Sam Buttler (b. 1996) is a Welsh composer. He is currently Associate Composer with The Ripieno Players, and they premiered his concerto for guitar and strings, Water Portraits, in 2019. In 2019, he worked closely with the flautist Lily Caunt on a ceiling full of stars, a piece inspired by and recorded in The Monteath Mausoleum in the Scottish Borders. This work incorporates sound from the surroundings as well as within the mausoleum, and has since been published by Tetractys Publishing. A version for recorder was premiered by James Risdon as part of the RNS Moves Concert Series in 2020. He was selected as one of the six composers for Tŷ Cerdd’s 2020 CoDI Mentors Scheme, where he worked closely with the composer Freya Waley-Cohen. His music has been regularly used by the Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales in a variety of promotional material.  During the lockdowns in 2020 and 2021,  he also remotely recorded After This Manner for five voices and Extend the Dawn for solo oboe and electronics. He was also recently shortlisted for Composition: Wales 2022 with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales with the piece Stones have memory here…, premiered in May 2022. He was chosen as one of the six composers for Tŷ Cerdd’s CoDI Lead scheme, working closely on a quartet of musicians from Paraorchestra on a new work, Chariots, Death, Jewels, and the Moon, premiered in March 2022.

In 2018, he was selected as one of eight composers commissioned for Royal Holloway’s Distant Voices, Current Drifts project with the Royal Holloway New Music Collective. Also in 2018, he recorded a trio of choral works in St Peter’s College Chapel, Oxford with Joe Davies (conductor) and singers from the University of Oxford. Also in 2018, he was chosen to participate in the 2018 Etchings Festival with the ECCE Ensemble. In 2019, he was selected as one of the Emerging Composers at the Ludlow English Song Weekend.

He graduated in 2017 with a BA in Music from St Peter’s College, Oxford. He then received a Distinction in his MMus in Composition at Royal Holloway, University of London with Aaron Holloway-Nahum, John Traill, and Chris Whiter in 2018. In 2020, he started a PhD in Composition at King’s College, London, supervised by Edward Nesbit and George Benjamin.

Homepage photo and headshot by Dan Cunniffe (https://500px.com/danielcunniffe)