Western music: An introduction

by Ronald Stevenson

216 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Ronald James Stevenson was a British composer, pianist, and writer about music.

The son of a Scottish father and Welsh mother, Stevenson was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, in 1928. He studied at the Royal Manchester College of Music, studying composition with Richard Hall and piano with Iso Elinson, graduating with distinction in 1948. He married Marjorie Spedding in 1952 and moved to Scotland in the mid-1950s.

Among his many compositions, the largest (in terms of duration) and most famous is his Passacaglia on DSCH for solo piano, written between 1960 and 1962.

He also wrote several chamber works including a String Quartet and Piano Quartet, numerous songs (among these, many settings of Hugh MacDiarmid, William Soutar and James Joyce) and works for solo piano. In 2007 he completed a choral symphony, Ben Dorain, on Hugh MacDiarmid's translation of the poem of that name by Duncan Ban MacIntyre.