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David Holyoake is a dual citzen Australian/British composer who spent most of his life in Melbourne and central Victoria and is now based between Lisbon Portugal and Brussels Belgium. He is interested in art music music as deep language, in the concept of duende and in using new music to help communicate environmental or social change.

Some of Holyoake's music is published by Reed Music and his compositions are receiving increasing recognition and performances in the UK, Australia, Belgium and beyond. His works are accessible, technically challenging, and have been described as displaying emotional depth, providing musicians with excellent material for either performance or study purposes. His music was part of the National Gallery of Victoria's first-ever sound programme, Now Hear This, featuring new music of 10 Melbourne composers as part of the National Gallery's 'Melbourne Now' exhibition in November 2013 - March 2014. Regarding the influence 'compositional schools of thought' he is much more interested in the legacy of post-spectralism than the legacy of atonalism.

He holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts and a Bachelor of Laws with Honours, both from the University of Melbourne, as well as piano performance qualifications from the AMEB and ABRSM. His concert works have been performed at venues such as the Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, the Brisbane Convention Centre, the Royal Academy of Music London, Fairfields Hall London, Rich Mix London, Beursshouberg Brussels, and broadcast on ABC Classic FM and other media. Holyoake has also composed music in various genres for professional and amateur theatrical productions, for contemporary dance, and scored a short independent film. In addition to his solo and chamber works, a number of commissions for soundtracks for film, theatre and contemporary dance can be heard on his new sound cloud page here.

When first starting out, back in 2006, he won second prize for piano composition at the Brisbane finals of the Keys Australian Music Competition, and soon after was awarded his first grants from Arts Victoria, then moving to Europe, the UK Arts Council, and the Belgian Ministry of Culture to support his work. He has worked with and been commissioned by leading ensembles such as Silo String Quartet (Australia), members of Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles (Belgium), Ensemble Mendelssohn (London), and leading choreographers such as Gerard Van Dyke of Kage Physical Theatre. Holyoake is a member of the Melbourne Composers League and has had works selected for and performed at several of their concerts. In London, he completed a commission from Nyctolopic (supported by the UK Arts Council) to create an original score for a 1-hour new contemporary dance-theatre work called The City Will Crumble, inspired by the philosophy and aesthetic of film noir.

Holyoake also has a professional background as an environmental campaigner and climate change policy expert. He worked for many years as an advocate and as a policy advisor with EU environmental law and campaigning NGOs such as ClientEarth.org and Bankwatch.org He later founded Swarm Dynamics in London which operated for 9 years as a small non-profit interdisciplinary organisation involving artists in imagineering sustainable, post-capitalist futures. He believes musicians and artists should be better organised as a force for change. In this theme, he was commissioned by London based Ensemble Matisse to compose Extinct Birds, supported by the Arts Council of England. This was an arts-science creation of 35 minutes duration, including sound recordings of extinct and endangered song birds against contemporary chamber music. By juxtaposing human song against the song of species whose destruction we have caused, Extinct Birds came with a powerful environmental message. In 2015, he was commissioned by Trio Metafora in Belgium, to compose The Message of the Hurricanes, a work for soprano, harp, flute about climate change and financial greed. This work was premiered in Brussels as part of the Origami new consonant music festival, and then taken to the Echternach international classical music festival in Luxembourg.

In 2017, Holyoake spent six months as composer in residence at Atelier Marcel Hastir in Brussels, a leading and historical cultural centre. During that time, he engaged with the historical archives of its recently deceased founder, artist and great humanitarian Marcel Hastir, who bravely helped save many people during the resistance to the Nazi occupation of Belgium. The resulting work was premiered at the venue in May 2017 by acclaimed violinist Daniel Rubenstein from Ensemble Mendelssohn and composer David Holyoake at the piano, with grant support from the Contemporary Music Council and the Ministry of Culture.

Holyoake has recently branched into film scoring, forming one part of his musical output, returning to studies in 2025 and graduating with high marks from the Film Scoring post graduate degree programme at Portugal's National Academy of Advanced Orchestral Studies, in collaboration with Metropolitana Orchestra. He scored a first independent short Film in 2026, featured at "Short Verse" and other independent festivals.

David Holyoake — current to September 2026