Thomas Metcalf

Thomas Metcalf (b. 1996) is a composer and researcher. His music explores the generation of musical material through non-musical phenomena, with an increasing focus on hybrid notations and gestural rhetoric.

He began his composition training with Robert Saxton at Oxford in October 2014, Thomas subsequently achieved a first-class BA in Music and an MSt in Composition with distinction as the Ogilvie Thompson Scholar of Worcester College. He subsequently studied with Kenneth Hesketh in 2020, focusing specifically on graphical methods of compositional design. In October 2021, he was awarded his DPhil (PhD) from Oxford University, for a thesis entitled Graphical Ekphrasis in Contemporary Music, supported by a research-led composition portfolio. His research has been published in journals such as Tempo, Music Analysis, and Leonardo.

Recent projects have included pieces for the International Chamber Music Festival Schiermonnikoog, soundfestival 2022, and a commercial recording of Thomas’s string quartet, Pixelating the River, by the Kreutzer Quartet, supported by the RVW Trust, Finzi Trust, and Oxford Music Faculty. He was appointed to a Junior Teaching Fellowship at the Ashmolean Museum (2021-2022) and has taken up the Junior Anniversary Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University for 2022-2023 for his project Photography and/as Music.