Raymond Warren was born in 1928 and studied at Cambridge University (1949–52) reading mathematics at first and then changing to music under Boris Ord and Robin Orr.
He has collaborated with many other artists of note including the poets John Reed, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Charles Tomlinson, the choreographer Helen Lewis and the founders of the Lyric Theatre, Belfast and written for performers including Peter Pears, Julian Bream, Eric Gruenberg, Cecil Aronowitz, Janet Price, Christopher Austin, Jeremy Huw Williams, David Ogden and the Dartington String Quartet.
Peter Jacobs has recorded the Monody movement from Warren's Second Piano Sonata (1977), which consists of a single line of melody with decoration.
Warren has worked closely with several poets, providing instrumental music to complement spoken words, including Lares (1972) with Michael Longley and The Sound of Time (1984) with Charles Tomlinson.
Warren wrote: "I knew Seamus Heaney quite well – we were both young lecturers at the Queen’s University of Belfast – and I thought of him then, before his coming to international fame, as essentially a deep-rooted Irish country poet.
Hence the decision not to set his sequence as song but instead to have the poems read and to bring out their almost ritualistic long term structures with the use of overlaid piano interludes."