Matthew Martin, The Choir of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge
Biography Matthew Martin, The Choir of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge
Gonville & Caius College Choir
is a mixed choir of 24 voices. It is one of the UK’s leading collegiate choirs, with an international reputation for performances of exceptional quality but also for innovative and adventurous recordings. It tours regularly in the UK and around the world.
The College’s musical tradition began at the end of the nineteenth century with a choir of men and boys, founded by the celebrated composer of Anglican church music Charles Wood, and later became an exclusively undergraduate male choir under Wood’s successor the composer Patrick Hadley. Hadley was succeeded by Peter Tranchell, under whose direction the choir became mixed in 1979, and Geoffrey Webber directed the choir from 1989 until 2019. The current Director of Music (Precentor) is Matthew Martin.
Matthew Martin
is Precentor and Director of Music at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge where he is a fellow and directs the renowned college choir. He read Music at Magdalen College, Oxford, before studying at the Royal Academy of Music and (privately) under Marie-Claire Alain in Paris.
From 2015 to 2020 he was Director of Music at Keble College, Oxford, and Artistic Director of the Keble Early Music Festival. Matthew spent much of his early life immersed in cathedral music and in 2010, after six years as Assistant Master of Music at Westminster Cathedral, he decided to focus more on composition.
Since then he has been commissioned to write music for many leading ensembles. He won the Liturgical category in the 2013 Ivors Composer Awards, and the first album of his choral music (Jubilate Deo) was recorded by Daniel Hyde and the Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford. He has written for the Cheltenham Music Festival (Trumpet Sonata) and The Tallis Scholars (Lamentations of Jeremiah).
His Rose Magnificat for Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort & Players won the Choral category in the 2019 BBC Music Magazine Awards. In 2019, he was asked to write a festival anthem (In the midst of thy Temple) for the choir of Westminster Abbey, marking the 750th anniversary of its refounding, and a test piece for organ (Triptych) for the 2019 St Albans International Organ Competition.
Most recently, he was commissioned to write a new carol (Angelus ad Virginem) for the 2022 Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge, and is currently working on a major new work for The Tallis Scholars to be performed as part of Miller Theatre’s 2025-26 Early Music series in New York.
Matthew’s music is published by Novello and Faber Music.
