Andrew Gant was a choral scholar at St John’s College, Cambridge under the direction of the late Dr. George Guest. He subsequently sang with most of the country’s leading ensembles, including The Tallis Scholars, The Sixteen, The Monteverdi Choir and the Cambridge Singers. He was first tenor and musical director of the Light Blues male-voice sextet, for whom he wrote many arrangements and with whom he toured all over the world.

His degree at Cambridge was in Music and English and included the Arthur Quiller-Couch prize for best creative work for the libretto of his opera Blake. He later studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music with Paul Patterson, gaining the degree of M.Mus and two of the Academy’s composition prizes. His opera The Basement Room was written for the Academy’s opera school and performed at the Academy and the Cambridge Festival. In 2002 he was awarded the degree of PhD in composition and contemporary music by Goldsmith’s College, University of London, where he studied with Dr. Sadie Harrison.

Andrew Gant has worked in church music all his adult life, singing regularly with all the professional church choirs in London including a two-year period as a tenor Lay Vicar at Westminster Abbey, appointed by the Abbey Organist Simon Preston. In the early 1990s he moved from singing in church choirs to directing them, and has held posts as conductor at Selwyn College, Cambridge, The Royal Military Chapel (The Guards Chapel), Wellington Barracks, London, and Worcester College, Oxford. He has given regular concerts with his choirs, and led them on foreign tours and in broadcasts and recordings. In September 2000 he took up his current post as Organist, Choirmaster and Composer at Her Majesty’s Chapel Royal.

The choir of the Chapel Royal has existed since at least the Norman Conquest, and its roll of musicians includes Robert Fayrfax, William Cornyshe, Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, Henry Purcell, John Blow and George Frederic Handel. Its duties today are much as they have always been: to sing the weekly service in the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace and to perform for the monarch at other occasions as required. In recent years these have included annual events such as the Royal Maundy ceremony and Remembrance Day Parade in Whitehall, the Golden Jubilee service at St Paul’s Cathedral, the funeral of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother at Westminster Abbey, and other weddings, funerals and baptisms of members of the Royal Family and the Royal Household. The choir consists of six Gentlemen-in-Ordinary, who are professional singers, and ten Children of the Chapel (boy choristers). The children are educated at City of London School, and receive a generous scholarship towards their school fees. Andrew Gant is always happy to talk to prospective parents about chorister places at the Chapel Royal.