He attended Peter Maxwell Davies’s classes at Dartington, and then took further, private, lessons with Davies while at The University of York, where he also studied composition with David Blake.
He was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge (1985-1987), and Northern Arts Fellow in Composition at Durham University (1988-1989) before joining the music department at Exeter University as lecturer (1989), reader (1995) and professor (1999) in composition. In 2000 he moved to the University of Manchester, where he is Professor of Music.