Adrian Vernon Fish

Adrian Vernon Fish, GRSM (Hons): ARCM: FIBA: Winston Churchill Fellow (born 20 January 1956) is a composer, broadcaster and Greenland cultural explorer.

He lives in the rural land of Erris in County Mayo, Ireland.

Adrian broadcasts on Erris-FM where he produces two shows Fish on Fridays where he discusses the stories behind the composers and music and The Venue - a magazine arts show.

In 1967, the school appointed a new music teacher, Peter Fowler.

It was Fowler who built up a tradition of music-making at QEH, and Fish found himself central to the growth of the music department.

It was only now that he started composing seriously.

Until this time, he had turned out over a thousand hymn-tunes of the sort he had grown up with, but his enthusiasm remained unchannelled and unguided.

The school's new choir performed at concerts, Carol Services, Speech Days and Founder's Days, always with Fish at either the organ or piano.

When neither instrument was involved, Fish played timpani or trombone in the school orchestra.

He now took organ lessons with Garth Benson at St. Mary Redcliffe Church, and later with Gary Desmond at the City Church.

In 1973, the QEH Choir toured Denmark and Sweden, with Fish as organist.

This was his first experience of the North European organ tradition.

He left school with an A in music A-level and spent a year at Dartington College of Arts, Devon, where he honed his skills as a composer, having fallen under the influence of the Avant-Garde of the time.

He continued to study the organ, now with John Wellingham at Dartington.

Following a year during which Fish worked as an organ-tuner's assistant with Hele and Company, of Saltash, Cornwall, he entered the Royal College of Music.

Under the tutelage of Alan Ridout, and guided by Herbert Howells, he abandoned his compositional style by destroying all his work to date.

His life's output was burned in the back yard of his basement flat in London's Lavender Hill.

Following Howells’ advice: “Write what is in your heart, my boy,” he began afresh, presenting a Symphony for Organ on the Plainsong hymn Pange Lingua for his final portfolio, later orchestrating the work as his Symphony no 1.

By the age of 21 Fish had composed over 200 works and subsequently destroyed them one autumn in 1977.

He has since brought his output of work up to over 200 again, including twelve symphonies, organ music, cantatas and cabaret songs.

Adrian Vernon Fish was born in Bristol, the only son of Harold Alfred Christopher Fish and Freda Jagger.

Both his parents were deeply involved in local amateur operatic societies, and Adrian was taken in his carry-cot to many rehearsals and performances.

At the age of four, he was allowed to stand backstage at a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers.

It was at that event that Fish determined to become a composer.

Fish started piano lessons with Gwyneth Maine shortly after starting school at Westbury-on-Trym Church of England Primary School in Bristol.

At the age of seven, he won an award in the Bristol Eisteddfod.

At the age of ten, Fish was sent as a boarder to Queen Elizabeth's Hospital, Bristol's famed “Bluecoat” school, on a foundation scholarship.

There was no music making at the school, except for an elderly piano teacher who visited once a week to give lessons.

At age eleven, Fish found himself appointed school organist.

The first hymn he had to play on the school's old organ was “Judge Eternal, throned in splendour,” to the tune Rhuddlan.

He remained school organist until he left at age seventeen.

Fish obtained an Associateship of the Royal Schools of Music (ARCM) as an organist in 1977, and graduated with honours (GRSM hons) in 1978.

In the late spring of 1978, Fish was appointed composer-in-residence to a dance-in-education group based in Lancaster.

On arriving in September, newly married to Margaret Crichton, a violin teacher, and daughter of a director of the John Jameson Distillery in Dublin, Ireland, he was informed that his new job had been axed.

Seven months later, his wife's peripatetic teaching post was also axed.

She was then appointed violin teacher for North Cornwall, and in August 1979, the Fishes moved to North Petherwin, between Launceston and Bude.

Fish found himself teaching piano at St Petroc's School in Bude.

On the birth of his son Patrick in 1982, Fish became Head of Music at Lucton School, Herefordshire, and the couple moved to Presteigne, just across the Welsh border in Powys.

Whilst in Presteigne, Fish was on the founding committee of the Presteigne International Festival.

His seventeen-hour performance of Erik Satie's “Vexations” with co-pianist Dawn Pye made headlines around the world in July 1983.