Cathedral Music: New Generation Perspectives

19-20 September 2024, Sarum College, Salisbury



Keynote Speaker

The Revd Professor June Boyce-Tillman

Professor Emerita of Applied Music, University of Winchester

Extraordinary Professor, North West University, South Africa


June is an international performer, composer, workshop leader and an international keynote speaker.  She read music at St Hugh’s College, Oxford.  She has taught in primary and secondary schools and higher education. Her doctoral research into children’s musical development has been translated into five languages. She has held visiting fellowships in the US. Her large-scale works for cathedrals involve professional musicians, community choirs, people with disabilities and school children. She is a hymn writer with the publication A Rainbow to Heaven; her hymns and chants are used internationally.  She has contributed chapters to various Oxford Handbooks including those on Music and Christian Theology, Community Singing and Care in Music Education. She founded Music, Spirituality and Wellbeing, an international network sharing expertise and experience in this area and organising international conferences including one in April 2024 on Ecologies of Practice in Music, Spirituality, and Wellbeing. 

She is concerned with wellbeing, eudaimonia, spirituality, education and radical musical inclusion culturally and personally. She is editing the series on Music and Spirituality for Peter Lang which includes her book, Experiencing Music – Restoring the Spiritual; Music as Wellbeing and the edited collections; Queering Freedom: Music, Identity and Spirituality; Enlivening faith: Music, Spirituality and Christian Theology, and Hearts Ease – The Spirituality of the Music of John Tavener.  She is an Anglican priest serving the parish of All Saints in Tooting, London where she runs a neighbourhood music festival. More about June.


Grace and Tradition – Spiritualities in Cathedral Music

This presentation will examine the place of cathedral music in a secularising world which is developing a range of spiritualities (which will be explored).  It will explore notions of identity, meaning-making, ritual, the concert/liturgy division and inclusivity; these will be examined in the light of a phenomenography of the musical experience.  It will include small case studies of lived experience.  It will interrogate the complexities in the interrelationship between the past, the present and the future and the potential role of grace in guiding these interactions.