b i b l i o g r a p h y

Jocelyn Pook composes music for film, television, theatre, dance and the concert platform. Since graduating in 1983 from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where she studied the viola, she has also toured and recorded extensively with many leading names in rock, pop and classical music, both as a soloist and with her ensemble the Electra Strings. She has collaborated with a diverse range of artists, including The Communards, Laurie Anderson, Massive Attack, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Peter Gabriel.

Her original score for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut established her as a highly original composer of screen music. In 2004 she scored the The Merchant of Venice, directed by Michael Radford, with Al Pacino in the role of Shylock. The soundtrack CD was released on Decca Classics in November 2004 and was nominated for a Classical Brit Award in May 2005. Dionysus, the first track on Untold Things, her 2001 CD, features in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. Jocelyn has composed music for several French feature films including Laurent Cantet’s Time Out (L’emploi du temps), Comment j’ai tué mon père, directed by Anne Fontaine and Wild Side directed by Sebastien Lifshitz. Jocelyn’s most recent score is for Paul Marcus’s re-make of the classic children’s story Heidi, released in the UK in August 2005.

Her most recent TV scores are for The Government Inspector, Peter Kosminsky’s drama-documentary for Channel 4 about the last days of the MoD scientist David Kelly, and for Death On The Staircase, the eight-part documentary directed by Jean-Xavier Lestrade, about the trial of American writer Michael Peterson for the murder of his wife. Jocelyn co-wrote with Harvey Brough the music for the BBC2 ten-part drama series In A Land Of Plenty. For S4C, she wrote the music for Saints and Sinners, a six-part documentary series about the history of the papacy, shown in more than twenty countries.

Jocelyn’s 1994 piece Blow the Wind / Pie Jesu, a setting of Kathleen Ferrier’s Blow the Wind Southerly against the contemporary voice of Melanie Pappenheim, became a crossover hit when it was used by Orange for their TV advertising campaign in 1997. Subsequently, her debut album Flood was released on Virgin.

The Jocelyn Pook Ensemble has presented performances of repertoire from Untold Things and from her film scores in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovenia, touring the UK on the Contemporary Music Network in 2001. Her most recent music-theatre work Speaking in Tunes toured in the UK between 2002 and 2004 and Jocelyn received the Composer of the Year Award for Multi-Media in the British Composer Awards of 2003.

Recent notable commissions for dance include Phantasmaton for the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company and for Darshan Singh Bhuller’s Requiem performed by the Phoenix Dance Company. Jocelyn has also composed music for two theatre shows by Bobby Baker, Box Story in 2001 and How To Live, recently premiered at the Barbican in London.