Richard studied composition at the University of York with Richard Orton, at the Royal College of Music with John Lambert (he won a Herbert Howells Prize for Composition and Cobbett and Hurlestone Prizes at the RCM and also the Theodore Holland Award).  He also benefitted from a short period of study with Jonathan Harvey, who continues to be something of a role model as a composer. In New Zealand he studied for his MMus at the University of Auckland, subsequently being awarded a Doctoral Scholarship and a Claude McCarthy Fellowship to investigate the use of sound in Tibetan Buddhist practices. 

As a young composer, his early interest in vocal music broadened later into explorations of electronic media, the orchestra and, even (his own instrument), the piano – of which a long acquaintance had led him to be rather nervous. Recurrent preoccupations since have been the interplay of highly ordered and free-form elements, of mosaic structures with melismatic vocal and instrumental lines and a quasi-spiritual search for a balance of dissonance and tonal elements (as in his Goldsmiths, University of London PhD project: 'Travels with Alex').  These elements have continued to be present in more recent works, together with a movement away from intense pre-compositional working towards more freedom and spontaneity.