List of British classical composers
Encyclopedia
The following is a list of people born in Britain or of British citizenship who have worked or currently work in the classical music tradition.

A

  • Richard Addinsell
    Richard Addinsell
    Richard Stewart Addinsell was a British composer, best known for film music, primarily his Warsaw Concerto, composed for the 1941 film Dangerous Moonlight .-Life:...

     (13 January 1904 – 15 November 1977)
  • John Addison
    John Addison
    John Mervyn Addison was a British composer best known for his film scores.Addison was educated at Wellington College, Berkshire and at the age of sixteen entered the Royal College of Music. He studied composition with Gordon Jacob, oboe with Léon Goossens, and clarinet with Frederick Thurston. ...

  • Thomas Adès
    Thomas Adès
    Thomas Adès is a British composer, pianist and conductor.-Biography:Adès studied piano with Paul Berkowitz and later composition with Robert Saxton at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London...

  • Kenneth Alford
    Kenneth Alford
    Frederick Joseph Ricketts was a British composer of marches for band. Using the pen name Kenneth J. Alford, his marches are considered to be great examples of the art...

  • William Alwyn
    William Alwyn
    William Alwyn, CBE, born William Alwyn Smith was an English composer, conductor, and music teacher.-Life and music:...

  • Geoffrey Alvarez
    Geoffrey Álvarez
    Geoffrey Alvarez is a British/Nicaraguan composer and conductor.He chairs the annual international composition competition run by.He studied composition privately with Giles Swayne, then with Paul Patterson at the Royal Academy of Music as a Leverhulme scholar, and later at the University of York...

  • Denis ApIvor
    Denis ApIvor
    Denis ApIvor was a British composer. He belonged to the generation of modernists that included Humphrey Searle and Elisabeth Lutyens....

  • Thomas Arne
  • Richard Arnell
    Richard Arnell
    Richard Anthony Sayer Arnell was an English composer of classical music. Arnell composed in all the established genres for the concert stage, and his list of works includes six completed symphonies and six string quartets.-Biography:Arnell was born in Hampstead, London...

  • Sir Malcolm Arnold
    Malcolm Arnold
    Sir Malcolm Henry Arnold, CBE was an English composer and symphonist.Malcolm Arnold began his career playing trumpet professionally, but by age thirty his life was devoted to composition. He was ranked with Benjamin Britten as one of the most sought-after composers in Britain...

  • Sir Ivor Atkins
    Ivor Atkins
    Sir Ivor Algernon Atkins was the choirmaster and organist at Worcester Cathedral for over 50 years . He is well known for editing Allegri's Miserere with the famous top-C part for the treble...

  • Frederic Austin
    Frederic Austin
    Frederic Austin was an English baritone singer, a musical teacher and composer in the period 1905–30. He is best remembered for his restoration and production of The Beggar's Opera by John Gay and Johann Christoph Pepusch, and its sequel, Polly, in 1920–23...


B

  • Edgar Bainton
    Edgar Bainton
    Edgar Leslie Bainton was a British composer, most celebrated for his church music. Perhaps his most famous piece is the liturgical anthem And I saw a new heaven, but during recent years Bainton's other musical works - neglected for decades - have been increasingly often heard in the concert...

  • Christopher Ball
    Christopher Ball
    Christopher Ball is a British clarinettist, composer and conductorBall was born in Leeds, England, and studied clarinet and piano at the Royal Manchester College of Music where his contemporaries included Harrison Birtwistle , Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr and John Ogdon...

  • Sir Granville Bantock
    Granville Bantock
    Sir Granville Bantock was a British composer of classical music.-Biography:Granville Ransome Bantock was born in London. His father was a Scottish doctor. He was intended by his parents for the Indian Civil Service but was drawn into the musical world. His first teacher was Dr Gordon Saunders at...

  • Stephen Mark Barchan
    Stephen Mark Barchan
    Stephen Mark Barchan is a British composer and conductor.-Career:Barchan studied composition with Richard Steinitz and Edwin Roxburgh .Organisations who have presented his music include London Sinfonietta Collective, LSO Discovery, Park Lane...

  • David Barlow
  • Richard Barrett
    Richard Barrett (composer)
    Richard Barrett is a British composer.-Biography:Barrett began to study music seriously only after graduating in genetics and microbiology at University College London in 1980 . From then until 1983 he took private lessons with Peter Wiegold...

  • Stanley Bate
    Stanley Bate
    -Life:Bate received early training in music and had composed two operas by age twenty. He studied under Ralph Vaughan Williams, R.O. Morris, Gordon Jacob, and Arthur Benjamin, and then in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and in Berlin with Paul Hindemith. He wrote incidental music for performances at...

  • Sir Arnold Bax
    Arnold Bax
    Sir Arnold Edward Trevor Bax, KCVO was an English composer and poet. His musical style blended elements of romanticism and impressionism, often with influences from Irish literature and landscape. His orchestral scores are noted for their complexity and colourful instrumentation...

  • Sally Beamish
    Sally Beamish
    Sally Beamish is a British composer of chamber, vocal, choral and orchestral music. She has also worked in the field of music theatre, film and television, as well as composing for children and for her local community....

  • David Bedford
    David Bedford
    David Vickerman Bedford , was an English composer and musician. He wrote and played both popular and classical music....

  • Luke Bedford
    Luke Bedford
    Luke Bedford is a British composer.He was educated at St Crispin's School in Wokingham. He studied composition with Edwin Roxburgh and Simon Bainbridge at the Royal College of Music, and won the Mendelssohn Scholarship in 2000. This was followed by post-graduate study with Simon Bainbridge at the...

  • Arthur Benjamin
    Arthur Benjamin
    Arthur Leslie Benjamin was an Australian composer, pianist, conductor and teacher. He is best known as the composer of Jamaican Rhumba, composed in 1938.-Biography:...

  • George Benjamin
    George Benjamin (composer)
    George William John Benjamin, CBE is a British composer of classical music. He is also a conductor, pianist and teacher....

  • Sir Richard Rodney Bennett
    Richard Rodney Bennett
    Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, CBE is an English composer renowned for his film scores and his jazz performance as much as for his challenging concert works...

    (1936)
  • Sir William Sterndale Bennett
    William Sterndale Bennett
    Sir William Sterndale Bennett was an English composer. He ranks as the most distinguished English composer of the Romantic school-Biography:...

  • Sir Lennox Berkeley
    Lennox Berkeley
    Sir Lennox Randal Francis Berkeley was an English composer.- Biography :He was born in Oxford, England, and educated at the Dragon School, Gresham's School and Merton College, Oxford...

     (12 May 1903 – 26 December 1989)
  • Michael Berkeley
    Michael Berkeley
    Michael Berkeley is a British composer and broadcaster on music.-Early life:His father was the composer Sir Lennox Berkeley...

  • Lord Berners

  • Ronald Binge
    Ronald Binge
    Ronald Binge was a British composer and arranger of light music.-Biography:He was born in a working-class neighbourhood in Derby in the English Midlands. In his childhood he was a chorister at Saint Andrews Church , London Road, Derby - 'the railwaymens church'...

  • Sir Harrison Birtwistle
    Harrison Birtwistle
    Sir Harrison Paul Birtwistle CH is a British contemporary composer.-Life:Birtwistle was born in Accrington, a mill town in Lancashire some 20 miles north of Manchester. His interest in music was encouraged by his mother, who bought him a clarinet when he was seven, and arranged for him to have...

     (born 15 July 1934)
  • Sir Arthur Bliss
    Arthur Bliss
    ‎Sir Arthur Edward Drummond Bliss, CH, KCVO was an English composer and conductor.Bliss's musical training was cut short by the First World War, in which he served with distinction in the army...

  • John Blow
    John Blow
    John Blow was an English Baroque composer and organist, appointed to Westminster Abbey in 1669. His pupils included William Croft, Jeremiah Clarke and Henry Purcell. In 1685 he was named a private musician to James II. His only stage composition, Venus and Adonis John Blow (baptised 23 February...

  • Carey Blyton
    Carey Blyton
    Carey Blyton was a British composer and writer best known for his song Bananas In Pyjamas which later became an Australian children's television series, and for his work on Doctor Who....

  • Capel Bond
    Capel Bond
    Capel Bond was an English organist and composer.He was born in Gloucester, the son of William Bond and the younger brother of painter and japanner Daniel Bond . He received his education at the Crypt school with his uncle, Rev...

  • Rutland Boughton
    Rutland Boughton
    Rutland Boughton was an English composer who became well known in the early 20th century as a composer of opera and choral music....

  • York Bowen
    York Bowen
    Edwin York Bowen was an English composer and pianist. Bowen’s musical career spanned more than fifty years during which time he wrote over 160 works. As well as being a pianist and composer, Bowen was a talented conductor, organist, violist and horn player...

  • Havergal Brian
    Havergal Brian
    Havergal Brian , was a British classical composer.Brian acquired a legendary status at the time of his rediscovery in the 1950s and 1960s for the many symphonies he had managed to write. By the end of his life he had completed 32, an unusually large number for any composer since Haydn or Mozart...

  • Frank Bridge
    Frank Bridge
    Frank Bridge was an English composer and violist.-Life:Bridge was born in Brighton and studied at the Royal College of Music in London from 1899 to 1903 under Charles Villiers Stanford and others...

     (26 February 1879 – 10 January 1941)
  • Benjamin Britten, Lord Britten
    Benjamin Britten
    Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to...

  • Gavin Bryars
    Gavin Bryars
    Richard Gavin Bryars is an English composer and double bassist. He has been active in, or has produced works in, a variety of styles of music, including jazz, free improvisation, minimalism, historicism, experimental music, avant-garde and neoclassicism.-Early life and career:Born in Goole, East...

  • John Bull
    John Bull
    John Bull is a national personification of Britain in general and England in particular, especially in political cartoons and similar graphic works. He is usually depicted as a stout, middle-aged man, often wearing a Union Flag waistcoat.-Origin:...

  • Geoffrey Burgon
    Geoffrey Burgon
    Geoffrey Alan Burgon was a British composer notable for his television and film themes.-Life and career:Burgon was born in Hampshire in 1941, and taught himself the trumpet in order to join a jazz band at school...

  • Alan Bush
    Alan Bush
    Alan Dudley Bush was a British composer and pianist. He was a committed socialist, and politics sometimes provided central themes in his music.-Personal life:...

  • Geoffrey Bush
    Geoffrey Bush
    Geoffrey Bush was a British composer, organist and scholar of 20th century English music.Geoffrey Bush was born in London, became a chorister at Salisbury Cathedral at the age of 8 and studied informally with the composer John Ireland...

  • Arthur Butterworth
    Arthur Butterworth
    Arthur Butterworth MBE is an English composer, conductor and teacher.Butterworth attended the Royal Manchester College of Music , where he studied composition with Richard Hall and also learned the trumpet and conducting...

     (b. 4 August 1923 in Manchester)
  • George Butterworth
    George Butterworth
    George Sainton Kaye Butterworth, MC was an English composer best known for the orchestral idyll The Banks of Green Willow and his song settings of A. E...

     (12 July 1885 – 5 August 1916)
  • William Byrd
    William Byrd
    William Byrd was an English composer of the Renaissance. He wrote in many of the forms current in England at the time, including various types of sacred and secular polyphony, keyboard and consort music.-Provenance:Knowledge of Byrd's biography expanded in the late 20th century, thanks largely...

     (1540 or late 1539 – 4 July 1623)


C

  • Thomas Campion
    Thomas Campion
    Thomas Campion was an English composer, poet and physician. He wrote over a hundred lute songs; masques for dancing, and an authoritative technical treatise on music.-Life:...

     (12 February 1567 – 1 March 1620)
  • Cornelius Cardew
    Cornelius Cardew
    Cornelius Cardew was an English experimental music composer, and founder of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble. He later rejected the avant-garde in favour of a politically motivated "people's liberation music".-Biography:Cardew was born in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire...

  • Doreen Carwithen
    Doreen Carwithen
    Doreen Mary Carwithen was a British composer of classical and film music. She was also known as Mary Alwyn.-Biography:...

  • Robert Carver
    Robert Carver (composer)
    Robert Carver was a Scottish Renaissance monk and composer of Christian sacred music.He spent much of his life at Scone Abbey in Perthshire and is regarded as Scotland's greatest sixteenth-century composer. He is best known for his sacred choral music, of which there are five surviving masses and...

  • Bob Chilcott
    Bob Chilcott
    Robert "Bob" Chilcott is a British choral composer, conductor, and singer, based in Oxford, England.Born in Plymouth, Chilcott sang in the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, both as a boy and as a university student. He performed the Pie Jesu of Fauré's Requiem on the 1967 recording. In 1985 he...

  • Jeremiah Clarke
    Jeremiah Clarke
    Jeremiah Clarke was an English baroque composer and organist.Thought to have been born in London around 1674, Clarke was a pupil of John Blow at St Paul's Cathedral. He later became organist at the Chapel Royal...

  • Nigel Clarke
    Nigel Clarke
    Nigel Clarke is a British composer and musician. He is a former head of composition and contemporary music at the London College of Music and Media....

  • Rebecca Helferich Clarke
    Rebecca Helferich Clarke
    Rebecca Clarke was an English classical composer and violist best known for her chamber music featuring the viola. She was born in Harrow and studied at the Royal Academy of Music and Royal College of Music in London, later becoming one of the first female professional orchestral players...

  • Frederic Cliffe
    Frederic Cliffe
    Frederic Cliffe was an English composer.-Life:As a youth, Cliffe showed a promising musical aptitude and was enrolled as a scholar of the National Training School for Music, the parent of the Royal College of Music, under its first Principal Arthur Sullivan.From 1884 to 1931 he held the post of...

  • Eric Coates
    Eric Coates
    Eric Coates was an English composer of light music and a viola player.-Life:Eric was born in Hucknall in Nottinghamshire to William Harrison Coates , a surgeon, and his wife, Mary Jane Gwynne, hailing from Usk in Monmouthshire...

  • Julian Cochran
    Julian Cochran
    thumb|200px|Julian Cochran in 1998Julian Cochran is an English-born Australian composer.Cochran's earlier works show stylistic influences from Impressionist music and his later works are more noticeably influenced by Classical music and folk music of Eastern Europe...

  • Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
    Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
    Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was an English composer who achieved such success that he was once called the "African Mahler".-Early life and education:...

  • Arnold Cooke
    Arnold Cooke
    Arnold Atkinson Cooke was a British composer.-Career:He was born at Gomersal, West Yorkshire into a family of carpet manufacturers. He was educated at Repton School and at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, where he read History, but he was already attracted to a career in music...

  • Benjamin Cooke
    Benjamin Cooke
    Benjamin Cooke was an English composer, organist and teacher.Cooke was born in London and named after his father, a music publisher based in Covent Garden...

  • Deryck Cooke
    Deryck Cooke
    Deryck Cooke was a British musician, musicologist and broadcaster.-Life:Cooke was born in Leicester to a poor and working class family; his father died when he was a child, but his mother was able to afford piano lessons. Cooke acquired a brilliant technique and began to compose...

  • Sir Frederic Hymen Cowen
    Frederic Hymen Cowen
    Sir Frederic Hymen Cowen , was a British pianist, conductor and composer.-Early years:Cowen was born Hymen Frederick Cohen at 90 Duke Street, Kingston, Jamaica, the fifth and last child of Frederick Augustus Cohen and Emily Cohen née Davis. His siblings were Elizabeth Rose Cohen ; actress,...

  • Robert Crawford
  • Harold Craxton
    Harold Craxton
    Thomas Harold Hunt Craxton, OBE was an English pianist and composer.Craxton studied piano at the Tobias Matthay Pianoforte School and made a name for himself early in his career as an accompanist with performers such as Dame Nellie Melba, Dame Clara Butt, Lionel Tertis and John McCormack.In 1919...

  • William Crotch
    William Crotch
    William Crotch was an English composer, organist and artist.Born in Norwich to a master carpenter he showed early musical talent . The three and a half year old Master William Crotch was taken to London by his ambitious mother, where he not only played on the organ of the Chapel Royal in St....

  • Joe Cutler
    Joe Cutler
    Joe Cutler is a British composer who studied music at the Universities of Huddersfield and Durham, before a scholarship at the Chopin Academy in Warsaw, Poland. He has taught composition at the Birmingham Conservatoire since 2000, and since 2005 he has been the Head of Composition there...

  • Francis Cutting
    Francis Cutting
    Francis Cutting was an English Lutenist and Composer during the Renaissance period.He is best known for having composed Packington's Pound and Greensleeves, both pieces originally intended for the lute.-References:...


D

  • Sir Peter Maxwell Davies
    Peter Maxwell Davies
    Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, CBE is an English composer and conductor and is currently Master of the Queen's Music.-Biography:...

  • Sir Walford Davies
  • Frederick Delius
    Frederick Delius
    Frederick Theodore Albert Delius, CH was an English composer. Born in the north of England to a prosperous mercantile family of German extraction, he resisted attempts to recruit him to commerce...

  • Stephen Dodgson
    Stephen Dodgson
    Stephen Dodgson is a British composer and broadcaster.- Biography :During World War II, he served in the Royal Navy. From 1947 to 1949, Dodgson studied at the Royal College of Music, where he later taught composition. In 1950, he visited Italy on a travelling scholarship, after which he taught in...

  • James Douglas
    James Douglas (composer)
    James Douglas is a Scottish classical composer.Douglas was born in Dumbarton. He was brought up in Edinburgh and moved to live in North West Scotland in 2006. Douglas has composed over 2000 works including music for a wide variety of instruments and a number of choral pieces...

  • John Dowland
    John Dowland
    John Dowland was an English Renaissance composer, singer, and lutenist. He is best known today for his melancholy songs such as "Come, heavy sleep" , "Come again", "Flow my tears", "I saw my Lady weepe" and "In darkness let me dwell", but his instrumental music has undergone a major revival, and has...

     (1563 – buried 20 February 1626)
  • Andrew Downes
    Andrew Downes (composer)
    Andrew Downes is a British classical composer.Downes was born in Handsworth, Birmingham. In 1969, he won a choral scholarship to St. John's College, Cambridge, where he gained an MA degree specializing in composition, and in 1974 went on to study with Herbert Howells at the Royal College of Music...

  • Paul Drayton
    Paul Drayton (composer)
    Paul Drayton is a British composer, conductor, pianist, and teacher.He was educated at High Wycombe Royal Grammar School from 1956 to 1962. He studied music at Brasenose College, Oxford, and was subsequently Director of Music at New College School, Oxford...

  • Thomas Dunhill
    Thomas Dunhill
    Thomas Frederick Dunhill was an English composer and writer on musical subjects. He is best-known for his song-cycle The Wind among the Reeds.-Life and career:Thomas Dunhill was born in Hampstead, London...

     (1 February 1877 – 13 March 1946
  • John Dunstable
    John Dunstable
    John Dunstaple was an English composer of polyphonic music of the late medieval era and early Renaissance...

    (c. 1390 – 24 December 1453)
  • Sir George Dyson
    George Dyson (composer)
    Sir George Dyson KCVO was a well-known English musician and composer. His son is the physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson and among his grandchildren are the science historian George Dyson and Esther Dyson...


E

  • Sir Edward Elgar
    Edward Elgar
    Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet OM, GCVO was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos...

    (2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934)
  • Rosalind Ellicott
    Rosalind Ellicott
    -Life:Ellicott was born in Cambridge, the daughter of Charles Ellicott, the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol. Her father had no interest in music whatsoever; however it has been suggested that it was his position that enabled her to have some of her works performed at the Three Choirs Festival...

  • David Ellis
  • Brian Eno
    Brian Eno
    Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...

    (born 15 May 1948)

F

  • David Fanshawe
    David Fanshawe
    David Arthur Fanshawe was an English composer, ethnomusicologist and self-styled explorer. His work is situated at the crossroads of traditional and modern music. His best-known composition is the 1972 choral work African Sanctus.- Life :Fanshawe was born in Paignton in Devon in 1942...

  • Giles Farnaby
    Giles Farnaby
    Giles Farnaby was an English composer and virginalist of the Renaissance and Baroque periods.-Life:Giles Farnaby was born about 1563, perhaps in Truro, Cornwall, England or near London. His father, Thomas, was a Cittizen and Joyner of London, and Giles may have been related to Thomas Farnaby , the...

    (c. 1563 – November 1640)
  • Eric Fenby
    Eric Fenby
    Eric William Fenby OBE was an English composer and teacher who is best known for being Frederick Delius's amanuensis from 1928 to 1934. He helped Delius realise a number of works that would not otherwise have been forthcoming....

  • Brian Ferneyhough
    Brian Ferneyhough
    Brian John Peter Ferneyhough is an English composer. His music is characterized by the extensive use of complex rhythmic tuplet notation which features in all his works...

    (born 16 January 1943)
  • Gerald Finzi
    Gerald Finzi
    Gerald Raphael Finzi was a British composer. Finzi is best known as a song-writer, but also wrote in other genres...

     (14 July 1901 – 27 September 1956)
  • Arthur Elwell Fisher
    Arthur Elwell Fisher
    Arthur Elwell Fisher was an English composer, organist, violist, violinist, and music educator who was primarily active in North America. His compositional output includes String Trio in G, Opus 54, a Rhapsody for violin and orchestra, a Thanksgiving Cantata, several works for solo piano and solo...

  • Graham Fitkin
    Graham Fitkin
    Graham Fitkin is a British composer, pianist and conductor. His compositions fall broadly into the minimalist and postminimalist genres...

  • Eliza Flower
    Eliza Flower
    Eliza Flower was a British musician and composer. In addition to her own work, Flower became known for her friendships including those with William Johnson Fox, Robert Browning, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor.-Biography:...

  • Cecil Forsyth
    Cecil Forsyth
    Cecil Forsyth was an English composer and musicologist. He was born in Greenwich on November 30, 1870, and he died in New York on December 7, 1941. He studied at Edinburgh University and at the Royal College of Music , and played viola in various London Orchestras...

  • Christopher Fox
  • Benjamin Frankel
    Benjamin Frankel
    Benjamin Frankel was a British composer. Frankel's most famous pieces include a cycle of five string quartets and eight symphonies as well as a number of concertos for violin and viola; his single best-known piece is probably the First Sonata for Solo Violin, which, like his concertos, resulted...

  • Peter Racine Fricker
    Peter Racine Fricker
    Peter Racine Fricker was an English composer who lived in the United States for the last thirty years of his life....

  • John Foulds
    John Foulds
    John Herbert Foulds was a British composer of classical music. Largely self-taught as a composer, he was one of the most remarkable and unjustly forgotten figures of the "British Musical Renaissance"....


G

  • Hans Gál
    Hans Gál
    Hans Gál was a composer, teacher and pianist.Gál was born to a Jewish family in the small village of Brunn am Gebirge, Niederösterreich, just outside Vienna. He was trained in that city at the New Vienna Conservatory where later he taught for some time. While a student he won the K. und K...

  • Henry Balfour Gardiner
    Henry Balfour Gardiner
    Henry Balfour Gardiner was an English musician, composer, and teacher. Between his conventional education at Charterhouse School and New College, Oxford, where he obtained only a pass degree, Gardiner was a piano student at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main where he was taught by Knorr...

  • William Gardiner
    William Gardiner (composer)
    William Gardiner was an English composer who is best known for his hymns. He published two collections of his works: Sac­red Melodies and Music and Friends .-References:...

  • John Gardner
    John Gardner (composer)
    John Linton Gardner, CBE is an English composer of classical music.-Biography:Gardner was born in Manchester, England and brought up in Ilfracombe, North Devon. His father Alfred Linton Gardner was a local GP and amateur composer who was killed in action in the last months of the First World War....

  • Orlando Gibbons
    Orlando Gibbons
    Orlando Gibbons was an English composer, virginalist and organist of the late Tudor and early Jacobean periods...

     (baptised 25 December 1583 – 5 June 1625)
  • Armstrong Gibbs
  • Ruth Gipps
    Ruth Gipps
    Ruth Gipps was a British composer, oboist and pianist.-Biography:Ruth Gipps was born in Bexhill-on-Sea, England in 1921. She was something of a child prodigy, winning performance competitions in which she was considerably younger than the rest of the field -- and female, to boot...

  • Andrew Glover
  • Alexander Goehr
    Alexander Goehr
    Alexander Goehr is an English composer and academic.Goehr was born in Berlin in 1932, the son of the conductor and Schoenberg pupil Walter Goehr. In his early twenties he emerged as a central figure in the Manchester School of post-war British composers. In 1955–56 he joined Oliver Messiaen's...

  • Berthold Goldschmidt
    Berthold Goldschmidt
    Berthold Goldschmidt was a German Jewish composer who spent most of his life in England...

  • Jonathan Goldstein
    Jonathan Goldstein (composer)
    Jonathan Goldstein is an award-winning British composer of music for film, television, advertising, theatre and live events, whose work encompasses a range of contemporary classical styles with orchestral, jazz, electro-acoustic & world influences.-Biography:...

  • Sir Eugene Goossens
    Eugène Aynsley Goossens
    Sir Eugene Aynsley Goossens was an English conductor and composer.-Biography:He was born in Camden Town, London, the son of the Belgian conductor and violinist Eugène Goossens and the grandson of the conductor Eugène Goossens...

  • Jonny Greenwood
    Jonny Greenwood
    Jonathan Richard Guy "Jonny" Greenwood is an English musician and composer, best known as a member of the English rock band Radiohead. Greenwood is a multi-instrumentalist, but serves mainly as lead guitarist and keyboard player. In addition to guitar and keyboard, he plays viola, harmonica,...

  • Edward Gregson
    Edward Gregson
    Edward Gregson is an English composer of international standing, whose music has been performed, broadcast, and recorded worldwide. He was born in Sunderland, England, in 1945. He studied composition and piano at the Royal Academy of Music from 1963-7, winning five prizes for composition...

  • Ivor Gurney
    Ivor Gurney
    Ivor Bertie Gurney was an English composer and poet.-Life:Born at 3 Queen Street, Gloucester in 1890, the second of four children of David Gurney, a tailor, and his wife Florence, a seamstress, Gurney showed musical ability early...


H

  • Patrick Hadley
    Patrick Hadley
    Patrick Arthur Sheldon Hadley was a British composer.-Biography:Patrick Sheldon Hadley was born on 5 March 1899 in Cambridge. His father, William Sheldon Hadley, was at that time a fellow of Pembroke College...

  • Richard Hall
    Richard Hall (composer)
    Richard Hall was an English musician and composer who became professor of composition at the Royal Manchester College of Music, a position he held from 1938 until 1956, when he became director of music at Dartington College of Arts...

  • Iain Hamilton
    Iain Hamilton (composer)
    Iain Ellis Hamilton was a Scottish composer.He was educated in London where he became an apprentice engineer, and remained in that profession for the next seven years. He undertook the study of music in his spare time...

  • Sir Hamilton Harty
    Hamilton Harty
    Sir Hamilton Harty was an Irish and British composer, conductor, pianist and organist. In his capacity as a conductor, he was particularly noted as an interpreter of the music of Berlioz and he was much respected as a piano accompanist of exceptional prowess...

  • Richard Harris
    Richard Harris (composer)
    Richard Harris is a London-based composer, arranger, transcriber, teacher and pianist.Richard Harris studied composition and orchestration at the University of Edinburgh, where his tutors included Kenneth Leighton...

     (born 5 March 1968)
  • Patrick Hawes
    Patrick Hawes
    Patrick Hawes is a British composer.He studied at St Chad's College, University of Durham before working as a teacher of music and English, being appointed composer in residence at Charterhouse School, where he produced a children's opera and several other choral works, some in partnership with...

  • Christopher Headington
    Christopher Headington
    Christopher Headington was an English composer and pianist.Born in London, he studied at Lancing College and the Royal Academy of Music, later studying composition with Lennox Berkeley...

  • Anthony Hedges
    Anthony Hedges
    Anthony Hedges is an English composer whose output covers most musical genres. His orchestral music includes two symphonies, a Sinfonia Concertante, concertinos for Flute, Horn, Trumpet, Bassoon, Variations on a theme of Rameau, together with a substantial number of light music compositions...

  • Victor Hely-Hutchinson
    Victor Hely-Hutchinson
    Christian Victor Hely-Hutchinson was a British composer, born in Cape Town, Cape Colony ....

  • Alun Hoddinott
    Alun Hoddinott
    Alun Hoddinott CBE , was a Welsh composer of classical music, one of the first to receive international recognition.-Life and works:...


  • Joseph Holbrooke
    Joseph Holbrooke
    Joseph Charles Holbrooke was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He was sometimes referred to as "the cockney Wagner".-Family:...

  • Alfred Hollins
    Alfred Hollins
    Alfred Hollins was a respected English organist, composer and teacher who was a famous recitalist in Scotland.- Biography :...

  • Robin Holloway
    Robin Holloway
    Robin Greville Holloway is an English composer.-Early life:From 1952 to 1957, he was a chorister at St Paul's Cathedral...

  • Derek Holman
    Derek Holman
    Derek Holman, CM is a choral conductor, organist, and composer.Holman attended the Royal Academy of Music from 1948 to 1952 and studied with Sir William McKie, Eric Thiman, and York Bowen...

  • Gustav Holst
    Gustav Holst
    Gustav Theodore Holst was an English composer. He is most famous for his orchestral suite The Planets....

     (born Gustavus Theodore von Holst, 21 September 1874 – 25 May 1934)
  • Imogen Holst
    Imogen Holst
    Imogen Clare Holst, CBE was a British composer and conductor, and sole child of composer Gustav Holst.Imogen Holst was brought up in west London and educated at St Paul's Girls' School, where her father was director of music...

  • Bill Hopkins
    Bill Hopkins
    G.W. Hopkins was a British composer, pianist and music critic.Hopkins was born in Prestbury, Cheshire and educated at Rossall School, Lancashire; his mother's learning difficulties meant she was unable to look after him, and he was raised by aunts...

  • David Horne
    David Horne (composer)
    David Horne is a Scottish composer, pianist, and teacher.A resident composer with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic for four years, he has been awarded several commissions...

  • Herbert Howells
    Herbert Howells
    Herbert Norman Howells CH was an English composer, organist, and teacher, most famous for his large output of Anglican church music.-Life:...

  • Vic Hoyland
    Vic Hoyland
    Vic Hoyland is an English composer.He was born in Wombwell, Yorkshire, England.Educated at Hull and York universities , Hoyland was Haywood Fellow at the University of Birmingham where he is currently Reader in Composition.Influenced by Luciano Berio and Franco Donatoni, Hoyland has composed...

  • William Hurlstone
    William Hurlstone
    William Yeates Hurlstone was an English composer who studied piano and composition at the Royal College of Music, after gaining a scholarship. His piano professors were Algernon Ashton and Edward Dannreuther...



J

  • Gordon Jacob
    Gordon Jacob
    Gordon Percival Septimus Jacob was an English composer. He is known for his wind instrument composition and his instructional writings.-Life:...

  • Rupert Jeffcoat
    Rupert Jeffcoat
    Rupert Edward Elessing Jeffcoat is a Scottish organist, composer, and Anglican priest.- Life :Jeffcoat was born in Edinburgh, Scotland....

  • Karl Jenkins
    Karl Jenkins
    -Other works:*Adiemus: Live — live versions of Adiemus music*Palladio *Eloise *Imagined Oceans *The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace...

  • Patrick Jonathan
    Patrick Jonathan
    -Life:Patrick Jonathan is a composer born in London, England, but currently based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A former student of Stanley Glasser, Edward Gregson and Don B...

  • Daniel Jones
    Daniel Jones (composer)
    Daniel Jenkyn Jones OBE was a composer of classical music, who worked in Britain. He used both serial and tonal techniques...

  • Wilfred Josephs
    Wilfred Josephs
    -Life:Born in Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne, Wilfred Josephs had his first musical studies in Newcastle with Arthur Milner, and showed early promise, but was persuaded by his parents to take up a 'sensible' career. He subsequently became a dentist, qualifying as a Bachelor of Dental Surgery of the...

  • John Joubert
    John Joubert (composer)
    John Joubert is a British composer of South African descent, particularly of choral works. He has lived in Moseley, a suburb of Birmingham, England, for over 40 years. A music academic at the universities of Hull and Birmingham for 36 years, Joubert took early retirement in 1986 to concentrate on...


L

  • Constant Lambert
    Constant Lambert
    Leonard Constant Lambert was a British composer and conductor.-Early life:Lambert, the son of Russian-born Australian painter George Lambert, was educated at Christ's Hospital and the Royal College of Music...

  • Frederic Lamond
  • Philip Lane
    Philip Lane (composer)
    Philip Lane is an English composer and musicologist. He is noted for his light music compositions and arrangements, as well as his painstaking work reconstructing lost film scores.-Biography:...

  • Kenneth Leighton
    Kenneth Leighton
    Kenneth Leighton was a British composer and pianist. His compositions include much Anglican church music, and many pieces for choir and for piano as well as concertos, symphonies, much chamber music and an opera. He wrote a well-known setting of the Coventry Carol...

  • Jeffrey Lewis
    Jeffrey Lewis
    Jeffrey Lewis is an American singer/songwriter and comic book artist.-Early life:Lewis attended State University of New York at Purchase and graduated in 1997 with a degree in Literature...

  • Paul Lewis
    Paul Lewis (composer)
    Paul Lewis is a British composer who was born in Brighton, England. Lewis began composing for television at age 20 and is best known today for his television music...

  • George Lloyd
    George Lloyd (composer)
    George Walter Selwyn Lloyd was a British composer.-Early life:Of Cornish ancestry, Lloyd grew up in a family with great enthusiasm for music. He was mainly home-schooled because of rheumatic fever. He later studied violin with Albert Sammons and composition with Harry Farjeon. He was a student at...

  • William Lloyd Webber
    William Lloyd Webber
    William Southcombe Lloyd Webber was an English organist and composer.-Life and career:Lloyd Webber was born in London...

  • Jon Lord
    Jon Lord
    Jonathan Douglas "Jon" Lord is an English composer, pianist and Hammond organ player.Jon Lord, also known as 'Hammond Lord', is a classically trained piano player. He is recognised for his Hammond organ blues-rock sound and for his pioneering work in fusing rock and classical or baroque forms...

  • Elisabeth Lutyens
    Elisabeth Lutyens
    Elisabeth Lutyens, CBE was a significant English composer.- Early life and education :She was one of the five children of architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and his wife Emily, who was profoundly involved in the Theosophical Movement...


M

  • Rita McAllister
    Rita McAllister
    Margaret 'Rita' McAllister is a Scottish musicologist and composer. She is the Director of Music at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and is renowned as an authority on the works of Sergei Prokofiev.She undertook her undergraduate studies at the University of Glasgow, graduating BMus...

  • John McCabe
    John McCabe (composer)
    John McCabe CBE is an English composer and pianist.- Biography :John McCabe was born in Huyton, Liverpool, Merseyside. A prolific composer from an early age, he had written thirteen symphonies by the time he was eleven...

  • Hamish MacCunn
    Hamish MacCunn
    thumb|right|Portrait of MacCunn, 1889, by [[John Pettie]]Hamish MacCunn , Scottish romantic composer, was born in Greenock, the son of a shipowner, and was educated at the Royal College of Music, where his teachers included Sir Hubert Parry and Sir Charles Villiers Stanford.MacCunn's first success...

  • Malcolm MacDonald
    Malcolm MacDonald
    Malcolm John MacDonald OM, PC was a British politician and diplomat.-Background:MacDonald was the son of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and Margaret MacDonald. Like his father he was born in Lossiemouth, Moray...

  • William McGibbon
    William McGibbon
    William McGibbon was a Scottish composer and violinist.Born and died in Edinburgh, he was the principal violinist of the Edinburgh Musical Society orchestra. Although a prolific composer, particularly for the flute, recorder and fiddle, only a few of his works are now known.-External links:...

  • Sir Alexander Mackenzie
  • John McLeod
    John McLeod (composer)
    John McLeod is a contemporary composer based in Edinburgh, who writes music in many media including film and television...

  • James MacMillan
  • Dame Elizabeth Maconchy
    Elizabeth Maconchy
    Dame Elizabeth Violet Maconchy Le Fanu DBE was an English composer, most noted for her cycle of thirteen string quartets.-Biography:...

  • Carlo Martelli
    Carlo Martelli
    Carlo Martelli is an English composer of classical music. He was born in London in 1935 into a working-class family , Carlo Martelli was brought up in Walworth and Richmond and became one of the most admired young composers in Britain while still in his teens.His teachers included William...

  • Benedict Mason
    Benedict Mason
    Benedict Mason, born on 23 February 1954, is a British composer.Mason was educated at King's College Cambridge and took a degree in film-making at the Royal College of Art . He did not turn to composition until his early 30s, but his first acknowledged work, Hinterstoisser Traverse , attracted...


  • Steve Martland
    Steve Martland
    Steve Martland is an English composer.-Life and Music :Martland was born in Liverpool, England and studied composition at Liverpool University and in the Netherlands with Louis Andriessen...

  • William Mathias
    William Mathias
    William Mathias CBE was a Welsh composer.-Brief biography:Mathias was born in Whitland, Carmarthenshire. A child prodigy, he started playing the piano at the age of three and composing at the age of five. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music under Lennox Berkeley, where he was elected a fellow...

  • Colin Matthews
    Colin Matthews
    Colin Matthews OBE is an English composer of classical music.-Early life and education:Matthews was born in London in 1946; his older brother is the composer David Matthews. He read classics at the University of Nottingham, and then studied composition there with Arnold Whittall, and with Nicholas...

  • David Matthews
    David Matthews (composer)
    David Matthews is an English composer of mainly orchestral, chamber, vocal and piano works.- Life :He was born in London into a family that was 'not especially' musical; the desire to compose did not manifest itself until he was sixteen, and for a time he and his younger brother Colin Matthews,...

  • Nicholas Maw
    Nicholas Maw
    John Nicholas Maw was a British composer.-Biography:Born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, Maw was the son of Clarence Frederick Maw and Hilda Ellen Chambers. He attended the Wennington School, a boarding school, in Wetherby in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was 14...

  • Billy Mayerl
    Billy Mayerl
    Billy Joseph Mayerl , was an English pianist and composer who built a career in music hall and musical theatre and became an acknowledged master of light music. Best known for his syncopated novelty piano solos, he wrote over 300 piano pieces, many of which were named after flowers and trees,...

  • Robin Milford
    Robin Milford
    Robin Milford was an English composer.- Biography :Milford was born in Oxford, son of Sir Humphrey Milford, publisher with Oxford University Press. He attended Rugby School from 1916 where his musical talent for the piano, flute and theory was recognised, and studied at the Royal College of Music...

  • Ernest John Moeran
    Ernest John Moeran
    Ernest John Moeran was an English composer who had strong associations with Ireland .-Early life:...

  • Dominic Muldowney
    Dominic Muldowney
    Dominic Muldowney is a British composer.-Biography:He studied at the universities of Southampton and York , and took private lessons with Harrison Birtwistle. From 1974 to 1976 he was composer-in-residence to the Southern Arts Association...

  • Thea Musgrave
    Thea Musgrave
    Thea Musgrave CBE is a Scottish composer of opera and classical music.-Biography:Born in Barnton, Edinburgh, Thea Musgrave studied at the University of Edinburgh and in Paris as a pupil of Nadia Boulanger...



P

  • Sir Hubert Parry
    Hubert Parry
    Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, 1st Baronet was an English composer, teacher and historian of music.Parry's first major works appeared in 1880. As a composer he is best known for the choral song "Jerusalem", the coronation anthem "I was glad" and the hymn tune "Repton", which sets the words...

  • Paul Patterson
    Paul Patterson
    Paul Patterson is a British composer and Manson Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music.Patterson studied trombone and composition at the Royal Academy of Music. He returned there to become Head of Composition and Contemporary Music until 1997, when he became Manson Professor of...

  • Harry Parr-Davies
  • Ian Parrott
    Ian Parrott
    Ian Parrott , who retired from the Gregynog Chair of Music at Aberystwyth in 1983, is a prolific Anglo-Welsh composer and writer on music. His distinctions include the first prize of the Royal Philharmonic Society for his symphonic poem Luxor, and commissions by the BBC and Yale University, and for...

  • Anthony Payne
    Anthony Payne
    Anthony Payne is an English composer, most famous for the work published as Edward Elgar: The Sketches for Symphony No. 3 Elaborated by Anthony Payne...

  • Martin Peerson
    Martin Peerson
    Martin Peerson was an English composer, organist and virginalist...

  • Cipriani Potter
    Cipriani Potter
    Philip Cipriani Hambly Potter was a British composer, pianist and educator.-Life and career:Born in London, the son of a piano teacher named Richard Huddleston Potter, Cipriani was named after his godmother...

  • Henry Purcell
    Henry Purcell
    Henry Purcell – 21 November 1695), was an English organist and Baroque composer of secular and sacred music. Although Purcell incorporated Italian and French stylistic elements into his compositions, his legacy was a uniquely English form of Baroque music...


R

  • Alan Rawsthorne
    Alan Rawsthorne
    Alan Rawsthorne was a British composer. He was born in Haslingden, Lancashire, and is buried in Thaxted churchyard in Essex.-Career:...

  • Timothy Raymond
  • Alan Ridout
    Alan Ridout
    -Life:Born at West Wickham, Greater London, England, Alan Ridout studied briefly at the Guildhall School of Music before commencing four years of study at the Royal College of Music, London with Herbert Howells and Gordon Jacob...

  • Betty Roe
    Betty Roe
    Betty Roe is an English composer, singer, vocal coach, and conductor.-Biography:Betty Roe was born in North Kensington, London, England. Her father was a fishmonger at the Shepherd's Bush Market, and her mother was a bookkeeper...

  • Cyril Rootham
    Cyril Rootham
    Cyril Bradley Rootham was an English composer, educator, organist and important figure in Cambridge music life.-Biography:...

  • Edmund Rubbra
    Edmund Rubbra
    Edmund Rubbra was a British composer. He composed both instrumental and vocal works for soloists, chamber groups and full choruses and orchestras. He was greatly esteemed by fellow musicians and was at the peak of his fame in the mid-20th century. The most famous of his pieces are his eleven...

  • John Rutter
    John Rutter
    John Milford Rutter CBE is a British composer, conductor, editor, arranger and record producer, mainly of choral music.-Biography:Born in London, Rutter was educated at Highgate School, where a fellow pupil was John Tavener. He read music at Clare College, Cambridge, where he was a member of the...


S

  • Leonard Salzedo
    Leonard Salzedo
    Leonard Salzedo was an English composer and conductor of Spanish descent....

  • Kevin Sargent
  • Sinan Savaskan
    Sinan Savaskan
    Sinan Carter Savaskan, born 1954, is a noted composer of contemporary classical music. He works and lives in London, England, where he is also head of academic music at Westminster School...

  • David Sawer
    David Sawer
    David Sawer is a British composer of opera and choral, orchestral and chamber music.-Biography:Sawer was born in Stockport, England. He studied music at the University of York where he began composing for contemporary music-theatre pieces. He continued his studies with Mauricio Kagel in Cologne...

  • Robert Saxton
    Robert Saxton
    -Biography:After early advice and encouragement from Benjamin Britten, Robert Saxton took private composition lessons with Elisabeth Lutyens. He went on to study with Robin Holloway at Cambridge University, with Robert Sherlaw Johnson as a post-graduate at Oxford University, and later with Berio....

  • Cyril Scott
    Cyril Scott
    Cyril Meir Scott was an English composer, writer, and poet.-Biography:Scott was born in Oxton, England to a shipper and scholar of Greek and Hebrew, and Mary Scott , an amateur pianist. He showed a talent for music from an early age and was sent to the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, Germany to...

  • Francis George Scott
    Francis George Scott
    Francis George Scott was a Scottish composer.Born in Hawick, Roxburghshire, he was the son of a supplier of mill-engineering parts. Educated at Hawick, and at the universities of Edinburgh and Durham, he studied composition under Jean Roger-Ducasse...

  • Marion Scott
    Marion Scott (musicologist)
    Marion Margaret Scott was an English violinist, musicologist, writer, music critic, editor, composer, and poet.-Biography:...

  • Humphrey Searle
    Humphrey Searle
    Humphrey Searle was a British composer.-Biography:He was born in Oxford where he was a classics scholar before studying — somewhat hesitantly — with John Ireland at the Royal College of Music in London, after which he went to Vienna on a six month scholarship to become a private pupil of Anton...

  • Mátyás Seiber
    Mátyás Seiber
    Mátyás György Seiber was a Hungarian-born composer who lived and worked in England from 1935 onward.-Career:Seiber was born in Budapest, and studied there with Zoltán Kodály, with whom he toured Hungary collecting folk songs. In 1928, he became director of the jazz department at the Hoch...

  • Martin Shaw
    Martin Shaw (composer)
    Martin Edward Fallas Shaw OBE, FRCM, DMus was an English composer, conductor and theatre producer...

  • Obadiah Shuttleworth
    Obadiah Shuttleworth
    Obadiah Shuttleworth , English composer, violinist and organist, was the son of Thomas Shuttleworth of Spitalfields in London. Thomas was a professional music copyist and harpsichord player.The exact date of Obadiah's birth is uncertain....

  • Sasha Siem
    Sasha Siem
    Sasha Siem is a British composer and singer-songwriter.-Musical Life:Siem has recently composed music for the London Symphony Orchestra, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, The London Sinfonietta, The Aldeburgh Festival, Opera North, Caius Choir Cambridge, The Rambert Dance Company The Royal Opera...


  • Robert Simpson
    Robert Simpson (composer)
    Robert Simpson was an English composer and long-serving BBC producer and broadcaster.He is best known for his orchestral and chamber music , and for his writings on the music of Beethoven, Bruckner, Nielsen and Sibelius. He studied composition under Herbert Howells...

  • Reginald Smith Brindle
    Reginald Smith Brindle
    Reginald Smith Brindle was a British composer and writer.Smith Brindle began learning the piano at the age of six, and later took up the clarinet, saxophone and guitar . Under pressure from his parents, he began to study architecture...

  • Dame Ethel Smyth
    Ethel Smyth
    Dame Ethel Mary Smyth, DBE was an English composer and a leader of the women's suffrage movement.- Early career :...

  • Naresh Sohal
    Naresh Sohal
    Naresh Sohal was born in 1939 in Punjab, Northern India. He is the first and one of the few accomplished Indian-born composers of western classical music. He is the first composer in this tradition ever to make settings of texts in Sanskrit, Punjabi and Bengali...

  • Philip Sparke
    Philip Sparke
    Philip Sparke is a British composer and musician. He is noted for his concert band and brass band music.- Music for Winds :* 1973/1976 Gaudium* 1975 The Prizewinners for Brass-Band* 1978/1995 Fantasy for Euphonium...

  • Robert Spearing
  • Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji
    Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji
    Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji was an English composer, music critic, pianist, and writer.-Biography:...

  • John Stafford Smith
    John Stafford Smith
    John Stafford Smith was a British composer, church organist, and early musicologist. He was one of the first serious collectors of manuscripts of works by Johann Sebastian Bach....

  • Bernard Stevens
    Bernard Stevens
    Bernard Stevens was a British composer.Born in London, Stevens studied English and Music at the University of Cambridge with E. J. Dent, then at the Royal College of Music with R.O. Morris and Gordon Jacob from 1937 to 1940...

  • James Stevens
  • Haldane Campbell Stewart
  • Richard Stoker
    Richard Stoker
    Richard Stoker is a British composer and writer.He started playing the piano at six; at seven he was composing. After initial encouragement from Arthur Benjamin and Benjamin Britten, he studied under Lennox Berkeley at the Royal Academy of Music. After winning the Mendelssohn Scholarship in 1962,...

  • Sir Arthur Sullivan
    Arthur Sullivan
    Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan MVO was an English composer of Irish and Italian ancestry. He is best known for his series of 14 operatic collaborations with the dramatist W. S. Gilbert, including such enduring works as H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado...



T

  • Joby Talbot
    Joby Talbot
    Joby Talbot is a British composer.Born in Wimbledon, London, Talbot studied composition at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama under Brian Elias and Simon Bainbridge....

  • Thomas Tallis
    Thomas Tallis
    Thomas Tallis was an English composer. Tallis flourished as a church musician in 16th century Tudor England. He occupies a primary place in anthologies of English church music, and is considered among the best of England's early composers. He is honoured for his original voice in English...

  • Phyllis Tate
    Phyllis Tate
    Phyllis Tate was an English composer known for forming unusual instrumentations in her compositions. Her musical style has been called avant-garde and she is recognized for appealing to amateur performers and children....

  • Sir John Tavener
  • Mansel Thomas
    Mansel Thomas
    Mansel Treharne Thomas OBE was a composer and conductor, who worked mainly in south Wales. He was one of the most influential musicians of his generation, known as a composer, conductor and adjudicator. He was for many years employed by the BBC and promoted the careers of many composers and...

  • Sir Michael Tippett
    Michael Tippett
    Sir Michael Kemp Tippett OM CH CBE was an English composer.In his long career he produced a large body of work, including five operas, three large-scale choral works, four symphonies, five string quartets, four piano sonatas, concertos and concertante works, song cycles and incidental music...

  • Thomas Tomkins
    Thomas Tomkins
    Thomas Tomkins was an English composer of the late Tudor and early Stuart period. In addition to being one of the prominent members of the English madrigal school, he was a skilled composer of keyboard and consort music, and the last member of the English virginalist school.-Life:Tomkins was born...

  • Sir Paolo Tosti
  • Harold Truscott
    Harold Truscott
    Harold Truscott was a British composer, pianist, broadcaster and writer on music. Largely neglected as a composer in his lifetime, he made an important contribution to the British piano repertoire and was influential in spreading knowledge of a wide range of mainly unfashionable music.- Life :Born...

  • Mark-Anthony Turnage
    Mark-Anthony Turnage
    Mark-Anthony Turnage is a prolific English composer of classical music. His initial musical studies were with Oliver Knussen, John Lambert, and later with Gunther Schuller...


W

  • Sir William Wallace
    William Wallace (Scottish composer)
    William Wallace was notable as a Scottish classical composer and writer; he first became an ophthalmic surgeon. He served as Dean of the Faculty of Music in the University of London.-Early life and education:...

  • Sir William Walton
    William Walton
    Sir William Turner Walton OM was an English composer. During a sixty-year career, he wrote music in several classical genres and styles, from film scores to opera...

  • John Ward
    John Ward (composer)
    John Ward was an English composer who was a contemporary of John Dowland.Born in Canterbury, John Ward was a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral. He went to London where he served Sir Henry Fanshawe both as an attorney in the Exchequer and as a musician. Ward married and had three children...

  • Peter Warlock
    Peter Warlock
    Peter Warlock was a pseudonym of Philip Arnold Heseltine , an Anglo-Welsh composer and music critic. He used the pseudonym when composing, and is now better known by this name....

  • Thomas Weelkes
    Thomas Weelkes
    Thomas Weelkes was an English composer and organist. He became organist of Winchester College in 1598, moving to Chichester Cathedral. His works are chiefly vocal, and include madrigals, anthems and services.-Life:Weelkes was baptised in the little village church of Elsted in Sussex on 25...

  • Judith Weir
    Judith Weir
    Judith Weir CBE, is a British composer.-Biography:Her music has been appreciated by audiences and critics alike. She trained with John Tavener while still at school and subsequently with Robin Holloway at King's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1976...

  • Samuel Wesley
    Samuel Wesley
    Samuel Wesley was an English organist and composer in the late Georgian period. Wesley was a contemporary of Mozart and was called by some "the English Mozart."-Personal life:...

  • Samuel Sebastian Wesley
    Samuel Sebastian Wesley
    Samuel Sebastian Wesley was an English organist and composer.-Biography:Born in London, he was the eldest child in the composer Samuel Wesley's second family, which he formed with Sarah Suter having separated from his wife Charlotte. Samuel Sebastian was the grandson of Charles Wesley...

  • Douglas Weiland
    Douglas Weiland
    Douglas Weiland is a modern-classical composer.Formerly a violinist - 2 years English Chamber Orchestra, 7 years Academy of St...

  • Graham Whettam
  • Percy Whitlock
    Percy Whitlock
    Percy William Whitlock was an English organist and post-romantic composer.A student of Vaughan Williams at London's Royal College of Music, Whitlock quickly arrived at a musical idiom that combined elements of his teacher's output and that of Elgar...


  • Grace Williams
    Grace Williams
    -Biography:Williams was born in Barry, near Cardiff, Wales.She was educated at Barry County School, and won a scholarship to Cardiff University . She then went to the Royal College of Music, London, where she was taught by Ralph Vaughan Williams...

  • John Williamson
  • James Wilson
    James Wilson
    James Wilson was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and a signer of the United States Declaration of Independence. Wilson was elected twice to the Continental Congress, and was a major force in drafting the United States Constitution...

  • Thomas Wilson
    Thomas Wilson (composer)
    Thomas Wilson CBE was a Scottish composer of classical music.One of the greatest musicians Scotland has produced, Thomas Brendan Wilson was born in Trinidad, Colorado, USA to British parents, but moved to Scotland with his family when he was 17 months old. They settled in the Glasgow area where he...

  • Beth Wiseman
    Beth Wiseman
    Beth Wiseman was a British composer, specializing in multimedia.- Biography :She studied composition with Alexander Goehr and was strongly influenced by her study of the Australian composer David Lumsdaine. She also taught in several British Universities and schools...

  • Hugh Wood
    Hugh Wood
    Hugh Wood is a British composer.- Biography :While Wood was brought up in a musical family, it was only after graduating in History from Oxford that he decided to dedicate his energies to composition; and he moved to London in 1954 to study with William Lloyd Webber, Anthony Milner, Iain Hamilton,...

  • John Wooldridge
    John Wooldridge
    Wing Commander John De Lacy Wooldridge, DSO, DFC and Bar, DFM, was a British film composer.- Early life :Wooldridge was born in Yokohama, Japan and was educated at St Paul's School, London...

  • William Wordsworth
    William Wordsworth (composer)
    William Brocklesby Wordsworth was an English composer.Wordsworth was born in London. He studied harmony and counterpoint under George Oldroyd from 1921 to 1931, continuing his study with Donald Francis Tovey at Edinburgh University from 1934 to 1936...

  • David Wright
    David Wright (British musician)
    David Wright in Kent, UK, is the keyboard player and composer who founded the New Age music label AD Music in 1989. He is also co-founder of the New Age electronic rock band Code Indigo and of the New Age music duo Callisto....

  • David Wynne
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