Stephen Goss, guitarist and composer

Who or what are the most significant influences on your musical life and career?

I was fortunate enough to be brought up at a time (the 1970s) and a place (South Wales), where classical music enjoyed a high cultural profile. In my first year at Olchfa Comprehensive School in Swansea, the question wasn’t ‘would you like to learn a musical instrument?’, but ‘which musical instrument are you going to learn?’ I already played guitar but decided to take up the violin with a few other friends. After all, free instrument hire and free lessons, what’s not to like? This led to youth orchestras, university, music college, and eventually becoming a composer. When I was a teenager, my parents were very happy for me to fantasise about becoming composer, and, through time, I met some people who composed for a living. I then understood that this was a possible career. This early nurturing environment of encouragement and support at home and through West Glamorgan Youth Music is the most significant influence on my musical life.

In addition to some favourite composers (Beethoven, Mahler, Bach, and Stravinsky), I am influenced by a wide range of musicians – John Adams, Thomas Adès, Uri Caine, Miles Davis, Cheryl Frances Hoad, Joni Mitchell, George Rochberg, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Errollyn Wallen, Frank Zappa, and John Zorn, is today’s list, but it’s always changing. My music is frequently informed by the writings of Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, James Joyce, and Dylan Thomas, as well as by art, design, and cinema: Tracey Emin, Terry Gilliam, Thomas Heatherwick, Freda Kahlo, Yayoi Kusama, Grayson Perry, and Gerhard Richter.

I was fortunate to have wise teachers – Robert Saxton, Edward Gregson, Peter Dickinson, and Anthony Payne. They encouraged me to follow my own path, only interfering and helping out when I got into trouble.

What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?

Staying fresh and trying not to repeat myself.

What are the special challenges/pleasures of working on a commissioned piece?

My music is shaped by the commissions I receive. How would my music best fit the occasion for which it has been commissioned? If it’s a solo or small chamber piece, how will the music reflect the tastes of the players who will tour and record the music? I write in a harmonic style that is appropriate for each commission. I think contemporary composers should be flexible enough to turn their hand to anything. W.H Auden thought that a poet should be able to write a villanelle, or a birthday card verse, or whatever else might be asked of them. I like that idea. After all, if no one wants your music, why write it?

What are the special challenges/pleasures of working with particular musicians, singers, ensembles or orchestras?

All my work is bespoke. It is written with specific performers in mind. I think a great deal about the visceral aspect of playing music. I don’t just try and make my music idiomatic for the instrument, but for the specific player’s tastes, personality, and technical arsenal. What drives me more than anything, is working with performers who will transform what I’ve written on paper into something magical that I could never even imagine – a form of musical alchemy. I am more concerned with who I am writing for than what instruments I am writing for. Collaboration is a very important part of my creative process, without it, I simply wouldn’t compose.

Of which works are you most proud?

I wouldn’t use the word proud, but I have some favourites. However, these favourites change over time. I enjoy hearing old pieces of mine in concert, as they bring back some wonderful nostalgic memories of the people and places of the early performances and recordings. I tend to look forward to the next projects that I have lined up, rather than spending too much time looking backwards.

How would you characterise your compositional language?

My music is very often narrative-driven and always programmatic in some way. I see composition as a form of storytelling. I draw on places, people, memories, literature, and artworks as sources for my music. I use references to and quotations from other music, and my pieces frequently jump from style to style within a single movement. Rather than trying to refine my own individual voice, I try to make my music as varied as possible. Stylistic flexibility and versatility are important aspects of my compositional language. I prioritise content over style. Ideas and emotions are more important to me than the style in which I try to communicate them.

How do you work?

Everything is deadline driven: No deadline? No piece. I start by procrastinating for as long as possible. During this stage, anything is possible. I fantasise, I dream, I imagine. This is the ‘ideas’ phase of composition. Here, the new piece can potentially be a gamechanger, the best and most original piece I’ve ever written. My imagination shifts and develops during this stage, which could potentially go on for ever. However, as the deadline approaches, there comes a day when I know I have to start committing ideas to paper. After an initial surge of activity and enthusiasm as I finalise plans, I always reach a low point – a crisis of confidence in the idea, a realisation that the great dream of a piece I held in my imagination may not change the world after all. I then get busy in the ‘design’ phase of piece – planning form, structure, narrative, character, and imagined soundworlds. The next phase, I call ‘finding good notes’ – this is the hardest part, where I make decisions as to what notes and rhythms I will select over others. The final phase is refining, editing, and polishing. I enjoy this phase, as I can gradually see the musical surface taking shape. I do most of my composing work at home in my studio. I use paper and pencil to begin with and often reach for my guitar or sit at the piano to work. I’ll often have more than one project on the go at any one time. If one piece isn’t going well, I’ll switch to another.

As a musician, what is your definition of success?

Not one definition, but I’ve narrowed it to three:

· Working with people I respect, admire, and can learn from

· Spending the majority of my working week on creative projects

· Earning the respect of my peers

What advice would you give to young/aspiring composers?

· It IS possible to make a living as a composer.

· Keep true to yourself; trends pass, and teachers don’t have all the answers.

· Keep an open mind by listening to as wide a range of music as possible (especially things that are outside your comfort zone).

· Ringfence quality time each week in which to compose, before filling your diary with everything else.

· Build your professional network, the more contacts you have, the more work you will get.

· Every composer has imposter syndrome and feels like an outsider to some extent. This is perfectly normal and to be expected.

What do you feel needs to be done to grow classical music’s audiences?

There is a very mixed picture internationally, some countries manage to do pretty well with audiences from all generations. In the UK, we need a complete culture shift. This can only really come from a change in government policy in relation to arts and education funding and priorities.

On the flip side, there are an increasing number of orchestral and classical instrument concerts that ARE very well attended – concerts of music by composers such as Max Richter, Ludovico Einaudi, Philip Glass, and Hans Zimmer have very large followings, as do film music concerts and game music concerts. We just need to convince these people to make the small step to attend more traditional classical concerts. Either that, or we have to look at classical music programming and come up with ways to make it more appealing to contemporary audiences.

What’s the one thing in the music industry we’re not talking about but you think we should be?

The dominance of nostalgia and the fear of the unfamiliar in music consumption. Leon Botstein was the first to point out that the technological developments of recording and broadcasting in the 20th Century had some unfortunate, unintended side effects. An enlarged audience became familiar with music, not by playing it themselves or remembering a live performance, but by hearing a broadcast or, more importantly, by playing a recording at home over and over again. It was repetition in listening, rather than through reading or playing, that generated familiarity. Listening, based on familiarity through recordings, does not seem to tolerate the new or unfamiliar. Botstein argues that modern-day listeners seem unable to listen the way that people read books and see pictures, judging as they go and willing to enjoy works of a wide range of quality and style. It seems people attend concerts not to experience something new, but to wallow in the over-familiar, a comfort blanket of nostalgia – tribute bands and the calcification of the classical canon are testament to this. I think the big challenge for the music industry is to promote the new ways of listening.

What is your most treasured possession?

A leather football signed by the 1938-39 Arsenal team given to my then 9-year-old dad when the family moved from London to Swansea. My father and grandfather used to go and watch the team train, as their house was just 200 metres from the old Arsenal stadium.

What do you enjoy doing most?

Socialising with family and friends.

Going to watch Arsenal with my son and daughter.

Composing, but only when it’s going well.

Stephen Goss’s album ‘Landscape and Memory’, a triple album of recent works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, and solo instruments, has just been released on the Deux-Elles label. Goss’s more widely known guitar music is heard within the context of his music for other instruments. But the music in this collection is above all an exploration of his two preoccupations: place and time – landscape and memory. Steve’s music is published by Editions Doberman.

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Stephen Goss’s music has been recorded on over a hundred albums by more than a dozen record labels, including Decca, EMI, Virgin Classics, Naxos, Deutsche Grammophon, and Deux-Elles. His work is widely performed internationally, often at leading venues such as Wigmore Hall and the Royal Festival Hall in London, Carnegie Hall in New York, and the Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow. Goss has worked with many of the world’s major orchestras including: the Russian National Orchestra, the Oregon Symphony Orchestra, the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Colombia, the China National Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra. Commissions have come from percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, cellist Natalie Clein, flautist William Bennett, and tenor Ian Bostridge; as well as guitarists John Williams, David Russell, Miloš Karadaglić, and Xuefei Yang. Goss’s eclectic and versatile approach has led to collaborations with artists as diverse as Alt-J, Avi Avital, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Steve is Chair of Composition at the University of Surrey, UK, Director of the International Guitar Research Centre, and a Professor of Guitar at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

http://www.stephengoss.net