Biography

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I write music for real people playing real instruments. This music is built on and in dialogue with the Western classical tradition, but it also lets in all the music I love from Mahler and Kurtág to Jim Steinman and Alan Menken. I draw from all my musical experience to create pieces which I hope are personal, communicative, surprising, intertextual, dreamlike, theatrical and human. I especially like to explore the spectrum between the fragmentary and the symphonic in my pieces, between eloquence and ineloquence, the different ways music can speak and move forward. I don’t use amplification or electronics, being obsessed with the physical, human dimensions of live performance on acoustic instruments.

Recent projects include a new orchestral work for the London Symphony Orchestra‘s Barbican season, performances by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, and the publishing of Three Dream Songs by edition db. I was awarded the Royal Musical Association’s Tippett Medal in 2023 for Canzoni et ricercari (commissioned for the Cheltenham Music Festival as part of being a Royal Philharmonic Society composer) and the British Horn Society Composition Prize for Three Dream Songs in 2025. I have also taken part in the LSO’s Panufnik Composers Scheme and have had several broadcasts on BBC Radio 3. I am currently in residence with the Britten Sinfonia on their Magnum Opus programme, for which I’ll be writing two new commissions including a horn concerto.

I live in London now, but am originally from Pontefract in West Yorkshire. I got a life-changing scholarship to Chetham’s School of Music as a sixth-former (studying composition with Jeremy Pike and Gavin Wayte) before going on to do music at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge (studying with Giles Swayne) and the Royal Academy of Music (studying with David Sawer). I completed my PhD supervised by Julian Anderson at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, and have an active teaching career alongside my composing.