Ed Driver | Composer

Ed Driver (2000-) is a London-based composer and performer. He read music at the University of Birmingham before studying for a master’s degree in composition with Kenneth Hesketh and Dai Fujikura at the Royal College of Music, where he was an H R Taylor Charitable Trust Scholar and a Vaughan Williams Bursary holder. Upon graduating from the RCM, Ed was presented with the Andrew Downes Award for achieving the highest mark of his degree.

Ed has won a number of other accolades, including the 2025 Royal Over-Seas League Composition Award (in association with the London Sinfonietta), the 2021 COMPASS Composition Prize (in association with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group), and the 2017 Howard Greenwood Composition Award. He has worked with several world-class ensembles, musicians and organisations including the Britten Sinfonia, the London Sinfonietta, the Fidelio Trio, Explore Ensemble, The Hermes Experiment, Tête à Tête Opera, ORA Singers, and Sarah Jeffery. Fascinated by aesthetics, his music often aims to imbue the logic of social-philosophical ideas with a vibrant sense of humour; recent research centres on constructing a Baudrillardian aesthetic of composition. Ed is a lover of comical, colourful, ugly, disgusting, rhizomatic, sparkly, beautiful, viscid, bursting, bubbling, absurd, simulacral, unfolding, permuting, pulsating music.