Composers' Workshop: Stephane Crayton

Stephane Crayton is a composer based in Cambridge. His compositions reassess various social dynamics of performance; he wrote a piece for the Ligeti Quartet in which every note of Beethoven’s Heiliger Dankgesang was reordered, and recently completed a short piece for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

Stephane is currently working on a PhD at King’s College, Cambridge, on the subject of New Music and conceptions of order, and he is also a member of teaching staff at the Junior Department of the Royal Academy of Music. 

In 2016 Stephane co-founded rites, a musical and theatrical collective that questions and challenges rituals and conventions of the concert hall. Stephane is also a partner in two design companies; one current project is the development of a chess set in which the form of the pieces represents their movement on the board.

Stephane writes "time and again the old compositional order comes up against a new order. Surveying some of these conflicts raises questions concerning the presentation of this history. In particular I argue against a linear presentation. Transposing these ideas to the present day, I take some small steps towards an identity of New Music, and towards a possible future in which New Music, freed from linear tradition, can escape its institution".