For most undergraduate composers, a debut album remains a distant ambition. For Christopher Churcher, a music student and finalist at Lady Margaret Hall, it has already become a reality. His album Moonrise, a collection of choral works recorded with Somerville College Choir, has earned national attention, including being selected as BBC Radio 3’s Album of the Week.
The path to Moonrise began long before Oxford. Christopher started composing at the age of ten or eleven, shortly after beginning piano lessons. But rather than sitting down to compose, Christopher’s primary catalyst for writing music was a reluctance to practise scales. Instead of working through assigned exercises, he found himself improvising melodies and chord progressions at the piano. Eventually he began writing those ideas down.
Music entered his life through several different routes. Growing up in Birmingham, he joined Birmingham Cathedral Choir as a child chorister, learning to sight-read and performing music several times a week. Later, after his voice broke, he moved away from singing and towards orchestral performance, taking up the bassoon and playing with youth orchestras. When he arrived at Oxford, he expected his future to lie primarily in orchestral music. Instead, it was choral music that transformed his direction.
That redirection, sparked inside Somerville’s chapel, is the thread that runs in a more or less straight line to Moonrise. The turning point came towards the end of his first year. Christopher attended one of the college’s contemplations, reflective services that combine music, poetry, and readings. Listening to the Somerville College Choir perform, he experienced what he describes as an epiphany.
“I just had this sort of epiphany that I’d been missing choral music from my life for so long,” he recalls. “I realised that that was where I needed to be.” Although he had spent years pursuing orchestral performance, the artistic language that ultimately felt most natural was the one he thought he had left behind. Through Somerville College Choir and its director, Will Dawes, he rediscovered a musical tradition that had shaped him as a child.
That relationship would eventually become the foundation for Moonrise. The choir provided a collaborative environment in which Christopher’s compositional voice could develop, serving as his “most kind of significant collaborators to date” who have “have hugely inspired the way that [he] write[s]”. Looking back, he is clear that the album would never have existed without Oxford. “This album only happened because I was in the right place at the right time with the right choir and the right director”, he says.
Yet Oxford’s influence extends beyond performance opportunities. Christopher speaks of the university as a creative ecosystem whose value lies in its intellectual diversity. Although he studies music, much of the poetry featured on Moonrise came through conversations with friends studying English and modern languages. The degree itself, meanwhile, exposed him to ideas that challenged his assumptions about what composition could be.
While rooted in the choral tradition, Christopher’s music draws inspiration from far beyond the classical canon. He speaks enthusiastically about artists ranging from Joni Mitchell to contemporary popular musicians. Rather than treating classical music as a sealed cultural category, he approaches it as part of a wider musical landscape. Oxford, he says, “removed any sort of prejudices that [he] had internalised from studying GCSE music”.
But, of course, Oxford isn’t all positive for composition. Christopher is careful not to romanticise the experience. “Oxford really gets in the way of composing,” he says bluntly at one point. The Music degree (like any Oxford degree), he explains, leaves little uninterrupted time for sustained creative work. Unlike a conservatoire education, his course does not centre composition itself. Despite this, he views Oxford as a productive tension, rather than a mere obstacle. The demands of the degree may limit the time available for composition, but they also expose him to ideas, texts, and people that continually enrich his creative work. “Whilst sometimes I can feel like I’m fighting against the degree a bit to find time to write and compose”, he reflects, “it’s so great because the degree is so stimulating”. Oxford, in his view, has been a place where academic study and artistic practice constantly inform one another.
The result is a compositional style that balances sophistication with immediacy. His creative process is surprisingly architectural. Before writing notes, he sketches large visual timelines on sheets of A3 paper, mapping emotional trajectories, climaxes, textures, and harmonic developments. He compares the process to designing a building.
Describing his composition process, he says: “I’ll sit there and think, okay, I’ve got five minutes. Where do I want the high point of the piece to be? How can I create a sense of catharsis for the listener?” The language is telling. Even when discussing structure, Christopher returns repeatedly to emotional experience. Composition becomes a carefully planned emotional journey, which leads him to reject the idea that composition is inherently intellectual. Instead, his music is fundamentally personal and autobiographical. “I think actually that does make me quite different to some classical composers”, he says. While some composers prefer distance between their work and their personal lives, he actively embraces vulnerability. His music functions almost as a form of emotional testimony.Nowhere is that clearer than in the third Pride Motet. Christopher says, “I put my heartbreak and my love and my humanity into that piece”.
For Christopher, the goal when composing music is to create music that anyone, regardless of their background in classical music, can listen to and appreciate. Asked how he would describe Moonrise to someone without a classical background, he avoids technical language entirely. Instead, he speaks about emotion. The album, he says, is an attempt “to express human emotion” and to create atmospheres that listeners can inhabit regardless of their musical experience. The words he chooses to describe the music – “warm, comforting, atmospheric, emotional, sensitive” – reveal a composer less concerned with intellectual display than with human connection.
As he prepares for the next stage of his career, including a move to Germany and new commissions for choir and orchestra, that commitment remains unchanged. The success of Moonrise has given him confidence that audiences are responding to the values that matter most to him: emotional truth, accessibility, and connection.
Moonrise emerged from precisely that conviction. Beneath its carefully crafted choral textures and ambitious artistic vision lies a simple idea: that music is at its most powerful when it communicates something real. It is an idea Christopher has cemented in his professional repertoire because of Oxford – because of a choir he wasn’t looking for, a director who became a collaborator, and a degree that left him fighting for time even as it gave him plenty to write about. That belief, and that drive to make music accessible, seems likely to remain at the centre of whatever comes next.
