Mark-Anthony Turnage is one of the best-know living British composers of contemporary classical music. Born in Corringham, Essex in 1960, he acquired his love of music from his parents, his father with a hobby of playing the piano and singing and his mother playing cornet in a brass band. He began piano lessons at age six and soon showed an enthusiasm for improvisation and composing. After graduating from the Royal College of Music, he then became a professor of composition at the same institution.
Turnage has composed numerous orchestral and chamber works as well as several operas. He has a highly eclectic style which is strongly influenced by other twentieth century eclectic composers and by jazz and other forms of popular music.
His first opera was Greek, which premiered in 1988. In 1996 he completed Blood on the Floor the Floor is a nine-movement suite for a jazz trio and large ensemble. One of his more recent works is Frieze, which was completed in 2013 and commemorates the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. Hammer a ring on it is a lively, jazz-infused orchestral and vocal work. Dialogue, which premiered in 2015, is somewhat of a double concerto, composed for a violin, a cello and an orchestra.