About Ed...

I started on the piano at seven and the organ at fifteen — and within a year the organ had quietly overtaken everything else. I studied with David Bridges at Taunton School and later with Paul Morgan at Exeter Cathedral, read Music at the University of Exeter, took the ARCO diploma, and trained as a teacher at Bath Spa. That mix — trained organist, university-trained musicologist, classroom-trained teacher — is still the foundation of how I work today.

The school years

For sixteen years I led music departments at two independent schools — Wycliffe College in Gloucestershire and then Queen's College, Taunton, where I was Director of Music from 2014 to 2024. That meant directing choirs and bands, music-directing productions from Coram Boy to Into the Woods to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, accompanying hundreds of exam candidates, running scholarship auditions, conducting the choral society through Haydn and Handel, playing the organ chapel, and managing a department of twenty-odd visiting teachers. It was rewarding, exhausting and a thorough education in itself.

Now

In 2024 I stepped out of full-time school music to build a freelance life around the work I most enjoy — playing, accompanying, and teaching. I'm now the Administrative Manager at Guildhall Young Artists Taunton, which keeps me close to young musicians coming up through the system, and I play regularly at churches across Somerset and the south west for services, weddings, funerals and recitals. This year I have also undertaken work with Somerset Operas and the

A few things outside the diary that I'm involved with:

• Official accompanist, Brian Cresswell Music Festival 2026 (formerly the Taunton Music Festival)

• Musical Director, Mid Wessex Singers — a large and very friendly choir based in Somerton

• Trustee, Southern Sinfonia — the professional chamber orchestra I helped bring to Queen's College as Orchestra in Residence in 2017

Off the bench

I live just outside Taunton with my wife Sally, a professional harpist, and our young son Nat. I grew up in Somerset (though, technically, I was born in Surrey) and have no plans to leave it.