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Photo: Jim Rolon

Andrew Ford is a composer, writer and broadcaster and has won awards in all three capacities. Born in Liverpool, England in 1957, he was educated at the University of Lancaster. He came to Australia in 1983.

Ford has composed orchestral and chamber music, operas and music-theatre pieces, and a wide range of vocal and solo instrumental works. His music has been featured internationally at such festivals as Adelaide, Aspen, Ferrara, Houston, Istanbul, Kuhmo, Melbourne, Seoul, Sydney and at Salzburg's Aspekte. All the major Australian orchestras have played his works, and so have groups such as the Brodsky Quartet, the London Sinfonietta, the Australia Ensemble, Het Trio, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble and the New Juilliard Ensemble. His piano pieces have been played by Peter Donohoe, Lisa Moore, Gerard Willems and Michael Kieran Harvey, while his vocal music has been sung by Sarah Leonard, Lyndon Terracini, Merlyn Quaife and, above all, Gerald English, for whose voice Ford composed more than a dozen pieces.

Ford's music has won several national awards. In 2003, The Waltz Book, an hour-long sequence of 60 minute waltzes for solo piano, written for Ian Munro, was awarded the Jean Bogan Prize. In 2004, Ford's song cycle, Learning to Howl, won both the AMC Award for Best Composition by an Australian Composer and the Paul Lowin Song Cycle Prize. At the 2004 Adelaide Festival, Jane Edwards and the Australian String Quartet gave the first performance of Tales of the Supernatural (an Ian Potter Commission) which went on to win an APRA award in 2005. His radiophonic work Elegy in a Country Graveyard was shortlisted for the 2007 Prix Italia.

Ford has been composer in residence with the Australian Chamber Orchestra (1992 - 94) and the Peggy Glanville-Hicks Composer Fellow (1998 - 2000). He was awarded a fellowship by the Music Board of the Australia Council (2005 - 06), during which period he composed, among other works, Scenes from Bruegel, jointly commissioned by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra and the New Juilliard Ensemble, first performed by the latter at Alice Tully Hall, New York in April 2006.

Recent works include Headlong for the Sydney Symphony, Thin Air for the Sydney International Piano Competition and A Singing Quilt, commissioned by Wingecarribee Shire Council for choirs in the NSW Southern Highlands, where Ford lives. His Symphony was premiered at the Australian National Academy of Music in November 2008, conducted by Brett Dean, and in 2009 Ford was ANAM's composer in residence. Other highlights of 2009 included the premiere of his opera, Rembrandt's Wife (libretto by Sue Smith) by Victorian Opera, and a week as composer in residence at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville.

Beyond composing, Ford has been an academic (on the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong from 1983 - 1995) and has written and broadcast on a wide range of music. In 1998 he won the Geraldine Pascall Prize for critical writing. Ford wrote and presented the ABC radio series Illegal Harmonies (first heard in 1997), Dots on the Landscape (2001) and Music and Fashion (2005). He has also written five books and, since 1995, presented The Music Show each Saturday morning on ABC Radio National.

Andrew Ford — current to February 2010