Jack Sheen (1993) is a composer and conductor from Manchester, recognised for his inventive approach to music-making which blends orchestral traditions with an expansive interdisciplinary perspective. His own music spans orchestral and chamber compositions, installations and site-specific spatial performances. He is currently an Artist in Association at London’s Wigmore Hall.
Sheen’s music has been commissioned by many of the orchestras and ensembles he regularly conducts, such the London Symphony Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic and Scottish Symphony Orchestras, Manchester Camerata, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Ulster Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Mosaik, Octandre Ensemble, Apartment House, Psappha, and Les MeÌtaboles, alongside internationally renowned venues, festival, galleries, and organisations including Venice Biennale, Wigmore Hall, V&A Museum, Aldeburgh Festival, Mixtur Festival, Rainy Days, and Camden Art Centre.
Current and recent projects include Lap/Trough, an orchestral work co-commissioned by BBC Symphony Orchestra, Luxembourg Philharmonic, and WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne; Ceremony Container, a concert-installation for Silent Green and Ensemble Mosaik (Berlin); Press, a 45’ piano quintet commissioned by Wigmore Hall and Apartment House; and Surface to Air, a 40’ choral work, sound installation, and LP created in collaboration wit the artist Anri Sala for FundaçaÌo de Serralves (Porto), performed by EXAUDI.
Awards include Ernst von Siemens Foundation Progetto Positano Residency (2024), PRS Composers Fund (2021), Arts Foundation Fellowship (finalist, 2020), Royaumont Voix Nouvelle Composition Prize (2018), Royal Philharmonic Prize for Composition (2016), an RNCM Gold Medal (2012) and BBC Young Composer of the Year (2011). In 2019 he was a Jerwood Fellow with Manchester International Festival.
Jack’s music has been released by LSO Live (Lung, 2025), NMC (Found, 2017), The Trilogy Tapes (Press, 2026; Croon Harvest, 2024; Solo for Cello, 2023), Black Truffle (The Vestige, 2025), and SN Variations (Sub, 2022).
As a conductor, 2026/2027 season sees Jack make his debuts with Hamburger Symphoniker, the HalleÌ, and BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and return to conduct BBC Symphony Orchestra, LSO, Klangforum Wien, London Sinfonietta, and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, amongst others.
He is the Co-Director of London Contemporary Music Festival, ‘the capital’s most adventurous and ambitious festival of new music’ (The Guardian).
Lag refers to the uncanny glitches we experience in digital technology when a user’s physical actions undergo a delay before they are digitally realised. For example, moving your computer mouse and seeing the cursor glide on screen slower than the ‘real time’ movement of your hand.
This effect relates to Lag’s temporal uncertainty. It is a 15’ concert work that operates during this time more like an installation. The music builds a static yet kinetic form which shuns a linear narrative in favour of music which lags, stretches back and forth, or simply bends around itself. One’s expectation of how things may unfold is gently confounded by this notion of ‘lag’, in both obvious and imperceptible ways.
Rather than using the orchestra as a single unified force, it is broken up into a collection of smaller ensembles, many of which perform independently of the conductor’s omnipresent beat. These individual groups gently act at their own pace, the effect of which may feel similar to observing a Petri dish of autonomous microorganisms, each one containing a canon of sorts, or perhaps guided towards a sense of inexact reoccurrence.
Commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and first performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov in May 2024 as part of Tectonics 2024.