Tom Coult

Tom Coult is a composer born in London in 1988. His playful and seductive music has been championed by many of the UK’s major orchestras and ensembles, resulting in a series of acclaimed large-scale pieces including Beautiful Caged Thing for soprano Claire Booth and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Sonnet Machine for the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, and St John’s Dance (premiered by Edward Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra to open the First Night of the 2017 BBC Proms).  

In 2021 he was made Composer-in-Association with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, who have played his music on a number of occasions – the first major piece of his residency will be Pleasure Garden, a concerto for violinist Daniel Pioro. He has enjoyed further associations with ensembles such as Britten Sinfonia and London Sinfonietta (who premiered Spirit of the Staircase, nominated for a South Bank Sky Arts Award). 

His music has been described as ‘funny and surreal and delicately poetic, all at once’ (The Telegraph), and ‘full of bewitching sounds…fresh and precisely imagined’ (The Guardian) – ‘Coult is a composer who spins glittering, teasingly ambiguous patterns out of simple-seeming material…a very individual voice’ (The Telegraph). 

Further orchestral performances have come from Netherlands Radio Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic Orchestras and Orchestra of the Swan, while his chamber works have earned performances by ensembles including Arditti Quartet, Psappha, Quatuor Diotima, Fidelio Trio, Riot Ensemble and soloists from the Philharmonia. His first opera, Violet, commissioned by Britten-Pears Arts and Music Theatre Wales, will receive its rescheduled premiere in 2022 at the Aldeburgh Festival and on tour. 

Tom studied at the University of Manchester with Camden Reeves and Philip Grange and at King’s College London with George Benjamin. Between 2017 and 2019 he was Visiting Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts at Trinity College Cambridge, and has taught on the Britten Sinfonia Academy composition course and with Aldeburgh Young Musicians. Awards include the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund Prize and the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize.