Studying Music at St Anne’s
Music at St Anne’s College has been strong and dynamic for the last decade, with significant strengths in academic study, composition, piano, string playing and conducting. Our director of studies is Martyn Harry, a composer specialising in instrumental music, opera, film and experimental music theatre genres as well as one of the two professors lecturing in composition at the Faculty of Music. Our stipendiary lecturers include Dr Alexandra Buckle, an expert in medieval and renaissance British music who is best known for having organised the music and prayers for the reburial of Richard III; and Dr Oliver Chandler, who is one of Britain’s most promising theorists and analysts specialising in 19th- and 20th-century music. Our third stipendiary lecturer is also our director of music, Dr John Traill. John runs the St Anne’s Camerata, Oxford’s premiere string orchestra ensemble, as well as the Oxford Institute of Conducting.
St Anne’s is a warm, friendly college that supports creativity and intellectual curiosity in all aspects of music. Here are seven compelling arguments why you should strongly consider applying to St Anne’s – but bear in mind that every cohort turns out differently, and so these are not the only reasons for applying! Oxford’s music degree is uniquely diverse and challenging, and our role is to support our students’ individual musical interests and professional development. We also find that students learn hugely from each other, so we take a great deal of care in appointing students with complementary interests.
Oxford University’s First All-Steinway School
We are immensely proud that St Anne’s College has become an All-Steinway School, the first in Oxford. All our pianos in college – whether used for performance in our concerts in the MOLT Concert Hall, for teaching, for practising or for playing in both the Junior Common Room or college bar – are made by Steinway & Sons in Hamburg, a unique guarantee of excellence. The recent arrival of seven pianos was celebrated in a special concert on 14th June this year, where all the new pianos came together to perform new pieces especially composed for seven pianists (and in one case for fourteen!)
Our All-Steinway School status has a huge ramifications for future of music making at our college. World-leading concert pianists will give regular concerts hosted by Steinway at the MOLT concert hall, alongside master classes not only for St Anne’s pianists but drawn from the local community. Steinway is also offering us performance opportunities for our students in its halls both in London and in other parts of the world. Clearly this will be a huge boost for not only piano playing within our college, but for all forms of music making and musical study within the college, and we can St Anne’s will certainly be an attractive place to apply to if you are interested in performance.
Significant Recent Academic Achievements in Music
If you care about musical academic study, you should think carefully about choosing St Anne’s College, too, for the following reason: it is arguably the best-performing college academically in music in the past decade. During this time 62% of all our music students having obtained firsts in their finals. This is double the average across all of the 23 colleges that offer music. St Anne’s music students have won the prestigious Gibbs prize for the best music finals result five times in the last ten years, with a further five students coming in the top three of their respective cohorts.
There really is no common factor in what made these students successful. Students have done their most outstanding work in entirely different things – early music, international copyright law, community music, ethnomusicology, music analysis, theories of microtonality, electroacoustic composition and film music, the social and cultural theory of music, and performance. We believe that our role is to help our students find themselves and to excel in the areas of study that they choose to carve out for themselves.
Many of our graduates have gone on to obtain postgraduate funding to study masters and doctorates, or have won funding awards to study performance or composition at conservatoires, too. Others have chosen instead to pursue successful careers in the music industry as composers, conductors, instrumentalists, artist administrators, broadcasters and producers (with one former student now serving as the producer in charge of the TV broadcast of Last Night of the Proms every year). A further group of students are building distinguished careers in law, computer science, teaching and through their work in the city.
Composition
Given the close involvement of Professor Martyn Harry and Dr John Traill in our college, we are keen to receive applications from composers. Professor Harry is jointly in charge of compositional projects within the university and Dr Traill is the music director of the faculty’s new music group, Ensemble Isis. All St Anne’s composers are able to study with Professor Harry in tutorials and in associated creative projects from the start of their first year. We also find that composers benefit from getting a diversity of perspectives on their work. We not only organise opportunities to study with composers of the quality of Eugene Birman and Manuel Martinez-Burgos when there has been an excellent fit, but set up a number of joint projects with students from our sister college, St Hilda’s, at the JdP Music Building there. In the past three years St Anne’s students have founded two student contemporary music ensemble which perform in and around Oxford (Red Lipstick and BRICKWORKS). When the university came to commission two new works from students for a significant concert given at the Sheldonian Theatre on May 7th to commemorate the arrival of a new Bach manuscript, both composers chosen by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment were St Anne’s College undergraduates in their second year: Daniel Reynolds and Nicholas Samuel. Many of our graduates have gone on to pursue professional careers as composers in contemporary classical music, music theatre composition, film music and jazz.
String Playing
St Anne’s College, uniquely, offers six string scholarships every year to those of its students who play violin, viola, cello and double bass. It has been the college of choice for many outstanding performers in recent years – such as the remarkable horn player and conductor Alice Knight. Nevertheless there is no question that the St Anne’s Camerata string orchestra is a key part of college life, and we are keen to find string players who can participate in it. The St Anne’s Camerata does several concert projects every year, in the MOLT concert hall, at the Holywell Music Room, in the Sheldonian Theatre and on tour. It has also done collaborative projects with the Castalian Quartet, the university’s string quartet in residence, as well as with the Kaleidoscope Collective. For many players these experiences are significant professional development opportunities, as shown by one of our current finalists who has used St Anne’s as a base to develop their own string quartet, to win priceless opportunities chamber music with the Castalians in concerts and to do significant projects in London.
Conducting
Because conservatoires only very rarely offer opportunities to young conductors at undergraduate level, Oxford University is a brilliant place to build your own career if you interested in becoming a conductor. You have the opportunity to set up your own ensembles and to compete for opportunities to conduct orchestras and ensembles run by the Oxford University Musical Society (OUMS). Our director of music, John Traill, is himself an outstanding conductor who runs the Oxford Conducting Institute at St Anne’s College. Students get the opportunity of learning Conducting Skills with him as part of the first year curriculum, and promising conductors who work with John have had the opportunity to do conducting workshops with the St Anne’s Camerata, the Oxfordshire County Youth Orchestra and the semi-professional Southampton Philharmonic Orchestra. A number of our graduates have obtained scholarships to study conducting at conservatoires at masters level after leaving St Anne’s, achieving success with the orchestras they themselves have founded.
Warmth, Supportiveness and Friendliness
A hidden strength of St Anne’s College is the incredibly tight, supportive nature of the musical community there, which came organically from our own students and has been maintained year after year. This is backed up both by the grounded, slightly informal character of the college as a whole, as well as the energy music students from their interactions with students from other Humanities courses: English, History, Medieval & Modern Languages, Classics, Oriental Studies, Philosophy as well as student artists from the Ruskin School of Arts.
Proximity to the Schwarzman Centre
Finally … the extraordinary development that the Music Faculty is moving to the Schwarzman Centre this September – just round the corner to St Anne’s! Its extraordinary array of facilities – concert halls, Black Box research centre, electronic music studios, practice rooms, musical instrument collection, lecture halls, a beautiful atrium, and a nice café – will be like having the South Bank Centre on your doorstep. Stunning!