Dr Toby Young is a Professor of Composition and UKRI Future Leader Fellow based at Guildhall School of Music & Drama, following the award of a £1.4 million grant to fund Dr Young’s research project Immersive Opera. The grant is part of UKRI’s initiative for promising research leaders and is the largest research-related funding award Guildhall School has received to date.

As a researcher Toby’s work draws on popular musicology, composition, philosophy, and cultural sociology to explore the blurred space between classical and popular music, with a particular focus on opera. Before coming to Guildhall, Toby was a Lecturer in Music at the University of Oxford, running a project focusing on electronic dance music and its ability to mediate complex social, musical, and aesthetic spaces. He also regularly engages in public talks and lectures, including a TEDx talk, a series of radio programmes on ‘Artistic knowledge’ (Resonance FM), and talks on the creative process and music industry for Saïd Business School.

As an award-winning composer and producer, Toby has been commissioned by ensembles and orchestras including the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Academy of Ancient Music, and Rambert Dance Company, and has collaborated with pop and jazz artists including the Rolling Stones, Chase & Status, Duran Duran, Florence Welch, Kano, Snow Ghosts, MOKO, and Jacob Banks. He is also the Music Supervisor of Punchdrunk, one of the world’s foremost immersive and site-specific theatre companies, for whom he has written soundtracks to a variety of TV and stage works including BAFTA-nominated productions for HBO and Sky Arts.

Toby is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a trustee of the Albert Schweitzer Foundation.