Stephen McNeff

Stephen McNeff studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music and undertook post-graduate research at the University of Exeter. He was Associate Director of Manchester University's Contact Theatre in 1979−80. From 1980−84, as Composer in Residence and Associate Director of the Music Theatre Studio Ensemble of the Banff Centre and then Comus Theatre Canada he won a Dora Mavor Moore Award for his opera The Secret Garden (1985) based on the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett. His theatre music in the 1990s saw McNeff receive a Scotsman award for the National Youth Music Theatre production of Aesop at the 1991 Edinburgh Festival before an unconventional staging of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland by the Donmar for the BOC Covent Garden festival in 1994 brought him wider attention. He was appointed 'Composer-in-the-House' with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in 2005. During his two-year tenure, he wrote a number of works for the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and its contemporary counterpart Kokoro.

Since 2002 McNeff has been a Visiting Artist of Dartington International Summer School, South West Music School and Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.