Roger Steptoe

Roger Steptoe (born 1953) is an English composer and pianist.[1] He studied music at the University of Reading as an undergraduate and then at the Royal Academy of Music, London, from 1974 to 1977 as a post-graduate student.[2] There he studied composition with Alan Bush and piano accompaniment with Geoffrey Pratley.[2]

His String Quartet No. 1 (1976) and the opera King of Macedon (1978–79, to a libretto by Ursula Vaughan Williams, based on a stage play by Charterhouse school pupil 1973-77 Charles Jockelson) were composed during his time as composer in residence at Charterhouse School from 1976 to 1979. Between 1980 and 1991 he was professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music.[3] Notable works during this period include the Clarinet Quintet and the solo piano piece Equinox, a series of concertos, and the Elegy on the Death and Burial of Cock Robin (1988) for counter tenor and strings.[4]

As a pianist, Steptoe recorded the first modern performances of the Walton and Bridge piano quartets, and in the first recording of the Four Last Songs by Vaughan Williams. Anthony Bye has described Steptoe's style as "wholeheartedly in the tradition of Vaughan Williams, Finzi, Howells, Britten and Tippett...regenerated with thoroughly contemporary means of expression".[4]