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Andrew Ford is a composer, writer and broadcaster. His music has been played in many parts of the world and featured at international festivals as far-flung as Houston and Huddersfield, Salzburg and Seoul.

Born in Liverpool, England, in 1957, Ford spent much of his childhood listening to the Beatles and other Sixties pop groups. A complete failure at piano lessons, he began to compose his own music as a teenager while at St Olave's School in Kent, where his family had moved in 1967. In 1975, he went to the University of Lancaster where he studied composition with Edward Cowie and John Buller and had a formative meeting with Sir Michael Tippett who persuaded him to forget about musical systems and trust his instincts as a composer.

After graduating with honours in 1978, Ford was appointed Fellow in Music at the University of Bradford where he conducted the choir and orchestra and ran a concert series to which he welcomed a wide range of musicians including Janet Baker, Frans Brüggen, Ravi Shankar and Carla Bley. In 1983, he moved to Australia to join the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong, teaching composition, but also lecturing on a variety of music from Renaissance polyphony to punk. Between 1992 and 1994, Ford took leave from the university in order to be composer in residence with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. In 1995, Ford retired from academe and ever since has presented The Music Show each Saturday morning on ABC Radio National.

Andrew Ford has composed for most media and his music has been played by groups such as the artresonanz Trio (Vienna), the Australia Ensemble, the Da Capo Chamber Players (New York), Duo Contemporain (Rotterdam), Het Trio (Amsterdam), the KAIDA Trio (Amsterdam), the London Sinfonietta, the New Juilliard Ensemble (New York), the Park Lane Group (London) and the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. All of Australia's major orchestras have performed his work, his piano music has been played by Peter Donohoe, Lisa Moore, Ian Munro and Gerard Willems, and his songs sung by Merlyn Quaife, Elizabeth Campbell, Lyndon Terracini and Gerald English. English, in fact, has sung a dozen works by Ford, most notably the music-theatre piece, Night and Dreams: the death of Sigmund Freud (words by Margaret Morgan), which he premiered at the 2000 Adelaide Festival, before taking it on to the Sydney and Melbourne festivals in 2001.

Other notable recent works include the large-ensemble piece, Dance Maze (1996) and the viola concerto, The Unquiet Grave (1997 – 98). Tattoo, for 12 timpani and four pianos, and Icarus drowning for clarinet, harp, percussion and string quartet were among the works composed while he was a recipient of the Peggy Glanville-Hicks fellowship between 1998 and 2000. During this period, he also began work on The Waltz Book, to a commission from the pianist Ian Munro funded by the Music Board of the Australia Council. Consisting of 60 minute-long waltzes, this project took more than four years to complete, but has been widely played (in whole and in part) since its premiere in 2003. There are also two new song cycles. Learning to Howl (2001) for soprano, saxophone, harp and percussion, sets words by Lorrie Moore, Christina Rossetti, Queen Elizabeth I and Elizabeth Smart. It was commissioned by the soprano Jane Edwards, also with Music Board assistance, and had its first performance in 2003. Tales of the Supernatural (an Ian Potter Foundation commission) is a set of folk songs from Finland, Scotland, Sweden, England and the Appalachian Mountains with the shared theme of love and ghosts. Composed in 2002, it was premiered at the 2004 Adelaide Festival.

Andrew Ford has won several prizes. They include the Yorkshire Arts Composers Award which he won jointly with Mark-Anthony Turnage in 1982 (for Portraits), the Sydney Spring Festival award for most original new work of the 1998 festival (for Tattoo) and the 2002 Jean Bogan Prize (for The Waltz Book). He also won the Geraldine Pascall Prize for critical writing in 1998.

He has published three books about music, and two more are written and due for publication in 2005. His 6-part radio series Dots on the Landscape - an oral history of Australian music (2001) was shortlisted for the Prix Italia and won an Australian Music Centre Award in 2002.

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© 2004

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