John Herbert Foulds, (November 2 1880 – April 25 1939), was a British composer of classical music.

The son of a bassoonist in the Hallé Orchestra, John Foulds was born in Hulme, Manchester on 2 November 1880. Largely self-taught as a composer, he was one of the most remarkable and unjustly forgotten figures of the ‘British Musical Renaissance’. Though prolific from childhood, Foulds himself joined the Hallé as a cellist in 1900, having already served an apprenticeship in theatre and promenade orchestras in England and abroad. Hans Richter gave him conducting experience; Henry Wood took up some of his works, starting with Epithalamium at the 1906 Queen's Hall Proms.

In some respects ahead of his time (he started using quarter-tones as early as the 1890s, while some of his later works anticipate Messiaen and Minimalism) Foulds was in others an intensely practical musician. He became a successful composer of light music (his Keltic Lament was once a popular favourite) and wrote many effective theatre scores, notably for his friends Lewis Casson and Sybil Thorndike. Perhaps the best known was the music for the first production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan (Foulds conducted a Suite from it at the Queen's Hall Proms in 1925). However his principal creative energies went into more ambitious and exploratory works, often coloured by his interest in the music of the East, especially India.