Andrew Toovey was born in London in 1962, and studied composition with Jonathan Harvey, Michael Finnissy and briefly with Morton Feldman. He has won a series of prestigious composition prizes including the Tippett Prize, Terra Nova Prize, the Bernard Shore Viola Composition Award and an RVW Trust Award.

Toovey has been the artistic director of the new music ensemble IXION since 1987 and was composer-in-residence at the Banff Centre, Canada for four successive years. He has worked extensively on education projects for Glyndebourne Opera, English National Opera, Huddersfield Festival, the South Bank Centre and the London Festival Orchestra, and has been composer-in-residence at Opera Factory and the South Bank Summer School.

Toovey’s work embraces a huge diversity of influences, from musical extremes such as Feldman and Finnissy, or the poetry of Artaud, Cummings and Rilke, to a passion for 20th century art. Recent Toovey commissions have included Music for the Painter Jack Smith (Brighton Festival), Dutch Dykes (De Ereprijs), Self portrait as a Tiger! (Ensemble Reconsil Wein) and Going home (BBC for the Szymanowski String Quartet). He has recently been commissioned by the BBC to write a viola concerto for the William Primrose festival in Scotland (2004), an orchestral suite based on music from his first opera UBU and a large orchestral work.