John Lunn

Lunn was born in May 1956. His father was a saxophonist in a jazz band. Lunn graduated from Glasgow University, where he studied 12-tone techniques. He has cited among his musical influences John Cage, Milton Babbitt, and György Ligeti, as well as Miles Davis. Lunn was also a member of "systems music" band Man Jumping, an early 1980s "jazz-pop-worldbeat fusion ensemble", where he played bass and keyboard.". He took a short course in computer music at MIT, and assembled his own computerised compositional system, using Cubase software. He later acquired a Prism Sound ADA-8XR multichannel converter and an Orpheus FireWire interface, accompanying them with external hardware analogue dynamics and EQ units in the form of a Maselec MLA-2 tri-band compressor and a Maselec MEA-2 equaliser.

He began composing for BBC Scotland in the late 1980s, with Beatrix: The Early Life of Beatrix Potter (1990) and The Gift (1991). His work also includes music for the television series Hamish Macbeth (1995–1997), Lorna Doone (2000), North Square (2000), Madame Bovary (2000), Cambridge Spies (2003), Bleak House (2005), Hotel Babylon (2006), Little Dorrit (2008), Downton Abbey (2010–2015), Waking the Dead (2011), The White Queen (2013), Shetland (2013), Grantchester (2014), The Last Kingdom (2015), and Belgravia (2020).

Lunn has written several operas. Two of them, Misper (1997) and Zoë (2000) (shown by Channel 4), were written for Glyndebourne. Another, Mathematics of a Kiss, was written for the English National Opera. He wrote the 2006 operetta Tangier Tattoo, with librettist Stephen Plaice, again for Glyndebourne. Lunn's violin concerto was premiered by Clio Gould and the London Sinfonietta at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.