The Guildhall School of Music and Drama is a music and drama school located in the City of London, England. Established in 1880, the school offers undergraduate and postgraduate training in all aspects of classical music and jazz along with drama and production arts. The school has students from over seventy countries. It was ranked first in both the Guardian's 2022 League Table for Music and the Complete University Guide's 2023 Arts, Drama and Music league table. It is also ranked the fifth university in the world for performing arts in the 2024 QS World University Rankings.
Colin Matthews, OBE is an English composer of contemporary classical music, and Chairman of Highways England. Noted for his large-scale orchestral compositions, Matthews is also a prolific arranger of other composer's music, including works by Berlioz, Britten, Dowland, Mahler, Purcell and Schubert. Other arrangements include orchestrations of all Debussy's 24 Préludes, both books of Debussy's Images, and two movements—Oiseaux tristes and La vallée des cloches—from Ravel's Miroirs. Having received a doctorate from University of Sussex on the works of Mahler, from 1964–1975 Matthews worked with his brother David Matthews and musicologist Deryck Cooke on completing a performance version of Mahler's Tenth Symphony.
Ralph Vaughan Williams dedicated his Symphony No. 4 in F minor to Arnold Bax.
Dudley Bright was appointed Principal Trombone of the London Symphony Orchestra in 2001 and retired from that position in June 2018. Prior to that, he held the same position with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Halle Orchestra and before that briefly as an associate with the LSO. He is also Professor of Trombone at the Royal Academy of Music.
Byron Fulcher is a British musician who is the principal trombone with the Royal Ballet and Opera and the London Sinfonietta. In addition, he is professor of trombone at the Royal College of Music.
Robert Saxton is a British composer.
Philip Cashian is an English composer. He is the head of composition at the Royal Academy of Music.
Christian Forshaw is an English saxophone player and composer.
Matthew King is a British composer, pianist, and educator. His works include opera, piano and chamber music, and choral and orchestral pieces. He has been described by Judith Weir, Master of the Queen’s Music, as “one of Britain's most adventurous composers, utterly skilled, imaginative, and resourceful."
Raymond Yiu, born 1973; is a composer, conductor, jazz pianist and music writer.
Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian is a British composer, singer, and harper. She is considered one of today's leading emerging composers.
Francisco Coll is a Spanish composer.
Stephen McNeff is an Irish composer, best known for his work in contemporary theatre and opera.
Joseph Phibbs is an English composer of orchestral, choral and chamber music. He has also composed for theatre, both in the UK and Japan. Since 1998 he has written regularly to commissions for Festivals, for private sponsors, and for the BBC, which has broadcast premieres of his orchestral and chamber works from the Proms and elsewhere. His works have been given premieres in Europe, the United States and the Far East, and he has received prestigious awards, including most recently a British Composer Award, and a Library of Congress Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation Award. Many of his works have been premiered by leading international musicians, including Dame Evelyn Glennie, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Leonard Slatkin, Sakari Oramo, Vasily Petrenko, Gianandrea Noseda, and the Belcea Quartet.
Cassandra Miller is a Canadian experimental composer currently based in London, UK. Her work is known for frequently utilising the process of transcription of a variety of pre-existing pieces of music.
Na'ama Zisser is a London-based composer.
Deborah Pritchard is a British composer. She is known for her concert works, a compositional approach informed by her synaesthesia, and her work in response to visual artists, most notably Maggi Hambling, Hugie O'Donoghue and Marc Chagall. She also paints music in the form of visualisations and music maps. The London Symphony Orchestra premiered her large orchestral piece The Angel Standing in the Sun at LSO St Lukes in 2015, her violin concerto Calandra was premiered by Jennifer Pike and the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican, London in 2022 and Radiance for solo cello, responding to The Peace Window by Marc Chagall at the United Nations, was premiere by Natalie Clein at the Purbeck International Chamber Music Festival in 2022. She won a British Composer Award for her solo violin piece Inside Colour in 2017,
Grace-Evangeline Mason is a British composer of contemporary classical music.
Alexandra Ioana Dariescu is a Romanian British classical concert pianist, educator, mentor and producer. She is best known for her multimedia project The Nutcracker and I and her focus on promoting the works of female composers.
Oliver Leith is a British composer of classical and electronic music. His work has been commissioned and performed by many international ensembles including Apartment House, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Plus Minus and Philharmonia Orchestra. He was appointed Doctoral Composer-in-Residence at the Royal Opera House in 2019.
