Thomas Neal is a conductor, musicologist, and teacher based in Oxford. Born in Stockton-on-Tees into a musical family, Tom read Music to postgraduate level at Clare College, Cambridge, graduating BA Hons in 2012 and MPhil in 2013.Since graduating, Tom has developed a career in music education. In 2018, he was appointed Director of Music at New College School, Oxford, one of the UK’s leading preparatory schools and home of New College’s renowned boy choristers. Highlights from the past seven years include staged productions of Britten’s Noye’s Fludde and Richard Rodney Bennett’s All the King’s Men; concert performances of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, King Arthur, and The Fairy Queen; symphonies by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert; and choral concerts featuring works such as Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s Advent cantatas and reconstructed St. Mark Passion, Haydn’s masses, and Britten’s Saint Nicolas—in collaboration with ensembles such as Instruments of Time & Truth, His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts, the Oxford Bach Soloists, the Oxford Opera Company, and the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra. Forthcoming projects include Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols, Mozart’s opera Bastien und Bastienne, and the St. Luke Passion formerly attributed to Bach.
In demand as a chorus director, Tom has held positions with the Cleveland Philharmonic Choir, Cambridge University Musical Society (CUMS) Chorus, the Cambridge University Chamber Choir, the University of Portsmouth Choir, and the Portsmouth Festival Choir. Past performances include: Bach’s cantatas, motets, masses, and passions; Handel’s Messiah, Chandos Anthems, and Brockes Passion; Mozart’s Requiem, Vesperae solennes de confessore, and ‘Great’ Mass in C minor; Haydn’s The Creation and masses; Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem; and large-scale concerts of music by Monteverdi and Gabrieli. Tom has also acted as chorusmaster for works including Bach’s Mass in B minor, Verdi’s Requiem, Puccini’s Tosca, Mahler’s Symphonies nos.3 and 8, Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, Howells’s Hymnus Paradisi and An English Mass, and Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms.
In September 2025, Tom will join the Benson Choral Society as Musical Director. His first season will include performances of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Handel’s opera Acis and Galatea, and Brahms’s Ein deutches Requiem.
Tom is also active as a church musician, specialising in music for the traditional Latin liturgy. His previous appointments include the organ scholarship at Our Lady and the English Martyrs, Cambridge; the Schola Cantorum of Fisher House, Cambridge; and the Shrine of St. Augustine, Ramsgate, where he directed The Victoria Consort. Tom is the founder-director of Ensemble Res Sacra, a professional group of male singers specialising in the liturgical performance of plainchant and Renaissance polyphony. He is a regular guest conductor of several liturgical choirs, including The Southwell Consort and Schola Abelis, and since 2018 has served as organist at the church of St. Michael the Archangel, Burghclere.
Alongside teaching and performing, Tom is active as a musicologist and historian. He has researched and written widely on music and culture in early modern Italy, with a particular focus on the life and works of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c.1525-1594) and the printed sources of sacred music in sixteenth-century Rome. Recent publications have explored the sources of Palestrina's masses, madrigals, hymns, and litanies; performance practice; music and the Tridentine liturgical reforms; music-making in Roman confraternities; and the literary sources of seventeenth-century spiritual madrigals. Tom has presented papers at more than twenty international conferences, and he gives regular public lectures and workshops on topics relating to sixteenth-century music, plainchant, and the liturgy. He recently coedited a volume of essays on sacred music in Italy and a further volume of essays on Palestrina is due for publication in 2027. His first book is scheduled for 2028.
An occasional composer, Tom’s choral works have been performed by such choirs as Westminster Cathedral Choir, the BBC Singers, and The Bach Choir.
Tom lives in Oxfordshire with his wife, Catherine, and their three children.
