In the pre-internet 1980s, listeners to BBC Radio 4’s Daily Service would often phone in, eager to know about a new piece of choral music they had just heard. They would ask if it was published or available on record, only to be told it had been written by the programme’s young director of music, James Whitbourn, sometimes only hours before.
When he took up the job straight from university, he discovered that few suitable two-minute pieces existed for the BBC Singers, so he set about writing his own. That positive reaction from the audience encouraged him to think there might be a future for his style of tonal composition, where he sought to say new things using established musical language.
Whitbourn, who has died aged 60 from cancer, carried on composing in that innovative yet accessible manner even while his work at the BBC expanded to encompass editing, conducting, producing and presenting. From 1990 to 2001 he ran the Choral Evensong radio series and developed a close association with the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, where he produced the Christmas Eve Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, driving the precious tape of the live broadcast back to Broadcasting House overnight for the Christmas Day repeat.
For a man who grew up in a household with no television, he found himself working increasingly in that medium, for 30 years producing the TV specials Carols from King’s and Easter from King’s. He also wrote the title music for large events, including Bridge Over Tay, for the coverage of the funeral of the Queen Mother in 2002, and D-day 60, which marked the 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings.
His piece for saxophone and choir, Living Voices, was commissioned by Westminster Abbey for its 9/11 commemoration service in 2001, and repeated a year later in New York at the site of the attacks.
Whitbourn’s score for the BBC Discovery Channel series Son of God evolved into his Son of God Mass (2001), which inspired the poet Melanie Challenger to ask him to collaborate on what was to become his most enduring work, Annelies, his 2005 concert-length setting of the diary of Anne Frank, now claimed to be one of the most sung large-scale choral works of the 21st century, with more than 40 performances taking place somewhere in the world every year.
The Son of God Mass opened other doors. The Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, recorded it under Timothy Brown, who showed the piece to the conductor James Jordan at Westminster Choir College, Princeton, and a long association with the US began. Jordan commissioned Luminosity, a seven-movement multi-media celebration of the power of creative love, and recorded Annelies, winning a Grammy nomination, one of four that Whitbourn received in a broad career in which he was also made executive producer of the Royal Opera House’s cinema and video label Opus Arte.
His scholarly curiosity took him in many different directions and produced work that ranged from Pika (2000), a large-scale orchestral piece that commemorated the bombing of Hiroshima, to Zahr Al-Khayal (Flowers of Imagination), for soprano and symphony orchestra, a product of a research fellowship into the music of Egypt, premiered last year at the Kontzerthaus Berlin.
Born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, James was the younger of the two children of Anne (nee Marks), an agricultural magazine editor, and Philip Whitbourn, a conservation architect. So keen was he to play the piano that his parents found a teacher, Beatrice Leach, who agreed to take him at the age of four. There was much family music-making at home, and he sang in the choir at St James’s Church, Tunbridge Wells, where he learned the organ with Derek Baldwin, and began conducting.
He started composing when at grammar school, crediting teachers Christopher Harris and Jared Armstrong at Skinners’ school with pushing him beyond A-level. A choral scholarship took him into the choir of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied music, before joining the BBC, where he met Alison Jones, a production assistant. They married in 1991 and set up home near Sevenoaks, Kent. Later he returned to Oxford, directing the music at St Edmund Hall and Harris Manchester College, and engaging in research at the theological foundation St Stephen’s House.
In 2020 this modest, likeable man gave me an insight into his compositional technique:
“I like to know the choir I am writing for, and to have its sound in my mind. I think of the way the singers breathe; their facial expressions. I like to know for what occasion the piece is commissioned and to try to picture its first performance and what it might feel like to be there.”
He would then create a dedicated notebook, with the text of the commission on the right hand page and five staves on the left. “I build up a series of ideas, and often have several versions of the same piece in one notebook,” he said. “But then comes the difficult moment when you have to choose what to keep and what to discard.”
His last work, Requiem, drawing on his Requiem Canticorum (2010) and Son of God Mass, was orchestrated by John Rutter and will be performed at Carnegie Hall, New York, on 13 April.
Whitbourn is survived by Alison, their children, Hannah, Naomi and Simeon, his sister, Katherine, and his parents.
• James Philip Edwin Whitbourn, composer and conductor, born 17 August 1963; died 12 March 2024
