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Pook graduated in 1983 from London's
Guildhall School of Music and Drama where she studied the viola with David Takeno and piano with Carola Grindea.
Career
Pook took part in the band
ABC's
Lexicon Of Love World Tour and appeared in the
Julian Temple/ABC movie Mantrap, continuing with a period of recording and performing with artists including
Massive Attack,
PJ Harvey,
Peter Gabriel and as a member of
The Communards for their three-year life. She also performed in this period as musician/actor with experimental theatre companies Impact Theatre Co-operative and Lumiere & Son, as well as in several productions with The National Theatre.
As a solo recording artist, Pook released several albums, including Deluge (Virgin Records 1997), Flood (Virgin Records 1999) and Untold Things (RealWorld Records 2001 - 2013). These also featured several singers she works regularly with, notably
Melanie Pappenheim with whom she has collaborated with on many projects.
Her career as a film composer took off when
Stanley Kubrick heard her album Deluge and asked her to score his film Eyes Wide Shut. The piece “Masked Ball”,[12] which incorporates a fragment of an Orthodox
Liturgy played backwards and lyrics sung (or chanted) in
Romanian, underscored the masked ball sequence.[13][14] Pook's score for Eyes Wide Shut received a Chicago Film Award and a
Golden Globe nomination.[15]
Pook was nominated for a
BAFTA for her score for
Channel 4's The Government Inspector[21] and, in April 2018, she won a BAFTA for her music for the 2017 TV film version of King Charles III (Dir: Rupert Gould).[22] She wrote the score for Netflix documentary series The Staircase directed by Jean-Xavier Lestrade.[23]
Pook wrote several concert, music theatre and opera pieces as well as touring with "The Jocelyn Pook Ensemble".
In 2002 she was commissioned by
The Proms to write a piece for
The King's Singers, "Mobile", in collaboration with
Andrew Motion. In 2003 she won a British Composer Award (Currently named the Ivors Composer Awards) for her music-theatre piece Speaking in Tunes.[24] She was commissioned to write a short opera, Ingerland,[25] 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.[26] In December 2012 her symphonic song cycle "Hearing Voices", exploring experiences of mental illness, featuring
Melanie Pappenheim with
Charles Hazlewood conducting the
BBC Concert Orchestra was premiered at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.[27]
Pook won a second British Composer Award in 2012 for her soundtrack to
Akram Khan's dance production DESH.[28] In June 2014 she composed music for
English National Ballet's Glastonbury Festival debut on the
Pyramid Stage, performing
Akram Khan's First World War-themed Dust, broadcast on BBC2. Her most recent ballet for English National Ballet, M-Dao choreographed by Yabin Wang, premiered in 2016 at
Sadler's Wells.[29]
She won an
Olivier Award in 2008 for the
National Theatre's production of St Joan (Dir: Marianne Elliot).[30] Other theatre work includes the 2014 play King Charles III by
Mike Bartlett which premiered at
Almeida Theatre, transferred to West End's
Wyndham's Theatre and then to Broadway, New York.[31] Pook wrote the score for National Theatre of Scotland's award-winning Adam which premiered at
Edinburgh International Festival in 2017 and featured a 120-strong, international digitally connected trans choir.[32]
In 2019, Pook was commissioned by
The Proms to write a new piece for Prom 49: The Lost Words. "You Need To Listen To Us" sets words from speeches by environmental activist
Greta Thunberg to music.[33] She also composed the soundtrack for The Kingmaker, a documentary about the controversial political career of
Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the
Philippines, directed by
Lauren Greenfield.[34]
Politics
In November 2019, along with other public figures, Pook signed a letter supporting
Labour Party leader
Jeremy Corbyn describing him as "a beacon of hope in the struggle against emergent far-right nationalism, xenophobia and racism in much of the democratic world" and endorsed him in the
2019 UK general election.[35]
1997 – Friday the Thirteenth –
The Stranglers – ("Waltz in Black", "Valley of the Birds", "Daddy's Riding the Range", "Golden Brown", "No More Heroes")