Humphrey has been a singer since joining New College Choir as a boy under Edward Higginbottom. In his penultimate year the choir recorded a Gramophone Award-winning CD of the little known early Tudor composer Nicholas Ludford (c. 1490-1557), and ever since Humphrey has had a close connection with composers from the Eton Choirbook to Tallis and Byrd, including Ludford and Robert Fayrfax (1464-1521).

 

When Humphrey arrived at Caius College, Cambridge to study music and sing, by complete coincidence the choir’s recording project for that year was music by Ludford. This turned a passion for the music into serious performance ambitions and an academic pursuit. Humphrey and Toby formed Ensemble Pro Victoria to perform Tudor and Continental works in Sidney Sussex in 2015, and went on to explore the early Tudor repertory as well as other things. Humphrey won the Rannoch Scholarship at Cambridge for an extended essay on Ludford and the Westminster area in which he worked, and for his finals wrote a large-scale study on analytical techniques of early Tudor music.

 

While a Master’s first-study singer at the Royal College of Music, Humphrey was awarded the Mercers’ Award to support the fairly major project of editing all of Robert Fayrfax’s extant works for the quincentenary in 2021, and a collection of works by Ludford. These are available for free on this website and also on the Choral Public Domain Library.