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Photo: Jim Rolon (2014)

Stephen Adams lives in Sydney where he works as Producer, Australian Music Unit for ABC Classic FM. His music is influenced by his performing experience in choral music, rock, improvisation and contemporary music theatre, as well as his language studies, extensive cross-cultural teaching experience, and activities as a radio, web and music producer. Also by his composition studies with Peter Sculthorpe at the University of Sydney and with Richard Vella at Queensland University of Technology.

His work at the ABC includes producing and presenting the specialist weekly New Waves podcast of Australian classical and experimental music, and commissioning and producing Australian music recordings and special projects. He was co-producer with fellow composer and presenter Julian Day of the weekly radio program New Music Up Late (2006-2014). 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).

His religious heritage and experiences of literature and other art forms have been fertile sources for musical ideas; likewise, what he describes as the experience of 'tactile synaesthesia' which fuels his approach to improvisation. Voice and breath play a large part in his musical imagination, mining the creative tension between delivering meanings and the ecstatic possibilities of vocalising. Textual quotations from music, literature and the media, and more recently field recordings, have functioned as alchemical ingredients for the magical dissolving of the fault-lines in experience.

Adams's 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 work - memory pieces, composed for Sydney Chamber Choir using a text by performance poet Ania Walwicz, was released by Tall Poppies on the Chamber Choir CD Landscape's Creatures (2001).

Other works range through incidental music, songs, chamber music, collaborative 'improvisations', digital works and electronica, and a 70-minute a cappella 'opera' Sydney Dreaming Theatre. The multi-speaker, digital/vocal 'score' for The Audience and Other Psychopaths (2001-2004), was created in a theatrical collaboration with Nigel Kellaway's THE OPERA PROJECT and writer Amanda Stewart.

Recent projects include several chamber works combining acoustic instruments with field recordings, such as site-specific works for Easter at The Piano Mill 2018 and 2019, group and solo improvisations working with voice, flute, field recording material and lo-fi sound difusion, and sonic interpretations of the writings of his partner Jen Craig and other authors for Little Fictions at the 2019 Newcastle and Sydney Writers Festivals and Sydney City Libraries' Late Night Librarty series. His work Afterwards for the Sydney Chamber Choir and percussionist Claire Edwardes was runner-up for Choral/Vocal Work of the Year at the 2015 Art Music Awards.

Adams says: "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 responces to the voices/narratives of writers have all been part of this process, each throwing up uncertainties and contradictions. It's all part of the attempt to get a firmer grip on experience - on the elusive magic of existence and its many possible meanings."

Stephen Adams — current to July 2019