Richard Blackford was born in London in 1954 and studied composition with John Lambert at the Royal College of Music. Awarded a first class Bachelor Of Music degree he won a Leverhulme Scholarship to study in Rome with Hans Werner Henze. During that period he won the prestigious Mendelssohn Scholarship and the Tagore Gold Medal. Henze commissioned two works, Concerto for Seven and Sinfonie Poliziane, for the first Montepulciano International Festival, works which were later recorded by the composer for Hessischer Rundfunk in Frankfurt. Shortly afterwards he was commissioned to write the critically acclaimed opera Sir Gawain and The Green Knight which was released on Argo Records. A sequel Gawain and Ragnall was broadcast on Radio 3 and played by the CBSO under the composer’s direction. His third opera, Metamorphoses, was commissioned by the Royal College of Music for its Centenary production, and his fourth, The Pig Organ (libretto by Ted Hughes), was performed by the Royal Opera at the Round House.

Richard’s music continued to be commissioned, broadcast and performed at national and international music festivals: String Quartet: Canticles Of Light (commissioned by the Brighton Festival and played by the Gabrieli Quartet); Music For Carlow (commissioned by the London Chamber Orchestra for the Carlow Festival); Postumous Leonatus (for the Newport Festival); Zodiac Dances (commissioned by Gemini for the Spitalfields Festival). 1990 saw the premiere of his musical King at the Piccadilly Theatre, London, starring Simon Estes and Cynthia Haymon. The recording by Decca was well received in Europe and the USA. King was performed again in 1997 in Washington DC as part of the inaugural celebrations for President Clinton. He has composed extensively for film and television, and to date has over eighty screen credits including City Of Joy (directed by Roland Joffe), A Maybe Day in Kazakhstan and The Shadow of Hiroshima (both directed by Tony Harrison). The collaboration with Harrison has continued with three further theatre productions: The Kaisers of Carnuntum (Vienna), The Labourers of Herakles (Delphi International Festival) and The Prince’s Play (Royal National Theatre) and the critically acclaimed feature film Prometheus.

From 1990-1995 Blackford was Director of Music at the Royal Ballet School where he wrote the ballet Plea to Autumn which he conducted at the Royal Opera House for a Royal Gala. In 1996, after an absence of writing for the concert hall of twelve years, he conducted the premiere of his cantata Mirror of Perfection, which received its Royal Festival Hall première in February 1997, and was subsequently recorded by Sony Classical. A BBC film of the piece, Seven Canticles of St Francis, was shown on BBC2 on Easter Sunday 1999. His music for Millennium, a ten-part television series produced by Jeremy Isaacs Productions for CNN, was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement In Music. The series won an Emmy Award for Best Title Sequence for which he wrote the music. 2001 saw  the premiere at the Royal Festival Hall of a new 55 minute choral work Voices of Exile commissioned by the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus and performed by them and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra with three soloists. Voices of Exile was televised by Meridian and was also the subject of a Meridian television documentary on Richard Blackford