James Dillon was born in 1950 in Scotland and began his musical career playing traditional Scottish bagpipe and in a rock band. His diverse studies included art and design at the University of Glasgow in 1968, and the music of Northern India at Keele University – his piece Ti.re-Ti.ke-Dha for percussion (1977) shows this rhythmic influence – then traveled to London in 1970 to study music, acoustics, and linguistics. He is primarily self-trained as a composer.

After winning First Prize in the competition of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 1978, Dillon’s reputation grew in 1982 with Who do you love and Parjanya-Vata, which won the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis in Darmstadt. In 1986, he was invited to be a guest lecturer at the State University of New York, taught composition at Goldsmiths, University of London, and participated in the IRCAM’s summer seminar.

His teaching career continued with ten years teaching at the Darmstadt Summer Courses (1982-1992). He also served as co-composer-in-residence with Brian Ferneyhough at Royaumont in 1996 and is a regularly invited guest professor around the world. Starting in 2007, he taught composition at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis, where he is now professor emeritus.

Many of Dillon’s compositions are grouped into cycles: for example, Nine Rivers, which spans eighteen years (1982-2000), is a set of nine pieces that explores relationships between flow and turbulence. Two compositions from this “collection” include electronics: Introitus (commissioned by the IRCAM in 1989-1990) and Oceanos (1985-1996), which Dillon calls the “delta” of the cycle, is a kind of synthesis of its other eight pieces, and calls on all of their instruments and performers. Notable among his other cycles are The book of Elements for piano (1997-2002) and three books of duets titled Traumwerk Book (1995-2002). Anthropology, created for the Orchestre de Paris, also includes multiple pieces.

Dillon’s catalogue also includes a major stage work Philomela (2004), for which he wrote his own libretto, inspired by Ovid and Sophocles. The composer describes it as “music/theatre,” as distinct from opera or musical theater. Dillon was also selected by BBC Television and the Arts Council of England to compose Temp’est (1995) for the series Sound of Film.

Among his many awards and honors, James Dillon was named “musician of the year” by the London Sunday Times in 1989, was an International Distinguished Fellow of New York University in 2001-2002, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Huddersfield in 2003. He has received five prizes in the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards, including for Chamber-Scale Composition with Traumwerk Book 1 in 1997 and with The Book of Elements Vol. 5 in 2002. The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival performed a major retrospective of Dillon’s work in November 1995; another important retrospective concert was performed in New York in 2001. In 2005 and 2011, he was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Prize in London. In 2009, he received the Deutschen Schallplattenkritik for the DVD of Traumwerk. The CD recording of Philomela won the Grand Prix de l’Académie du Disque Lyrique 2010. In 2015, he was awarded the BASCA British Composer Award for Stabat Mater dolorosa.