Tippett studied composition (1923–28) at the Royal College of Music and privately (1930–32) with R.O. Morris. After serving as music director (1940–51) at Morley College, London, he became a radio and television speaker for the BBC and active as an orchestral conductor. He was knighted in 1966, and he served as director of the Bath (music) Festival from 1969 to 1974.

Tippett developed slowly as a composer. His early music was conservative, but in the late 1930s he developed a personal, modernistic idiom that was marked by rhapsodic lyricism, intricate counterpoint, and polyphonic rhythms that have a lilting, bounding quality. His first significant composition, an oratorio on his own libretto, A Child of Our Time (composed 1939–41), made him famous upon its performance by the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1944. Tippett's most successful works were on a large scale, in particular the operas The Midsummer Marriage (performed 1955), King Priam (1962), The Knot Garden (1970), and The Ice Break (1977), for which he wrote his own librettos. His instrumental works include four symphonies, concertos, string quartets, and piano sonatas.

Beginning with King Priam, his surging rhythms and lush harmonies give way to a starker, more taut style featuring abrupt juxtapositions of sharply contrasting musical subsections. Tippett's works were not frequently performed in Great Britain until the 1960s. Similarly, it was not until the following decade that his works were regularly scheduled in the United States.