ABOUT US
Welcome to the Magpie Duo!
We’re so glad you visited us – we are a violin + piano group that develops community around contemporary music in the neighborhoods of New York City and beyond by presenting programs that intertwine music from across generational and cultural lines. Named after the bird long known in Western folklore for its obsessive and curious trinket-collecting, our concerts draw from a wide array of stylistic periods, pulling works from disparate eras of music making while continuously circling back to the contemporary form of our craft.
Like the composers we program, we find ourselves grappling with the history of the classical concert music canon and the ways in which it needs to expand. Through our programs, we aim to bring forth new collections of concert music, ones that are distinctive and vibrant, sometimes disruptive and other times restorative.
Our hope is for our listeners to experience the expressiveness of our art form through the conversation all artists participate in when they create work: the story of history, both musical and human.
Lauren Conroy
Violin
Violinist and composer Lauren Conroy is a New York-based musician who is passionate about performing contemporary music in dynamic multidisciplinary contexts. She performs solo and ensemble works spanning traditional to modern. An avid performer of new music, she is a member of the BlackBox Ensemble. Lauren has co-produced and performed on several multidisciplinary projects including Juilliard’s Future Stages and NYC Ballet’s Choreographic Institute. She is currently the co-director of composer Hannah Ishizai’s chamber opera titled Tsuru no Ongaeshi, which will premiere in Spring 2026.
Lauren has been invited to several festivals and residencies including Toronto Summer Music Fellowship, Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, Norfolk New Music Workshop, Bowdoin International Music Festival Fellowship, Avaloch Farm Music Institute, and The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Lauren is a graduate of The Juilliard School where she completed her Master of Music and was the Departmental Assistant at The Juilliard School’s Center for Innovation in the Arts. After graduating from Juilliard, she then attended NYU and completed her Master of Arts in Contemporary Musical Arts Performance and Administration as a Koppenaal Scholar. At NYU, she was granted the Dean’s Award for Summer Research where she was a resident scholar at The John Cage Trust at Bard College culminating in a multidisciplinary performance project at the NYU Blackbox Theater.
Lauren previously attended Indiana University studying with Simin Ganatra and graduated from the Hutton Honors College and Jacobs School of Music with a Bachelor of Music Degree in Violin Performance. She also completed a minor in Political and Civic Engagement and a certificate in Performing Arts Entrepreneurship.
With a passion for outreach and teaching as well as performing, Lauren teaches violin at West Amadeus Music Studios and is the Operations Assistant at the 92nd Street Y School Engagement of the Arts.
Matthew Schultheis
Piano + Composition
The music of American composer Matthew Schultheis (b. 1997) is driven by a love of visual art and literature, a preference for dramatic, rich, sometimes opulent textures, a reverence for present-day musicians’ inheritance of past musical idioms, and a fascination with the connections performers and listeners make between deeply familiar and newly-heard pieces.
Born in the Washington, D.C. area and based in New York City, Matthew is a C. V. Starr Doctoral Fellow at The Juilliard School, having completed his master's degree there in 2022. He has studied with Matthias Pintscher since 2020. He earned his BM in composition, additionally studying piano full-time, at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
Matthew has collaborated with the Tokyo Symphony and Juilliard Orchestras; Ensemble intercontemporain; Attacca, Mivos, JACK, and Hausmann Quartets; IU New Music Ensemble, and Sound Icon. He has participated in summer festivals at Bowdoin, Brevard, New Music On the Point, SUNY-Purchase (with the National Youth Orchestra) BU’s Tanglewood Institute, and the EAMA–Nadia Boulanger Institute. Recent and upcoming commissions this year include works for solo piano (Jacob Skiles), chorus (New York Virtuoso Singers), solo viola (Sam Kelder), flute and percussion (Coriolis Duo), and violin and piano (Magpie Duo). In August 2024, he will conduct a new orchestral work with the Tonkunstler Orchestra as part of the Grafenegg “Ink Still Wet” workshop.
Matthew’s music has received three consecutive BMI Student Composer Awards and additional honors from ASCAP, the Society of Composers, Inc., the Music Teachers National Association, and the IU composition department. Both of his works for orchestra, Columbia, In Old Age (2020) and Governing Forces (2023), received awards from Juilliard.
An accomplished pianist dedicated to performing new music, Matthew has frequently premiered his own works throughout his time as a student, in addition to giving recitals of music in the standard repertoire. He formed Magpie Duo with violinist Lauren Conroy in 2023; together they have performed recitals of 20th and 21st century music at venues in New York and Chicago. He has also appeared with the Juilliard Dance Division and Juilliard Percussion Ensemble in large-scale works by Philip Glass and Charles Wuorinen. He was a member and frequent featured soloist of the Indiana University New Music Ensemble from 2016–2019; as a soloist with that ensemble, he performed György Ligeti's Piano Concerto in spring 2018.