Composers
Jocelyn Pook
© Hugo Glendinning
Born: 1960
Brief Biography: Jocelyn Pook’s distinctive style is a product of her diverse experiences in classical, commercial and world music. After graduating from London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, she performed with many pop artists including The Communards and Massive Attack, and formed Electra Strings for whom she wrote original material. She has worked extensively with eminent dance companies such as DV8 and Shobana Jeyasingh, and in 2002 she was commissioned by the BBC Proms to write a work for The King’s Singers in collaboration with Poet Laureate Andrew Motion. Notable film credits include Michael Radford’s adaptation of The Merchant of Venice and Stanley Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut.
For a complete biography, click here.
Key Works:- Blow the Wind: Pie Jesu
(1994: mezzo-soprano, string quartet, tape) - Portraits in Absentia
(1999; answerphone message samples, orchestra) - Eyes Wide Shut
(1999; film score) - Saints and Sinners
(2000; Persian singer, chorus, ensemble) - L’emploi du temps (2001; film score)
- Speaking in Tunes (2002; string quartet, tape)
| Career Highlights:- 1997 Blow the Wind / Pie Jesu, used by Orange in TV advertising campaign
- 1999 score for Eyes Wide Shut nominated for Golden Globe Award
- 2001 wrote score for Laurent Cantet’s film L’emploi du temps
- 2002 Phantasmaton premiered by the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company
- 2003 Multimedia Award for Speaking in Tunes at the first British Composer Awards
- 2004 wrote score for Michael Radford’s film adaptation of The Merchant of Venice
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Full Biography:
Jocelyn Pook is an award-winning composer who writes music for film, television, theatre, dance and the concert platform. Originally coming from a background of experimental theatre and dance, both as a performer with Impact Theatre Co-operative and Lumière and Son, and then as a composer with DV8 Physical Theatre and O Vertigo Danse, Jocelyn’s interest in this medium resurfaced when, in collaboration with visual artist Dragan Aleksic and director Graeme Miller, she created the music-theatre piece Speaking In Tunes for which she received a British Composer Award in the multi-media category. Recent dance commissions include Phantasmaton for the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company and Darshan Singh Bhuller’s Requiem for the Phoenix Dance Company. Jocelyn has also composed music for theatre such as Pete Brooks' Insomniac, Bobby Baker’s productions of Box Story and How To Live, The Royal Shakespeare Company’s King John and most recently she collaborated with Paul Arditti on the critically acclaimed National Theatre production of St Joan, starring Anne-Marie Duff, which won an Olivier Award for Best Music and Sound Design. Upcoming work in this area is Elemental - a large-scale site specific music theatre project written and directed by Patrick Barlow.
Established as a highly original composer of screen music, her score for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut garnered a Golden Globe nomination. Other significant work in this area includes The Merchant of Venice (Dir: Michael Radford), with Al Pacino in the role of Shylock and a soundtrack released on Decca Classics which was nominated for a Classical Brit Award; the classic children’s story Heidi (Dir: Paul Marcus), starring Max von Sydow, Geraldine Chaplin and Diana Rigg and Brick Lane (Dir: Sarah Gavron) based on Monica Ali’s best selling novel. Jocelyn’s music was featured in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York and she has also had much success with music for European films such as Caótica Ana (Dir: Julio Medem), Laurent Cantet’s L’emploi du temps (Time Out), Comment j’ai tué mon père (Dir: Anne Fontaine), La Repentie (Dir: Laetitia Masson) starring Isabelle Adjani and Wild Side (Dir: Sebastien Lifshitz) the soundtrack of which featured Antony Hegarty from Antony & The Johnsons.
Some of her many scores for TV include: Storm Over Everest (Dir: David Breashers) - a documentary about the fatal ascent of Everest by a group of climbers; Death On The Staircase (Dir: Jean-Xavier de Lestrade), an eight-part documentary about the trial of American writer Michael Peterson for the murder of his wife; the Royal Television Society nominated score to Granada’s The Butterfly Collectors; S4C’s Saints and Sinners, a six-part documentary series about the history of the papacy, shown in more than 20 countries; the major BBC2 10-part drama In A Land Of Plenty, which she co-wrote with Harvey Brough; The Sight (Dir: Paul Anderson) - a supernatural thriller starring Honor Blackman and the BAFTA nominated score for The Government Inspector (Dir: Peter Kosminsky) – the Channel 4 award-winning drama-documentary about the story of the late Dr. David Kelly and the events leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Jocelyn’s music has also been set to television commercials. Her work Blow the Wind / Pie Jesu, a setting of Kathleen Ferrier’s Blow the Wind Southerly against the contemporary voice of Melanie Pappenheim was used by Orange for their TV advertising campaign and the work Masked Ball (from the CD Flood ), was used as the soundtrack for an extraordinary Campari commercial.
Since graduating from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1983, where she studied the viola, she has toured and recorded extensively with many leading names in rock, pop and contemporary music (both as a soloist and with her ensemble the Electra Strings) including Laurie Anderson, This Mortal Coil, Massive Attack, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Nick Cave, Lyle Lovett and Peter Gabriel. Her own group - The Jocelyn Pook Ensemble - includes singers and long-time collaborators Melanie Pappenheim and Harvey Brough, Iranian singer Parvin Cox, Sri Lankan vocalist Manickam Yogeswaran, and occasionally Natacha Atlas, with whom Jocelyn is currently collaborating on an album project. The Ensemble has presented performances of repertoire from Untold Things, Flood and music from her film scores, throughout the US, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovenia. Her most recent tour of the UK was via the Contemporary Music Network and they performed at the opening week of Kings Place – the new venue in Kings Cross - in October last year and Chester Novello published a book of Jocelyn’s cello music to coincide with these performances.
With a blossoming reputation as a composer of electro-acoustic works and music for the concert platform, Jocelyn’s fascination with the human voice can be heard in most areas of her commissioned work. Her work Mobile was a commission from the BBC Proms and the Kings Singers and is a collaboration with the Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, Portraits in Absentia was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and is a collage of sound, voice, music and words woven from the messages left on her answer phone over a period of three months and this was arranged for orchestra for the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra and given its first performance at the Dewan Filharmonik Petronas in Kuala Lumpar, under the direction of Kevin Field. Future projects include commissions for the BBC Concert Orchestra, the Hilliard Ensemble and counter-tenor Andreas Scholl and chamber orchestra.
"It is with this solo project (Deluge) that she shows her mettle as a composer of imagination and ingenuity" The Wire
"Jocelyn Pook has sampled the thoughts of those evicted and combined them with the sounds of destruction to ingenious and powerful effect" Time Out (on Blight)
"Pook is acquiring a cult following" The Independent
"Few directors are as involved and invested in the musical details of their films as was the late genius Stanley Kubrick ... specially commissioned works that shine for their originality and eclecticism ... minimalist, exotic, rich and soul-stirring." Billboard
On Eyes Wide Shut
"Kubrick may have been her Pygmalian, but there's much more to Pook than that, so it's worth keeping your ears open." La Sicilia
'The heightened sense of menace reaches its climax with the intensely spooky music of Jocelyn Pook' James Verniere, Boston Herald
'The film is enhanced by Jocelyn Pook's wonderful score' - Gene Shalit, NBC News
'A magical score by Jocleyn Pook' David Hunter, The Hollywood Reporter
External Websites
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