Chronicle Summer 2024

20 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

Peter Clements You joined us as Director of Music in September 2023. Tell us a bit about your education and career so far. I was a chorister at Bristol Cathedral and a pupil at Bristol Cathedral School; from there I went to Clare College, Cambridge as an organ scholar, where I read Music. My time in Cambridge provided me with some wonderful opportunities – some of them slightly scary (playing the organ on live broadcasts for Radio 3), some allowing me to witness history in the making at first hand (a tour to Riga, Moscow and Leningrad, as it then was, in the dying days of the USSR) and some bordering on the surreal (recording a CD of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas in George Lucas’s Skywalker Studios in deepest California). My first teaching post was in Sussex, at Hurstpierpoint College, a school set in beautiful surroundings on the edge of the South Downs. From Hurstpierpoint I moved to Uppingham, where I was the Head of Academic Music. Uppingham has a very strong musical tradition and I spent 22 happy years there working with some very talented pupils and colleagues. Who or what inspired you to become a musician and to teach music? I think that the experience of performing wonderful music at a high standard five or six days a week as a chorister made a very big impact; it was a great musical education to receive at a very impressionable age, and one that opened my eyes and ears to a huge range of high-quality repertoire. What are your ambitions for Teddies musicians? As a Director of Music one wants pupils to leave the school with a love of music at some level (whether as a performer, creator/composer or listener) – and with a sufficiently broad-minded attitude to be open to exploring unfamiliar musical styles and repertoires. Yes, some pupils will go on to forge very successful musical careers, and one obviously takes great pride and satisfaction in seeing that, but, more broadly, music is a central block of the cultural ‘hinterland’ that we all need to nurture and maintain. Do you have a favourite place in Oxford? I love the atmosphere in some of the college chapels – the ambience of Magdalen Chapel at Evensong on a dark evening, for example. As a family, we’d vote for Mamma Mia, closely followed by the Temptations dessert restaurant on the Banbury Road! What are you currently reading? I am currently reading Citizen Clem by John Bew – a biography of Clement Attlee. I’m fascinated by the way in which such a modest and diffident character could turn out to be one of the most transformational prime ministers of the past century; in a rare flash of wit Margaret Thatcher apparently described Attlee as ‘all substance and no style’. Do you have a favourite piece of music to play or listen to? J S Bach’s Mass in B Minor . I’d be hard pushed to identify any other piece that so perfectly fuses the emotional, intellectual and (arguably) spiritual qualities of music. What can we look forward to in the musical life of Teddies next year? We’re still at the stage of finalising plans for next year but, in addition to the ‘standard’ routine of major musical events in Oxford, we are planning to hold a major concert at a London venue in the spring of 2025.