Butterfield discovered his desire to be a composer while a chorister at King's College at Cambridge, England. He then studied composition with Rudolf Komorous at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, and then with Bülent Arel at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. As soon as his studies were concluded, Butterfield embarked on an artistic life that dismissed well-treaded paths of previous composers. He moved to Toronto in 1979 and founded Klo, an avant-garde rock band. Sound poetry and visual art soon became part of his instructional and professional endeavors. In 1980, he took the pseudonym Isobel Foote and gave a showing of installation art in galleries in his adopted city of Toronto. He also gave workshops in the visual arts department at Concordia University in Montreal. Butterfield returned to writing recognizably avant-garde classical music again in 1983. Three years later he and John Bentley Mays formed an opera writing collaboration, which has produced several pieces of vocal music of various lengths, including their full-length 1998 opera Zurich 1916. Vocal and stage music has made up a substantial portion of his output, as well as chamber music and electro-acoustic music. Throughout the 1990s Butterfield has been a professor of composition at the University of Victoria, and was the Victoria Symphony Orchestra's composer-in-residence in 1998. He has received commissions from many new music ensembles, and has been a vital performer in Western Canada, premiering Boulez's Le marteau sans maître and Berg's Chamber Concerto in British Columbia, where his presence on the musical scene has been indispensable.