Artist Spotlight: William Southworth
- Jun 15
- 4 min read
William Southworth is a Birmingham-based composer whose musical life has moved between contemporary classical music and heavy metal. Born in Solihull, he was a chorister at St Alphege Parish Church and studied the cello and piano, later teaching himself guitar and performing in a number of rock and metal bands. He began composing whilst at Solihull Sixth Form College before reading composition at Coventry University, studying with Robert Ramskill, Kate Romano and Rob Godman. Read and find our more about him ahead of the RRO's performance of The Last Watch of Hero on Sunday the 28th of June.
Intro
I am a Birmingham-based composer whose musical life has moved between the vastly different worlds of classical music and heavy metal. Having abandoned composition in the mid-2000s, I returned to writing around eighteen months ago with a renewed sense of purpose and clarity. My emerging body of contemporary classical work draws deeply on the traditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, alongside more contemporary influences.
Early Life and Musical Beginnings
I was born in Solihull and grew up in a musical household, where my parents and three siblings were all involved in music in one way or another. I was a chorister at St Alphege Parish Church, studied the cello and the piano, and played in various youth orchestras; experiences that laid the foundations of my lifelong love of
orchestral music. My other enduring musical passion is for heavy metal, a genre I discovered one rainy lunchtime at junior school when a friend brought in a cassette of Metallica’s Black Album. In time I taught myself the electric guitar and played in a number of bands.
I only began composing classical music during my time at Solihull Sixth Form College, and even then it was intermittent and without much direction. As my time at college came to an end, and with little idea of what to do next, the suggestion arose that studying composition at university might be an option.
University
At Coventry University I studied with Robert Ramskill, Kate Romano and Rob Godman. It was here that I discovered the three composers who would shape, and continue to shape, my musical language: Gustav Mahler, Steve Reich and John Adams. Whilst Mahler’s music felt familiar and rooted in the same symphonic
tradition as Beethoven, Schubert or Brahms, the American minimalist’s style, which rejected classical form and structure without abandoning tonality or accessibility, and whose use of repetition was entirely different from the riffbased language of rock and metal, was absolutely revelatory.
Although I produced few works of real quality, it was a magical period of discovery. When I returned to composition in 2025, it was many of the works I’d first encountered at university that reignited my interest. During this time I developed a musical language best described as postminimalist, with my later student works becoming more chromatic and harmonically adventurous, though performances were few and far between.
Hiatus
After university, I continued to compose, and in 2005 my string orchestra work Underside and Vortex was premiered at St Martin’s Church in Birmingham by the Central England Ensemble. The piece had been written while I was still at university, and after the performance it became clear, though I hadn’t really
noticed it before, that I’d been writing but not ever finishing anything. Over the next couple of years I tried to write, but nothing of quality emerged, and I spent less and less time composing. In 2007, after a long period of inactivity, I made one final attempt to revive my composing; a short choral piece whose score I still have, though it simply wasn’t very good. And so I stopped composing altogether. I had also fallen out of love with metal and had long since stopped playing the guitar, leaving me with no music-making at all.
Return to Music
I lived in London between 2013 and 2017, and during this time, I slowly returned to the guitar and, for the first time in more than a decade, began listening to metal again. I had dismissed the genre as rather juvenile, but through this period of rediscovery, I found many underground bands producing genuinely interesting records and, more importantly, I realised it was perfectly ok to love metal for its power and directness, and that not everything had to be an intellectual exercise. I continued to listen to classical music and attend concerts, but I felt no desire to compose. Writing music remained a strange relic of my past.
When I returned to Birmingham in 2017, I reconnected with Steve White, an old friend and former bandmate from Sixth Form College. Along with Chris Scrivens we formed the metal project Lunar Mercia, releasing an EP and an album and performing around the country, though the project now exists solely as a studio venture.
In the winter of 2024/25 I found myself listening to a great deal of Arvo Pärt and became fascinated by his process. I borrowed scores, studied them, and eventually decided, almost on a whim, to try writing a short choral piece. I didn’t expect it to lead anywhere; it was simply curiosity. But I didn’t stop. Before long I
was writing regularly and, crucially, thinking about music constantly, just as I had at university. By the summer of 2025 I had completed drafts of my first new pieces and had continued to study composition and theory in earnest. This year I began formal composition and harmony lessons with Ivor McGregor and have become increasingly active in seeking performances for my work.
The Romantic Revival Orchestra’s performance of The Last Watch of Hero this June will be the first performance of my contemporary classical music since 2005. I am extraordinarily grateful to Wiktor and Tommaso for giving me this opportunity, and to the players of the RRO for bringing the piece to life.
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