John Pitts composes music most easily summarised as melodic, motoric, motif-driven, jazz-tinged, post-minimal impressionism. He has music degrees from Bristol and Manchester Universities, studying composition under Wyndham Thomas, Adrian Beaumont, Geoff Poole, John Casken and John Pickard, also receiving tuition from Raymond Warren and Robert Saxton. In 2003 John won the Philharmonia Orchestra Martin Musical Scholarship Fund Composition Prize, his Piano Quartet being performed by the Fidelio Quartet in the final stage of the competition at the Royal Festival Hall. Typhus and Nuts & Bolts, two of his chamber pieces, have been shortlisted by the Society for the Promotion of New Music. He writes music for Christian worship, with two hymns on Naxos CDs recorded by his brother Antony Pitts and Tonus Peregrinus, including one in Faber’s The Naxos Book of Carols. In 2006 Choir & Organ magazine commissioned I will raise him up at the last day for their new music series. John has also written music for four plays and two short operatic works – Crossed Wires (Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 1997), and 3 Sliced Mice (commissioned by Five Brothers Pasta Sauces). Are You Going? for piano triet received its first concert performance at the Kiev ‘Chamber Music Session’ Festival 2010 by the internationally acclaimed Kiev Piano Duo and Antoniy Baryshevkiy. John's Indian duet Raag Gezellig was the competition piece for the 2011 International Piano Duet Competition in Valberg France, and has subsequently been recorded by the French Duo Bohêmes and performed in a number of countries. Other recent pieces include the piano duet Passacaglia and the 15-minute 2 piano 2 percussionists Gaelic Faram Jig written for the Kiev Piano Duo and performed at the Kiev Festival 2012. John is one of the founding members of the Severnside Composers Alliance, and has had four pieces released on the Dunelm label. He has conducted four Bristol Savoy Operatic Society productions, arranging Pirates of Penzance, Gondoliers and Iolanthe for small band. Since 2010 he has been Associate Conductor of the Bristol Millennium Orchestra.