Francis James ('Jim') Brown (26/10/1925 - 18/01/2008), born Rochester, New York, USA, died London, England.
The American-born composer, Francis James Brown, studied at the Eastman School of Music in New York under its director, Howard Hanson. He received two Fulbright awards to travel to Florence, where he was a composition pupil of Luigi Dallapiccola. He was an accomplished pianist and a prolific composer of songs, orchestral, chamber and operatic music, showing great musical sensibility.
The music of Joseph James is the fruit of a long-standing collaboration between the composers:
- Francis James Brown and
- Stanley Joseph Seeger
Both are composers in their own right, having first met in Florence in the early 1950s while studying with Luigi Dallapiccola. Their recorded works include the film score for
Priest of Love, a film biography of D.H.Lawrence directed by Christopher Miles,
Sketches from The Scarlet Letter, an opera based on the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Concerto for 3 Bouzoukis and orchestra and
Requiem after J.S.Bach, a moving and imaginative interpretation of Bach's music used for a setting of the Latin requiem mass.