Adrian Jack

Adrian Frederick Joseph Jack (16 March 1943 – June 2026) was a British composer.

Life and career Adrian Frederick Joseph Jack was born in Datchet, near Slough, Buckinghamshire, England, on 16 March 1943. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood (1954–1960), and the Royal College of Music, London (1961–1964), where he studied composition with Peter Racine Fricker, fugue and orchestration with Gordon Jacob, piano with Antony Hopkins and organ with John Birch. From 1967 to 1969 he studied composition and electronic music with Włodzimierz Kotoński at the State Higher School of Music in Warsaw, Poland.

Jack started composing at the age of 13. He later studied at the Royal College of Music. The main conscious influence at that time was Messiaen. Hearing Boulez's "Le marteau sans maitre" brought a new atonal complexity to his music, replaced by an austere paring-down following his discovery of Edgard Varèse. He actually wrote to Varèse to ask if he could study with him in New York and received a letter of refusal, not very long before Varèse died in November 1965.

For the next 20 years, Jack composed somewhat intermittently, but his works included "Holly Bush", written in Poland and given a public rehearsal by the London Sinfonietta under Roger Norrington at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London; a piano concerto for Roger Woodward, which was never performed; a monodic piece for any instruments or voices, "You told me so yourself", which received performances by different soloists and groups both in England and abroad; and "A piece for learning" – a "variable" score performed under Richard Bernas's direction at the Dartington Summer School.

He lectured at the Royal College of Music from 1969 to 1977, then he joined BBC Radio 3 as a script-writer for music programmes. He left the BBC in 1993 and for the next ten years was active as a freelance music critic and devised and presented several radio programmes on music and architecture for BBC Radio 3 with the producers Tim Thorne and Antony Pitts, and two notable examples of radiogenic work, "Chromatic Fantasy" and "From the Diary of a Fly". Jack has written about music regularly since 1970 for most of the quality national papers, notably The Guardian and, later, The Independent. The other activity was as director of a series at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, devoted to new music. It ran from 1978 to 1995. Many of his scores are lodged with the British Music Information Centre (BMIC) and recordings at the British Library Sound Archive.

Owing to ill health Jack no longer composed in later years and withdrew from making public appearances. He died in June 2026, aged 83.