Andrew Ford

Andrew Ford OAM is an Australian composer, writer and broadcaster. His music is recognised for its engagement with poetry in a succession of songs and song cycles, its responses to the visual arts, and its often unconventional approach to scoring. He is the author of eleven books, most recently The Shortest History of Music, and is well-known as the presenter of The Music Show on ABC Radio National.

Ford’s music has been performed and broadcast in many parts of the world, and championed by groups such as the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Brodsky Quartet and the New Juilliard Ensemble. Other groups who have taken up Ford’s music include the Black Dyke Band (UK), Da Capo Chamber Players (New York), dèdalo Ensemble (Brescia), Duo Stump-Linshalm (Vienna), Ensamble 3 (Mexico City), Het Trio (Amsterdam), Hong Kong Sinfonietta, London Sinfonietta, Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Shanghai String Quartet and all Australia’s major orchestras and ensembles.

His music has been conducted by Oliver Knussen, Odaline de la Martinez, Reinbert de Leeuw, James MacMillan, Brett Dean, Paul Daniel, Jeffrey Tate, Marko Letonja and Benjamin Northey, played by pianists such as Peter Donohoe, Piers Lane, Lisa Moore, Ananda Sukarlan, Michael Kieran Harvey and Aura Go, and sung by the likes of Yvonne Kenny, Iva Bittová, Katie Noonan, Jane Sheldon, Teddy Tahu Rhodes, Gian Slater, Robyn Archer, Lyndon Terracini and Gerald English.

Born in Liverpool, England, in 1957, Ford spent much of his childhood listening to the Beatles and other Sixties pop groups. After his family moved to Kent, he attended St Olave’s Grammar School in Orpington. In 1975 he went to Lancaster University where he studied composition with Edward Cowie and John Buller and had a formative meeting with Sir Michael Tippett who told him to forget about musical systems and trust his instincts. Between 1978 and 1982 Ford was Fellow in Music at the University of Bradford, a non-academic job that involved conducting the university’s choirs and orchestra, running its Music Centre and directing a concert series. In 1983 he relocated to Australia to join the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong. While there, he completed a doctorate, writing his thesis on musical word setting from Elvis Costello to Elliott Carter. Between 1992 and 1994 Ford was composer in residence with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and from 1998 to 2000 he was Peggy Glanville-Hicks Fellow.

Some of Ford's notable recent works include Raga for electric guitar and orchestra, premiered in the Adelaide Guitar Festival by Zane Banks with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra; a Missa Brevis commissioned by four Australian cathedrals; The Meaning of Trees commissioned by the Australian Youth Orchestra and premiered by them under Matthew Coorey at the end of 2022, and The Blessing, for Elizabeth Campbell (mezzo-soprano) and Celia Craig (oboe), a collaboration with JM Coetzee based on an episode from his novel Elizabeth Costello. 

Ford’s music has received a range of prizes beginning with the Yorkshire Arts Composers Award, which he won jointly with Mark-Anthony Turnage in 1982 for Portraits, and including the Sydney Spring Festival award in 1998 for Tattoo, and the 2002 Jean Bogan Prize for The Waltz Book. Learning to Howl was awarded the prestigious Paul Lowin Song Cycle Prize in 2004, Rembrandt’s Wife won a Victorian Green Room Award (2010), and Rauha the Albert H Maggs Award (2012). He received an Order of Australia Medal in the 2016 Queen’s Birthday Honours.

Ford has spoken about his own and other music at festivals, universities and schools throughout Australia. He has been resident composer at the Australian National Academy of Music (2009) and HC Coombs Creative Arts Fellow at the Australian National University (2018). In the United States, he has lectured at the Juilliard School, the Peabody Institute, Boston Conservatory and the Aspen Music Festival School, and in 2014 was Poynter Fellow and visiting composer at Yale University. In 2015 he was visiting lecturer at Shanghai Conservatory of Music.

Ford’s work as writer and broadcaster was recognised in 1998 with the Geraldine Pascall Prize for critical writing, and in 2021 a Sidney Myer Facilitator’s Prize. In addition to presenting The Music Show, he has written, presented and co-produced five radio series: Illegal Harmonies (1997), Dots on the Landscape – an oral history of Australian music (2001), Music and Fashion (2005), The Sound of Pictures (2010) and Earth Dances (2015). His conversations about music and art with the painter Ben Quilty, Three Front Doors and a Paddock, are available to download.

Ford lives with his wife and daughter in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales.