Canadian organist/conductor/pianist/composer and current President of the Royal College of Organists, Sarah MacDonald, reflects on the role of the church musician in the education of children and the next generation, from the elite UK boarding choir school to the most ordinary of primary/elementary establishments. Reductions in funding to music (and indeed, the arts in general) in public school systems around the world are worrying for all of us. How can we, as organists and choir trainers, redress the balance, so that these valuable and worthwhile skills are not lost completely? Drawing on her many years of experience as Director of the Girl Choristers at Ely Cathedral and Director of Music at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, Sarah explores the various ways in which church musicians are filling in the musical gaps left by years of government cuts in the UK. She will be joined by her colleague, Jonathan Schranz, a former member of her choir at Selwyn, who is now Director of Music at St George’s RC Cathedral Southwark (London) and who is responsible for delivering one of the UK’s groundbreaking initiatives to teach singing and musical literacy to thousands of primary-school-aged children in the UK, where music education is all but lost in non-fee-paying schools. Plenty of time will be allowed for discussion about how the various programmes in the UK are potentially relevant/transferable to the musical education of Canadian children.
Sarah MacDonald is a Canadian-born, UK-resident conductor, organist, pianist, and composer. She is Director of Music at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and Director of Ely Cathedral’s Girl Choristers. Sarah has been at Selwyn since 1999, and was the first woman to hold such a post in an Oxbridge Chapel. She is also Organist to the University of Cambridge, the first woman to hold that historic office. She studied at the University of Cambridge and the Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto, and her teachers include Marek Jablonski, Leon Fleisher, John Tuttle, and David Sanger. Sarah has made over commercial 35 recordings; her first solo disc, a recording of the Goldberg Variations on the Steinway-D at Ely Cathedral, was released in 2024. Sarah performs internationally every year and is in demand as a conductor, organist, and examiner. She has over 60 published works for choir and/or organ, and has written a popular book about the British choral tradition, a compilation of her column for the American Organist magazine ‘UK Report’, which she has contributed monthly since 2009. Sarah is currently serving as President of the Royal College of Organists. In her spare time, she is a keen amateur photographer.
Jonathan Schranz is a conductor based in London. He studied choral conducting at the Royal Academy of Music where he was awarded a Distinction along with numerous prizes. Prior to this he read music at Churchill College, Cambridge, graduating with first class honours in 2015. He was made an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music in 2023.
He is Director of Music for the Archdiocese of Southwark and at its mother church of St George’s Cathedral, where he oversees the Cathedral Music Department and its four cathedral choirs each week. This includes the Children’s Choir, Junior Choir, Cathedral Consort, and Cathedral Choir of mixed choristers, choral and organ scholars and professional lay clerks. Jonathan is also director of the Southwark Singing Programme, a diocesan music education programme which facilitates whole-class singing in 21 schools across the archdiocese each week. In recent years the cathedral choirs have made two commercial CD recordings and given regular BBC broadcast performances.
A firm believer in the transformative social impact of choral music, Jonathan is a co-founder and trustee of the charity Sing Inside, which delivers singing workshops in prisons across the country. His master’s thesis, exploring the benefits of choral music within a prison chaplaincy, has been presented at the Universities of Leicester and Oxford.
When off the podium, Jonathan spends his time in aquariums, zoos and penny arcades.
This is a free event. For more details, or to register to attend, click here.
Date: May 31, 2025
Time: 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm ET on organCONNECT Discord channel
