John Simon (born 12 March 1944) is a South African-born British classical music composer. Education and musical career The composer was born in Cape Town. He studied to be an economist at the University of Cape Town and left South Africa in 1965 as a result of apartheid and came to London where he studied composition part-time at Trinity College of Music and the Royal College of Music. His teachers included James Patten and John Lambert. He taught in the London Borough of Hillingdon for four years (1975–1979) where some of his earlier compositions received their premieres. In 1979 he returned to South Africa at the height of grand apartheid and taught music on the Cape Flats, while maintaining his creative work as composer. His opposition to apartheid led him to compose a series of orchestral works that were a response to the events of the time, including the death in custody of Steve Biko. These include his Threnody 1 for strings (subtitled Rage, rage against the dying of the light) and Threnody 2 for strings, clarinet and timpani (subtitled Steve Biko in Heaven), the first piece of serious music to use the current South African national anthem as a theme. His Requiem for Orchestra (originally entitled Requiem of 1984), a work in which the words of the Latin mass are sung by instruments rather than voices, and the pentagonal Violin Concerto dedicated to the victims of Sharpeville are larger scale paired works. A later 'struggle' piece was the symphonic suite Children of the Sun (Los Hijos del Sol), a musical depiction of key aspects of the conquest of the Incan Empire by the Spanish. All of these works make use of the opposing elements of serialism and tonality. His Requiem for Orchestra was premiered by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Edward Downes. Other BBC premières included those of his Violin Concerto and Wind Quintet. Threnody 2 has been widely performed and broadcast, inter alia at the Edinburgh International Festival and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. It was under embargo at the SABC from 1987 to 1993. Other orchestral works include his Piano Concerto No 1 (1969-2003), which combines serialism with tonality; Piano Concerto No 2 (1977-1979), a tonal work in accessible contemporary style; and his four-movement Symphony (1993-1997), which has as a unifying feature the vibrant rhythms of Africa, three of the movements