MAXWELL
STEER - BIOGRAPHY
Born St Cecilia’s Day 1946, my career has combined
the worlds of music, drama & journalism.
A
chorister at Canterbury Cathedral, I later ran away to Paris at the age of 15
hoping to study with Olivier Messićn but in fact began my professional life
three years later as a silent film pianist at the National Film Theatre, London.
At this time, despite being offered a place at Durham, I prefered to study
privately with, and under the guidance of, harpsichordist Jane Clark. My studies
included conducting with Nicholas Conran (Surrey U) and his teacher Sergiu
Celibidache in Stockholm, and organ with Allan Wicks (Canterbury Cathedral) and
Alan Harverson (RCM).
As
a harpsichordist I have broadcast on BBCr3 with leading baroque music performers
– Roy Goodman, Nancy Hadden, Jeremy Barlow and others – recorded Falla's
Harpsichord Concerto for Capital Radio, performed in the UK premiere of
Stockhausen's Die Jahreslauf and
toured Europe and the US with several ensembles. For a time I was a BBC Radio 3
Producer.
Between
BBCtv’s Greta Garbo - the Swedish Years
(Emmy award 1968) and BBCr3's Mr V (1989
Prix Italia nomination) I composed music for more than 120 drama programmes on
tv and radio, was musical director for the opening of both the Crucible Theatre
Sheffield in 1970 and the prototype Bankside Globe in 1971. Later, in 1981,
while London Director of Music at the Royal Shakespeare Company, I conducted the
world premiere of Nicholas Nickleby.
During the 70s I maintained a dual career, composing and recording drama music while also producing and directing film commercials. When a First Assistant Director to Christopher Miles in Greece on a C4 drama-doc about the Elgin Marbles I acted in scenes with Hugh Grant and Oscar-winning scriptwriter Julian Fellowes.
Between
1983-89 I concentrated more on original writing, and scripted 25 Drama &
Feature programmes for the BBC featuring many artists including David Suchet,
Sam Wanamaker, John Wells, (Sir) Robert Stephens and Elizabeth Spriggs. The
(Royal) National Theatre commissioned A
Tormented God, a one-man show for Bob Stephens based on Berlioz’s Memoires.
My 1991 stage play The Watcher in the
Rain, about James Joyce’s schizophrenic daughter and Jung, was reviewed in
The Guardian as ‘fascinating and unpredictable ... with a wealth of theatrical
invention.’
From
1986, when Ian Dearden and I received an Arts Council commission to create The
Glass Tower, an interactive electro-acoustic music drama, I was much
involved with experimental music technology. As Head of 20thC Studies at the
Royal College of Music Junior Department 1987-1991 I pioneered electro-music
tuition for young people, creating a Yamaha-sponsored summer school at the
University of East Anglia with Denis Smalley in 1989 called Soundscape.
In 1990 I was commissioned by BBCr3 to create the experimental drama Notes
from Janŕcek's Diary, which I created single-handedly in the BBC
Radiophonic Workshop that summer. The Times called it ‘a kaleidoscope of
subtle and bewitching effects’. I subsequently presented the BBCr4
Kaleidoscope documentary MIDI Magic.
The following year soprano Nancy Long premiered my Elegy
for the SPNM (Society for the Promotion of New Music), a 30 minute
electro-acoustic work that had been composed over the previous 20 months in the
RCM studio.
This
marked the end of a chapter in my life. Feeling unable to evolve within the
conceptual constraints of establishment music and broadcast drama I relinquished
my post at the RCM in 1991 and for a time pursued my interests in green issues
in journalism and publishing. I created a national listings magazine for John
Brown Publishing called CataList and
also edited a double issue of the academic journal Contemporary Music Review on Music
& Mysticism with contributions from 17 leading musicians, philosophers
and psychologists, as well as presenting a BBCr4 series Music
As Sacred Experience. Also during this period I was commissioned to visit
India for the BBC radio, which resulted in two programmes, a feature In
Search of Sai Baba, and a documentary about the philosophy of
Indian music. Subsequently, Denis Smalley, now Professor of Music at City
University, London invited me to organise the first Music
& the Psyche conference, which
led to its establishment as a regular event, and culminated in the appearance of
the Music & Psyche Journal.
In
1994 my wife and I moved to the Wiltshire village of Tisbury, and I began to
reconnect with live music-making, returning to composition with works in a
variety of mediums, including a graphic colour score which was selected for
performance by the SPNM and published in Music
& Mysticism. I also recorded Bach’s French Suites on the harpsichord,
and began playing with a range of ensembles from Ghanaian musicians to Bath
Baroque Orchestra.
The
genius loci of Tisbury is William
Beckford, an eccentric polymath who built the gothic Fonthill Abbey nearby at
the beginning of the 19thC before building Lansdowne Tower in Bath, and whose
one novel, Vathek, influenced both
Byron and Scott. Discovering that his compositions were in the Bodleian in 1998
I set about editing and publishing the first complete edition of his music; and
have written articles in a variety of journals as well as contributing the
chapter on music in The Reception of
William Beckford in Europe (Continuum 2003).
Drawing
these wide-ranging interests into a coherent musical focus was my principal
activity during 1998/9 and resulted in a variety of compositions including
another SPNM selection The Cruelty of
Dreams for violin solo, and Spectral
Music for flute and piano, premiered at a concert in November 1999. For this
occasion I formed a choir, the Beckford Singers, with whom I successfully
premiered and recorded two cycles of unaccompanied Dylan Thomas poems, one with
the tenor, Lynton Atkinson.
2000
saw the completion of two further works: Images
in Smoke for full orchestra, entered for the Masterprize Competition, and The
Spy In The Mirror, a ‘dreamatic scenario’ for mezzo and ensemble. This
is a significant work for me as I also give workshops in dream imagery and over
recent years have been allowing my own compositional process to arise from
dreaming rather than conscious intention. The text of the scena is based on a
dream of my own which unfolded like a thriller, and which I have matched with
the sound-world of an imaginary film-score.
Our
younger daughter, Serafina, being by now a harp student at Trinity College of
Music, it was a happy coincidence that she was able to take part in the premiere
of Mensicus, a six movement work for
harp commissioned to accompany a painting exhibition of the same title by my
friend Chris Jennings at Kingston U with fellow harpist Hugh Webb in 2001. Later
she gave the London premiere of my Grovely
Wood. There followed Sonnets to
Orpheus, a 50’ song-cycle to 12 of my own translations of Rilke Sonnets.
Scored for soprano, saxes, percussion, piano and bass, it embodies most
effectively to date, my synthesis of a palette of styles that varies from
rhythmic expressivity to hard rock.
Alongside
these activities I find my services increasingly in demand for piano and
composition lessons locally. as I encourage concerts to take the place of exams.
Developments in 2002 included teaching music part-time in a state school -
eye-opening but horrendous - and coordinating the Spirit Zone of the Big Green
Gathering - heart-opening but arduous.
My writings on the broader philosophical questions surrounding music, technology and consciousness have been published in a number of journals including AudioMedia, Classical Music, NoiseGate, Diffusion, Analecta Husserliana and various Quaker journals. In 1997 a tape I produced in which members of the Salisbury Hearing Voices group explained their condition won a MIND award. This encounter led me to study the psychology of voice-hearing in relation to creativity and resulting paper, The Creative Voice, has been published in a variety of journals and as a chapter in the symposium Raising Our Voices from Handsell Press.
I am currently planning a one day conference for The Music & Psyche Network called 'Music was my first love - a day of connections and reconnection'. It will be held at Trinity College of Music, Greenwich on Sat April 12th. 2003.