Jonathan Lloyd (composer)

Jonathan Lloyd (30 September 1948 – 31 July 2025) was a British composer.

Lloyd's early teachers included Emile Spira. He continued his studies at the Royal College of Music where he was a recipient of the Mendelssohn Scholarship. His orchestral work Cantique, which he wrote whilst at the RCM, was featured in the 30-year retrospective of the Society for the Promotion of New Music (SPNM) in 1973. He continued to study composition with John Lambert and Edwin Roxburgh as well as Henri Pousseur in Durham.^[1] In 1973, Lloyd attended the Tanglewood Music Center in the US, where he studied with Gyorgy Ligeti and where he won the Koussevitsky Prize for his work Scattered Ruins. In 1978-1979, he was composer-in-residence at the Dartington College of Arts in its theatre department.^[1]

Lloyd began to achieve wider recognition with his 1981 work Toward the Whitening Dawn, which he composed in memory of John Lennon. He composed works on commission from such ensembles as the London Sinfonietta, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. In addition to works for the concert hall, Lloyd composed a new score to accompany the silent version of Alfred Hitchcock's 1929 film Blackmail.^[2]In 1986 he collaborated with the music critic Michael White on a large-scale community opera, The Adjudicator, for the village of Blewbury, Oxon.

Lloyd died on 31 July 2025 at the age of 76.^[3]

• Musices Genus
• Scattered Ruins
• The Adjudicator

• Boosey & Hawkes webpage on Lloyd
• Royal Philharmonic Society, RPS Elgar Bursary recipients webpage on Lloyd
• Colin Anderson, 'BBC Symphony Orchestra/Andrew Davis – Jonathan Lloyd's old racket & Tippett 4 – Stephen Hough plays Brahms'. Classical Source website.