Philip Sawyers

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Philip Sawyers (born 20th June 1951) is a British composer of orchestral and chamber music, including four symphonies. Sawyers was born in London. He began composing as a teenager, studying at Dartington College of Arts in Devon with Colin Sauer (violin) and Helen Glatz (composition). His studies continued at the Guildhall School of Music where his teachers were Joan Spencer and Max Rostal (violin), and Buxton Orr, Patric Standford and Edmund Rubbra (composition). A career as an orchestral violinist, starting in 1973 with the Royal Opera House Orchestra, Covent Garden, left little room for composition. During this time Sawyers was also teaching, primarily as the violin coach for the Kent County Youth Orchestra, and as a visiting teacher at schools and colleges. This lasted until 1997, when he opted to spend a year in postgraduate study at Goldsmith’s College, leading to a resumption in composition. From 2000-2013 he was an examiner for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music. Sawyers mostly favours traditional forms and absolute music with few programmatic overtones. The composer has said he felt that his largely tonal music, influenced by Hindemith, was "distinctly out of fashion" during the last three decades of the twentieth century. His first works date from his time as a student in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but he received little attention as a composer until 2001 when one of those student pieces, the Symphonic Music for Strings and Brass (1972), was

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