Chorale Prelude: When I survey the Wond'rous Cross

Chorale Prelude: Amazing Grace

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

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

This piece owes its genesis to two influences. One is the soundworld of Frank Perry, a visionary percussionist I first encountered 30 y/a, who introduced me to the belief that any musical sound, having been released into the world with appropriate mindformation, should not be curtailed to suit the performer's convenience or in the interests of a conventional musical narrative. The second is the improvisations that I used to take part in with colleags who formed the Music & Psyche Network. From the former I learnt how journey on or within sound; from the latter how to be sensitive to mood changes and to make music collectively as part of time's arrowhead.

Both of those ideas inform this piece which I initially composed between october & december 2018, but went on rewriting as I learnt it for its premiere on 6 April 2019. This version is a rerecording made in my studio on Easter Day, 20 April 2019.

The concept within the piece is of a monody which forms a carciero d’invenzione (creative restriction) where two notes are only rarely  played simultaneously, except as octaves. I had to relax this principle as the premiere approached while I was still rewriting to capture and refine the idea/s of flow. So having to think how to make musical ideas work monodically was jut taking up too much time and eroding my practice.      

The piece is improvisatory, and all springs from the opening motifs which then interweave, merge and mutate like colours in a tapestry over the duration of the piece. If music is frozen architecture, then Incantabulation is Frank Gehry! The best way to listen is to drift off and allow the music to inspire a stream of eidetic images, in the way one might encounter fleeting views from the window of a speeding train, rather than look for coherent musical argument. Nevertheless there is one, and the narrative is not devoid of structure. 

Poulenc had a favourite marking: les deux pédales. I have taken this to an extreme, letting the notes build up in incantatory washes of colour in which you can immerse yourself.

I have tried to create a graphic style in the editing that helps to delineate the musical arc.

Incantabulation - composed & performed by Michael Maxwell Steer

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

Please listen with headphones!

Incantabulation - composed & performed by Michael Maxwell Steer

MMSteer

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