Geoff Lister/The Ubyssey

Matthew Emery pulls a stack of sheet music out of a leather case and unfolds it over the keyboard.

“Last week, I came in with this mess of paper,” he says, his fingers wandering over the keys as he scans the page. On it are lines of music staffs, covered with little pencil scratches. He’s been workshopping the piece with his professor and mentor, Dr Stephen Chapman. Scraps of paper are taped over sections that needed tightening up. “He said, ‘Okay, let’s sit down and play this together and work this out.’ I came this week and it’s a million times better. The lines are clearer, the harmonies. Everything’s not cluttered. It’s organized.”

After a few finishing touches, Emery will send the piece of to a group of musicians who will perform it live for violin and piano in Montréal, Vancouver and Toronto. It won’t be the first time the 20-year-old composition student has heard his music performed live. He’s won numerous national awards for his work, which has been performed by the Vancouver Chamber Choir.

Emery started playing music early in life. His mother, a French horn player, introduced him to classical music. He started singing in choir at an early age, before turning to piano. Composition became a way to break the monotony of practice. “Like most kids, I didn’t like practicing,” he says. “So I just started fooling around, and one day started writing down what I was fooling around with.”

When Emery was 14, his first composition was performed by a youth choir in his hometown of London, Ontario. It was an existential shift.

“You spend months in your room, writing these notes down, and then you hear them live for the first time, and you hear what’s been inside your head,” he says. “Your heart either stops completely or it beats 1000 beats per minute and you get sweaty and everything just melts away, and you’re in this room, you can’t see any audience and it’s just this wall of sound that’s been inside your head that’s now coming out of someone else and going into your ears.

“And so from there, it’s like a drug. You want to hear your music.”

That drive got him to UBC, where he is now studying under Dr Chapman, who is the head of the music composition department and considered by some to be Canada’s premier composer.

Emery studies mainly theory and composition, two pursuits that often find themselves at odds.

“You get bombarded all the time with form and structure. There’s form in music, but it’s also about learning to be expressive, about being creative,” he says. “You’re playing music that breaks all these rules, and you’re trying to understand that, okay, this is what Beethoven is saying, but in order to do this justice, you have to throw all the rules you learned an hour ago in theory class, and break free of this mold that the school is in to be an artist.”

The life of a composer is an ascetic one. Emery wakes up at six every morning and writes for an hour before heading off to class. Music is admittedly all he does. He runs in the same circles as other music students, who not surprisingly talk a lot of music. It’s an opinionated bunch. There are disagreements over everything, between self-described purists like Emery and more experimental composers who try to break the form. And most of them don’t really know much about popular music (the only modern artist Emery could name was Adele).

But in the dark of the theatre, Emery still gets that same thrill.

“You’re just sitting in the audience, and what’s been trapped inside your head you’re now hearing,” he says. “And the whole world just stops.”

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