The old adage that "those who can't do, teach" is definitively contradicted by Julian Anderson, a significant figure in British composition and music education. Anderson's colorful orchestral and choral scores incorporate elements of both modernist experimentalism and folk tradition; they have often been commissioned and programmed across Britain, continental Europe, and North America. Anderson was born April 6, 1967, in London, and attended Westminster School and the Royal College of Music, studying at the latter with John Lambert. He went on to work with Alexander Goehr at Cambridge, and then finished off his musical education with lessons and master classes with György Ligeti, Per Norgard, and Olivier Messiaen. After a youthful string quartet, Anderson seemed to spring fully formed onto the compositional scene with his two-movement Diptych for orchestra (1990), which won the 25-year-old the RPS Composition Prize and generated a pair of commissions for more large-scale orchestral music, Khorovod (1994) and the Alhambra Fantasy (2000). Both were successful and established Anderson as a frequent recipient of orchestral commissions, often from several orchestras pooling resources. His violin concert In lieblicher Bläue, for instance, was premiered by violinist Carolin Widmann and commissioned jointly by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Seattle Symphony Orchestra, and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. Such successes blossomed into major composer-in-residence appointments with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the London Philharmonic. More purely experimental in nature was the Book of Hours, composed in Birmingham for 20 musicians and live electronics. Also composed for the CBSO, the Four American Choruses (2001-2004) inaugurated a new interest in choral music on Anderson's part, often reflecting a nonreligious spirituality and continuing into the 2010s. His opera Thebans, based on Sophocles' Oedipus cycle, was produced by the English National Opera in 2014. Anderson's piano concerto The Imaginary Museum was premiered at the BBC Proms in 2016 by pianist Stephen Osborne and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and his Van Gogh Blue had its premiere in Cambridge (U.K.) in February of 2019. A distinguished educator, Anderson was appointed head of composition at the Royal College of Music in 2000, moved to Harvard University in 2004, and returned to England in 2007 to take up the post of professor of composition and composer-in-residence at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. ~ James Manheim, Rovi