RICHARD PEAT - COMPOSER
Richard Peat was one of six composers to be awarded a scholarship by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies to study with him on the Advanced Composition course at the Dartington International Summer School in 2008; he was selected again in 2021 to study with Nico Muhly. For the past twenty years, Peat worked as a full-time teacher but continued to compose. The commission and performance of a large-scale community oratorio (The Sky Engine) from JAM on the Marsh in 2023 inspired him to step away from teaching in 2025 to focus on composing.
His first publicly performed work, Tenebrae, was premièred by the Britten Sinfonia at the Sounds New festival in 1997 while he was still at school. Peat’s music has been performed all over the world and broadcast on BBC Radio 3. He is the most successful entrant in JAM’s Call for Music, with the music panel anonymously selecting his works on six occasions, and has also received awards from Oxford Festival of the Arts, the Isolda Composition Foundation, Green Opera, World Classical Music Awards, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, London New Wind Festival, Kent New Composers, and Glasgow University. In October 2022, the Choir of Selwyn College Cambridge and Ely Cathedral Girls’ Choir, conducted by Sarah MacDonald, released a full-length album of Peat’s choral music, Faces in the Mist. His choral music is published by Encore Publications.
Peat studied at City University (where he completed his doctorate in 2007) with Rhian Samuel and privately with Paul Max Edlin. He taught composition and theory at City and was later appointed as assistant composer on Sound and Music’s Sound Inventors scheme and Master in charge of Composition at Millfield School. He has led composition workshops for regional arts festivals, was commissioned to write pieces for Faber Music’s Fingerprints series and was selected for a residency with COMA’s (Contemporary Music for All) Connect the Dots programme working with musicians with disabilities.
Based on the novel by Susan Hill, his opera I’m the King of the Castle, written in collaboration with librettist Timothy Knapman, was performed at the Holywell Music Room. Other works have been performed by leading artists such as the London Sinfonietta, the London Mozart Players, the Kreutzer Quartet, Onyx Brass, Icebreaker, the Moonlight Symphony Orchestra, CalArts New Century Players, Ixion, the Korros ensemble, the Marylebone Trio, the Aurora Ensemble, Trinity Boys’ Choir, the choristers of Canterbury Cathedral, St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral Girls’ Choir, the choir of St Bride’s, Fleet Street, Martyn Brabbins, Nicholas Cleobury, Michael Bawtree, Stephen Layton, Andrew Morley, Patrick Bailey, Rebecca Afonwy-Jones, Julian Close, Lynsey Docherty, Samara Ginsberg, and Jane Manning.
Research interests include the role of composition in education, the music of Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks, the harpsichord in the 20th century, and the representation of children in opera.