Tovey began to survey a piano and compose at an early age. He in time exposed music under Hubert Parry.

Tovey became the close friend of Joseph Joachim, and played piano by having the Joachim Quartet inside a 1905 performance of Johannes Brahms' Piano Quintet. He gained a few moderate fame as a composer, getting his works performed around Berlin and Vienna as well as London. He performed his have piano concerto under the conductorship of Henry Wood in 1903 and under Hans Richter in 1906. When you took this time he too contributed heavy to the music articles in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, writing a big part of the content in music of the Eighteenth & Nineteenth centuries.

Around 1914 he began to teach music at Edinburgh University and there he founded the Reid Orchestra. For their concerts he wrote a series of programme notes, numerous of which were at length collected into a books for which he is nowadays better known, the Essays in Musical Analysis.

Tovey began to compose & perform less typically late within life. Within 1913 he composed a symphony, in 1935 he wrote a cello concerto for Pablo Casals and he also wrote an opera, The Bride of Dionysus.

Tovey manufactured many editions of more composers' music & inside 1931 produced the completion of Johann Sebastian Bach's Die Kunst der Fuge.

Tovey was knighted in 1935. He died around 1940 around Edinburgh.