Stephen Goss


Stephen Goss is a Welsh composer, guitarist and academic. His compositional output includes orchestral and choral works, chamber music, and solo pieces. His music draws freely on a number of styles and genres. He is particularly known for his guitar music, which is widely performed and recorded.
As of 2020, he is Professor of Composition in the Department of Music and Media at the University of Surrey. He is also a professor of guitar at the Royal Academy of Music in London and the director of the International Guitar Research Centre, which he founded with John Williams and Milton Mermikides in 2014. Before moving to the University of Surrey in 1999, he taught at the Yehudi Menuhin School.
Goss studied at the Royal Academy of Music and the Universities of Bristol and London. His composition teachers were Edward Gregson, Robert Saxton, Peter Dickinson and Anthony Payne, and he studied guitar with Michael Lewin.

Compositions

Goss's work has included several projects with the guitarist John Williams, who recorded and toured his Guitar Concerto with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 2014. Goss has collaborated with artists as diverse as Andrew Lloyd Webber, Alt-J, and Avi Avital. In his role as composer-in-residence for the Orpheus Sinfonia, he wrote the Concerto for Five for the combination of violin, saxophone, cello, bass, piano and orchestra, and the Piano Concerto - the first classical concert piece to feature an interactive tablet app.
Orchestras which have performed his music include The Russian National Orchestra, The China National Symphony Orchestra, The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the State Symphony Orchestra 'New Russia', The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, The Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, The Scottish Chamber Orchestra, BBC NOW, The National Symphony Orchestra of Colombia, The Oregon Symphony Orchestra. His Albéniz Concerto for guitar and orchestra was released on EMI Classics in November 2010. Goss wrote the first ever Theorbo Concerto, which was released on the Deux-Elles label in 2019.
Other commissions have come from: guitarists, David Russell, Xuefei Yang, Zoran Dukić and Miloš Karadaglić, the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, cellist Natalie Clein, violinist Nicola Benedetti, flautist William Bennett, pianist Emmanuel Despax, and the tenor Ian Bostridge. Most of his music is published by Doberman Editions, Quebec, Canada.

Musical language

A central theme running through Goss's work is the evocation of time and place. His uses of quotations and stylistic references help to shape his pluralist musical language, which is characterised by abrupt stylistic gear changes. As Kimberly Patterson has observed, ‘Goss’s compositional interests are in the continuum that lies between transcription and composition and in the ways in which pre-existing material can be used to create unusual and interesting music’. Goss doesn't see ‘interpretation, transcription, arrangement, improvisation, and composition as different things with distinct boundaries between them.’ He suggests that ‘the distinctions can be useful, but they are artificial… rather like the colours of the rainbow’. Jonathan Leathwood has proposed that Goss ‘denies traditional expectations of originality’ and that ‘the listener is drawn into a maze of referents’.
An interest in music and landscape dates back to two collaborations with Charles Jencks, The Garden of Cosmic Speculation and Frozen Music . Through these and later projects, Goss has developed ways of balancing literal and metaphorical representations of landscape, architecture, and sculpture in music.
While Goss's influences can be traced in the work of many musicians, his compositional approach owes as much to literature and the visual arts – James Joyce, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Gerhard Richter, Grayson Perry, Terry Gilliam, and Thomas Heatherwick. The strong literary connection in the music has been pointed out by Leathwood, who states that ‘there can be little doubt that Stephen Goss intends to provoke, among other things, thought in the form of words - verbal association and a kind of wordplay encoded in the music; not symbolism, but semiosis in the literary sense that modern thought has tended to give it, an interest in music as text’.

Performance

As a guitarist, Stephen Goss has worked with many leading composers and has toured and recorded extensively with the and other ensembles. He has recorded more than 20 CDs as a soloist and chamber musician and has given recitals in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. He has performed alongside Paco Peña and John Williams and has played concertos with orchestras such as the Bournemouth Sinfonietta and the English Sinfonia.

Selected list of compositions

Orchestral, choral and large ensemble

  • Landscape and Memory 2022
  • Koblenz Concerto 2019
  • The Vine-fruit Carol 2018 Doberman 1277
  • Theorbo Concerto 2018 Doberman 1311
  • A Concerto of Colours 2017 Doberman 1156
  • Invisible Cities 2017
  • Carnival of Venice 2017
  • The Paganini Concerto 2014
  • Concerto for Five 2013
  • Piano Concerto 2013
  • Guitar Concerto 2012 Doberman 910
  • Songs of the Solar System 2012
  • The Shard 2011 Doberman 895
  • The Albéniz Concerto 2009 Doberman 887
  • Cottleston Pie 2001
  • Arcadia 1996
  • Dreamchild 1995
  • Saviour of the World 1992
  • Hymnen an die Nacht 1985

    Chamber music

  • Crunch Time 2019
  • The Garden of Cosmic Speculation 2004/2016 Doberman 1055
  • The Flower of Cities 2012 Doberman 852
  • Northern Lights 2010 Doberman 969
  • Reflections on the Garden of Cosmic Speculation 2010
  • Variations on a Burns Air: Scherzo 2009
  • Prelude and Gnossienne 2008
  • Uneasy Dreams 2006 Doberman 1054
  • Frozen Music 2006 Doberman 872
  • Drums and Trumpets 2005
  • The Garden of Cosmic Speculation 2004 Doberman 1048
  • Tango: The White Queen 2003
  • Spin 2003
  • Trumpets and Clocks 2002
  • One-Nil 1994

    Duos and solos

  • Exhalation 2021
  • The Lake of Time 2020
  • Motherlands 2019
  • Still Life 2018
  • Songs of Ophelia 2016 Doberman 1116
  • The Miller's Tale 2015 Doberman 1079
  • The Book of Songs 2014 Doberman 986
  • River Winds 2011 Doberman 983
  • Caught Between 2011 Doberman 968
  • The Sea of the Edge 2010 Doberman 890
  • American Pastoral 2010 Doberman 952
  • The Autumn Song II 2010 Doberman 891
  • The Autumn Song 2009 Doberman 873
  • Welsh Folksongs 2008 Doberman 989
  • Welsh Folksongs 2008 Doberman 981
  • From Honey to Ashes 2007 Doberman 1000
  • Dark Knights and Holy Fools 2006 Doberman 953
  • Park of Idols 2005 Doberman 871
  • Gymnopédies after Erik Satie 2003
  • First Milonga, Last Tango 2002 Doberman 875
  • Under Milk Wood Songs 1990 Doberman 894
  • Six Inventions 1986

    Multiple guitars

  • River Fragments 2020
  • Tarot 2019
  • Venezuela 2019
  • Minimal Effort 2018
  • Cantigas de Santiago 2017 Doberman 1217
  • Talking Drums 2016 Doberman 1155
  • Mahler Lieder 2011 Doberman 845
  • Still the Sea 2009 Les Productions d’Oz 2260
  • Welsh Folksongs 2008 Doberman 981
  • The Raw and the Cooked 2004 Doberman 874
  • Gnossiennes after Erik Satie 2002 Doberman 947
  • Lachrymae 2001 Doberman 892
  • Carmen Fantasy 1998 Doberman
  • Tempo of Three Quartered 1993
  • Under Milk Wood Variations 1989 Editions Orphée 494-02831

    Solo guitar

  • Hiraeth 2020 Doberman 1374
  • Perpetual Motion Machine 2020 Doberman 1395
  • Happy Sad 2020
  • Verismo 2020
  • Bagatelles with Fantasies 2020 Doberman 1362
  • Threnody 2019
  • Time 2018 Doberman 1238
  • Cinema Paradiso 2017 Doberman 1154
  • Labyrinth 2016 Doberman 1036
  • Sound of Iona 2016 Doberman 1030
  • Watts Chapel 2015 Doberman 1013
  • Sonata Capriccioso 2015 Doberman 1003
  • Cantigas de Santiago 2014 Doberman 926
  • Illustrations to The Book of Songs 2014 Doberman 951
  • Sonatina 2013 Doberman 992
  • Marylebone Elegy 2012 Doberman 866
  • El Llanto de los Sueños 2007 Doberman
  • The Chinese Garden 2007 Doberman
  • Sonata 2006 Doberman 868
  • Raise the Red Lantern 2004 Doberman 867
  • Oxen of the Sun 2003 Doberman 870
  • Looking Glass Ties 2001 Doberman 1011
  • E 1996
  • Three Miniatures 1986

    Solo piano

  • Piano Cycle 2012 Doberman 1012
  • Portraits and Landscapes 2010 Doberman 893
  • Rough Music 2009 Doberman 1046
  • Interludes 2008 Doberman 889
  • invisible starfall 2003
  • an ideal insomnia 2002 Doberman 996