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, and is increasingly being heard overseas.

Since 2021, he has been Composer-in-Association with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, for whom he has written a number of scores that have since been performed by London Philharmonic and Adelaide Symphony Orchestras, Manchester Camerata, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Ernen Festivalorchester, Scottish Ensemble, Ensemble Resonanz and Trondheim Soloists. In 2024 NMC released a recording of the BBC Philharmonic performing four of his orchestral works, including pieces featuring frequent collaborators Daniel Pioro and Anna Dennis.

Coult’s first opera, Violet, with text by Alice Birch, was premiered in 2022 at the Aldeburgh Festival and on tour, and was described by The Telegraph as ‘the best new British opera in years‘. It has already been staged in second and third productions in Paris and Ulm, Germany, in 2022 and 2023. It has won or been nominated for: an International Opera Award, a South Bank Sky Arts Award, a Critics Circle Award, an IVORS Composer Award and a UK Theatre Award.

He has been Composer-in-Residence at Aldeburgh Festival, Switzerland’s Musikdorf Ernen Festival, and Oxford Lieder Festival, and has written pieces for BBC Symphony Orchestra (including St John’s Dance to open the First Night of the 2017 BBC Proms), Mahler Chamber Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Arditti Quartet, Britten Sinfonia, Marian Consort, Hermes Experiment and Dunedin Consort. Further performances have come from Royal Philharmonic and Royal Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestras, Quatuor Diotima, Sean Shibe, 12 Ensemble, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective and Orchestra of Opera North.

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

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. He currently teaches at the Royal Northern College of Music, and has taught on education projects with Britten Sinfonia Academy, Aldeburgh Young Musicians, Music in the Round and Bangor Music Festival. Awards include a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists, the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund Prize, Critics’ Circle Award and the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize.