Chorale Prelude: When I survey the Wond'rous Cross

Impromptu Valentine, originally an improvisation on 14 February 2022

Impromptu Valentine (composed & performed by MMS)

This 10 minute meditation is a  soft and soothing exploration of how you experience kindness and how you can harmonise it internally so that it’s there for you at any time. This refreshing pause can be used as often as you like. May it brings joy to your day.

Harmonising With Kindness

Ian Thompson (tenor) with Susan Daniel (alto) and Peter Hill (piano). Semichorus including Susan OGrady conducted by Nicholas Conran. Translated by MMS and produced by him at IBC Studios 1969

Diary Of One Who Disappeared 8

Sonnets to Orpheus 6 (Sonnet 1.17) Music /lyrics by Michael Maxwell Steer based on the German of Rainer Maria Rilke.

©2001. ®2004 by Frances M Lynch with the Argonaut Ensemble (Carlos Lopez-Réal saxes, Andrew Cottee percussion, Nick Hayward bass, MMS piano /director)

Sonnets to Orpheus 12: Silent companion of the empty spaces

Notes From Janàček’s Diary is an adaptation - written, composed, performed and realised by MMS - of certain fragments of Janacek's occasional musical text jottings collected & published by Vilem Tausky. It was commissioned by BBCr3 Features, producer John Theocharis, and created at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop over the summer of 1990, thanks to the cooperation of Brian Hodgson.
   The acoustic recording took place in June 1990 at the Paris Studio, L Regent St London, with Janacek as an old man played by John Moffat, Janacek as a young man by Stephen Garlick, all women's voices by Der Shin Hwang, violin Wilfred Gibson, piano MMS, and the children's voices of Laura-Jane Rich, Suzi Steer & Serafina Steer.
    The subsequent electronic realisation took MMS over 40 studio days in Maida Vale.
    Everybody in BBCr3 Features loved it. The one person who didn't was John Drummond, Controller R3; thus Notes From Janàček’s Diary was both my finest and final programme for BBC Radio.
   More details: http://msteer.co.uk/creative/janacek/janacek.html

Notes From Janàček’s Diary 6: The Beginning of a Novel

This play, broadcast as a 'drama on three', makes use of Berners own music (L'uomo dai baffi) as the music of the composer at the centre of the drana, Emmanuel Smith. Berners modeled the character on William Walton, and the piece is also a roman a clef about Walton's (bi-)sexual as well as his creative dilemmas.

The cast: Rupert Graves as Emmanuel Smith: Jane Wenham as Madame Jeanne d'Arc, his mentor: Annette Badland as the '7ft Amazonian trombone player' with whom Smith falls in love: Susie Brand as Evangeline Brown, his fiancée: Manning Wilson & Rachel Gurney as Rev & Mrs Brown, her parents. Anthony Newlands as the mysterious Count Omega's social secretary: Timothy Bateson as Prof Grumbelius who is brought in to advise Smith. And Irène Prador as the Queen Mother.
L'Uomo dai baffi performed by the Aquarius Ensemble under Nicholas Cleobury, and in a piano version by Michael Maxwell Steer. Produced by John Theocharis BBCr3 Features. 1987

Critics wrote:
"The big drama of the week on Radio 3 … A pleasantly exotic whimsy." The Listener.
"These highly original [musical] works help to make the characters seem more credible than on the printed page … as a result Count Omega was magnified by its translation from novel to radio play; and Lord Berners' fantasy became a musical extravaganza." Times Lit Supp

COUNT OMEGA (by Lord Berners, dramatised by MMS) part 4

I created this electronic or acousmatic composition in the Royal College of Music Electronic Music Studio (where I was Head of 20thC Studies at the Junior Department) during 1989-90 for live quadrophonic performance. It was premiered in 1991 by the Society for the Promotion of New Music, and heard in Paris (with Nancy Long) and London and Keele (with Der Shin Hwang). This is a live recording of the latter.

It is a setting for soprano solo of a passage 'O we become old' from James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which involves the performer playing part of Für Elise on the piano as well as a Bix Beiderbecke record on a 78rpm horn gramophone. I composed it as an elegy to my then-current life as a broadcast composer /writer, which I knew I must leave in order to deepen my personal and musical creativity. That was an event that took place at the end of 1991 when I resigned from the RCM to explore new horizons.

http://msteer.co.uk/


Elegy by Michael Maxwell Steer, performed by Der Shin Hwang

Between 2006-2012 Susan Nares & I would often meet at her home in Chewton Glen Farm, Christchurch, for spiritually-attuned improvisation. See also video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUID9Pg93l4&list=PLDA07DF0F23DCBECD  

Seven. SN, MS. 22/07/2007

Sometimes. SN, MS. 22/07/2007

0:00     1st mvt:     Son Montuno
5:07      2nd mvt: Bolero-Chá
8:08     3rd mvt: Fantasía

Headphones recommended!

COUNT OMEGA (by Lord Berners, dramatised by MMS) part 4

MMSteer

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