Draft:Stephen Gibson

• Comment: See WP:COI. Ensure all statements are sourced. Greenman (talk) 10:23, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

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Stephen Brodie Gibson (b. 1957) is a British composer of contemporary classical music and music notation designer.

Biography and career

Early Life

Stephen Gibson. was born in East Barnet, London into a musical family. His father Arthur was a professional organist who came down to London from Liverpool after the war. His mother Sheila was a choir singer from Barnet, North London.  Arthur’s arrangements of organ music were widely appreciated, with several of them being published by Ashdown, Cramer and other publishers, and his interest in contemporary classical music deeply influenced Stephen’s formative years. Stephen studied piano from an early age and took up the French horn from the age of 11. His piano teachers included Muriel Simkin, Renna Kellaway and Christopher Elton, and his horn teachers were Barry Castle, Robert Blackburn and Ken Cordingley. He was a secondary school pupil at Queen Elizabeth’s Boys’ Grammar School, Barnet where his music teacher was David Patrick. From 1975 to 1979 he studied composition for his BMus degree at Birmingham University where his composition teachers were John Casken, John Joubert, and later Bill Hopkins. Following his degree, he spent some time as a pianist for ballet and contemporary dance in Birmingham and London; the Lehmiski School of Dance in Digbeth, the Birmingham University Dance Department and the London School of Classical Dance in Golders Green. This together with experience gained from writing music for the University Drama Department gave him invaluable insight into the workings of theatre. In 1982 he was invited to study music theatre for two years at The Banff Centre of Fine Arts, Alberta, Canada with composer Stephen McNeff and poet Charles Causley. Here he met many other influential figures and composers of contemporary music and theatre.

Music Overview

His musical influences included the music of Tippett, Boulez and Elliott Carter, the latter about whom he wrote his university dissertation, and also Havergal Brian with whom he considered he would have a common affinity. Whilst at university he developed what was to become his own personal algorithmic method of composition throughout his early pieces. This method, in contrast to the serialist approach taken by his mentors Boulez and Carter, was derived from the use of ranges rather than absolute values. It was similar in its totalist approach to theirs, whereby every facet of the composition was derived from a similar or contrasting range of values, or a range of the ranges in between. The works Stomp, From the Seed There Weeps a Willow..., and the Extension series of compositions are all written using this technique. Later on he renewed the technique in his String Quartet no 3. It was a result of his period at the Banff Centre that he was required to write music of a more “practical” nature, and it led to an interest in folk music and minimalism. He was commissioned by The Banff Centre in 1983, to write the music for Ghost Town, a two-act folk opera to a libretto by Jeremy James Taylor, which combines a set of folk music arrangements with traditional operatic numbers. This piece led the way to a “mellowing” of his style towards a more direct music where melody and simple accompaniment are to the fore. Major pieces in this idiom are the Symphony and the cantata Happy Land. His music has been heard at the Huddersfield Festival and on Radio 3, and performers have included the Endymion, Koenig and Altissimo Ensembles, Still Life with Guitar, Michael Finnissy, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and London New Wind who have been staunch supporters of his work premiering a string of pieces in the last ten years including ...phosis 2, Polymonophony, Tribute, Three Bells and Three Hockets. His output now stretches to over 100 pieces.

Technology

Stephen’s career in the late 80s and early 90s coincided with the advent of the new digital technologies, particularly those which led to musical score preparation on the computer. As fascination for this new reality became ever stronger, composition, although still pivotal, became for many years a second string to the bow. He was one of a handful of early adopters of the SCORE music notation program written by Prof. Leland Smith of Stanford University. He co-founded the company New Notations to offer music preparation services using SCORE and to provide sales and support of the SCORE program in the UK and Europe. As a result, SCORE became the standard for music preparation at the start of the 90s and is still being used today. He prepared for publication many of the works of John Tavener and James MacMillan amongst others and has been heavily involved in the engraving of the Carl Nielsen and Kurt Weill complete editions. He became a personal friend of Leland Smith, visiting trade fairs, and helping to test and improve the program. At the same time, he taught himself computer programming and wrote his own addon utility software to provide additional functionality to the main program. His programs for midi playback, midi input and conditional score editing - Midiscor, MidiscorWrite and ScorEdit - have been sold to SCORE users all around the world. He was also one of the early adopters of Sibelius, and immediately saw its potential. New Notations launched the original Acorn version of the Sibelius program at the Frankfurt Music Fair in 1992. Later on, when Sibelius had been rewritten for Mac and PC, Stephen was invited to write the SCORE converter where he worked closely with Jonathan Finn on its development. The converter was included as part of Sibelius until version 5, after which it was superceded by MusicXML.

Going forward

In recent years, Stephen has been concentrating on writing larger scale compositions, particularly concertos with orchestra of which there are currently five.  The ones for violin, viola and cello form part of his Concerto Triptych, which, as its name implies, were conceived as a set of three. It has also been one of his overriding ambitions in the last decade moving forward to establish a link between his compositional activities and the new technology. So, in 2013 he embarked on a large-scale project to automate using computers much of the functionality of the compositional method he used in his earlier works. With the working title of Scordatura, this will provide a new compositional tool where algorithmic values and decisions made by the computer can be converted directly into music notation and printed as a score. Stephen’s music is published by UMP

List of Compositions – (selective list) 

STAGE

• Subclass Four Million 1983
• Music Hall Songs 1987
• Here’s a Health to Cardinal Puff 1993,
• Le Petomane - Nightingale of the Moulin Rouge 2003

ORCHESTRAL

• Symphony 1985-6
• Sonatas for Piano and Orchestra 2007
• Suite no 1 for Small Orchestra 2016
• Suite no 2 for Small Orchestra 2016
• Concertino for Horn and Strings 2020
• Viola Concerto 2021

WIND

• Night Train
• Set no 1 for wind band 2007
• Set no 2 for symphonic wind band 2011-12
• Folk Song Suite (Set no 3) for symphonic wind band 2013

CHAMBER

• String Quartet no 1 1974/2005
• Extension II/Study 1979-80
• Extension III 1980
• String Quartet no 2 2004
• String Quartet no 3 2006
• Polymonophony 2018
• Tribute 2019

VOCAL

• There was Once a Time… 1984-5
• Happy Land (cantata) 1994
• Rare Birds 1994
• The Creeping Crawling Terror 2006
• Three Welcomes and Three Farewells 2012

INSTRUMENTAL

• Extension IV for Clarinet and Piano 1981-2
• Stomp 1981-2
• From the Seed There Weeps a Willow… 1983
• Flute Songs 1986
• 24 Bagatelles for Horn and Piano 2010
• 52 Easy Piano Pieces 2010
• Fanfares for Eva 2014
• Three Fantasies for Two Clarinets 2015
• Three Bells 2019
• Sonata for Two Bassoons 2018

For a comprehensive list and listening, visit https://www.stephengibson.co.uk/

External Links

http://www.stephengibson.co.uk/

https://ump.co.uk/composer/stephen-gibson/