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After Cardiff Hoddinott spent some time in London, where he took private lessons with the Australian composer Arthur Benjamin, making ends meet by turning out film scores for Walt Disney, and also another for Hammer Films' lively epic Sword of Sherwood Forest, with Richard Greene as Robin Hood. His incidental music for radio plays and films during the 1950s, 60s and 70s included scores to accompany works by the European writers Jean Anouilh and Gabriel Garcia Lorca, the poets Dannie Abse and Robert Browning, plays by Christopher Fry and the Welsh nationalist poet-playright Saunders Lewis (1893-1985), and texts by Gwyn Thomas, the Oxford-educated coalminer's son from the Rhondda, member of the BBC Brains Trust and 'true voice of the English-speaking valleys'.

Hoddinott returned to Wales in 1959 to lecture at the Welsh College of Music and Drama. Later, from 1967, as the new professor of music at his old university college of Cardiff, with his friend, the pianist John Ogdon, he set up and then ran the Cardiff Festival, which had a heavy focus on contemporary arts and modern music. In this capacity Hoddinott was generous in promoting the music of fellow-composers (Sir Peter Pears rather aptly described him as 'a Father Christmas of a man'). In each role he exercised a huge beneficial influence on music and the arts in Wales.

Around this time Hoddinott's Variants for Orchestra (RPO 1966) and Night Music (New Philharmonia, 1967) gave evidence of new stylistic elements that owed something to the example of Lutoslawski and Penderecki.

A violinist rather than pianist by training, he composed not at the piano, but directly into the orchestral score. Among the composer's favourite techniques at this time was the use of palindrome and double palindrome, in which a sequence of musical notes is first stated and then restated in reverse order; in his First Piano Concerto (1960) and elsewhere he coupled this with use of a dodecaphonic line.

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