Composition · Time · Consciousness · Systems · Creative Practice
Dr Matt Geer is a composer-researcher whose work explores musical time, consciousness, ritual, systems, repetition, permutation, and listening through creative practice.
His research asks how compositional processes shape not only musical structure, but also the listener’s experience of time, attention, memory, and perception. His work is particularly concerned with the relationship between systematic musical procedures and subjective experience: how repeated, permuted, or gradually transformed material can create states of stillness, acceleration, immersion, ritual, or altered attention.
Matt completed a PhD in Music Composition at Queen’s University Belfast. His doctoral research examined the philosophical and temporal implications of systems-based composition through a portfolio of original works and critical reflection.
His research asks how compositional processes shape not only musical structure, but also the listener’s experience of time, attention, memory, and perception. His work is particularly concerned with the relationship between systematic musical procedures and subjective experience: how repeated, permuted, or gradually transformed material can create states of stillness, acceleration, immersion, ritual, or altered attention.
Matt completed a PhD in Music Composition at Queen’s University Belfast. His doctoral research examined the philosophical and temporal implications of systems-based composition through a portfolio of original works and critical reflection.
Research Overview
Matt’s research sits at the intersection of composition, creative practice, aesthetics, philosophy, and listening.
His work is concerned with questions such as:
His work is concerned with questions such as:
- How can musical systems shape the experience of time?
- What happens when repeated or permuted material becomes ritualistic, meditative, obsessive, or unstable?
- How can composition engage with consciousness, attention, and perception?
- How can creative practice operate as a form of research?
- What is the relationship between compositional process and listener experience?
- How can sacred, ritual, or contemplative musical traditions inform contemporary composition?
- How can music create experiences of stillness, suspension, acceleration, memory, or altered temporality?
PhD Research
Matt completed a PhD in Music Composition at Queen’s University Belfast.
His doctoral research explored the temporal and philosophical implications of systems-based composition, with particular attention to repetition, permutation, combinatorial processes, musical process, and the listener’s experience of time.
The project brought together:
At its simplest, Matt’s PhD asks: How can the way music is made change the way time feels?
Through original compositions and written reflection, the research explores how repeated patterns, systematic processes, and gradual transformations can alter the listener’s perception of musical time.
His doctoral research explored the temporal and philosophical implications of systems-based composition, with particular attention to repetition, permutation, combinatorial processes, musical process, and the listener’s experience of time.
The project brought together:
- a portfolio of original compositions
- critical reflection on compositional process
- philosophical and aesthetic inquiry
- practice-led research methods
- analysis of musical temporality
- exploration of consciousness and listening
At its simplest, Matt’s PhD asks: How can the way music is made change the way time feels?
Through original compositions and written reflection, the research explores how repeated patterns, systematic processes, and gradual transformations can alter the listener’s perception of musical time.
| Dr Matt Geer - PhD Thesis |
Creative Practice
Matt’s research is grounded in composition. His creative practice includes concert music, choral and organ music, stage works, and emerging screen/documentary composition.
Selected research-led works include:
Selected research-led works include:
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Ludions - For voice and piano, 2021 · c. 15 minutes
First performance by Anna Gregg, Soprano Ludions is a song cycle for voice and piano that explores short-scale temporal distortion, fluctuation of consciousness, and the instability of perceived time. Inspired by Erik Satie’s Ludions, the work treats each song as a compact perceptual field in which musical repetition, change, and verbal/sonic gesture alter the listener’s sense of duration over a relatively brief span. In the context of my PhD research, the work investigates how small formal units can create disproportionate shifts in awareness: the music does not simply “tell” a narrative, but invites the listener’s own consciousness to become the site in which temporal narrative forms. The score’s programme note describes the work as inviting the listener into “small movements of temporal distortion,” where perception of time and consciousness may fluctuate over a short period. |
Recording starts at 18:43
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Kalachackra - For Pierrot Ensemble, 2022 · c. 5 minutes
First performance by the Hard Rain Soloists Ensemble, Belfast Kalachakra develops the PhD’s central concern with musical time as a cyclic and phenomenological experience. Taking its title from the ancient Indian concept of the “wheel of time,” the piece explores time as a succession of moments shaped by memory, anticipation, recurrence, creation, destruction, and return. Within the research framework, the work is especially important because it translates philosophical ideas about temporality into a concise ensemble form: cyclic materials, fragile textures, and repeated musical gestures create a listening space in which time is perceived less as linear progression than as recurring transformation. The score’s programme note explicitly connects the work to momentary experience, cycles of time, and the composer’s awareness of temporal implications in compositional practice. |
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Memento Mori - For solo trumpet, 2023 · c. 12.5 minutes
First recorded by Rebecca Toal Memento Mori is a solo trumpet work concerned with mortality, silence, impermanence, and the psychological elasticity of time. The piece uses complex rhythms, permutational arrays, and interruptions of silence to frame listening as a confrontation with finite duration. Within the PhD portfolio, it functions as one of the clearest examples of temporal consciousness becoming both the subject and the medium of the work: the music does not simply depict mortality, but creates a sequence of sounded and unsounded events through which the listener experiences time as fragile, unstable, and emotionally charged. The trumpet’s heraldic character gives the work a ritualistic quality, while the alternation of sound and silence suggests different modes of consciousness: continuous awareness on one hand, and punctuated, event-based perception on the other. The score’s programme note explicitly connects the work to limited time, mortality, permutational arrays, silence, consciousness, and the listener’s own internal narrative. |
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