Biography

Stephen Maniam lives and works in Edinburgh as a composer, music teacher and double bassist. Whilst his music is usually neither overtly religious nor pastoral, he is nonetheless deeply influenced by his Christian faith and a keen interest in mountaineering, cycling, distance running and visiting the planets wilder places.

He graduated from Durham, Cambridge and City University and has received several awards/scholarships.  Teachers have included Sir Peter Maxwell-Davies, Rhian Samuel, Sohrab Uduman, Philip Cashian, John Woolrich, Alasdair Nicholson, Sally Beamish, Kurt Schwertsik, Errolyn Wallen, Michael Alcorn and Stephen Montague.

His first orchestral piece The Seven Men of Moidart was broadcast by the BBC Philharmonic/Martyn Brabbins on BBC2 and Radio3 during 1996 BBC Young Musicians and his orchestral piece City Polyphony was broadcast on Dutch National Radio as part of the International Gaudeamus music week 2001.  Works have been performed in at least 10 different countries and UK highlights include performances at the Bath Festival; Purcell Rooms; St. Johns, Smith Square; Wigmore Hall and Edinburgh Festivals.

Stephen thinks being a composer at the start of the 21st century is both exciting and frustrating.  He embraces the freedom to borrow ideas from many styles and genres; and is interested in most classical music of the past 100 years from high-modernism to minimalism, he appreciates the complexity of composers like Xenakis and Ferneyhough and also enjoys the simplicity of Reich and Part.  He appreciates the way that many modern composers have developed a strong, unique voice by furrowing a very narrow channel often with great antipathy to all other means of composing, but feels that we have reached a point where a composer should be able to be free to use a very beautiful, simple idea one moment and contrast this with an incredibly esoteric, complex idea the next.  Ligeti is probably the recent composer of most interest to him, though Birtwistle, Nancarrow, McMillan, Stravinsky and Bartok are all influential too.  He also listens to, and sometimes borrows from, jazz, folk, non-western, baroque, funk, early, classical period, latin, etc.  On the one hand he finds this freedom liberating, but he also finds the process of starting a piece at a time when everything is acceptable, and nothing is off-limits, very difficult.