Buller returned to music in his thirties, taking an external London University BMus in 1964 after private study with Anthony Milner.
[2] Perhaps his best known work is Proença (1977) for electric guitar, mezzo-soprano and orchestra,[3][4] which was selected by the 1978 International Rostrum of Composers in Paris.
Other works include The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies (1978), The Theatre of Memory (1981), the opera Bakxai (1992), Bacchae Metres (1993) and Illusions (1997).
[5] In his obituary for John Buller in the Guardian, Martin Wainwright wrote, '...John's discovery of Joyce fuelled him for most of his creative life, and I think what became fundamental to everything he composed was the Joycean notion that imagination is nothing but extended memory, that the commonplace of our musical or aural consciousness is virtually infinite, so that the task of the composer is to go down to the elements of musical consciousness and reorder them.
His voice, in everything, came from this vision, and maybe that is why it embraced a wider than usual range of idioms and contrasts, including popular elements.