David Matthews was born in Walthamstow, London, in 1943. He began composing – with an attempt at a full-scale symphony – at the age of 16 but, being self-taught and formally unqualified in music, went to study classics at Nottingham University (1962–65; the university awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in Music in 1997). Starting in the early 1960s he was one of the musicians (along with his composer brother Colin and the composer and conductor Berthold Goldschmidt) who assisted Deryck Cooke in the preparation of what became Cooke's famous ‘Performing Version’ of the draft of Mahler's Tenth Symphony. Between 1966 and 1969 Matthews took lessons from Anthony Milner. During this period he was also working at Aldeburgh as an assistant to Benjamin Britten (1966–70); a few years later, it was to be in an improvised piano-duet version played by David and Colin Matthews that the partly paralysed Britten first heard his own Third String Quartet (1975).