Christopher Willcock

Willcock studied music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, graduating in 1974, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1977. He then pursued doctoral studies in sacramental and liturgical theology at the Institut Catholique de Paris. In 1998 he won the Albert H. Maggs Composition Award.

Collaborating with author and cartoonist Michael Leunig, he won the 2006 Classical Music Award for Choral or Vocal Work of the Year with excerpts from Southern Star, his cycle of nine Christmas carols. The carols are scored for four-part adult voices or three-part children’s voices with harp, reminiscent of Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols. Other major works have been performed by the Tallis Scholars (May 2000) and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra (December 1998).

In 2004 the Melbourne Chorale appointed him their first composer-in-residence. That year they performed two new a cappella pieces, Etiquette with Angels (a setting of a poem by fellow Australian Jesuit Andrew Bullen) and his Latin setting of Psalm 50, Miserere, and later that July his John Shaw Neilson Triptych.