Chloë is a British mezzo soprano with a vibrant performing career and an academic with a PhD from the Music Faculty of the University of Cambridge. Her work unites the too often divided spheres of performance and research.
As Founder and Director of Marginalia Performance
Marginalia are an interdisciplinary performance collective bringing cutting-edge academic research to life in performance. Marginalia use research to unlock possibilities for original and engaging performance events, telling stories that have remained hidden on the margins of history and introducing original ideas to new audiences. We also shine new light on more familiar material, re-energising well-known repertoire by exploring it from different perspectives.
As an Academic
Her doctoral research explored the music sung at Notre Dame de Paris at the end of the 12th century. This music was completely new and very ambitious, yet it was created not by composers, but by groups of unnamed and extremely skilled singers, working together orally to develop new ways of creating music. Her work explored these processes of creation, asking how we can use the notated remnants of these fluid, oral creative processes to ask who these people were and how they sang. Singing was vital to this investigation, facilitating an immersion in the sound and physicality of the music and thereby revealing previous hidden things about its creation. This work was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and she was a Cambridge Trust Scholar. Since finishing her PhD, she has worked on the British-Academy-funded project ‘Wordless Singing in the Medieval Church’ with Dr Henry Parkes as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Nottingham. She has also presented a public lecture for the Royal School of Church Music, ‘Giving New Voice to a Forgotten Past: Polyphony in Twelfth-Century Paris’ and published ‘Notre-Dame de Paris: the Birthplace of Modern Composition?’ in the Church Music Quarterly (2021, issue 2, online).
As a Performer
As a performer, she was a 2021 Oxford Lieder Mastercourse Young Artist, a 2019/20 Making Music Selected Artist and a finalist in the London Song Festival British Art Song Competition in 2019 all with her pianist duet partner Adam McDonagh. She has performed as a soloist with a number of Cambridge Orchestras, most recently singing Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder with the University Symphony Orchestra as winner of their Concerto Competition. Other appearances as a soloist include Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder and Der Abschied with The Cambridge Mahler Orchestra, Elgar’s Sea Pictures with the Graduate Orchestra, and Lili Boulanger’s Du fond de l’abîme for the season launch of the inaugural Minerva Festival in 2019, which promotes female and non-binary composers. Her onstage appearances include Romeo/A rose by another name: Juliet and Romeo (Marginalia Performance), the title roles in La Cenerentola and Carmen (Cambridge University Opera Society), La Zia Principessa/Suor Angelica, Ottavia/L’incoronazione di Poppea and Testo/Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda.
In 2020, she had the honour of helping to craft and performing in the premier of Green Opera’s ‘Fillu’. The Lieder-opera tells the story of Eugenie Schumann, the youngest daughter of Clara and Robert, and her lover, the Austrian soprano Marie Fillunger, through a dramatised performance of nineteenth-century Lied and readings of their letters. The project aimed to champion a diversity in love so rarely seen on the operatic stage. It was recorded and performed as part of the JAM on the March virtual festival in July 2020.
As an Educator and Director
Chloë is also a committed educationalist. Her workshops as part of Marginalia’s education work aim to inspire in pupils a love of sharing stories with audiences and to furnish them with the tools to go beyond singing beautifully and to really and truly perform. She currently teaches at Cranleigh School in Surrey and has also coached the treble choir at Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in South London. This involved preparing the boys for roles with the Royal Opera House and Opera Holland Park. She is a lecturer and small group teacher on the undergraduate music course at Cambridge and has lectured on the Sutton Trust Summer School, which prepares pupils from underprivileged backgrounds for Oxbridge applications. She is also passionate about facilitating adult community music-making and she currently directs Choir 2000 and Women of Note, a choral society and community choir respectively, both Cambridge based.