John Bishop

Bishop was born in Adelaide and studied piano from the age of 12 under the tuition of the distinguished Adelaide teacher William Silver. In 1919, he won the Alexander Clark Scholarship to the  Elder Conservatorium, and in 1923, he won the South Australian Elder Scholarship to the Royal Colleg of Music in London. There, Bishop studied conducting in addition to furthering his piano studies with Herbert Fryer. His first appointment as a conductor came in 1928 for the Royal Wellington Choral Union and Wellington Philharmonic Orchestra in New Zealand.

He returned to Australia in 1936 to take up a position as Director of Music at Scotch College in Melbourne. From 1940 to 1947 he was conductor of the Melbourne University Conservatorium Orchestra.

In 1948, Bishop became a professor of music at the University of Adelaide, where he reformed the curriculum and faculty and set up a visiting lectureship program. He formed a partnership with Sir Lloyd Dumas in the late 1950s to help found a major arts event in South Australia. He was instrumental in the establishment of the Adelaide Festival of Arts and became its inaugural arts director in 1960. Bishop continued in this position until his death.

He died suddenly in the foyer of Australia House in London, of hypertensive cardiovascular disease, on 14 December 1964, aged 61.