Person · Female

Erika Fox

British composer

From
Wien, United Kingdom
Since
1936–present
Releases
1

About

Erika Fox (born 3 October 1936) is a British composer and teacher. Born in Vienna (as Erika Roth), she grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home: her mother, Dina Roth Hager, had shown early promise as an artist.. In 1939 at the age of three, Fox emigrated to England as a refugee. There she went on to study composition with Bernard Stevens and piano with Angus Morrison at the Royal College of Music, also taking private composition lessons with Jeremy Dale Roberts and Harrison Birtwistle. She married Manfred Fox in 1961. He died in 2006.

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Fox was active in modern music circles from the 1970s, working with the Fires of London, the Nash Ensemble, Dartington and the Society for the Promotion of New Music. For two decades she enjoyed considerable success, with works such the Kaleidoscope quartet (for flute, harp, vibraphone and cello, 1983) and her puppet music drama The Bet (1990), which was performed at the Purcell Room, the Almeida Theatre, the Huddersfield Festival and the Norwich Puppet Theatre. But her music faded from view in the mid-1990s.
A revival of interest resulted in the issue of a CD recording in 2019, the first recordings of her music. Her orchestral work Osen Shomaat was recorded by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2020. David Spielt Vor Saul a new concerto for piano and large ensemble, was commissioned by the BBC and first performed by Julian Jacobson and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Geoffrey Paterson, at City Halls, Glasgow, on 13 January 2022.
Her musical style shows the influence of Eastern European folk music combined with ancient modal liturgical chant and Jewish Chassidic music. She has taught as the Centre for Young Musicians in Pimlico, at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and as Visiting Composer and Teacher at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She lives in West London.

From Erika Fox on Wikipedia, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Discography

Albums 1

Links

Teacher

Identifiers

Data from MusicBrainz, saved 14 Nov 2026. Photo from Wikimedia Commons, covers from the Cover Art Archive and Apple Music.