My friend Jeremy Peyton Jones, who has died aged 66, was a composer who worked at various times as an arts programmer and a music lecturer.
Some of Jeremy’s most notable compositional work was for 10 theatre shows in the 1980s and early 90s (including Deadwood, 1985, at Kew Botanical Gardens in London) directed by Hilary Westlake with texts by David Gale and staged by the Lumiere & Son theatre company.
He wrote music for The Sleep (1985) and Lulu Unchained (1986), both directed by Pete Brooks, and his chamber opera, The Menaced Assassin, was premiered in 1989 for the Royal Opera House’s Garden Venture scheme. He also composed for his own ensemble, Regular Music, over a number of years.
One of six children, Jeremy was born in Lympstone, Devon, to Donald Peyton Jones, a naval officer who later became a vicar, and his wife, Anne (nee Coode). From being a boy chorister at Exeter Cathedral he went on to King’s school, Taunton, and then Dartington College of Arts in Devon.
While taking a music degree (1976-79) at what is now Goldsmiths, University of London he was a student of mine. We shared an enthusiasm for American minimalism, which led Jeremy to model his own compositional style on works by, among others, Steve Reich and Philip Glass.
With fellow Goldsmiths graduates Helen Ottaway and Andrew Poppy, Jeremy formed the ensemble Regular Music, styling themselves as “early instigators of the UK post-systems movement whose work straddles the spheres of rock, minimalism and post-punk”. Their eponymous album (1985) has recently been re-released, and a larger version of the group, Regular Music II, operated from 1990 onwards.
Aside from playing with his ensemble, in the early 80s Jeremy was events programmer at the Midland Group Arts Centre in Nottingham, where, having become fascinated with continental European theatre directors such as Pina Bausch and Jan Fabre, he enthusiastically programmed radical performance art by UK companies.
In the 90s he was course leader and head of music at Nottingham Polytechnic, later Nottingham Trent University, before returning to Goldsmiths, where he went on to become a reader in music. In 2002 he spent some months as composer in residence at Brisbane Conservatorium, Australia.
Sailing was a great hobby, and the cruises he took every summer for a month with his family inspired compositions such as North South East West (1989), which used nautical texts to contemplate identity, insecurity and isolation.
Notable among his later works is a three-part series of music-theatre pieces with the title Against Oblivion (2007-14). Endings, created with the composer Kaffe Matthews, was premiered in 2012, and two years later came Jeremy’s involvement with Imitating the Dog’s multi-media production of A Farewell to Arms.
Jeremy’s last years were clouded by mental health problems. He was a generous friend and colleague to many.
In 1995 he married Claire Randall. She survives him, along with their children, Miranda, Patric and Lois, and his brother Richard.
