Dr Edward Wickham

Edward Wickham was appointed Director of Music at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge in 2003 and later became Fellow and Director of Studies in Music. His duties at the College include direction of the two choirs, curating the Kellaway Concert series, and supporting a wide range of collegiate musical activities. In 2008 he formed the St Catharine’s Girls’ Choir, the first college-based choir for girls in the UK. Under his direction, the choirs of St Catharine’s have made several recordings – latterly on the Resonus label – and toured as far afield as China and the United States. The choirs have gained a reputation for ambitious and innovative programming, which has included commissioning contemporary works and collaborations with musicians from non-Western traditions. The choirs broadcast regularly on Radio 3 and 4 (In Tune, The Choir and Sunday Worship) and a recent Head Chorister was named Chorister of the Year by BBC Radio 2.

Dr Wickham has been an Affiliate Lecturer at the Faculty of Music in Cambridge since 2006, where he delivers courses on Late Medieval and Renaissance music and its notation; for several years he was the Course Director of the MMus in Choral Studies  His current research interest entails the examination of modes of text understanding and intelligibility within a range of choral repertories. He is also the co-director of the recently established Cambridge Early Music Consort.

Educated at Oxford and King’s College, London, where he received his PhD for a study in 15th century sacred music, Dr Wickham has throughout his career maintained a busy schedule both as conductor and academic. Soon after leaving Oxford he established the vocal ensemble The Clerks, with which he made over two dozen recordings, and received many plaudits including the Gramophone Early Music Award. As director of The Clerks, his recordings and performances of Renaissance repertoire have made a significant contribution to the understanding and appreciation of composers such as Ockeghem, Obrecht and Josquin Des Prez; and their innovative performances from manuscript facsimiles (notably a late-night BBC Proms performance) have done much to illuminate issues of period performance in Renaissance polyphony. He is equally engaged with contemporary music, commissioning new work from composers as diverse as Christopher Fox, Joanna Marsh, Robert Saxton and Stevie Wishart.

With The Clerks, Edward Wickham has also collaborated with artists from different traditions, disciplines and media. Typical of this approach have been the programmes which he developed under the umbrella of a substantial Arts Council grant in 2009-12: a collaboration with singers from Syria, a 24-hour sound installation involving community choirs and inter-faith groups, and a programme mixing live singing and electronics, presented in unusual venues such as a Victorian Pumping Station and Edwardian swimming baths. Most recently, he has been working with speech scientists and cognitive psychologists on a series of projects supported by the Wellcome Trust, exploring the intelligibility of words in music, and musical hallucinations. This work has been presented in concerts across the UK, been profiled on BBC Radio and the resulting research published in peer-reviewed journals.

Dr Wickham is much in demand as a choral coach, and has given workshops and masterclasses throughout the UK, USA and Europe; he was also for several years a guest conductor at the Tokyo Cantat Festival. He is a committed advocate of choral outreach, and is the founder and Artistic Director of The Oxford and Cambridge Singing School, which runs vacation singing courses for children around the UK and internationally; and a Director of The Cambridge Choral Academy.