Alasdair Jamieson was born in Edinburgh and graduated from St. Andrew’s University, and from there trained as a teacher at Cambridge. His first post was as Director of Music at Cheltenham College Junior School, followed by posts in Gloucester, at Birmingham University, in Abingdon, at Bootham School in York, and in Skipton and Pocklington.
A spell of research in the 1980s into the Italian composer Petrassi led to him sitting on the international jury for the Choral Composition Prize in Arezzo. He has recently returned to academia, and, having completed a doctoral thesis on Scottish composer Hamish MacCunn, is now a teaching fellow at Durham University.