Edward Higginbottom
English conductor
Edward Higginbottom (born 16 November 1946, Kendal) is a music scholar, organist, choirmaster and conductor. Most of his career has been as organist at New College, Oxford, where he led their choir for 38 years and produced a large number of choral recordings.
Musical biography
Before moving on to St Mary's Church in Warwick, Edward was a chorister at his local parish church where he started playing the organ. Edward completed his undergraduate and graduate training as organ scholar of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he developed a particular interest in French baroque music and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Organists. He toured regularly in France at that time as director of the Cambridge University Purcell Society. As a graduate student, he spent time in France (1970–1972), studying the organ with Marie-Claire Alain while working on his doctoral thesis.
He was appointed as the Organist and Director of Music at New College, Oxford in 1976. While the main role of the choir is to provide liturgical music for worship, Edward went further, organizing economically viable choir tours and a broad set of musical recordings. By doing so, he "has helped the cause of such institutions through a period when financial constraints and changes in social attitudes have threatened choral foundations".
In 1990 he was made an officer, and subsequently a Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture for "his role in the revival of choir schools in France and support of French cultural activities".
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This entry incorporates text from “Edward Higginbottom” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.