George Nicholson (b.1949) is one of the generation of composers who emerged in the early 1970s from York University, where he read Music and English. He studied composition under Bernard Rands and, after a period of school teaching, returned to undertake postgraduate composition studies with David Blake, gaining a PhD in 1979. The earliest influence on his work, and probably the most significant in terms of musical philosophy, was Henri Pousseur. Like Pousseur, Nicholson has looked to Schoenberg for a means of finding a path toward a synthesis of old and new, and an awareness of his position in the wider context of musical history.