[1] As a boy, Copley was a pupil at Brighton College; he went on to study composition at the Royal Academy of Music and privately with Hans Keller.
His many works include Farnham Fantasia for strings, performed in both the Royal Festival and Royal Albert Halls and the Concerto for Trumpet, Strings and Percussion which received its first performance by John Wallace and the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Barry Wordsworth in the orchestra’s 75th Birthday Weekend.
In May 2013, Expiry TBC, a multimedia work funded by the Arts Council written in collaboration with writer Mark Hewitt including music for electronically enhanced cello was given its first performances at the Brighton Festival Fringe.
2018–19 commissions included music for a multimedia installation, funded by the Arts Council with live performance based on a re-imagining of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen with writer Maria Jastrzᶒbska and artist Dagmara Rudkin, and Salamanca 1936, a secular oratorio for bass solo chorus and orchestra based on an incident that took place in the early days of the Spanish Civil War.
2020s compositions include music for the play Prison Dialogues (Brighton Festival 2021) and Music of Exile for viola and 13 solo strings, an Arts Council funded collaboration with exiled Syrian viola player Raghad Haddad, incorporating Arabic folk scales.