Stephen Goss’s music receives hundreds of performances worldwide each year. It has been recorded on over a hundred albums by more than a dozen record labels, including EMI, Decca, Virgin Classics, Naxos, and Deutsche Grammophon. His output embraces multiple genres: orchestral and choral works, chamber music, and solo pieces.

Goss’s work is marked by a fascination with time and place – both immediate and remote – and the musical styles that evoke them. In many of his compositions, contrasting styles are juxtaposed through abrupt changes of gear. His compositional voice is shaped by his parallel career as a guitarist – that is to say, as a performer, transcriber, arranger, improviser and collaborator with other composers and performers. Not surprisingly, his music often tests the boundaries between all these activities and original composition.

Several of Goss’s recent projects have involved the legendary guitarist John Williams, including his Guitar Concerto, which Williams recorded and played on tour with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Some of the world’s leading orchestras to have performed his works include the Russian National Orchestra, the Oregon Symphony Orchestra, the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Colombia, BBC NOW, the China National Symphony Orchestra, The Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and The Barcelona Symphony Orchestra.

Commissions have come from percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, cellist Natalie Clein, flautist William Bennett, lutenist Nigel North, and tenor Ian Bostridge; as well as guitarists David Russell, Xuefei Yang, Zoran Dukić, Miloš Karadaglić, Aniello Desiderio, Artyom Dervoed, and Łukasz Kuropaczewski. Goss’s eclectic approach has led to collaborations with artists as diverse as Alt-J, Avi Avital, and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

As a guitarist, Steve has worked with Tōru Takemitsu, Hans Werner Henze, Peter Maxwell Davies and Elliott Carter, and toured and recorded extensively with the TETRA Guitar Quartet.

Stephen Goss 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. In 2018 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music, an honour limited to 300 living people. He was born in Wales on 2nd February 1964.