A History of the World in 50 Pieces

Born in Glasgow, Tom Service graduated from York University and studied the music of American composer John Zorn for his PhD at the University of Southampton. He began presenting Radio 3’s Hear and Now in 2001 and now regularly presents Music Matters, the station’s flagship classical music magazine programme, and the New Music Show. He also writes and presents The Listening Service, which has run for more than 120 episodes. As well as fronting many Proms on BBC radio and television, he has presented a number of BBC TV documentaries, including a six-part series of 20th-Century Classics at the Proms, The Joy of Mozart and The Joy of Rachmaninoff – and three programmes, on Handel’s Messiah, Verdi’s La traviata and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 (Leningrad), with co-presenter Amanda Vickery. He has written about music for The Guardian, of which he was Chief Classical Music Critic, and has given lectures at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and York, and at Trinity College of Music in London. In 2018–19 he was Gresham Professor of Music at Gresham College, London. Tom was Guest Artistic Director of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2005 and is the author of Music as Alchemy: Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras and Full of Noises, interviews with the composer Thomas Adès.