NEWS

 

Towards the end of 2011 I gave three performances of my latest piece, Archangels, for organ. You can see three videos of me playing the piece on Youtube: St Gabriel, St Raphael and St Michael. There is also a review on Bachtrack.

 

On 4 January 2012 I gave a talk in the Leeds Cathedral Lecture series. The title was: Sing a New Song to the Lord? Musical reflections on the sacred and the secular, tradition and modernity.

 

I am currently writing another work for organ and hope to give a first performance later in the year.

 

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The following are a few autobiographical notes for those interested in the music I compose or my related work as an organist, teacher, music examiner and musicologist living in London.  For audio clips of various of my other compositions click here.

 

My main musical mentors in composition were Howard Ferguson and,  more recently,  Margaret Hubicki.  Having started composing  as a fairly small child, my music first came before the wider musical world when the CD of my Lament for Bosnia  (FCC 0001) was top of the classical charts in Tower Records for several weeks in 1994, and it is still my most performed and broadcast work, including several airings on the BBC and Classic FM . Particularly memorable for me has been conducting Lament with the Strings of the Royal Academy of Music and with the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra.  Since Lament I have been fortunate that one composing opportunity has led to another.

 

The following are some compositional highlights rather than a complete list. My First Symphony was commissioned by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and performed in the main concert season of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the Royal Albert Hall, conducted by Vernon Handley and broadcast on Classic FM.  My Second Symphony and Violin Concerto were both performed on separate occasions at St John’s, Smith Square.  A ballet, Alice, was commissioned by  the Stadttheater in Giessen, Germany, and has received many performances.   Missa Pacis, an orchestral and choral mass, was commissioned for the Brompton Oratory, London.   Top of the Morning for flute and piano (in Flute Time Pieces 1) was published by OUP.   Bagatelle for piano, played by Mark Tanner, was released on disc in 2009 (PRCD 1018).  My most recent commission was for a choral work from the Worshipful Company of Musicians.

 

I was born in Birmingham in 1967, the only child of my British-born father and my mother who came to the UK in 1939 as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany.   I was a chorister at Southwell Minster, where I studied the organ under Kenneth Beard. At Chetham’s School of Music,  I studied the organ with Derrick Cantrell and - this is perhaps hard to believe for my friends! - became Head Boy.  As Organ Scholar of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, my Director of Studies was Peter le Huray and I studied the organ with Peter Hurford.   I was very lucky to become an Associate of the Royal College of Organists at sixteen, winning five prizes, later being even luckier to win a further three prizes when I became a Fellow.   My occasional organ recitals have been in  churches, cathedrals and college chapels, including King’s College, Cambridge.  I also played a piano duet with James Kirby on a CD for Chandos featuring the music of Margaret Hubicki (CHAN 10322).  I have held various church-music appointments, and became Director of Music at St Mary’s, Woodford in London in 2011. Having never composed for the organ before, in 2010 I  developed a yearning to write for the instrument, which was, in fact, my first love.  The initial fruit of this has been the three-movement Archangels, which I premiered in 2011 on the marvellous three-manual organ at Woodford.  

 

Alongside composing, I have occasionally tried to gather my thoughts together in articles describing what I am aiming to achieve in my music.  Two early ones especially hold good for giving some useful background, for anyone interested, about the musical path I strive to follow: ‘Musical Post-Modernism without Nostalgia’, The Musical Times  (Sept. 1989), 536-7 and ‘Ruin or Renewal: The Future of Music’, The Salisbury Review (March 1991), 34-7.

 

Hoping to deepen my composing technique, I decided to make a study of Anton Bruckner’s mammoth musical apprenticeship with Simon Sechter and its influence on Bruckner’s Music. The research was awarded a PhD from Manchester University and was subsequently published as a book:  Simon Sechter’s Fundamental-Bass Theory and  Its Influence on the Music of Anton Bruckner (Edwin Mellen Press, 2009). I  have since been invited to give pre-concert talks on Bruckner’s music for the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. As a fledgling musicologist hunting in Vienna I stumbled upon a clue to some overlooked contemporary reminiscences about Schubert giving, for instance, Schubert’s only recorded opinions about Bach; co-authored with the Schubert expert Rita Steblin, these memoirs were published as ‘Studying with Sechter: Newly Recovered Reminiscences about Schubert by his Forgotten Friend, the Composer Joseph Lanz’, Music & Letters, 88 (May 2007), 226-65.

 

My piano teaching led to the invention of Scale Shapes  using the ‘Stocken Method’, published in five volumes by Chester Music, which is now  in its third revised edition. It is a diagrammatic method for learning scales, which, although conceived in a moment, has had surprising international popularity.  Examining for the Associated Board of the Royal School of Music has taken me to many countries, especially in south-east Asia. I am also a diploma examiner for the ABRSM and a trainer of examiners. Other recent teaching includes running a General Musicianship course at Manchester University and lecturing for the RCO (Royal College of Organists) Academy.

 

Today I live in Poplar in East London, in the shadow of Canary Wharf, combining composition with organ playing, private teaching (organ, piano, theory, composition), freelance lecturing, and examining.

 

REVIEWS

 

“The brief Bagatelle (2008) by Frederick Stocken (born 1967) is a bittersweet treat, fully expressed in tonal terms. One can almost taste Tanner’s enjoyment.” Fanfare Magazine.

 

“Stocken’s Bagatelle is only two-and-a-half minutes long, and Prokofievan, too, but with a bittersweet sophistication and melodic catchiness that suggests his larger-scale works will be worth tracking down.” International Record Review.

 

“Stocken’s Bagatelle plays with major-minor expectations in a Busonian way, in a work of neo-classical economy.” Records International.

 

“At last a young English composer has chosen to write accessible, beautiful music which is unashamedly passionate and melodic.” A.N. Wilson, The Evening Standard.

 

“…it is music which makes me believe that a new Sibelius or a new Elgar has been born.” A.N. Wilson, The Spectator.

 

“… one of the most promising talents of his generation….it is refreshing to find a composer who is producing music which is clear, profound, free-flowing and superbly composed.” Malcolm Williamson, the late Master of the Queen’s Music, quoted in The Sunday Telegraph.

 

“Stocken is forging his own language.” Nottingham Evening Post.

 

“Stocken’s work will also prove popular with players for he has written very much a showpiece for the violin.” The Strad.

 

“The Agnus Dei of his Mass was beautiful and quite striking with ladders of woodwind rising against the sound of the solo singers, soon to be shattered by the sound of war (as in, but not like, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.)” The Tablet.

 

“Stocken has managed to create something like a ‘symphony of the city’ that is suitable for our time, which makes you breathless and sometimes invites you to rest.” Translated from Wetzlauer Neue Zeitung.

 

“Frederick Stocken has written a surprisingly melodic score especially for this entertaining spectacle, reminiscent of the late romantics.” Translated from Giessener Anzeiger.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Frederick Stocken

Composer