Stephen Goss

Stephen Goss (born 2 February 1964) 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.

Goss studied at the Royal Academy of Music (where he won the Julian Bream Prize in 1986) and the Universities of Bristol and London (where he completed his doctorate in 1997).

His composition teachers were Edward Gregson, Robert Saxton, Peter Dickinson and Anthony Payne, and he studied guitar with Michael Lewin.

Before moving to the University of Surrey in 1999, he taught at the Yehudi Menuhin School.

An interest in music and landscape dates back to two collaborations with Charles Jencks, The Garden of Cosmic Speculation (2005) (which was featured on the South Bank Show) and Frozen Music (2006) (commissioned for the opening season of the Menuhin Hall).

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 (for example, Beethoven, Mahler, Stravinsky, John Adams, Georg Rochberg, Miles Davis, Uri Caine, John Zorn, and Frank Zappa), 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’.

As a guitarist, Stephen Goss has worked with many leading composers (such as Toru Takemitsu, Hans Werner Henze, Peter Maxwell Davies and Elliott Carter) and has toured and recorded extensively with the Tetra Guitar Quartet 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.

His Albéniz Concerto (2009) for guitar and orchestra was released on EMI Classics in November 2010.

Goss's work has included several projects with the guitarist John Williams, who recorded and toured his Guitar Concerto (2012) 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 (2013) for the combination of violin, saxophone, cello, bass, piano and orchestra, and the Piano Concerto (Signum Classics 2013) - the first classical concert piece to feature an interactive tablet app.

Orchestras which have performed his music include The Russian National Orchestra (under Mikhail Pletnev), 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.

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.

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.

A central theme running through Goss's work is the evocation of time (nostalgia and historical reference) and place (landscape and architecture).

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’.

As of 2020, he is Professor of Composition in the Department of Music and Media at the University of Surrey.