Jacob Fitzgerald
Composer

Jacob Fitzgerald is a composer based in London, whose music has been described as “remarkable, touching and intimate one moment, then hilarious the next”. 

 

Recent projects include murmuration, a recorder quartet performed by Palisander, a piece for two hundred school children and a string quartet in a forest, and in 2021 Jacob secured funding from Arts Council England to support his miniature ballet, notes on loving, much ado about nothing, a collaboration with choreographer Emily Pahlawan-Collinson. Performance highlights so far in 2023 include Achtzig! for recorder and violin duet, performed by John Turner and Benedict Holland in St. Paul’s, Heaton Moor, and murmuration's third BBC Radio 3 broadcast as part of their Words and Music series. This work is also published by The Peacock Press and available for purchase via their website. Upcoming performances include Those who wait for the Lord performed by the choir of St Mary’s Bourne Street as part of the London Festival of Contemporary Church Music at 11am, 14th May, Bow Suite, performed by Graham Oppenheimer, and lines and squares and nursery chairs for Prime Brass in Ely Cathedral this November.

 

Starting his musical life as a chorister at Jesus College, Cambridge, Jacob has gone on to study composition at Aldeburgh Young Musicians, Chetham’s School of Music, the Zurich Hochschule der Künste and Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. His teachers have included Huw Watkins, Isabel Mundry and Simone Fontanelli. Writing for a wide variety of settings, he has had his work performed and commissioned by ensembles and performers including the Hermes Experiment, Gesualdo Six, House of Bedlam, the Brodsky, Ruisi and Piatti Quartets, and cellist Martina Schucan, in venues ranging from St John’s Smith Square to the Timber Festival in Derbyshire. Jacob has been the recipient of, amongst others, the Douglas Steele Award, the National Centre for Early Music Composers Award and has been shortlisted for The Clements Prize.

 

The first movement from Jacob’s four inventions for solo piano is also included in Trinity College London's grade 8 syllabus, launching this coming September.

 

​

“An interesting and attractive new voice” - Thomas Lyon, Oxford University Press on Pie Jesu

 

“Remarkable, touching and intimate one moment, then hilarious the next … quite extraordinary. What a powerful piece, every single member of the audience was held spellbound throughout … glorious symmetry” – Neil Cox, composer, on notes on loving, much ado about nothing