Rhian Samuel is slowly building a name for herself as a composer of considerable sensitivity. She studied at Reading University in England to where, after 16 years in the US (studying at Washington Univ. and teaching at the St Louis Conservatory), she returned to teach in 1984. She is currently Professor of Music at the City University in London.

She has maintained her connections with her Welsh homeland with a series of orchestral works for the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Her works include vocal, chamber and instrumental pieces, an Elegy-Symphony written in the USA and premiered by Slatkin in St Louis and jointly won the ASCAP/Rudolph Nissim Prize for her choral-and-orchestral work “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” in 1983. She was also co-editor of the New Grove/Norton Dictionary of Women Composers (1994).