Judith Weir (b1954 in Cambridge, England) first studied composition with a few lessons from John Tavener during her schooldays in London. She went on to study music at King’s College Cambridge, where her teacher in her final year was Robin Holloway. She then spent several years as community composer with Southern Arts Association, working with schoolchildren and amateur musicians.

After spending much of the 1980s teaching in Glasgow, she worked in the 1990s as CBSO’s composer-in-association and Spitalfields Festival’s artistic director. It was with these two institutions that she started to build her choral catalogue, which now includes several large-scale works for chorus and orchestra, including We are Shadows and Concrete, as well as two operas which include extended roles for chorus, The Vanishing Bridegroom and Miss Fortune.

Judith Weir was appointed Master of The Queen’s Music, in succession to Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, in July 2014; and in January 2015 became Associate Composer to the BBC Singers, an ensemble she has already worked with, very happily, for many years.