Music
Course overview
BA Music
Typical intake: 4
At Oxford, we study music by reading, listening, performing and composing. We create music in all its aspects and analyse the relationships within a piece of music, and between that piece and its genre and context.
The course is of three years duration, and there is an Honour Moderations examination at the end of the first year. Besides the core subjects of History of Music, basic Techniques of Composition and Analysis which all must take, the music course offers a wide range of options to suit the interests of individuals. These include performance and composition (available at both first and third year examinations) and in the Final Honour School only, Dissertation, Editorial exercise, Analysis, Electro-acoustic Music, Orchestration, Ethnomusicology, as well as a choice of historical and other special subjects. Typically undergraduates receive two tutorials a week, although this may be augmented by a third in certain terms depending on the choice of special subjects, for which arrangements are usually made with tutors from other colleges. Tutorials take place individually or in pairs as well as in small seminar groups.
Although the University does not provide instrumental tuition, for those offering Performance as an examination option, the Faculty of Music offers termly financial support for students to take instrumental and vocal lessons either with teachers based in Oxford or outside. The Faculty of Music offers master-classes from visiting ensembles. Practical music-making is encouraged as part of an undergraduate’s general musical education and there are many opportunities for performers to take part in orchestral, choral and chamber music concerts as well as to give recitals, and for composers to have works performed. Although much of such activity takes place throughout the University, Worcester College has its own music society which also provides a platform for such activities.
Tutors
Fellow & Tutor in Music
Professor Jennifer Walshe
Professor Jennifer Walshe
Fellow & Tutor in Music
Professor of Composition
Education
Bmus (RSAMD), PhD (Northwestern)
‘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.
Assistant Chaplain & College Lecturer in Music
The Revd Dr Matthew Cheung Salisbury
The Revd Dr Matthew Cheung Salisbury FRHistS
Assistant Chaplain & College Lecturer in Music
Assistant Deputy Dean of Degrees
Education
BA (Toronto), MSLR (Leuven), MSt DPhil (Oxford)
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).
Senior Research Fellow & College Lecturer in Music
Dr Thomas Hyde
Dr Thomas Hyde ARAM
Senior Research Fellow & College Lecturer in Music
Education
BA MMus DPhil (Oxford)
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)
