We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Matthew Ricketts. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Matthew below.

Matthew, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

I am currently working on an operatic adaptation of Robert Service’s iconic 1907 ballad poem “The Cremation of Sam McGee” (in collaboration with librettist and fellow Canadian Royce Vavrek). We have had two developmental workshops (in NYC and in Dawson City, The Yukon, respectively) with plans for further development through Vancouver Opera in 2024. Having grown up with this beloved piece of Canadiana, memorizing it with my Father as a summer project, reciting it around the campfire at Cub Scouts and when camping with my family, “The Cremation of Sam McGee” is a project that is closer to my heart than almost any other, reaching far back into my own history—and Canada’s history—to engage with a story that is, essentially, about our relationship to nature, our relationship to industry, our interpersonal relationships and the meaning of a promise made….with a generous dose of spooky surrealism!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am at heart a musical story-teller, or a teller of stories in and through music. What constitutes a story, and how music might intone a story in its own language (or, if the music involves voice, that strangely wonderful combination of musical language and actual language), has been of great interest to me since I began composing in the last years of high school. I originally wanted to be a writer, and have had a life-long love of language and literature, and poetry, more recently; but I have also been a musician, though not a terribly serious one at first. At a certain point in those formative years I began to take music writing more seriously and writing writing less seriously, though I did leave behind a legacy of several ambitious and thoroughly embarrassing novels and novellas; and in the process of switching from one form of writing to another, something narrative-like remained in my musical concerns (or perhaps got awkwardly transferred from one medium to another!). I say awkwardly because music does not “narrate” the way that speech and writing narrate (music, famously, has no verbs, no nouns); and yet somehow music is powerfully narrative-like in so many ways: how it unfolds in time, dynamic and striving, exploratory and wandering. Even my purely instrumental music seems to have a strongly narratological tone, imparting a sense of journey (which turns out to be an important word when I describe my own music).

Alongside the interest in narrative and storytelling-in-sound, I also from a young age had an interest (or obsession) with architecture and design. I come from a family of builders (my father and brother are general contractors; my mother a kitchen designer; my grandfather a plumber) and spent as much time in my childhood making music as I did studying blueprints and eventually making my own—fantastical buildings, palaces and opera houses and grand public buildings like museums and libraries. I have made the obvious connection before in the link between blueprints and musical scores (both are, in their ways, two-dimensional representations of something multi-dimensional; and both in their way are something like instruction manuals, a how-to guide for making something). But I believe now that an even stronger link between architecture and music is the aspect of world-building: of creating a compelling space for people to inhabit. Music, like architecture, creates a strong sense of space and place for many listeners, albeit one existing in the mind alone.

Given all of this, it is no coincidence that the kinds of musical projects I have been most drawn to have involved dance, film and—above all else—opera. Opera is, for me, the perfect combination of sound, space/place and journey. Operatic projects like “Chaakapesh” (with Tomson Highway), “Unruly Sun” (with Mark Campbell) and my current work with Royce Vavrek (“The Cremation of Sam McGee”) all have unique approaches to this combination of world-building and musical journeying, from the exploration of a dying man’s memory palace while he builds a seaside garden (“Unruly Sun”) to a mythological plunge into the belly of a sturgeon and back (“Chaakapesh”)…..and, most interesting and challenging of all for me, “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” which takes the iconic Canadian ballad poem by Robert Service from 1907 about two gold miners outside of Dawson City, The Yukon and reimagines this as an evening of bawdy, whisky-fueled storytelling around a campfire, “the original proscenium” where narrative and myth was born.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

Being given the freedom to imagine other worlds; to create and visit them, and sometimes to bring visions of those worlds back to share with other people. Artists are given a chance to think and rethink the world in a way that many other people simply do not think they have permission to do; perhaps artists have something to teach us after all!

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Diaghilev, the famous Russian impresario, told his artists: “astonish me!” I’m a fan of astonishment, surely, but I think I prefer a state of enchantment, so I would say my mission is to enchant.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://matthewricketts.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/matthewrickettscomposer/
• Other: https://soundcloud.com/matthewricketts

Image Credits
Marco Giugliarelli, Laura Bianchi, and Matthew Ricketts