Humphrey Clucas

Who is Humphrey Clucas?

Humphrey Clucas is a British composer, singer and author.

Clucas read English at King’s College, Cambridge, where he was a choral scholar. Having taught English in schools for twenty-seven years, while maintaining a separate singing career, he finally gave up teaching on his appointment as a Lay Vicar of Westminster Abbey, from which he retired in 1999.

As a composer he is self-taught, and though well known for a set of Responses, written as an undergraduate, nearly all his serious work has been done since 1979. He has written a great deal of choral music, much of it liturgical. But there are also concert works for choir and orchestra and for unaccompanied choir, a Housman song cycle for countertenor, a Clarinet Sonatina, a large body of organ music, including an Organ Symphony a series of works for double bass - and so on. He has written for a large number of English cathedrals, and also for the Vasari Singers, Gothic Voices, the organists Martin Baker, Robert Crowley and Peter Wright, and others. His latest work, was a carol for the BBC Boy and Girl Chorister of the Year, the Choir of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, and the Royal Harpist.