Collaborators

Bettina Varwig is Professor of Music History at the Faculty of Music and Fellow at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. Her research centres on the history of listening, the body, the senses and the emotions in early modern music. She works in close collaboration with performers in order to bring historical insight into productive dialogue with musical practice.

Originally from Germany, Bettina took her undergraduate degree at King’s College London and her PhD at Harvard University. She was a Fellow by Examination at Magdalen College, Oxford and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge, before taking up a post as Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Music at King’s College London. She has held her current post at the University of Cambridge since 2017.

Bettina’s work has been honoured with several prizes, including the Jerome Roche Prize of the Royal Musical Association and the William H. Scheide Prize of the American Bach Society. Her latest monograph, Music in the Flesh: An Early Modern Musical Physiology (Chicago, 2023), won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society. In 2025 she received the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association.

Selected Publications:

• ‘Plenisentient Musicking’, Critical Inquiry (in press)
• Music in the Flesh: An Early Modern Musical Physiology (University of Chicago Press, 2023)
• Rethinking Bach, ed. Bettina Varwig (Oxford University Press, 2021)
• ‘Music in the Thirty Years War: Towards an Emotional History of Listening’, Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music 26/1 (2020)
• ‘Heart-Felt Musicking: The Physiology of a Bach Cantata’, representations 143/1 (2018), 36-62
• Histories of Heinrich Schütz (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

Photo Credit: Zen Grisdale

Violinist Margaret Faultless performs music from Monteverdi to the present day in a career that has included leading the contemporary music ensemble Aquarius, co-leading a West End Musical and The Scottish Ballet orchestra, and performing with ensembles such as the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Academy of St Martin’s in the Fields. She has guest-led the Russian National Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra (London) and the Handel and Haydn Society (Boston). 

Now best known as a specialist in historical performance practice, she has held principal positions in and performed with many of the best-known period instrument ensembles. Margaret led the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra(Ton Koopman) in their ten-year Bach cantata project, performing and recording every cantata. She was a member of The London Haydn Quartet, whose CD of Opus 9 was hailed as ‘one of the great Haydn quartet recordings’. She also lectures and broadcasts on performance. Her research interests include leadership, social interactions in Haydn symphonies and Bach’s notation.

As a leader of The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, she performs at the Proms, the South Bank, Glyndebourne and has toured all over the world, working with conductors such as Sir Simon Rattle, Sir Mark Elder, Sir Roger Norrington, Ivan Fischer, John Butt and Maxim Emelyanychev. She directs the OAE Experience Scheme for young professionals – an exceptional education initiative that brings together early career period instrument specialists from all over Europe. She directed and helped to devise the acclaimed Breaking Bach project, a collaboration with breakdancers under choreographer Kim Brandstrup that had its premier at the Edinburgh Festival in 2025.

 A graduate and Honorary Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge,  Musician in Residence at St John’s College  and bye-fellow at Girton, she is the Artistic Director of the Cambridge University Collegium Musicum and of the University chamber music scheme (IAS), and works closely with the CMP. For 15 years Margaret was first Director of Performance at the Faculty of Music, a multi-faceted role which she helped to develop. She is the first Becket Chair of Historical Performance at The Royal Academy of Music, a Professor of the University of London and an Honorary Fellow of Birmingham Conservatoire, the city in which she grew up. 

Margaret is the Artistic Director of Music for Awhile, a flexible ensemble she founded in 1996. This group of eminent historical performance specialists is the professional ensemble collaborating with Bettina Varwig in the ground-breaking and artistically thrilling practice-based research project Music in the Flesh.

Photo credit: Eric Richards

Born in Liverpool, Nicholas Mulroy has performed extensively in the baroque repertoire, and has sung Bach’s Evangelists all over the world: in Sydney opera House, at the BBC Proms, and in the USA as well as in Bach’s churches in Arnstadt, Weimar, Köthen and Leipzig. He has also enjoyed a long association with the music of Monteverdi, having recorded his Vespers several times and sung around 80 performances of the Full Monteverdi, an immersive dramatisation of the great Fourth Book of Madrigals, devised by John La Bouchardière and Robert Hollingworth. 

Nick’s other musical interests include song recital - he has sung many times at Wigmore Hall, including Schubert songs, Purcell odes, and the complete Britten Canticles - and a particular love for the rich song tradition of Latin America. His album combining Purcell, Monteverdi, Víctor Jara, and Silvio Rodríguez -‘De Pasión Mortal’ - was released to critical acclaim in 2024 on Linn Records. 

Nick is a Visiting Professor at the Royal Academy of Music, Associate Director of Dunedin Consort, a Musician in Residence at Girton College, Cambridge, and Director of Trinity Boys Choir. He has given masterclasses and taught at the Australian National University in Canberra, the Royal Northern College of Music, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and has worked across Europe, with a particular emphasis on communication and text in ensemble singing.

‘Music in the Flesh’ has been a richly instructive and inspiring project, and has put into practice and words a much clearer sense of music’s value and effect. The invitation and encouragement to remain open to music’s power to make us listen, move, feel, and think differently feels like an important message to carry at this - or any - time.

In 1996 Simon Whistler and Margaret Faultless decided to celebrate their love of an ancient church in a magical setting with a concert. It brought together musicians of international standing to perform Baroque music on period instruments. The church was All Saints, Alton Priors and Music for Awhile was born. 

The annual focus is still the Summer Festival, which continues to inspire audiences and performers alike, in an atmosphere of creativity and collaboration. The ensemble brings together established musicians from Europe’s most acclaimed ensembles with young artists to share diverse experiences and perform a wide range of repertoire. 

Festival programmes have included performances of early English opera, (Purcell and Blow), masques, theatre music and has premièred new editions of manuscript material from the British Library by Henry Purcell and others. The ensemble has created new works combining music and poetry from Virgil’s Aeneid and Ted Hughes Tales from Ovid. The 2024 season included innovative programming of contemporary South American song with Purcell and a recital of 17th Century music for viols and violin with Armenian folk music and new compositions.

Gospel Oak Chorale is a group of established amateur and young professional singers giving quarterly public choral concerts in London, actively exploring ideas of embodiment in musical performance pioneered by Bettina Varwig and John Landor.

The choir is community focused: we encourage young people, students and locals with some background in choral singing to collaborate over a weekend of open workshops that culminate in a free public concert. We work to broaden access both to the traditions of choral singing and the reinvention of its performance, including instrumental arrangements, that is at once historically informed and improvisational. In this sense we see ourselves as a development of Varwig’s and Landor’s work and aim to bring their principles to a wider constituency of performers and audiences.

Our unticketed concerts take place at All Hallows Church in London NW3. We collect donations for the London Churches Refugee Fund, and seek small awards from institutional funders, enabling us to provide stipends for student and early career professional singers and musicians to attend rehearsals and performance weekends. Our intent is twofold: both to encourage greater experimentation amongst the choir as a whole with the benefit of more experienced support, and to expose our visiting singers to the methods and techniques we are developing. We intend that their time with us will go on to inform their future practice as choral singers in teaching and leading capacities.