Sarah MacDonald

Composer

Sarah MacDonald is a Canadian-born organist and conductor based in the United Kingdom. She currently holds the positions of Fellow and Director of Music at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and Director of Ely Cathedral Girls’ Choir. She has been at Selwyn since 1999, and is the first woman to hold such a post in an Oxbridge Chapel. She came to the UK from Canada in 1992 as Organ Scholar of Robinson College, Cambridge after studying piano, organ, and conducting at The Royal Conservatory of Music’s Glenn Gould School in Toronto with Leon Fleisher, Marek Jablonski, and John Tuttle. At Cambridge she read for a degree in Music and studied the organ with David Sanger.

Sarah has played numerous recitals and conducted choirs throughout the UK, North America, the Middle East, New Zealand, and much of mainland Europe. She has made over 35 recordings, variously in the guises of pianist, organist, conductor, and producer, and currently works most frequently with Regent Records. Sarah is a winner of the Royal College of Organists’ coveted Limpus Prize, and has taught organ and conducting for Eton Choral Courses, Oundle for Organists, the Jennifer Bate Organ Academy, and courses run by the RCO. For its first decade, she was a Director of the annual Girl Chorister Course at St Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, in New York City.

Sarah is a Fellow and Examiner of the RCO, and has also been a Trustee and a member of the Academic Board. She has had numerous choral compositions published by Encore Publications, the Royal School of Church Music, and St James Music Press. Sarah also writes a popular monthly column for the American Guild of Organists’ magazine The American Organist, called ‘UK Report’. In 2018 Sarah received the honorary ARSCM in recognition of her contribution to choral music in the UK and Canada, and the citation made particular mention of her support of contemporary British composers.