Tutors

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 in London, Cambridge and Oxford. With The Clerks he has run many collaborations with schools, most notably with the Tower Hamlets Music Education Service, resulting in performances at the Spitalfields Festival and in Cambridge.

Graham Ross
Director of Music, Clare College

Meet Graham Ross in Clare Chapel here.

Graham Ross has established an exceptional reputation as a sought-after conductor and composer of a very broad range of repertoire. He is co-founder and Principal Conductor of The Dmitri Ensemble and Director of Music and Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, with whom his performances around the world and his extensive discography have earned consistently high praise. In demand as a regular guest conductor of other ensembles in the UK and abroad, recent collaborations have included London Philharmonic Orchestra, London Mozart Players, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, BBC Singers, BBC Concert Orchestra, Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra, Aurora Orchestra, Purcell School, and Australian Chamber Orchestra. Highlights in the 2022/23 season include return engagements to BBC Singers, London Mozart Players, Aalborg Symfoniorkester, DR Vokal Ensemblet, and Salomon Orchestra, and debuts with Music in the Round, Gothenberg Symphony Orchestra, Tallis Vocalis in Hong Kong, and concerts with the Choir of Clare College across the UK and overseas in Denmark, the Netherlands, and the USA. At the age of 25 he made his BBC Proms and Glyndebourne debuts, with other opera work taking him to Jerusalem, London, Aldeburgh and Provence. He has conducted and recorded world premières of a wide spectrum of composers, including James MacMillan, Judith Bingham, Giles Swayne, Vaughan Williams, Imogen Holst, Nico Muhly, Brett Dean, Lydia Kakabadse and Matthew Martin. He has conducted more than twenty albums and since 2011 he has recorded exclusively for Harmonia Mundi, including a highly-acclaimed series of music for the church year. His latest album Ice Land: The Eternal Music is was released in 2022. As a composer commissions have included BBC Concert Orchestra, City of London Sinfonia, National Youth Choir of Great Britain, Covent Garden Chamber Orchestra, O Duo, Park Lane Group, Wigmore Hall and the Solstice Quartet. As an animateur and through outreach work he has conducted projects in Tower Hamlets, Wigmore Hall, English National Opera and Glyndebourne Festival Opera, and overseas in Nigeria, Palestine, across Europe and the USA. He is founder and Artistic Director of Singers Abroad, running annual courses for singers of all ages, and a Trustee and Patron of the London Festival of Contemporary Church Music. He is a regular contibutor on BBC Radio, including as a recent guest presenter of Inside Music. In 2021 he was made an Honorary Fellow the University of Macau, where he was presented with a Half Moon Award for the Arts in 2019. He studied music at Clare College, Cambridge and conducting at the Royal College of Music, London. He held a conducting scholarship with the London Symphony Chorus, has served as assistant conductor for Vladimir Juroswki, Diego Masson, Sir Roger Norrington and Nicholas Collon, and acted as Chorus Master for Sir Colin Davis, Sir Mark Elder, Ivor Bolton, Edward Gardner, Richard Tognetti and Lars Ulrik Mortensen.

Nicholas Danks
Director of Music, Corpus Christi College

Nicholas Danks was born into a family of professional musicians and studied the organ under Frederic Goodwin and David Sanger. In 1993 he was awarded an organ scholarship at Corpus Christi College, and went on to become Assistant Organist at the Royal Parish Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, later becoming Director of Music and directing for many high-profile BBC Broadcasts. In 2008 Nicholas returned to Cambridge to take up the post of Director of Music at his old College, and now specialises in Harmony and Counterpoint and Keyboard Skills. In recognition of his teaching and mentoring work, Nicholas was elected as a Fellow of the Corpus and became the College’s Director of (academic) Studies in Music. 

Andrew Reid
Director of Music, Little St Mary’s

Andrew Reid’s love of choral music started as a chorister in his village choir. He was organ scholar at St Catharine’s and later Robinson College, Cambridge, during which time he performed the complete organ works of JS Bach in one 25-hour recital. He held sub organist roles at Westminster Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, playing the organ for the premiere of James MacMillan’s Westminster Mass and the funeral of HM Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, prior to becoming Director of Music at Peterborough Cathedral, Director of the RSCM and Managing Director of Organ Builders Harrison & Harrison. Andrew is currently Director of Music at Little St Mary’s, teaches in local schools and the University and undertakes a variety of other musical work.

Dr David Skinner
Director of Music, Sidney Sussex College

Meet David Skinner in Sidney Sussex College Chapel here.

Dr David Skinner is Fellow and Osborn Director of Music at Sidney Sussex College, and artistic director of the early music ensemble Alamire.

His research has centred around music institutions, manuscripts and composers of 16th-century Europe, and is particular specialism is music and the Reformation in England. A large portion of his doctoral thesis was published in the Roxburghe Club volume The Arundel Choirbook (Arundel: Duke of Norfolk, 2003), and he has since published a number of music editions, facsimile volumes, and articles. as well as more than 30 commercial recordings (awards including Gramophone, BBC Music, Limelight, Times CD of the Year, and others). Dr Skinner’s recent publications include The Anne Boleyn Music Book: Facsimile with Introduction, DIAMM Facsimiles 6 (London: Royal College of Music, 2017), and ‘‘Deliuer me from my deceytful ennemies’: A Tallis Contrafactum in Time of War’, Early Music (Oxford University Press, 2017). The latter project, in which Queen Catherine Parr was identified as the author of a contrafact of Tallis’s grandest antiphon Gaude gloriosa dei mater, received wide media coverage including all major broadsheets, BBC 4 Today Programme and BBC Breakfast News. As a presenter he has worked extensively for BBC radio, appearing in and writing a variety of shows on Radio 3 and 4. He acted as music advisor for the Music and Monarchy series on BBC 2 with David Starkey, and was Music Consultant for the recent BBC4 documentary on the history of Evensong with Lucy Worsley. He is currently completing a new edition of Tallis’s Latin church music for Early English Church Music (Stainer & Bell).

Dr Simon Jackson
Director of Music, Peterhouse

Dr Simon Jackson is Director of Music at Peterhouse and a Bye-Fellow of the College. Alongside his position at Peterhouse, he is also Organist and Director of Music at the neighbouring Church of Little St Mary’s, which served as Peterhouse’s chapel until the current building was consecrated in the 1630s. Simon is a former member of the choirs of York Minster, Peterborough Cathedral and Jesus College, Cambridge, and in addition to his musical activities, he leads an active academic career. He has recently completed a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Warwick, and his research examines the relationship between poetry and music in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His doctoral thesis, exploring the literary and musical activities of the poet-priest George Herbert, won the George Herbert Society Chauncey Wood Prize, and a recent article won the English Literary Renaissance award in 2015.