Ronald James Stevenson (6 March 1928 – 28 March 2015) was a Scottish composer, pianist, and writer about music. Biography 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 (now incorporated in the Royal Northern College of Music), studying composition with Richard Hall and piano with Iso Elinson, graduating with distinction in 1948. He married Marjorie Spedding in 1952. He moved to Scotland in the mid-1950s. As a socialist pacifist conscientious objector, he applied for exemption from National Service, but was refused recognition by the North Western Tribunal. He, in turn, refused to attend a medical examination as an essential preliminary to call-up, which led to prosecution and sentence to 12 months imprisonment in Wormwood Scrubs. The sentence qualified him to go to the Appellate Tribunal, which finally allowed exemption from military service conditional upon work on the land. 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, based on a 13-note ground bass derived from the musical motif D-E-C-B: the German transliteration of Dmitri Shostakovich's initials ("D. Sch."). Stevenson's work takes more than an hour and a quarter to perform and is one of the longest unbroken single movements composed for piano. Stevenson's other works include two piano concertos, the second of which was first performed at the Proms in 1972, a violin concerto commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin, and a cello concerto in memoriam Jacqueline du Pré. 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. This work, for full chorus and chamber choir with chamber orchestra and symphony orchestra, was begun in the 1960s and laid aside for many years. The world premiere was given in City Halls, Glasgow, on 19 January 2008 by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, with the composer present. Stevenson was very active as a transcriber of music other than his own, chiefly for the piano, in the tradition of Ferrucio Busoni, Percy Grainger and Leopold Godowsky. His transcriptions covered composers as