakov's, and Schoenberg's works on composition, orchestration, and harmony. He currently attends his local high school and is a junior. He is currently working on a large tone poem for full orchestra (Les Chansons de Guerre) and two full-scale symphonies (Symphonie Nr. 1 en Fa Mineur; Symphonie Nr. 2 "Le Monde Moderne").

Les Chansons de Guerre

This large symphonic work based on human emotion throughout the times of war was started in early August of '06 and was completed in mid-February of '07. This piece is about twenty minutes long. It equates war with a storm and shows how one can see the storm build on the horizon and slowly and eventually head right towards you - the same way that someone might see a war. It also shows the utter destruction of war - towards the middle -, and it shows the disturbance that war forever brings to the people it inflicts by changing the "calmness" motif from and easy and gentle C Major into an restless and uneasy set of minor key, switching back and forth between many different ones - just like the tiny ripples left by the parting wind of the storm.