Jocelyn Pook

Jocelyn Pook is a British composer and violist whose work bridges the gap between contemporary classical, avant-garde, and world music. A graduate of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, her early career was marked by collaborations with pop and rock innovators like Peter Gabriel and Massive Attack, which informed her later willingness to integrate electronics and non-traditional structures into her scores.

Her sound identity is rooted in the viola, her primary instrument, which she uses to anchor complex vocal arrangements. She gained massive international recognition for her score to Stanley Kubrick's 'Eyes Wide Shut,' specifically for the track 'Masked Ball,' which utilized reversed Romanian Orthodox liturgy. This established her as a master of the 'uncanny' in music. Her work often explores themes of memory and identity, notably in 'Portraits in Absentia,' where she used answerphone messages as a narrative device. Critically, she is regarded as a pioneer of the electro-acoustic chamber style, sitting alongside peers like Max Richter or Jóhann Jóhannsson, but with a more pronounced focus on the human voice as a primary textural tool.