Stephen Dodgson

Stephen Cuthbert Vivian Dodgson (17 March 192413 April 2013) was a British composer and broadcaster. Dodgson’s prolific musical output covered most genres, ranging from opera and large-scale orchestral music to chamber and instrumental music, as well as choral works and song. Three instruments to which he dedicated particular attention were the guitar, harpsichord and recorder. He wrote in a mainly tonal, although sometimes unconventional, idiom. Some of his works use unusual combinations of instruments. Biography Stephen Dodgson was born in Chelsea, London in 1924, the third child of John Arthur Dodgson, who was a symbolist painter and nephew of Campbell Dodgson, and his wife, who was born Margaret Valentine Pease and also an artist. He was distant cousin of Lewis Carroll. He was educated at Berkhamsted School in Hertfordshire and at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire. In 1942, he was conscripted into the Royal Navy and took part in anti-submarine warfare escorting convoys in the Battle of the Atlantic. On returning to London, he studied composition privately for a year with Bernard Stevens before enrolling at the Royal College of Music in 1946, officially to study the horn (under Fr