About Me
Jacques Allen (born 2001) is a British composer, pianist, organist and teacher. He graduated in 2022 with a degree in music from the University of Oxford, where he studied with Martyn Harry. He served there as the president of the Magdalen College Music Society between 2020-2021. He has worked since 2022 as the Director of Music for the St. Margaret and All Saints Church, Canning Town, where he gives weekly organ performances to over 1000 people. He also directs the choir there, having grown it from its initial few members to one with now over twenty voices. He is currently working towards a Master of Music Degree in Composition at the Royal College of Music, where he studies under renowned composer Kenneth Hesketh. He will graduate this year.
Jacques’s works span a variety of musical genres: including concert, film, operatic and sacred music. They are characterised by their blending of minimalist, serialist and neoclassical influences, and recently, their intent to provoke moral, social or political discussion. These themes also feature in Jacques’s musicological writing, such as his dissertation on Disability Aesthetics. His academic work and his compositions reciprocally inform one other, and are grounded in a strong foundation in musical analysis, history, and stylistic composition. He has collaborated with orchestras and ensembles including RCM New Perspectives, RCM Symphony Orchestra, the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, the Castalian String Quartet and the CHROMA Ensemble.
His compositions have been accoladed several times – in 2018 he won the Corpus Christi Cambridge Essay Prize for Harmony, and last year his score for student film Zara was nominated for Best Music Score at the 2023 Oxford University Filmmaking Foundation Short Film Festival. Soon after, his work was featured in a multimedia installation at Somerset House, which won the Art: High Budget category of the 2023 [d]arc awards. In 2024, he won the Large Ensemble Competition at the Royal College of Music. As a result, his work Elegy for the Feminine Man was premiered in the Amaryllis Fleming Hall in November 2024. Over 25 minutes long, it is his most ambitious project to date.
As a pianist, Jacques has been in high demand, giving recent performances in prestigious venues such as the Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch and Clare College, Cambridge. In April 2024, he organised and featured in a charity concert which sold out its 250 tickets, raising over £5500 for the St. John Bosco Children’s Camp. He regularly plays as an organist for weddings and funerals, having played for hundreds at several churches in London and Essex. He is also an experienced teacher, having worked with people of all age groups and backgrounds for over a decade, both privately and in schools. He mentors many pupils in ABRSM Piano and Theory graded exams, in which they frequently achieve distinctions and merits.
