Stephen Goss’s music receives hundreds of performances worldwide each year and has been recorded on over 50 CDs by more than a dozen record labels, including EMI, Decca, Telarc, Virgin Classics, Naxos, and Deutsche Grammophon. Steve writes communicative and accessible music that draws freely on a number of styles and genres. Sometimes allusions to the music that inspires him are disguised—perhaps only a rhythm or harmony is retained—sometimes they dazzle the ear with unexpected juxtapositions.

Recent work includes a number of projects with the guitarist John Williams, who has recorded and toured Steve’s Guitar Concerto (2012) with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Steve collaborated with Andrew Lloyd Webber on a guitar version of music from his musical Stephen Ward. Other commissions have come from: regular guitarist collaborators, David Russell, Xuefei Yang, Jonathan Leathwood and Miloš Karadaglic, the cellist Natalie Clein, flautist William Bennett, and the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra. Steve’s Albéniz Concerto (2009) for guitar and orchestra was released to great critical acclaim on EMI Classics in 2010.

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

Stephen Goss studied at the Royal Academy of Music (where he won the Julian Bream Prize) and the Universities of Bristol and London (where he completed his doctorate). His composition teachers were Edward Gregson, Robert Saxton, Peter Dickinson and Anthony Payne, and he studied guitar with Michael Lewin.

After six years on the staff at the Yehudi Menuhin School, Steve is now Chair of Composition and Director of Research at the University of Surrey, UK, and a Professor of Guitar at the Royal Academy of Music in London.