Matthew McClung

Equally at home with orchestral, solo, and chamber music, Dr. Matthew McClung has performed with a wide variety of prestigious ensembles throughout the United States.He has performed with the Houston Grand Opera, the Hawaii Opera Theater, the Glimmerglass Opera Orchestra, the Spoleto Festival Orchestra, the Hanover Chamber Orchestra, the National Repertory Orchestra, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, OrchestraX, Symphony of Southeast Texas, River Oaks Chamber Orchestra, plus the symphony orchestras of Arkansas, Austin, Corpus Christi, Hong Kong, Honolulu, Houston, Kentucky, Lexington, Maui, Phoenix, San Antonio and Victoria. As a chamber musician, he has performed with Alisa Weilerstein, the Percussion Group Cincinnati, the Tierkreis Percussion Ensemble, the So Percussion Group, Elemental Percussion, Strike 3 Percussion, Musiqa, Chaski, Drumpetello, the Houston Composers Alliance, Da Camera (Houston), NOVA (Salt Lake City), the San Antonio Chamber Music Society, the Contemporary Dance Theater of Cincinnati, the Virginia Arts Festival, the Music in Time series in Charleston, South Carolina, the Cinco de Brasso Quintet, the Corpus Christi Brass Quintet, and Terra Nova, among others.

Matthew has played on the national tour of a Broadway show, a steel drum concerto with the Kentucky Symphony, jazz vibes with the Rusty Burge Quartet, and his own composition, in collaboration with Rounder recording artist Rachel Buchman, for hundreds of school children. As a winner of a Presser award, he studied for a summer with the Master Drummers of the Ewe tribe in Ghana, West Africa. Matthew holds an engineering degree from the University of Cincinnati and a Master of Music degree from the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and he is the recipient of the first Doctoral degree ever awarded in percussion performance from the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. He is currently an Associate Professor of Music at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi and the principal percussionist of the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra and the Glimmerglass Opera Festival.

“…the exhilarating athleticism of Matthew McClung’s performance … made (this) the biggest crowd-pleaser of this musically rewarding afternoon.” -Salt Lake Tribune

“McClung played stylishly and smartly … The performance sang with a distinctive joie de vivre.” -Houston Chronicle