Timothy Bowers

Timothy’s specialisms include writing music for guitar (solo pieces, larger ensembles, song-cycles and a concerto commissioned by the Academy) and classical accordion. He has worked as a composer and arranger with the award-winning Finnish choir Campanella. In the 1990s, sponsorship from British Airways took Timothy to the Bartok Institute in Miskolc, Hungary, as a visiting composer focusing on orchestral works.

Notable commissions include a cycle of five sonatas and a Sinfonia Concertante for the Academy’s Brass Department, and four sonatas for woodwind instruments supported by Queens’ Temple publications. His vocal music includes four song cycles, ‘Last Words’, which have been performed as part of a project at the University of Bangor and Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. His music has achieved widespread recognition at home and abroad, and publishers include Ricordi, Oxford University Press, and Queen’s Temple Publications. 

Timothy also writes and lectures on 20th-century British music. He is the author of ‘Strings, winds, pipes, pianos and food – the concertos of Malcolm Arnold’ and has also contributed an in-depth study of Arnold’s Symphonies, spotlighting the composer’s use of serial technique in ‘Composers on the Nine’ commissioned by Paul Harris. 

Timothy studied composition with Alan Bush at the Royal Academy of Music (1973-1978) and funding from the Countess of Munster Trust enabled him to study privately with David Blake. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of York.