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Anne Boyd has enjoyed a distinguished career as a composer and music educator. She graduated from the University of Sydney with a BA Hons in Music degree in 1967 and subsequently, in 1972, from the University of York in England with a PhD in composition. She has held academic positions at the University of Sussex (1972-77) and at the University of Hong Kong, where she was the founding Head of the Department of Music (1981-1990). In 1990 she became the first Australian and the first woman to be appointed Professor of Music at the University of Sydney where her research work focuses upon the influence of landscape and of Asian music upon Australian composers. Her struggles to ensure the survival of this department gained international attention through the release of the Connolly/Anderson award winning documentary Facing the Music (2001).

Born in 1946, Anne Boyd wrote her first compositions as a little girl growing up on a remote outback sheep station in Central Queensland where her only music teaching was via ABC Radio (especially The Children's Hour's Mr Melody Man) and a recorder book. Much later she became a student of Peter Sculthorpe and inherited through him a lifelong fascination with the musical cultures of South East Asia, especially Japan and Indonesia. She regards the ancient court music of Japan as a primary influence, the closest musical representation of the arid outback landscape of her early childhood. Composition is viewed as essentially spiritual and she is much interested in the idea of music as meditation, as a means of changing states of consciousness. Her music is based on the intersection of Christian Love with Buddhist silence. Some of her more recent work explores Christian mysticism.

Anne Boyd's best known compositions, which are played throughout the world, include the meditation for solo piano Angklung (1974) one of several works written for, or inspired by, the pianist Roger Woodward; the choral composition A Vision: Jesus Reassures His Mother; the song cycle for voice and chamber ensemble Meditations on a Chinese Character (1996); Goldfish Through Summer Rain (1979) for flute and piano; and the orchestral work Grathawai (1993).

Boyd’s music is published by Faber Music ( London) and the University of York Music Press. In 1997, ABC Classics produced a disc solely dedicated to her work, Meditations on a Chinese Character, the royalties from which support the Australian Women's Music Fund and in 2000 Tall Poppies released another disc of her music, Crossing a Bridge of Dreams.

In 1996 Anne Boyd was honoured with the award of an AM in the Order of Australia for her service to Music as a composer and educator. In 2003, she was conferred Honorary Doctor of the University by the University of York (UK).

Biography provided by the composer — current to September 2005