Stephen Emmer’s journey from silence back to sound is a story of reinvention, resilience, and artistic rebirth. It is also a reminder that creativity can flourish even in the face of profound personal barriers.
In a world overflowing with noise—traffic, construction, airplanes, crowded venues—most people shrug off the constant barrage. But for musicians, the stakes are life-changing. Dutch composer and musician Stephen Emmer understands this more intimately than most. After decades in music, he developed severe tinnitus and partial hearing loss—conditions that could have ended his career. Instead, he transformed them into the foundation of Mount Mundane, a richly textured album recorded with full orchestra and choir at London’s iconic Abbey Road Studios.
Early Challenges: When Sound Becomes a Threat
For Emmer, the roots of his hearing struggles go back to his early days as a touring musician. Playing in bands like the Lotus Eaters and the Minny Pops, he often performed in loud environments long before hearing protection was common practice. “Our generation was the one without any hearing protection,” he recalls. “There was no known fact at the time… of what damage it could do to you.”
He remembers musicians proudly boasting about standing right in front of amplifiers at deafening volumes. “Some people were quite proud in saying, yes, I stood all up front… it was really, really loud,” he says. “Obviously today we know a little more about sound.”
The consequences hit years later. Emmer developed a tonal form of tinnitus—a constant internal tone that never stops. “I’ve been hearing that now for more than a decade, 24/7,” he explains. The sound is internal and subjective, impossible for others to hear or measure. “It’s a rather lonely affair,” he adds, noting how hard it is to explain something no one else can perceive.
Alongside tinnitus, he also lost sensitivity in his left ear, making stereo listening almost unbearable. “I started to really miss the musical information… which didn’t reach my left ear,” he says. “That ruined all the appetite for listening.”
For a time, he stopped composing altogether.
Relearning How to Listen and Create
The turning point came through something surprisingly simple: a mono Bluetooth speaker. Emmer discovered that hearing music through a single source—rather than the left-right spread of stereo—allowed him to absorb the complete sound without missing information. “If I want to hear the full production, then I’ll have to do that with one speaker instead of two,” he explains. This seemingly small change reopened a door he thought was closed.
Yet getting back to creating wasn’t easy. When he finally felt ready to compose again, he found himself unsure where to begin. In that moment of uncertainty, he reached into the past. Like many musicians of his era, Emmer had recorded musical ideas onto cassette tapes in the 1980s. He dug them out—tiny fragments of melodies from 1985, written by a much younger version of himself. To his surprise, something stirred.
“I actually thought the melodies of this young composer… I can hear something in those melodies,” he recalls. They became a lifeline—raw material that he, now older and armed with decades more skill, could develop into something new. “This is how it started to be a musical dialogue with my younger self,” he says. The naïve simplicity of the old ideas gave him something to build on. “I could now easily embellish [them] with deeper, more meaningful harmonies and orchestrations.”
This process laid the foundation for Mount Mundane, an album grounded in reflection, rediscovery, and emotional clarity.
Crafting the Sound: Impressionism and Spaciousness
As Emmer began shaping the album, he gravitated toward the gentle harmonic language of French impressionism—Debussy, Ravel, Lili Boulanger. This was no coincidence. His hearing limitations made loud, aggressive music physically painful. “I can only create more tranquil type of music… because [loudness] simply hurts my ears,” he explains. The soft edges and shimmering harmonies of impressionism aligned perfectly with what he could comfortably hear and create.
“The mildness of French impressionist music and the harmonic richness of it was very suitable for what I was trying to say,” he says.
To bring these reimagined melodies to life, Emmer recorded at Abbey Road Studios with a carefully selected ensemble. He asked the “fixers”—the contractors who assemble session players—for musicians known for sensitivity rather than force. “Not belters or hard-boiled percussionists,” he told them. What he wanted were performers who could produce warmth, nuance, and lyricism. Many of the players came from major orchestras like the Royal Philharmonic and London Symphony.
Even the recording process was engineered for softness and space. Working with senior Abbey Road engineer Andrew Dudman, Emmer designed the sessions to anticipate a Dolby Atmos mix. “Why not take a bit more of a proactive attitude… and create the spaciousness during recording, not during mix down,” he explains. Instead of adding ambience later, they shaped it in the room—placing microphones deliberately to let the hall breathe around the instruments.
The result is a sound world both intimate and expansive, shimmering with atmospheric detail.
A Career-Defining Moment at Abbey Road
For Emmer, the emotional peak of the project came during the sessions themselves. Standing in Abbey Road’s legendary Studio Two—the same room where the Beatles made history—felt surreal. But the deeper impact came from hearing his music played by dozens of musicians at once.
Conductor Anthony Weeden invited him down from the control room to stand beside the choir as they prepared to record. “Seeing so and hearing so many people performing the music which you’ve created… was for me indeed a magical moment,” Emmer says. After years of fearing he might never compose again, this felt like a triumph.
He describes an almost cinematic sense of completion: “If I cross the world-famous zebra in front of Abbey Road and I might get hit by a car—no problem. I have my mission accomplished.”
Breaking the Taboo: Artists Against Tinnitus
Emmer’s personal journey also led him to help found Artists Against Tinnitus, an organisation dedicated to breaking the silence around the condition. Many musicians, he explains, hide their symptoms out of fear—fear they’ll be judged, or even fired. “I discovered one thing. It’s a taboo amongst us who make music,” he says.
His goal is to change that. “Let’s get a foundation where we, as artists, will take responsibility and organize workshops, lectures, et cetera, to get rid of that taboo.”
The issue extends far beyond musicians; veterans, surgical patients, and many others suffer from tinnitus. But artists, he believes, can help lead the conversation.
A Message of Persistence and Hope
Despite everything he has faced, Emmer’s career has reached new heights. Mount Mundane has won more than 15 international awards—more acclaim than any of his previous albums. For him, the success carries a deep symbolic meaning.
He compares his experience to that of a Paralympic athlete: someone who has lost something, yet achieves greatness through perseverance. “Life isn’t over when you come across barricades like that,” he says. “There must be something in [this album] that appeals to people… and this especially shows that there is hope.”
Listen to the interview here