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Photo: Lyn Dowling

British-Australian composer Nicholas Routley was born in England and has spent his working life in Australia. He was educated at New College School, Oxford, George Heriot's School, Edinburgh, and St John's College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge, he studied piano under Peter Feuchtwanger, composition with Patrick Gowers, and analysis and conducting with Hans Heimler, a pupil of Felix Weingartner.

Routley emigrated to Australia in 1975 to take up a post at the Department of Music at the University of Sydney, and became an Australian citizen in 1984. He was twice seconded to the University of Hong Kong for periods of three years. The founder-director of the Sydney Chamber Choir, Routley has also conducted the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and several other orchestras in Italy, Australia and East Asia. He has also been active as a professional pianist, especially in vocal and chamber music, having performed extensively with the tenor Gerald English and the counter-tenor Hartley Newnham, among many others, and has given recitals in many European countries, East Asia, and Australia.

While being deeply Australian in spirit, his music has been described as polystylist - it derives most of its stylistic base from a combination of postmodern and Romantic influences, but also often reflects his deep love of Renaissance music, especially the music of Josquin des Prez. Other influences include Ross Edwards and Michael Tippett.

Returning to composition in 1996, Routley began with two choral works for the Sydney Chamber Choir, one of which, "Sicut Lilium" has received wide recognition, and was recorded on the Tall Poppies disc Landscape's Creatures. He was then commissioned by the Sydney University Musical Society to write a large-scale choral work. The resulting three-movement piece, "Mycenae Lookout", on an epic poem by Seamus Heaney for baritone soloist, choir, two pianos, and percussion, was premiered in Sydney in 1997. His symphony was commissioned by the Darwin Symphony Orchestra, and premiered in Darwin in 2002. The guitarist Adrian Walter comissioned a Guitar Concerto, "Pasupatham", which was premiered at the Darwin Guitar Festival in 2004. His Clarinet Concerto was commissioned by David Thomas, who performed it in Darwin and Melbourne in 2007.

His song cycle "Like Snow" (1997) has been widely performed and recorded, by singers including Hartley Newnham, Timothy Dufore, and Gaynor Morgan. In 2023 the harpist Louise Johnson comissioned him to write a piece for flute, harp, and viola. The resulting Sonata has been performed in Ballina, Sydney, and at the 2026 Blackheath Chamber Music Festival. His list of works includes a trombone sonata written for Greg Vanderstruik, and a memorial ode for Peter Platt, Professor of Music at the university of Sydney from 1975 - 1990.

Routley has had a lifelong passionate interest in the music and culture of India. Since 2008 his major composition project has been to write three operas on the vast Indian epic, Mahabharata. This cycle, comparable in scale to Wagner's Ring Cycle, was completed in 2026 and is now awaiting production. The first section of this work to be composed, a chorus for the refugees from the war which is the central subject of the epic, was performed several times by the Sydney Chamber choir in 2004. Several other excerpts from the work have been performed, notably the scena known as "Draupadi's Aria".

He has five children, Rachel, Alexis, Stephanie, Jeremy and Celeste, and since retiring from the University of Sydney he has lived in Georgica, in the Northern Rivers district of NSW.

Nicholas Routley — current to September 2026