Composition at Cambridge

Musical composition at Cambridge has flourished for most of the 20th century and shows no signs of abating in the 21st century. A significant proportion of the past professors have been composers - Stanford, Hadley, Orr, Goehr - and a selective list of former students who have made name and fame over the last 40 years or so speaks for itself: Jonathan Harvey, David Blake, Peter-Paul Nash, Diana Burrell, Robert Saxton, Judith Weir, Benedict Mason, Jonathan Dove, George Benjamin, Julian Phillips, Julian Anderson, Thomas Adès, Edwards Rushton, Huw Watkins.

In recent years this record owes much to the presence of four practising composers on the Faculty strength: Alexander Goehr and Hugh Wood (who both retired in 1999), Ryan Wigglesworth (until 2009) and Robin Holloway, with several other composers employed by the colleges. But it surely owes still more to the outstanding opportunities for performance in Cambridge, with its wealth of college chapel choirs and organs, its various university orchestras and choruses, and above all the spread of vocal, instrumental and conducting talent in the student body at large.

Cambridge provides almost unrivalled opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate composers, the interests of the latter being catered for within the Faculty of Music by the M.Phil in Musical Composition (for details of this course see sidebar under "Courses/Applications").