Matthew Wren - Composer
I am Matthew Wren. I grew up in Tring, in Hertfordshire. I now live in Buckinghamshire with my wife and I am a father to a wonderful son, who is nonverbal and autistic.
My biggest interest in life is what people now refer to as software engineering. I started programming computers when I was nine, and was rather obsessive about it, so much so that the doctor recommended that my parents took my computer away from me because I was looking so pale through a lack of sunlight. My parents followed her advice, but soon after I went to boarding school, which fortunately had its own computer room that I could use at my leisure, and I did!
I also discovered there a passion for languages, and would study Spanish grammar obsessively in my spare time. After my first year, I stayed with a Spanish family over the summer in a coastal village in the Basque country and quickly became conversant in Spanish. Languages and travel became another passion of mine, and I went on to learn three other languages. I also lived in Germany and Spain for a number of years.
Despite being strong personally in computers and mathematics, I grew up in a family that was very creative. Like my siblings, I loved portraiture and figure drawing from a young age.
Like my siblings also, I wrote a lot of poetry from my late teens into my early thirties. Later in life I tried my hand at sculpture, which went well, but I was living such a busy life at the time that I couldn’t devote much time to it. There is still time though.
My love of orchestral music was probably, like many people, inspired by the great John Williams. I saw Star Wars when I was six years old, and I think his music played a central role in the love I and others felt for the film. My first LP was ET.
We had a second lounge, which was mostly unused, and it had a HiFi system in it; I would often go in there, lie on the floor, listen to that LP, and be transported to another World.
I am not sure if this is an autistic trait, but certainly daydreaming or being away in my own thoughts has been a big part of my life, and John Williams’ music bridged that World.
I became particularly interested in classical music in my late teens when CD’s first came to the market, and again it became an obsession of mine. I subscribed to Classic CD from issue one, and would avidly read every page and listen to all the music that was on the free CD that accompanied it.
I amassed a collection of over 200 CD’s in a relatively short amount of time, and immediately started composing my own music on a synthesizer I had given to me. Over the years I wrote quite a lot of sketches on the piano, but never dedicated enough of my focus to finish any of them.
In December 2023, however, I decided it was really now or never, and I sat down and wrote my first orchestral composition “Im Schwarzwald (In The Black Forest)”, and on its tail “Matterhorn”
I clearly have benefitted from several prominent autistic traits in my music. I think principally hyper-focus. Without obsessing over classical music in my younger years or being able to lock myself up in my own World and obsessively think about my composition, I doubt I would be able to do what I have done.
I also suffer from anxiety which is tremendously common in the autistic community, and part of that for me has been agoraphobia, to the point where a few years ago I was housebound for close to a year.
My music is inevitably drawing on my battles with anxiety; there is a lot of darkness you will hear that emanates from this place, but hopefully through this darkness shines the light of hope, and ultimately, in the Matterhorn, a sense of overcoming life’s challenges in its slightly terrifying but triumphant finale.
