Bob Chilcott has been involved in choral music for most of his life. He was a chorister and choral scholar at King's College, Cambridge, and for twelve years was a member of the vocal group The King's Singers. Since 1997 he has worked as a full-time composer and has written a wide variety of choral music, including a significant amount of music for young choirs. He has over one hundred pieces published by Oxford University Press, and a number of his choral works have been published in German, Swedish, Norwegian and Slovenian.

As well as being Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Singers, he has conducted many other leading choirs in their field, including the World Youth Choir, the RIAS Kammerchor, Orphei Drangar from Sweden, Jauna Musika from Lithuania, the Taipei Chamber Singers and the Tower New Zealand Youth Choir. He has worked in twenty three countries on six continents, and at festivals from Festival 500 in Newfoundland to Tallinn, where in 2004, as the first foreign musician to be invited, he conducted a choir of 7000 young singers at the Estonian Song Festival in one of his most popular pieces, "Can you hear me?".