Peter Phillips

Peter Phillips has devoted his artistic career to the research and performance of Renaissance polyphony. Having won a scholarship to the University of Oxford in 1972, he studied Renaissance music with David Wulstan and Denis Arnold. He gained his early conducting experience working with small ensembles with which he could explore rarities in the musical repertoire.

In 1973 he founded The Tallis Scholars, with which group he has given more than 2,300 concerts and made more than sixty recordings, encouraging a worldwide interest in polyphony. As a result of his work – which along with concerts and CD-recordings has included publishing new editions and writing articles – Renaissance music has come for the first time to be accepted as a central part of the mainstream classical repertoire. In 2013 the Tallis Scholars celebrated their 40-year anniversary with a series of 99 concerts performed worldwide.

In addition to directing the Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips works intensively with other specialist ensembles. He is currently collaborating with the BBC Singers, the Netherlands Chamber Choir, the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Intrada (Moscow) and El León de Oro (Spain). He is also Patron of the Chapel Choir of Merton College Oxford. In 2014 he established the international A Cappella Choral Competition at St John’s Smith Square in London, which attracts choirs from all over the world and which took place for the third time in 2017.

Alongside his career as a conductor, Peter Phillips is a well-known writer. For 33 years he wrote a regular music column for The Spectator. In 1995 he became the owner and publisher of The Musical Times, the oldest continuously-published music periodical in the world. His first book, English Sacred Music 1549–1649, was published in 1991 by Gimell; his second, What We Really Do (first edition published 2003, second edition released 2013), offered an unsentimental account of life as a touring musician, along with insights into the structure and performance of polyphonic music. In 2018 BBC Radio 3 broadcast Peter Phillips’s views on Renaissance polyphony in a series of six hour-long programmes.

In 2005 Peter Phillips was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture. He is a Bodley Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, where in 2008 he co-founded the current Choir of Merton College. In 2021 he became an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford.