John Arthur Casken (born 15 July 1949) is an English

composer A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music. Etymology and Def ...

. Casken was born in

Barnsley Barnsley () is a market town in South Yorkshire, England. As the main settlement of the Metropolitan Borough of Barnsley and the fourth largest settlement in South Yorkshire. In Barnsley, the population was 96,888 while the wider Borough ha ...

West Riding of Yorkshire The West Riding of Yorkshire is one of three historic subdivisions of Yorkshire, England. From 1889 to 1974 the administrative county County of York, West Riding (the area under the control of West Riding County Council), abbreviated County ...

, England. While at Barnsley Grammar School in the 1960s his music teacher played a recording of Berg's Violin Concerto, which had a lasting influence. He studied composition at the

University of Birmingham , mottoeng = Through efforts to heights , established = 1825 – Birmingham School of Medicine and Surgery1836 – Birmingham Royal School of Medicine and Surgery1843 – Queen's College1875 – Mason Science College1898 – Mason Univers ...

with John Joubert and

Peter Dickinson Peter Malcolm de Brissac Dickinson OBE FRSL (16 December 1927 – 16 December 2015) was an English author and poet, best known for children's books and detective stories. Dickinson won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association ...

. He attended the Warsaw Academy of Music between 1971 and 1972, where he studied with

Andrzej Dobrowolski Andrzej Dobrowolski (September 9, 1921 – August 8, 1990) was a Polish composer and teacher. He studied at the Warsaw Conservatoire during the war and afterwards in the State High School of Music in Kraków Kraków (), or Cracow, is the seco ...

but also met and became friends with

Witold Lutosławski Witold Roman Lutosławski (; 25 January 1913 – 7 February 1994) was a Polish composer and conductor. Among the major composers of 20th-century classical music, he is "generally regarded as the most significant Polish composer since Szyman ...

.Whittall, Arnold
'Elegies and affirmations: John Casken at 60'
in ''The Musical Times'', No 1909 (Winter 2009), pp. 39-51 He has lectured at the universities of Birmingham (from 1973) and Durham (from 1981), and between 1992 and 2008 he was Professor of Music at the

University of Manchester The University of Manchester is a public university, public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester city centre, Manchester City Centre on Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road. The university owns and operates majo ...

. Casken's students include

Michael Alcorn Michael Alcorn (born 22 January 1962) is a full-time academic and current Director of the School of Music and Sonic Arts at Queen's University, Belfast and a partite composer. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Michael Alcorn studied at ...

, David Jennings and James MacMillan. Casken lives in Northumberland. He has acknowledged the landscape as a significant influence on his work. Works such as the orchestral ''Orion Over Farne'' (1984), the unaccompanied choral work ''To Fields We Do Not Know'' (1985), (described as "a Northumbrian elegy"), the orchestral song-cycle ''Still Mine'' (1992), the ensemble piece ''Winter Reels'' (2010) and the choral ''Uncertain Sea'' (2014) have all drawn inspiration from Northumberland. Casken has also composed two operas: ''Golem'' (1988), which has been revived frequently, and ''God's Liar'' (2000), the latter based on

Tolstoy Count Lev Nikolayevich TolstoyTolstoy pronounced his first name as , which corresponds to the romanization ''Lyov''. () (; russian: link=no, Лев Николаевич Толстой,In Tolstoy's day, his name was written as in pre-refor ...

's novella ''

Father Sergius "Father Sergius" (russian: Отец Сергий, Otets Sergiy) is a short story written by Leo Tolstoy between 1890 and 1898 and first published (posthumously) in 1911.Julian Connolly in Charles A. Moser (ed.), ''The Cambridge History of Russian ...

''. His Cello Concerto of 1991 was written for

Heinrich Schiff Heinrich Schiff (18 November 1951 – 23 December 2016) was an Austrian cellist and conductor. Early life Heinrich Schiff was born on 18 November 1951 in Gmunden, Austria. His parents, Helga (née Riemann) and Helmut Schiff, were composers. H ...

. The Violin Concerto was premiered at the 1995

Proms The BBC Proms or Proms, formally named the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts Presented by the BBC, is an eight-week summer season of daily orchestral classical music concerts and other events held annually, predominantly in the Royal Albert Hal ...

with Dmitri Sitkovetsky as soloist, and the Oboe Concerto ''Apollinaire’s Bird'' (written for Stéphane Rancourt) and Trombone Concerto ''Madonna of Silence'' (written for Katy Jones) were premiered by the Hallé Orchestra in 2014 and 2019 respectively. There is also the Symphony ''Broken Consort'' (2004), performed at the 2004 Proms, and a Concerto for Orchestra (2007). Casken has written much chamber music, including three string quartets, the first in 1982. The Piano Trio (2003) uses themes from the opera ''God's Liar'' as its source material. He wrote ''Rest-ringing'', unusually scored for string quartet and orchestra, for the Lindsay Quartet in 2005. Recent work has shown a renewal of interest in musical theatre, with the melodrama ''Deadly Pleasures'' for narrator and small ensemble, based a poem by

D M Thomas Donald Michael Thomas (born 27 January 1935), is a British poet, translator, novelist, editor, biographer and playwright. His work has been translated into 30 languages. Working primarily as a poet throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Thomas's 1981 ...

concerning the life of

Cleopatra Cleopatra VII Philopator ( grc-gre, Κλεοπάτρα Φιλοπάτωρ}, "Cleopatra the father-beloved"; 69 BC10 August 30 BC) was Queen of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt from 51 to 30 BC, and its last active ruler.She was also a ...

, and a monodrama, ''Kokoschka’s Doll'', premiered at the Cheltenham Festival in 2017, about Alma Mahler's relationship with the painter

Oskar Kokoschka Oskar Kokoschka (1 March 1886 – 22 February 1980) was an Austrian artist, poet, playwright, and teacher best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes, as well as his theories on vision that influenced the Viennese Expres ...

. A CD of ''Kokoschka’s Doll'' was released in 2020.

References

External links

John Casken at Schott Music LimitedJohn Casken website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Casken, John 1949 births Living people 20th-century classical composers 21st-century classical composers English classical composers Academics of the University of Manchester Academics of Durham University Academics of the University of Huddersfield English opera composers Male opera composers Alumni of the University of Birmingham English male classical composers 20th-century English composers 20th-century British male musicians 21st-century British male musicians