Stephen Montague has been played on NTS shows including Organic Music Tokyo w/ Chee Shimizu, with Slow Dance On A Burial Ground first played on 24 June 2016.

Stephen Montague (b.10 March, 1943 Syracuse, New York) grew up in Idaho, West Virginia and Florida. He studied piano, conducting and composition at Florida State University (BM:1965, MM:1967), received a doctorate in composition from Ohio State University (DMA:1972) and won a Fulbright Fellowship to work in Warsaw, Poland (1972-74). He first came to England as a musician with Strider Dance Co. (Richard Alston & co.), but since 1975 has worked as a freelance composer based in London and touring worldwide. His music has been widely performed, featuring in numerous international festivals, most recently the BBC Proms (London) and Wiener Musik Tage (Austria) with Composer Portrait concerts devoted to his music in London, Cambridge, New York, Houston, Vienna, St. Pölten, Bad Münster and Budapest. Major commissions include works for the Royal Festival Hall (London), Cheltenham Festival, Bath Festival, the Proms and Ft. McLeod Festival (Canada) as well as works for pianists Stephen Kovacevich and Marc-André Hamelin, percussionist Evelyn Glennie, the Hilliard Ensemble, the International Computer Music Association, and a 35-minute work for narrator and orchestra commissioned by British Telecom premiered by the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Centre, London, with a further 15 performances by other leading British orchestras around the UK and abroad.

Stephen Montague was a founder of Sonic Arts Network in 1980, Chairman (1993-97) and Artistic Director (1998-99) of the SPNM (Society for the Promotion of New Music), Associate Composer with The Orchestra of St. Johns, London (1995-1997), and Featured Composer for the City of Oxford (1997-1998). Internationally, he was Guest Professor at the University of Texas – Austin (1992, 1995, 2000) and the University of Auckland, New Zealand (1997).

In 2004-05 he was Artistic Director of the ‘Open Score Project’ for Contemporary Music Making for Amateurs commissioning 10 works by leading international composers including Sir John Tavener, Michael Nyman, Frederic Rzewski and John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin), a project that was short-listed in the 2005 Royal Philharmonic Society’s Music Awards.

His honours and awards include 1st Prize at Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition, France (1994), the Ernst von Dohnányi Citation for Excellence in Composition (1995), The Ohio State University Distinguished Alumnus Award (2000), Honorary Fellow (2002), Composer in Residence Trinity College of Music, London (2003) and Honorary Fellow of Leeds College of Music (2004). ‘Southern Lament’ a CD of his piano works (NMC D118) performed by Philip Mead, won the 2006 International Piano magazine’s “Best New Piano Music Recording Award”.

In addition to writing for traditional orchestral forces Montague has also written numerous more ‘experimental’ works such as his Horn Concerto for klaxon horn soloist and an orchestra of automobiles.

Although a long term UK resident, his compositional influences remain transatlantic. He comments: "I have lived in Britain since 1974 but my musical heroes remain American: I admire Charles Ives's unapologetic juxtaposition of vernacular music and the avant-garde, Henry Cowell's irreverent use of fist and arm clusters, the propulsive energy of minimalism and John Cage's radical dictum that 'all sound is music’”.

As a "virtuoso pianist" [New York Times] he has recorded for all the major European radio networks, performed at Carnegie Hall, London's Queen Elizabeth Hall and Centre Pompidou, Paris. In 1985 he formed a duo with pianist Philip Mead, Montague/Mead Piano Plus, which tours internationally and, until his recent death, collaborated with sculptor, Maurice Agis, providing multi-channel electroacoustic sound environments for Agis’s giant inflatable sculptures Colourspace and Dreamspace.

Montague currently teaches at Trinity College of Music, London and is the New Music Associate at University of Cambridge Kettle’s Yard Gallery Museum (2010 -2011).