Dr Edward Wickham

Dr Edward 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. His current research interest entails the examination of modes of text understanding and intelligibility within a range of choral repertories.

Dr 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 and only college-based choir for girls in the country. 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; and make regular broadcast appearances. 

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. The Clerks have given concerts in many of the major UK and European festivals and venues, numerous broadcasts on British, European and US radio, and undertaken coast-to-coast tours of the USA. As director of The Clerks, his recordings and performances of Renaissance repertoire 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. 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 in the UK and overseas.