Background
PhD, Northwestern University
A 2026 Guggenheim Fellow, Mathew Arrellín (pronounced: A-rre-yín) is a composer and cellist from El Paso, Texas, currently based in Chicago.
His music has been performed by the Mivos Quartet, Third Coast Percussion, ~Nois, Fonema Consort, Ensemble Dal Niente, the Low Frequency Trio, Dalia Chin, Ben Roidl-Ward, and the Chicago Composers Orchestra, among others. His work spans solo, chamber, and orchestral formats and has been presented at festivals and institutions across the United States and abroad, including VIPA, June in Buffalo, SCI National Conference, and Foro Internacional de Música Nueva.
He is the recipient of a 2023 General Commission from the Barlow Endowment for Musical Composition, two William T. Faricy Awards for excellence in composition from Northwestern, Illinois Arts Council grants in support of new works, and was a finalist for the 2025 Rome Prize.
He holds a PhD in Music Composition and Technology from Northwestern University (2022) and a bachelor's degree in theory/composition and cello performance from the University of New Mexico (2016).
Since childhood, Mathew has practiced drawing and painting alongside his music and draws on visual art as a compositional inspiration, both in the creative process and in search of conceptual frameworks. For example, his flute concerto "Overpainted Photographs" takes its title from Gerhard Richter's series of the same name and attempts to answer the question of how to “overpaint” a sonic memory in a piece of music. A more recent work for string quartet dedicated to the Spanish surrealist Remedios Varo explores some of the artist’s paintings as jumping-off points for musical ideas.