Grace Newcombe (Music, 2008)
Grace is an Early Music singer, ensemble director, and researcher, whose love of all things medieval stemmed from her Organ Scholarship and Music BA at Hertford College.
While I was still at school, I couldn’t quite bring myself to choose between music and medicine. Studying medicine was something of a craze in my school-year, and an astonishingly high proportion of my friends made the sensible decision to keep their musical skills as an evening hobby, and to become doctors. I’m sure my parents were quietly hoping for the same decision from me.
After much um-ing and ah-ing, various meetings with the school careers advisers, and umpteen warnings of the financial insecurity of attempting to be a freelance singer, I followed my heart (what else can you do as a teenager?) and chose music – convincing myself that everything would be fine. I picked Hertford for its active choir and Music Society, its beautiful wisteria, and its reputation for friendliness and openness. I was delighted to be selected as the new Organ Scholar for Hertford’s excellent chapel choir. Musical direction and organ playing is still something of a man’s world, and female Organ Scholars are a minority. This isn’t the boys’ fault, of course; it’s largely due to England’s wonderful but rather one-sided tradition of child choristers in cathedrals. I was proud to represent a college that chose to actively support and promote me as a choir director and organist. Hertford also had a female chaplain in my time, and selected another female Organ Scholar after me; it is a college that enjoys challenging the status quo, and levelling the playing field, whatever your background. (But don’t worry, boys, it’s not only the girls who receive such support at Hertford!)
During my three years directing the choir and studying Music, I found myself drawn further and further down the rabbit hole of ‘Early Music’, partly due to Oxford’s thriving Early Music community. Eventually, thanks to the combination of my academic training at Oxford and my practical experience as an Organ Scholar there, I was in a position to successfully apply to the world’s leading conservatoire for the performance and study of Early Music, the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland. I have since enjoyed five years in Basel, started a PhD at the UK’s top institute for research in Music (the University of Southampton), founded my own medieval music ensemble, Rumorum (do visit us at www.rumorum.com), and am now working with musicians and ensembles in Europe which my pre-Hertford self would never have believed possible. My teenage dream, quite amazingly, couldn’t be going any better; and my time at Hertford played a major role in helping me to become the happy freelancer I am today.