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Photo: Jim Rolon (2014)

Stephen Adams is a Blue Mountains-based composer-improviser, voice and sound artist with a developing movement practice, and 19 years' experience as ABC Classic's Australian Music Curator/Producer (2004-23). Formative experiences include singing in The Contemporary Singers (1986-96), gigging in Sydney's post-punk scene (1984-88), flute improvisation to church gospel chorus sing-alongs and favourite classical, jazz and rock records, and diverse music theatre performances (including singing Miles in 1978 NSW Uni Opera production of Britten's Turn of the Screw, writing and performing music for a 1981 Marian St Theatre children's pantomime, and as ōtsuzumi drummer in the 1984 Australian premiere of traditional Japanese Noh drama). Also composition studies with Peter Sculthorpe (1983-6) and Richard Vella (2003-4), and his work as a cross-cultural language teacher (1989-2004).

Stephen has created music for choirs, chamber ensembles, orchestras, rock bands, and theatre, as well as studio works for radio and other media. His vocal concert works have been frequently presented on radio and performed in tours and international festivals in Australia, Asia, Europe and North America. His best-known choral work, Sydney Dreaming, was the title track of ABC Classics' 1996 Contemporary Singers CD. His major choral work for Sydney Chamber Choir - memory pieces - on a text by performance poet Ania Walwicz, was released by Tall Poppies on the Chamber Choir CD Landscape's Creatures (2001) and toured across North America and to Germany by Canada's Ensemble de la Rue and released on their 2005 Memory Pieces CD. Highlights of his early work for theatre are his score and libretto for a 70-minute acapella 'opera' Sydney Dreaming Theatre (1992) with the Native Rose Music Theatre Company, and a multi-speaker vocal electro-acoustic score for Nigel Kellaway and The Opera Project's The Audience and Other Psychopaths (2001-04) with text by Amanda Stewart and the voice of soprano Karen Cummings.

At ABC Classic, Stephen established and produced ABC Classic's New Waves, Classic Australia website, Composer Commissioning Fund, and many other broadcast events, online projects, programs, and recordings, including ABC Classic's co-hosting and wide-ranging broadcast and online coverage of the 2010 ISCM World Music Days in Sydney. He was the ABC's representative on the Radio Music jury at the 2007 Prix Italia in Verona, a panellist at Soundstreams Canda's 2008 conference on music and new media, and the Australian delegate to the 2014 ISCM in Wroclaw, and to the International Rostrum of Composers in Helsinki (2014), Tallinn (2015), Wroclaw (2016) and Palermo (2017), where he conducted a public interview for the Rostrum with celebrated Italian composer Sciarrino.

Stephen was 2015 APRA/AMCOS Art Music Awards finalist for Afterwards for choir, radios, and percussion soloist, premiered by Sydney Chamber Choir and Claire Edwardes, conducted by Liz Scott. Sunset inside the listening room premiered at Easter at The Piano Mill 2019 and has been released on vinyl through Harrigans Lane Collective records. Piano in a field of recordings was selected Australian work at ISCM World Music Days 2022, Auckland, and was recorded for Wirripang Playing with Fire CD by Tamara-Anna Cislowska. Close to your ears, commissioned for 2024 Sonic Hugs radiophonic project, premiered on air across Australasia, Europe, and North America.

Adams says: "Music is the space where contradictions resolve or are suspended in magical irresolution, where the shaping time and sounding of voices strengthen our grip on experience, our sense of being in the world and of life's beautiful and terrible strangeness".

"Voice and breath play a large part in my musical imagination, mining creative tensions between delivering meaning and ecstatic possibilities of vocalising. 'Tactile synaesthesia' fuels my approach to improvisation, working at the intersection of the textural/timbral qualities of voice, wind instruments, field recordings, everyday objects and lo-fi electronics. I'm fascinated by gradual timbral, textural and spatial transitions and the subtle melding and blurring of acoustic and electronic sounds. The evocation of spatial experiences and effects, whether within conventional musical textures, or through the movement of performers and the sonic displacement of instruments using FM transmitters and radios as a fragile mobile distributed sound system.

Recent improv collaborations include Weizen Ho's Performaure : Performateur #2 (Splinter Magic 2019), writer Jen Craig (2019 Newcastle Writers Festival), Will Hansen (2019 Microflix Fest), and The Music Box Project's Duets (2022, Peter Leung) and (Cut Paste Play festival (2024, Naomi Johnson) and Sound Picnic @The Coal Loader (2024), plus featured guest appearances at The Guesthouse, Cork, Ireland (2018) with Karen Power and friends, and Spectrum East, Belgrade (2020) with Richard Barrett and friends. He performs with and is a founding member of Chronology Arts Artist Collective interdisciplinary performance group (2024- ) and is working to establish a similar performance collective in the Blue Mountains.

I've become increasingly pre-occupied by the concept of co-existence - how we shape our actions, from sound-making to movement, in relation to each other. And to other species and our environment. Making and interacting with field recordings, group and solo improvising, and shaping sonic responses to the voices/narratives of writers have all been part of this process, each throwing up uncertainties and contradictions that my composing seeks to embrace, coming closer to the elusive magic of existence and its many possible meanings."

In 2025 Stephen has composed new studio work Breathing Rotations (featuring members of The Music Box Project) for broadcast on the RADIA international network, and Whistler in the wind for flautist Eliza Shephard and field recordings, premiered with Lloyd Van't Hoff, Michael Duke and Matthew Wilkie at Blackheath Chamber Music Festival. He is currently working with The Music Box Project and dramaturg Nikki Heywood on his large-scale Imaginary Radio Station project with support from Bundanon, the University of Sydney Performance Discipline (Rex Cramphorn Performance Research Studio) and Create NSW.

Stephen Adams — current to June 2025