Janet Owen Thomas 1961–2002

Janet Owen Thomas began her career as an organist but devoted the final decade of her relatively short life to the composition of a small body of fastidiously crafted vocal and chamber works, the majority of them only a few minutes long. Although her education followed the conventional route of the aspiring organ virtuoso, her interests extended far beyond the cathedral close: she became fascinated by science — astronomy, fractals, and algorithms — and her literary sympathies were broad — among the poets she set were Verlaine, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Wendy Cope — and she dearly wished to write an opera on Racine’s Phaedre.

She was born in 1961, in Merseyside, to Welsh and German parents, and attended Merchant Taylors’ Girls School in Liverpool, and St Hugh’s College Oxford, where her teachers included James Dalton and Nicholas Danby for organ, and Derrick Puffett and Robert Saxton for composition. A scholarship to Hamburg, where she studied briefly with Ligeti, led to a commission from the German organist Johannes Geffert, Rosaces, subsequently published by Novello.

Back in England, during the 1980s, Thomas worked as a composer, performer and teacher, but it was not until the success of New and better days, a setting of texts from Isaiah and Boris Pasternak commissioned for the opening of Liverpool’s Tate Gallery in 1988, that she elected to devote all her energies to composition. In 1990, she returned briefly to education, enrolling in a course in music technology at York University, where she produced The condom tester’s lament, a pithy music-theatre piece for speaker and electronics.

In the 1990s, her talent began to flower more rapidly, and her work was commissioned by a number of leading British groups, including the Goldberg Ensemble, Bingham String Quartet, Lontano, and Gemini, and performed more frequently overseas. Her biggest piece, a BBC commission, Under the skin, for large ensemble, was premiered at the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music in 1999 and broadcast just a few days later.

Janet Owen Thomas: born Liverpool, 29 January 1961; died York, 5 June 2002.