21 Facts About Joby Talbot

Joby Talbot was born on 25 August 1971 and is a British composer.

Joby Talbot has written for a wide variety of purposes, with a broad range of styles, including instrumental and vocal concert music, film and television scores, pop arrangements and works for dance.

Joby Talbot is known, to sometimes disparate audiences, for quite different works.

Joby Talbot grew up in Mitcham, South London, and attended King's College School, Wimbledon, on a music scholarship from the age of eight.

Joby Talbot played the piano and oboe, studied composition privately with Brian Elias and after receiving a Bachelor of Music from Royal Holloway University of London, he completed a Master of Music at Guildhall School of Music and Drama under Simon Bainbridge.

Joby Talbot played saxophone on the song "Time of Legends" for gothic rock band NOSFERATU, appearing on their 1993 single "Savage Kiss" and their 1994 album The Prophecy.

In 1999, following some minor television scoring jobs, Joby Talbot was commissioned to write the theme and score for BBC Two's comedy series The League of Gentlemen, for which he was awarded the Royal Television Society Award for Best Title Music and which he would continue to score throughout its three series and film, The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse.

Joby Talbot was commissioned, in 1999, by the British Film Institute to provide a new score for Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 silent film The Lodger, and again in 2002 the BFI had Joby Talbot write a piano trio to accompany Evgenii Bauer's The Dying Swan.

In 2002, Joby Talbot wrote The Wishing Tree, a short a cappella madrigal setting a text by Kathleen Jamie, for The King's Singers, commissioned by the ensemble and The Proms as part of the Queen's Golden Jubilee.

Subsequent to this, Joby Talbot was asked by Nigel Short, artistic director of chamber choir Tenebrae, to create a work that described the ancient Christian pilgrimage route across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela.

In 2006, Joby Talbot wrote the trumpet concerto Desolation Wilderness for soloist Alison B m and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Turku Philharmonic Orchestras.

The next year, Joby Talbot was commissioned by the Philharmonia Orchestra to write an eighth movement to Holst's The Planets, as part of their interactive installation Universe of Sound at the Science Museum, London.

Joby Talbot's half was adapted from his string quartet Manual Override, originally commissioned in 2007 by Singapore's T'ang Quartet; and from the 2005 cello work Motion Detector, written for cellist Maya Beiser.

Subsequent to Chroma, Joby Talbot became increasingly involved in projects for dance, adapting his 2002 score for Evgenii Bauer's silent film The Dying Swan to score Fool's Paradise, a short 2007 work devised by choreographer Christopher Wheeldon for his company Morphoses and later integrated into the repertoire of The Royal Ballet.

When Wheeldon was appointed to choreograph The Royal Ballet's first new, full-length narrative ballet commissioned in almost 20 years, he approached Joby Talbot to write the score.

Joby Talbot commented that he spent two years thinking about 'nothing else.

In 2023 Joby Talbot received an Ivor Novello Award nomination at The Ivors Classical Awards 2023.

Carlson's production Eau for CCN Roubaix and the Orchestre National de Lille had its premiere in Lille in 2008, and Joby Talbot later adapted the score as Tide Harmonic, a five-movement chamber work released on Signum Classics in 2011.

Joby Talbot wrote the theme for the BBC One drama series Frankie.

Joby Talbot himself acted as producer as well as arranger on the XL Recordings album Aluminium, a limited-edition collection of songs by The White Stripes, arranged by Joby Talbot and Christopher Austin for chamber orchestra.

In 2016, Joby Talbot provided the score for animated movie Sing and received an Annie Award for Outstanding Achievement, Music in an Animated Feature Production.