Steve Martland

Biography

Steve Martland (10 October 1954 – 7 May 2013) was an English composer. He helped to curate the Factory Classical label of Factory Records, featuring contemporary British composers.

Life and music

Martland was born in Liverpool, and studied composition at Liverpool University and in the Netherlands with Louis Andriessen. He worked almost exclusively with artists outside classical institutions—Dutch and American groups, freelance musicians and especially his own Steve Martland Band which toured his music internationally. He also worked with the King’s Singers and Evelyn Glennie for whom he wrote Street Songs. Martland was composer in residence at the ETNA Music Festival in Sicily in 2006 and 2007. His music was published by Schott Music.
Usually amplified, muscular and powerfully rhythmic, his music was extensively choreographed: Dance Works commissioned and premièred by London Contemporary Dance Theatre has received many new productions around the world, and Remix was awarded the SACD Prize for Video Dance Choreography Music after being choreographed for BBC TV by Aletta Collins.
His Principia was adopted as the theme music for the BBC radio programme The Music Machine. Dance Works is also used as the title music for a Dutch TV programme. He also wrote and directed A Temporary Arrangement with the Sea, a film about Louis Andriessen. In August 1998 he collaborated with the band Spiritualized on a project for the Flux Festival in Edinburgh.
Martland’s preoccupation with the function of the composer in society was reflected in his commitment to music education. He believed in the educational impact of creativity: "Creativity is everything that is against what's going on in the world right now. It's to do with tolerance and understanding other people." Martland directed many composition projects in schools both at home and abroad and he initiated and ran for many years Strike Out, his own annual composition course for school children.
Martland died in Reading after suffering a heart attack in his sleep, during the night of 6 May 2013, at the age of 58.

Legacy

In 2015, composer Tim Benjamin founded the Steve Martland Scholarship for young composers at the Sound and Music Summer School, in honour of his former mentor.

Listenings

Steve Martland audio on MySpace
Dance Works in the Sound Library of the publisher Schott Music
Remix in the Sound Library of the publisher Schott Music