He studied composition with the Viennese émigré Hans Heimler (a pupil of Alban Berg) and then at the Royal Academy of Music, London.
The Shakespeare-inspired ‘Prospero’s Isle’ (2006), is a work for cello and piano that was subsequently expanded and orchestrated to form a symphonic tone poem, arranged for performance in St Petersburg in 2007.
[1] Songs of Nature and Farewell is written for the combination of Soprano, Flute, Cello, and piano (after the composer Maurice Ravel's Chansons Madécasses)[2] As an arranger he reconstructed and orchestrated sketches for Wagner's projected opera 'Männerlist größer als Frauenlist' for the Royal Opera House in 2007 and arranged Wagner's Siegfried Idyll for the 2008 City of London Festival.
James Francis Brown was awarded a five-year NESTA fellowship in 2003, and was the first composer-in-residence at the International Musicians Seminar, Prussia Cove, in 2006.
the French 'Les Six' or the British 'Manchester School', from the early and late twentieth-century respectively), mostly London-based and with broadly similar interests and aesthetic outlook, reflecting sympathies for British masters such as Britten and Tippett and the great music of the First Viennese School, especially Haydn and Beethoven, as well as the Scandinavian influences of Sibelius and Nielsen.