Jocelyn Pook

Jocelyn Pook (born 14 February 1960, Birmingham, England) is a British composer, pianist and viola player.

Jocelyn Pook graduated in 1983 from London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama where she studied the viola. She performed with many pop artists including The Communards and Massive Attack, and formed Electra Strings together with Sonia Slany 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 Proms to write a work for The King's Singers in collaboration with Andrew Motion.

Pook recorded on two occasions with pianist Jeremy Peyton Jones for Rough Trade and later for Century XXI. About a year later, she joined Anne Stephenson and Audrey Riley to accompany Virginia Astley both on stage and record. Session work followed and alternated with her co-founding of the Electra Strings with Australian violinist Sonia Slany and an album on the Village Life label. This neoclassical chamber quartet later transformed into the Brilliant Strings after she and Slany had gone their separate ways.

As a solo recording artist, Pook released several albums. These included Deluge (1997), Flood (1999) and Untold Things (2003).

Her career as a film composer took flight when cuts from her album Flood were used in Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut. The piece Masked Ball, which incorporates a fragment of an Orthodox Liturgy played backwards and lyrics sung (or chanted) in Romanian, underscored the masked ball sequence.

Further scores have subsequently been contributed to several European films, notably the 2004 film version of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Peter Kosminsky’s film on David Kelly, The Government Inspector, Brick Lane and 2007’s Caótica Ana.

Pook was commissioned to write a short opera, Ingerland, for ROH2 (the contemporary producing arm of London’s Royal Opera House) which was performed in the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio Theatre in June 2010.

On the 3rd of December 2012 her work "Hearing Voices", was performed in premiere by Melanie Pappenheim with Charles Hazlewood conducting the BBC Concert Orchestra at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in a concert on the theme of hysteria.