About...

Matthew H. Fields allies himself with the broad banner of classical music. But he refuses to be pinned down to any doctrine or movement within classical music, insisting instead on the freedom to make tonal music, atonal music, modernistic music, atavistic music, music full of Apollonian intellectual fire, music full of Dionysian abandon, music of contrapuntal complexity, music of elegant simplicity, music reflecting the flavors of America and Europe as well as his native Jewish culture, and an ever-changing mixture of all of those and more.

With each work, Fields strives to push himself in new directions, expanding upon past developments while offering listeners something fresh. But he always values music as splendor in sound. By this, he means that music affects us because it is nonsense, and so, as listeners, we supply personal meanings for it and treat it as if it were very intimate communications in our own personal internal languages. Like the faces we see in clouds, we cannot help but project expression and emotion onto music, but we often see different faces in the same clouds, and project different expression onto the same music. In fact, it is precisely the fact that different people can enjoy the same music while getting totally incomparable messages out of it that makes Fields say music is not a universal language, not a language at all, but a special sort of service we offer to each other which seems to have universal appeal, and through which even warring factions find the ability to collaborate peacefully.