Dr Steve Potter PhD

Steve Potter is a composer, scholar, performer and performance curator. Prior to coming to the Guildhall he was a 2015-16 Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, and taught at Auburn Correctional Facility through the Cornell Prison Education Program. His artistic work integrates critical reflections on racial segregation and class ideology, with experimental noise, speech, and movement, into complex yet direct performances.

Collaboration through friendship is central to his practice, and his collaborators have included anthropology and literature scholars, instrumental improvisers, computer musicians, post-dramatic actors, vocalists and dancers. His performing life encompasses prepared piano, accordion, voice, amplified objects, samplers, drawing, improvisation with film, and conducting.

Works include Well I want it in writing, the smallest event and the secretest agency (2016, Cornell University); Music for the Sleepy (2015, Infancy, History and the Avant-Garde festival, London); Krono-Metre: Catalogue Out of Time (2010, with Kélina Gotman, Making Sense Colloquium, IRI-Centre Pompidou/Institut Télécom/NYU in Paris); Old People in the Wrong House Dancing With Robots (2011, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Domaine Forget festival, Quebec); and The Officers (2008, New York City Opera VOX showcase). He was influenced by studies with Janet Gyatso (Buddhist philosophy); David Osmond-Smith (critical theory); Martin Butler, Gilius van Bergeijk, Clarence Barlow, and Louis Andriessen (composition).

His PhD (King's College London, 2011, supervised by George Benjamin and Silvina Milstein) comprised a portfolio of compositions and commentary performing and reflecting on cross-cultural musical borrowing and the mutual incompatibility of current paradigms of music-making.