Janet Owen Thomas

For the Australian mathematician and educator, see Janet Thomas.

Janet Owen Thomas (29 January 1961 – 5 June 2002) was a British composer and organist.

Early life and education Owen Thomas was born on Merseyside to parents of Welsh and German heritage. and the composer Robert Saxton. She received a scholarship to travel to Hamburg, where she briefly studied with composer György Ligeti, whose organ music she later wrote an article about. The period in Hamburg led to Owen Thomas being commissioned by to write the solo organ piece Rosaces (1984), which was subsequently widely performed and published by Novello. It was during this time that she wrote a music theatre piece, The Condom Tester's Lament, for speaker and electronics. She went on to take advanced composition studies with Anthony Gilbert at the Royal Northern College of Music.

In 1991, the BBC Proms presented the UK premiere of Rosaces. Owen Thomas was the youngest composer whose music was featured in that year's festival, and the work went on to be played in over a dozen countries.

Style In her obituary for Owen Thomas, fellow composer Nicola LeFanu described the former's musical style as follows:The hallmark of her style is linear counterpoint; the music is carefully constructed to allow for self-similarity in its proportions, both in the large and in the detail. In speaking of her work, Thomas acknowledged the influence of the 17th-and 18th-century music which she played so much in her days as an organist. Her contrapuntal textures are transformed, though, by the "shimmer and glitter" which she loved. Fiori musicali (1997) commissioned and recorded by the Bingham String Quartet. Under the Skin (1999) commissioned by the BBC for the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.