Ms Catherine Groom

I am Director of Music and a Bye-Fellow at Fitzwilliam College, where I direct the Choir, co-ordinate music-making both secular and sacred across the College and supervise undergraduates. After studies at Oxford University, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Royal Academy of Music, my career as a musician has involved directing, improvising and composing, singing and playing a variety of instruments including Gothic/triple/lever/electro harps and recorders (not to mention the Globe Theatre's immense thundersheet), writing about music for a variety of print and digital publications, and course leading on Goldsmiths, University of London's access to higher education summer programmes. I have played for a great many theatres and theatre companies including the Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and in the West End including on the long-running RSC adaptations of Hilary Mantel's Mann Booker prizewinning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, and in a great many operas ranging from Monteverdi continuo playing to the world première of Louis Mander's opera Beowulf. I have appeared on BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. Following an inspiring interfaith touring and recording project in Morocco with English ensemble Passamezzo and Sufi singer Abdou 'Voix de Vent' el-Haak, I am now engaged on a PhD entitled ''They that go down to the sea in ships': musical usages of the Psalms at the convergences of the Abrahamic faiths in the maritime trading ports of post-Reformation Europe and the near East, and their reverberations today'.