Music at Worcester

Caius Lee read Music and was Organ Scholar at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, during which time he founded the Florence International Singing Programme. Since 2019, he has been a trustee for Awards for Young Musicians, supporting talented young musicians from low-income families. He has worked with choirs, festivals and played solo recitals in Europe, Asia and South America. Returning to the Diocese of Leeds in 2021 as a Choral Director, Caius lead choirs in his native Bradford before joining Worcester in September 2023. His passion for community engagement and choral excellence has been recognised with a Royal Society of Arts Fellowship (FRSA).

‘The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years’ (The Irish Times) and ‘Wild girl of Darmstadt’ (Frankfurter Rundschau), composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others.

Recent projects include TIME TIME TIME, an opera written in collaboration with the philosopher Timothy Morton, and THE SITE OF AN INVESTIGATION, a 30-minute epic for Walshe’s voice and orchestra, commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. THE SITE has been performed by Walshe and the NSO, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and also the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra. Walshe has worked extensively with AI. ULTRACHUNK, made in collaboration with Memo Akten in 2018, features an AI-generated version of Walshe. A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, her third solo album, released on Tetbind in 2020, uses AI to rework canonical works from early Western music history. A Late Anthology was chosen as an album of the year in The Irish Times, The Wire and The Quietus.

Walshe is currently Professor of Composition at the University of Oxford. Her work has been profiled by Alex Ross in The New Yorker and by Andrew Dickson in The New York Times.

Thomas Hyde is a composer and academic. He has taught at City University and held a junior fellowship at the Royal Academy of Music. He combines his role at Worcester College with a lectureship in music at King’s College, London. In 2017 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music and in 2023 was appointed a vice-President of the Presteigne Festival. He is chair of the Lucille Graham Trust, a small charity supporting education music projects in the London area.

Dr Hyde teaches analysis, techniques of composition, original composition across all three years of the undergraduate music course. He also tutors on various optional history topics and dissertations relating to British musical modernism.

Thomas Hyde is a composer with a wide number of commissioned works produced over the last twenty years. Recent pieces have included a Symphony for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, choral music and two operas: That Man Stephen Ward (2008) and Aiding and Abetting (2019-22) for Scottish Opera. Dr Hyde also writes about music (see publications tab).

Recent selected publications:

Writings

• ‘Symphonying’, The Cambridge Companion to the British Symphony, ed. Nicholas Jones (forthcoming)
• Stephen Dodgson: A Centenary Celebration, ed. Oliver Chandler & Thomas Hyde, de la Porte Publishing (forthcoming)
• ‘Derek Bourgeois (1941-2017)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2021
• ‘Michael Tippett: The Biography; The Pre-History of ‘The Midsummer Marriage’, Twentieth-Century Music, Cambridge University Press, Vol 17(2), 2020
• ‘William Mathias: The Student, Real and Imagined’, British Music, Vol.39/40, 2018
• David Matthews: Essays, Tributes and Criticism, ed. Thomas Hyde, Plumbago Books, 2014

Recordings

• Symphony, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Geoffrey Paterson (Resonus, 2021)
• Sweet was the Song, ORA, Suzi Digby (Harmonia Mundi, 2018)
• That Man Stephen Ward, Damien Thantrey, Nova Music Opera, George Vass (Resonus, 2017)

I am Head of Research (Humanities) and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Hill Collection of Musical Instruments at the Ashmolean Museum; and I lead on all conservation, research and curatorial aspects at the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments at the University of Oxford. Previously, I have held positions at the University of Oxford as Scott Opler Fellow; at the University of Cambridge; at the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of York (CREMS); at the Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance de Tours (CESR); and at the Harvard Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, where I was Hanna Kiel Fellow.

My work has received the support of fellowships and grants from the British Academy, the Society for Renaissance Studies, the Royal Historical Society, the Renaissance Society of America, the Kress Foundation, the École Pratique des Hautes Études, the Academia Belgica and the Newton Trust at the University of Cambridge, among others.

I champion the public engagement of academic research, working across a diversity of cultural heritage and digital humanities projects, serving as consultant and advisor for international institutions and associations, with the aim of building and improving partnerships between academia, policy and industry for the study and preservation of tangible and intangible culture. I have appeared on several radio shows on these topics.

I also act as a mentor for early career researchers, and I serve as an advisory member for international cultural heritage projects in Europe and the US. At Oxford, I continue to serve as the Research Staff Representative for the Humanities Division and the Conference of Colleges, and I sit on the Humanities Research Committee and Divisional Board, as well as on Governing Body at Worcester College.

I am the Director in Humanities at AISUK, with the aim of promoting scientific collaborations between Italian and British academic institutions and research centres in the public and private sector, through scientific events and other initiatives such as mentoring and support for graduate students and junior researchers.

• Early Modern Music and Material Culture
• Early Modern History
• Museums, Musical Instruments and Material Culture

I am a cultural historian and digital humanities scholar working at the intersection of Early Modern History, Built Environment, Music, and Material Culture Studies. My research is located at the interdisciplinary intersection of art history, architectural history and music history and my publications focus on musical instruments, soundscapes, space and the senses in Renaissance social life. My work combines the analysis of historical materials with 3D virtual modelling, GIS platforms and acoustic analyses, to investigate the relationship between art, music, space and the senses in the Renaissance.

I am the founder and academic lead of the Digital Humanities and Sensory Heritage Network: Space, Objects and the Senses at TORCH, an interdisciplinary team of scholars working on digital humanities, musical instruments, space and sound from a variety of perspectives and across disciplines; and exploring the benefits and limitations of digital humanities methods for approaching and understanding historical sources, material objects and cultural heritage.

I am currently working on two main projects. The first explores the multiple sensory registers through which performative urban events and rituals were encountered and experienced in Early Modern Confraternities in the Venetian Terraferma. My second project, a monograph entitled Fantastic, Monstrous and Marvellous Musical Instruments of the Global Renaissance, explores the carvings of human and nonhuman figures, monsters and grotesque creatures on the scrolls and headstocks of stringed musical instruments. This work, based at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, has been funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust and the EU Commission, and constitutes the first comprehensive study of these decorative elements, exploring what they say about the visual, material and non-auditory dimensions of Renaissance music culture.

View all publications on the Faculty of History website

Matthew’s academic formation has spanned music, history, theology, and canon law. A former student at Worcester, he was first appointed College Lecturer in 2010. Over the years he has served as Chairman of the Faculty of Music, as intercollegiate organ scholarships coordinator, as consultant senior researcher in the Faculty of Letters in the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and as adviser to cathedrals, churches, and television and radio producers on musical and liturgical matters. His research has been profiled on BBC Radio and TV.

Matthew is also Assistant Curate at St Barnabas, Jericho (the College’s parish church) and National Liturgical Adviser to the Church of England.

Matthew teaches the historical and philosophical side of the BA course in Music, and has also convened option papers at undergraduate and postgraduate level on the theology of sacred music and on Western plainchant. Matthew has supervised postgraduate and undergraduate research for the faculties of Music and Theology on a wide range of topics connected with sacred music and/or the worship of the Church, and welcomes enquiries for supervision and collaboration.

With a background in editorial and analytical work with the manuscripts and printed books of the Western liturgical tradition, Matthew has published widely on the transmission and regulation of the liturgy and its music in medieval England, especially the liturgical Uses of Sarum and York. He is also interested in the theology of music in present-day Christian worship, and in the intersections of medieval and modern liturgical praxis with literary and critical theory: he has worked on specific issues related to participation, technology, and the liturgical theology of Joseph Ratzinger. Matthew is also interested in the intersections of medieval and modern liturgical praxis with literary and critical theory. Matthew’s research has always been informed by practice, and he continues occasionally to direct recordings, performances, and services which include newly edited music and liturgical text. He has published several books (including The Secular Liturgical Office in Late Medieval England, 2015; most recently editing God in Fragments: worshipping with those living with dementia, 2020) and numerous articles and book chapters on medieval and contemporary liturgy and sacred music. He has led several research projects and contributed to others, in areas ranging from medieval convent drama to Covid-19.

Principal publications include:

• God in Fragments: Worshipping with those Living with Dementia (London: Church House Publishing, 2020).
• Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary according to the Use of Salisbury, (co-edited with John and Sally Harper)  Early English Church Music 59-60 (London: Stainer and Bell for the British Academy, 2019).
• Worship in Medieval England (Amsterdam: ARC Humanities Press / Amsterdam University Press, 2018).
• Medieval Latin Liturgy in English Translation (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017).
• The Secular Liturgical Office in Late Medieval England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015).
• Hear My Voice, O God: Functional Dimensions of Christian Worship (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2014).
• Cataloguing Discrepancies: The Printed York Breviary of 1493 (with Andrew Hughes and Heather Robbins) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011).