The composer, conductor, priest, musicologist and Gramophone reviewer Ivan Moody has died aged 59.

Born in London in 1964, Moody studied music and theology at the Universities of London, Joensuu and York (where he did his doctorate). Among his teachers had been Sir John Tavener and, like him, Moody was powerfully drawn to the music, spirituality and liturgy of the Orthodox Church – whose music and faith was to play a foundational part in his own compositions and life.

His substantial body of music includes such works and collaborations as the oratorio Passion and Resurrection (1992), based on Orthodox liturgical texts and premièred by Red Byrd and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under Tõnu Kaljuste, Canticum Canticorum I for the Hilliard Ensemble, and Prayer for the Forests which won the Arts for the Earth Festival Prize, and was premièred by the Tapiola Choir in Finland. Later works have been premiered or championed by groups and artists including Raphael Wallfisch (a cello concerto), Trio Mediaeval, The Tallis Scholars, Chanticleer and Capella Romana, with ECM among labels to have released his music.

Reviewing a recording of his work Simeron in 2014, Alexandra Coghlan perfectly caught the influences that shaped his music-making here and elsewhere, describing it as ‘typical of the composer’s recent work – a distillation and crystallisation of a style that has become ever cleaner and more texturally refined. Setting the Greek text of the Byzantine Holy Week Rite and a sermon by Bishop Melito of Sardis, the work finds a harmonic astringency to balance its yielding, unbending instinct to melody. Chant meets human cries, ecstatic chorales break through scuttling chromatics in a performance whose precision and restraint only heighten its intensity.’

Moody held various academic posts, including Professor of Church Music at the University of Eastern Finland from 2012 to 2014, and worked extensively as a conductor. A onetime member of the choir of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in London, he subsequently served as cantor in both Greek and Bulgarian parishes in Lisbon. In 2007 he was ordained to the priesthood, becoming rector of the Serbian Orthodox Parish of the Transfiguration in Estoril, Portugal. 

Writing and teaching widely, he contributed for a number of years to Gramophone, on choral music across the full breadth of eras and styles from Hildegard von Bingen to Tavener and beyond, as well as writing on contemporary music more broadly, and will be remembered fondly by all those who worked with him.