Jack Sheen is a conductor and composer from Manchester, England. His music spans orchestral works to performance and sound installations, and he regularly works with leading orchestras, ensembles, galleries, and artists on concert and operatic performances, commissions, and interdisciplinary projects. Especially at home within late-romantic, modern, and contemporary music, Jack brings his compositional insight to interpretations of core repertoire that have been highly praised.
Jack has conducted orchestras including London Symphony Orchestra, Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic, Britten Sinfonia, and Royal Northern Sinfonia, as well as ensembles such as London Sinfonietta, Bit20, Apartment House, EXAUDI, FontanaMix, and Ensemble 10/10. This season, Jack made his Royal Opera House debut, conducting Oliver Leith’s Last Days to great acclaim, returned to Tanglewood Music Centre as a Guest Artist, and will soon make his debut with BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and City of London Sinfonia.
As a composer, Jack has had concert works commissioned by orchestras, ensembles and organisations such as the LSO, BBC Philharmonic, London Sinfonietta, BBC Radio 3, Aldeburgh Festival, Apartment House, EXAUDI, Manchester Camerata, Aurora Orchestra, and Les Métaboles, alongside large-scale site-specific installations by Venice Biennale Musica and Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, Casa de Serralves (Porto), V&A Museum (London), Holden Gallery (Manchester) and PINK (Manchester).
Recent projects include Phant Heap Render, a 15’ large ensemble and audio work commissioned by the London Sinfonietta; his debut album Sub, a 50’ spatialised large-ensemble work commissioned by Octandre Ensemble; Solo for Cello, which received its world premiere at Wigmore Hall by Anton Lukoszevieze, Director of Apartment House, to critical acclaim and later released on CD by The Trilogy Tapes; and a series of open-form performance-installations deconstructing, spatialising and expanding existing concert works across large spaces and extended time-frames, in which the performers’ real-time decisions, the audience’s movement, and the space itself become unpredictable forces on the composition.
Awards include PRS Composers Fund (2021), Arts Foundation Fellowship (finalist, 2020), Rovaumont Voix Nouvelle Composition Prize (2018), Royal Philharmonic Prize for Composition (2016), an RNCM Gold Medal (2012) and BBC Young Composer of the Year (2011). In 2019 he was a Jerwood Fellow with Manchester International Festival.
Jack was one of the curators behind London Contemporary Music Festival from 2018–2023 (‘the capital’s most ambitious and adventurous festival of new music’, The Guardian), and is Co-Founder the LCMF Orchestra. He has worked with many of the world’s leading composers and artists, collaborating with figures ranging from Sir George Benjamin, Elaine Mitchener and Chaya Czernowin to Matthew Barney and Cerith Wyn Evans.
The Trilogy Tapes is a record label come graphic focused clothing line which was launched in 2008 by Palace graphic designer Will Bankhead. The Trilogy Tapes started as a blog where founder Will Bankhead posted music, skate photos, flyers, scans of magazines and videos.