Steve Goss: Study notes

YOU COULD HAPPILY spend all day in the University of Surrey’s Performing Arts Technology Studios, letting your ear wander from one instrument to another while the staff and students practise for the day’s recitals, lessons and concerts. It must be heavenly to spend one’s working life immersed in music.

Dr Steve Goss, Reader and Head of Composition in the Department of Music and Sound Recording, does just that. But he’s more than just a music teacher.

“My research is composition,” says Steve, “I work all over the world with different orchestras, ensembles, and soloists - rehearsing, performing and recording.” He is in fact one of the foremost guitar composers in the world, having worked with and been commissioned by some of the biggest names in the discipline. Where a literature academic may write a book on Shakespeare, or a physics professor may investigate subatomic particles, Steve composes music.

One of his most ambitious and well-known pieces was written for the guitar virtuoso Jonathan Leathwood. Called Oxen of the Sun, it is unusual in being a piece for two guitars, to be played simultaneously by one person. “Jonathan Leathwood is an amazing musician,” recalls Steve. “He’s the only person who can perform Oxen of the Sun, and plenty of other people have tried. We developed all sorts of new techniques for the piece. He would say ‘look, I can do this – is there anything you can compose that uses this particular technique?’

“Jonathan has performed the piece over 100 times. 18 months after the first performance he’d developed even more techniques for playing the two instruments at the same time. So I completely rewrote one of the movements in order to incorporate some of these new things he’d discovered. The composition was very much driven by what Jonathan could do. It is as much his piece as mine, that’s for certain. It is quite astonishing to see him performing it.”

A recent piece, the Albéniz Concerto, was commissioned by EMI Classics for a CD recorded by Xuefei Yang and the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra. “I thought it would be great to write an imagined Albéniz guitar concerto, completely in his style like a big romantic concerto,” recalls Steve. “The guitar has many concertos, but there’s a big gap between 1830 (the end of Giuliani’s concertos) and 1939/40 (Rodrigo’s Aranjuez Concerto). So the chance to write something truly romantic in the middle was really exciting.” The piece was recorded in Spain and received a warm reception on its release toward the end of 2010.

Trends
“Essentially, composition academics try to push the boundaries of music,” explains Steve. “We also write about what’s happening in the world of music today, how music is gradually transforming over time, and what the latest trends are. In particular, we look at how the work we do as composers relates to what’s going on in society, and how our music reflects that society.”

As an example, Steve cites a current project that he and a pianist colleague are working on that looks at the relationship between mental health and creativity via the works of piano composer Robert Schumann. Many people believe he had bipolar disorder, and possibly also functional dystonia - a psychological condition which may cause a hand or foot to spasm or become fixed in an abnormal posture for some or all of the time. “On the way up from his depressions, Schumann would produce amazing music, stacks and stacks of it,” says Steve. “The moral dilemma is that, if Schumann were around today, it might be possible to ‘cure’ his mental illness. This might give him a lot of benefit in terms of his personal wellbeing, but would he be able to write music of the same intensity?”

Stephen’s musical research concentrates mainly on the period from the late twentieth century to the present day, so what is he finding out about the music that is being written now?

“Music is changing,” he reflects. “Between the end of the Second World War and the late 1960s, classical concert music was very much dominated by high-modernism. It was austere, atonal, and broke the connection with the past. It became challenging to listen to. It was the perfect music to reflect the society of the day; after the war, everyone wanted a tabula rasa in order to start afresh. But now things have changed quite a bit. We live in an age of recycling, looking at what has gone before – we enjoy a dynamic relationship between the past and the present. Music now can incorporate styles from the past; it can move effortlessly from one style to another. So I suppose the most noticeable thing about the kind of music people are writing now is that it’s becoming more varied.”

For some, this move toward a less daunting listening experience is a welcome relief. But does it mean that more serious themes are being put aside, along with complex compositional styles?

“People often mistake complexity for seriousness,” points out Steve. “You can write music that deals with difficult issues, difficult ideas, difficult concepts, but with a musical surface that’s not alienating. There are some composers who have pared things right down to the simplest means. For instance, Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer, writes music that is as simple as possible. He has created pieces of great beauty with very limited resources. On the other hand, you have composers such as Mark-Anthony Turnage, who’s working a lot with jazz musicians. In America there’s John Adams, who’s writing operas that are a lot more direct – the subject matter is still difficult – but the music is more approachable.”

Steve is in an unusual position, being both a composer and an academic. Does he ever feel he is getting the balance wrong?

Vibrant
“I don’t think of them being separate,” he explains. “I just think of ‘work’. Work is teaching composition at the University of Surrey, being involved in all the things that go on here, and then writing music to fulfil commissions - it’s all part of ‘the job’. I had a sabbatical a few years ago, and of course it’s great to just sit and write music all day every day, but after a while you miss that contact with the students, the people who stretch you with intriguing questions. Then there’s the company of colleagues, and the exchange of ideas. The whole university environment here is vibrant and exciting.

“I certainly bring my experience of working professionally as a composer to my teaching - but my teaching also feeds my composing work. I think of them as being two sides of the same coin. I don’t think ‘Oh, I’ve got to go off and be a teacher now’ or ‘Now I’ve got to be a composer for a while’, they’re integrated. As a composition teacher, I’m always looking to see what other composers are up to, what new pieces have come out – and I discuss them with students. The students can be very inspiring; they come up with viewpoints I hadn’t considered. It’s great to see people getting really enthusiastic about what’s new. Students often have great energy and drive – there’s no doubt that being surrounded by young, enthusiastic people rubs off on me in a beneficial way.”

Teaching composition is a significant part of his life at the University, but Steve thinks people might have misapprehensions about what goes in composition tutorials: “The thing about teaching composition is that everyone imagines you’re teaching something creative, something artistic, and to some extent that’s true. However, nearly everyone has lots of good ideas. The ideas aren’t the problem. The problem is realising the ideas.

“And to realise the ideas, you need an awful lot of technical information and technical skills, and those are far more objective than people might imagine. So, for example, when you write for a violin, you have to think about where the fingers go, how the bowing will work. When you write for violin in combination with piano, the piano can be much louder, so you need to consider balance and register very carefully. It’s a question of building up all the skills you need to write for instruments and voices and then how you deal with musical material (the melodies, rhythms, colours and harmonies). If you start a piece, and use too many ideas too quickly, there’s nowhere for the piece to go. So how do you structure a piece, how do you deal with your material? How do you write the right kind of material for the length of piece you’re writing? You know, when Wagner writes a piece that lasts four evenings, it doesn’t start in a flurry of excitement and activity – it starts with a long E-flat pedal that sits there for ten minutes. Consequently, the listener knows they are in for the long haul.

“So really it’s a question of how you deal technically with your material. And that’s relatively straightforward to teach. The students also get a lot of help in learning how to compose from having their pieces played, from working with musicians in rehearsals of their pieces.”

That’s something all Surrey’s composition students get to do – every year the University holds the Joyce Dixey Competition, in which every composer in the Department enters an original piece to be rehearsed and played in public, before an audience. “So when you study composition you are actually studying the mechanics of composition, as well as the creative aspects. Teaching composition is really just giving people the skills to realise the ideas that they already have.”

Vision
Steve diplomatically describes the suggestion that he sounds like a musical midwife as ‘an interesting idea’. “I think what we do is to provide an environment for people to work hard, be nurtured, then go and do their own thing. One of the hardest things to do as a composition teacher is to resist imposing your tastes and prejudices on your students – trying not to make them see the world as you see it. For me, teaching is about allowing students to develop their own thoughts, their own ideas, their own vision, without imposing anything on them. There are some students who will show you a piece and you’ll think ‘actually, that’s brilliant. There are lots of things I could suggest, but the piece might lose something’. So part of teaching is knowing when to step back, and when your interference is going to be useful.”

Steve teaches composition at all levels, from undergraduates to PhD students. At undergraduate level the tuition is aimed at training. “Getting skills in the bag”, as Steve puts it. At master's level people are beginning to develop their ideas more, their approaches, and their aesthetics – where they feel they’re coming from as creative artists. And then at PhD, Steve thinks the composers have essentially reached a professional level. “By that stage everyone knows how to put a piece together,” he says. As PhD students already know what the instruments can do in their various combinations, his job becomes much more about discussing ways of making a piece work as well it possibly can. “Someone will come to you with a piece that’s pretty good already, so we might discuss some very detailed points of subtle refinement.

“We have three other composers on staff, Dr Tom Armstrong, Dr Milton Mermikides and Dr Matt Sansom, and between us we cover very many different styles of music. So people can come here and write beat-based electronica, they can write rock songs, they can write concert classical music, they can compose film music, music for games, musical theatre – the list is endless. I want people to see Surrey as the place to come to for composition.”

You might think a composition tutor would derive huge satisfaction from seeing a student’s piece of music improve under his influence, but Steve disagrees. “That tends not to happen within a piece,” he points out. “It tends to be that people will write a piece, and then learn from it so that when they come to write the next one it will be better. However, the most satisfying aspect of teaching composition at Surrey is seeing the transformation in what people can do between when they arrive at university and what they achieve by the time they leave. And what’s great about music is that the end-product of years of work can be seen in a concert environment, whether it be the performance of a composition or an instrumentalist or singer giving a final recital. And that’s nice - there’s a real sense of occasion about that. Assessing live concerts is much more enjoyable than reading exam scripts.”

So is life as a modern composer, researcher and tutor as enviable as it would appear? “I think the exciting thing about music now is that anything goes,” says Steve. “There’s no one style that dominates. So not only do you have different composers who do very different sorts of things, you also have composers who will write in different styles from one piece to next. For example, Sir Richard Rodney Bennett - who’s coming here in March as part of the Guildford International Music Festival - is a great British composer who’s written concert music, film music, he plays jazz, he’s written music for TV… he very happily moves from one area to another. That approach has become the norm. You no longer have to find your own style and then stick with it for life.”