Born in Dublin in 1978, Jonathan Pitkin was brought up in Edinburgh. He studied at Christ Church, Oxford and at the Royal Academy of Music, where he was the recipient of several prizes and awards. His principal teachers have been Christopher Brown and Guy Reibel.
His music has been performed and commissioned internationally as well as at major venues across the UK, including the Royal Festival Hall and the Huddersfield and Spitalfields Festivals. Performers have included the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Singers, members of the Philharmonia Orchestra, and conductors Garry Walker, Nicholas Cleobury, Stephen Layton and Martyn Brabbins.
In 1998 he attended Karlheinz Stockhausen’s inaugural composition course in Kürten, Germany, and in 2000 spent three months at the Paris Conservatoire, studying composition, orchestration and electro-acoustic music. He now teaches composition and musicianship at the Junior Department of the Royal College of Music, as well as undergraduate historical studies and postgraduate orchestration. Jonathan was also involved in the RPS Award-winning Sound Inventors initiative in 2002, and the spnm/Making Music scheme Adopt a Composer in 2003.
A number of his works have been broadcast by BBC Radio 3, including the orchestral pieces Mesh and Borrowed Time; he has also appeared to discuss his work on Radio 3’s ‘Hear and Now’ and ‘Music Matters’. Two of his choral pieces are published by Oxford University Press as part of the New Horizons series, while other works include Con Spirito, for piano and Yamaha disklavier, which was shortlisted for a British Composer Award in 2008.
In 2001 Jonathan was awarded the inaugural Temple Church Composition Prize and was shortlisted by spnm. In 2009 he completed a DMus at the Royal College of Music.