In conversation with Bob Chilcott: on voice, community and the courage to keep writing

<p><em>From jazz harmonies to children’s choirs, Bob Chilcott’s music has become part of the choral landscape. He talks to </em><strong><em>CHORALLY</em></strong><em> about the craft of writing for voices, the power of collective music-making, and how discipline and curiosity keep him moving forward.</em></p><hr><p>Even when the tech gremlins delay our Zoom call, Bob Chilcott arrives with an apology and a smile. Somewhere off-screen a cat belonging to his agent, Val, has taken up residence on a keyboard. The mood is human, not heroic – exactly the tone that has made Chilcott one of the most performed choral composers of our time.</p><h2><strong>From Watford to Cambridge</strong></h2><p>Chilcott’s path began with a suggestion from a parish vicar in Watford. He sang in the local church choir, where the assistant organist was a young Andrew Davis. ‘The vicar told my parents I should try for King’s,’ he recalls, referring to King’s College, Cambridge, where he would become a chorister. ‘They didn’t really know what it was, but we went up, and I got a place.’</p><p>This was a different England: boys’ choirs were common, social mobility felt possible, and doors opened if you had the interest and the nerve. ‘It gave opportunities,’ he says simply. ‘It certainly did for me.’ </p><p>After his time as a chorister he went to Merchant Taylors’ School in north-west London, where teachers encouraged him to compose. By his teens he was producing instrumental pieces, including two concertos for fellow pupils, and developing an early interest in harmony and texture.</p><p>At Cambridge he returned to King’s College as a choral scholar. There, amid a circle of lively contemporaries, he refined the voice that would become his own – tonal, lyrical and rooted in communication.</p><p>After graduating he began writing arrangements for Radio 2’s orchestras and Friday Night is Music Night, discovering that light music could be both sophisticated and joyful. ‘I’ve always liked jazz harmony,’ he says. ‘I used to play a bit of jazz piano; it’s part of my musical mind.’</p><h2><strong>Finding his voice with The King’s Singers</strong></h2><p>Chilcott’s next decisive turn was joining The King’s Singers. He didn’t arrive by the usual route. He had contributed a couple of vocal arrangements – ‘This Old Man’ in a jazz style and ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ – when tenor Bill Ives needed to take time off. Chilcott was asked to deputise for three months. Ives decided to leave, and Chilcott, then 30 and full of energy, stepped into the role.</p><p>‘If I’d auditioned for an open vacancy, I don’t think I’d have got it – wrong voice type,’ he says, typically matter-of-fact. ‘But I was quick musically, and I could contribute.’ He wrote a great many arrangements for the group, including orchestral scores for concerts with American symphony orchestras and their regular Christmas shows with the LSO. More importantly, he developed a feel for vocal ensemble – not just choirs in the abstract, but the up-close voicing that makes a small group sound alive.</p><h2><strong>Writing for real voices</strong></h2><p>That attention to living singers – their breath, diction and collective presence – sits at the heart of Chilcott’s writing. He talks about words the way a stage director talks about actors: what they need to do, how they carry meaning, the narrative they imply.</p><p>He loves working with poets and librettists. Since 2009 he has collaborated regularly with Charles Bennett, with whom he created The Angry Planet for the 2012 Proms. He has sought out younger voices too, including Georgia Way, Delphine Chalmers and, currently, the children’s author Tim Napman. ‘I bring the idea, and then you wait to see what comes back,’ he says. ‘It’s often completely different from what you imagined – and that’s the joy. It takes the music in new directions.’</p><h2><strong>Process and pragmatism</strong></h2><p>The composer’s job, in this telling, is less solitary genius and more curiosity with discipline. Chilcott works office hours – roughly nine to six – because he knows regularity breeds invention. Some days the ideas fall flat; others fly. A big score, like his St John Passion, can take six to nine months. A three-minute piece might take a month or two days. It depends on motivation and how you’re feeling.</p><p>He still starts with pencil and paper at the piano – ‘I love mechanical pencils’ – but now inputs to the computer earlier than he used to. He’s pragmatic about the technology that supports him. ‘If I were starting now, I’d use every tool that helps,’ he says. ‘It’s brilliant.’</p><p>That practicality extends to his publisher. I ask whether the editing process for music resembles the sub-editing and structural feedback novelists receive. ‘Not really,’ he says, smiling. ‘OUP’s editorial team are brilliant – absolutely superb. They’re meticulous about layout, typesetting and proofing. But they don’t usually come back saying, “I don’t think this passage works.” It’s more about presentation and quality control, and they’re exceptional at that.’</p><p>It’s a revealing glimpse of the professionalism behind his approachable sound world.</p><h2><strong>Choosing what to write – and what not to</strong></h2><p>He is equally pragmatic about what to write and when to say no. Chilcott has produced one large instrumental work and enjoyed it, but he would not take on another orchestral commission lightly. ‘I’d have to feel I had something to say,’ he explains. ‘I’m motivated by ideas, and sometimes a proposal comes in that I know isn’t right for me. I have turned down a few pieces – not because I don’t appreciate the offer, but because I couldn’t bring enough of myself to them. You need that spark of connection. If it’s not there, the piece shouldn’t exist.’</p><p>The same applies to conducting: he has conducted plenty, but you will not find him on the podium for Bach’s St John Passion. ‘Others have deeper investment in that. I need the motivation of the piece itself.’ The test is simple: does the idea ask to be sung, and can he bring something meaningful to it?</p><h2><strong>Teaching, mentoring and the collective voice</strong></h2><p>Commissioning is now a two-way street. He still receives invitations, but increasingly he starts with an idea he wants to write and then he, Val and Oxford University Press look for the right partner. The model suits his temperament. ‘I’m motivated by ideas,’ he says. ‘If I can think them through, and we find a partner, that’s ideal.’</p><p>It has led to children’s pieces, jazz-leaning masses, and a long line of works that give amateur and professional choirs something singable, shapely and satisfying. If there is a Chilcott hallmark, it is the sense that the music enjoys being sung.</p><p>The reach of that catalogue is international. Commissions arrive from the United States, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Japan and elsewhere. Travel used to amplify the connections; festivals and conventions in the US, in particular, could move a career along. That ecosystem is thinner now. ‘Some festivals never came back after Covid,’ he notes, and the economics are tougher. Social media should help, but the noise is relentless.</p><p>Still, he remains an advocate for planning and for asking. ‘Don’t assume anyone knows anything unless you tell them,’ he tells his Birmingham University Singers. ‘People are supportive – but they can’t help if they don’t know what you want to do.’ It sounds like practical advice for students; in truth it is how he has run his own career.</p><p>Teaching has become an important strand, and he speaks about it with real enthusiasm. During the pandemic he taught two days a week at Downe House, a girls’ school in Newbury, and he still visits twice a term to mentor music scholars and support GCSE and A-level composition. He has taught on residential courses, led masterclasses and plans to do more of it.</p><p>‘I love teaching,’ he says. ‘It’s energising. There’s a joy in helping people find confidence in their own ideas.’ He also runs numerous singing days – large participatory workshops that bring communities together around new or favourite repertoire. For Chilcott, these events are an extension of the same impulse that drives his composing. ‘I’m interested in the collective – that’s what inspires me in choral music. It’s about people coming together. The collective sound, the shared experience – that’s what moves me.’</p><h2><strong>Looking ahead</strong></h2><p>Ask about favourites and he demurs – it changes. But he lights up at the last movement of Poulenc’s Figure humaine, a blast of defiant freedom that he returns to often. He mentions Brahms’s Geistliches Lied. Yet the repertoire that truly excites him is contemporary. With the Birmingham University Singers he programmes almost entirely living or recent composers. ‘Earlier music doesn’t speak to me in the same way,’ he says, not dismissively but with the clarity of someone who knows what sparks his ear.</p><p>And then there is the future. Chilcott is not winding down. ‘I don’t want to retire,’ he says. ‘I love what I do and I hope to stay in good shape.’ He has just begun <a target="\_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="<https://chorally.co/c/career-opportunity-news/lucy-walker-and-bob-chilcott-appointed-composers-in-association-at-st-martin-s-voices>">a three-year role as composer-in-association</a> with St Martin’s Voices at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London – ‘brilliant, at my age,’ he says, delighted at the chance to articulate ideas that have been knocking for years.</p><p>The word collective surfaces again. He wants to keep exploring ways that choirs can express community and purpose. It is striking how often he returns to that simple theme: music as something people make together.</p><p>If the industry likes to label, Chilcott is relaxed about the tag. He knows that composing primarily for choirs means the LSO is unlikely to appear in his inbox asking for a new symphony. The trade-off is one he has chosen and sharpened. ‘It helps to decide the path you want,’ he tells young writers. ‘Where do you want your music to live? Then put your energy into learning that world and meeting the people who do it.’</p><p>For him, that world includes children – an area many composers neglect and one he genuinely loves. It includes accessible harmony that doesn’t talk down to singers. It includes texts chosen or commissioned with care so that the words carry meaning and the music carries the words.</p><p>The last image from our conversation is the most telling. Chilcott, who has written hundreds of pieces and toured the world, who has put jazz into the Kyrie and theatre into a motet, describes his working day: pencil on manuscript, at the piano, nine to six, most days. It is not glamorous. It is not even particularly newsworthy. But it is the honest craft of someone who still takes pleasure in how a chord opens, how a vowel carries, how a line moves from one singer to another and makes a room feel larger than itself.</p><p>The secret, if there is one, is not that he is a ‘great composer’, however true that may be in the minds of choirs everywhere. It is that he remains exactly the musician he sounded like on Zoom – curious, collaborative and quietly thrilled by what voices can do together. </p>