Duncan Ferguson

Since his 2008 appointment as organist and master of music at Edinburgh's St. Mary's Cathedral, Duncan Ferguson has raised the profile of the cathedral's choir, led it in a series of acclaimed recordings, and exploited the new sonorities made possible by the choir's pathbreaking admission of girls and women to its ranks. He has also toured widely and recorded as a solo organist. Ferguson was born about 1982 and attended Magdalen College, Oxford, where he held an organ scholarship. His training also included a scholarship organ post at St. Paul's Cathedral, where he got experience working with a cathedral choir in daily performances and led it at diocese-wide and national services. Among his teachers were Thomas Trotter, David Goode, Kevin Bowyer, Grayston (Bill) Ives, John Scott, and Malcolm Archer. Ferguson earned a Master's degree at Oxford, writing a thesis on the place of music in the writing of history. He worked as assistant director of music at St. Michael's, Cornhill, and as a tutor at King's College, London, before being named assistant organist at St. Mary's in 2005. The following year, women were added to the Choir at St. Mary's Cathedral as altos. Girl trebles had also been admitted in 1978; St. Mary's was the first cathedral choir in the U.K. to include them. Ferguson's duties at St. Mary's included rehearsing and conducting the choir for daily services, and for more extensive events such as a series of appearances at the month-long Edinburgh Festival, recruiting and training choristers, and teaching organ at the cathedral's own music school. He has also conducted various other youth and adult choirs as well as orchestras, and he has appeared on BBC radio broadcasts and toured the U.K. and the U.S. as an organ soloist. Prior to Ferguson's arrival, the Choir at St. Mary's Cathedral had not had a significant recording career, but that changed quickly as the choir was signed to Delphian and audiences got a taste of the slightly gritty sound Ferguson achieved with his mixed-gender group of choristers. A recording of sacred music by John Taverner was recorded in 2009 and released in 2011, and Ferguson has since led the choir in recordings of music by Gabriel Jackson, John Sheppard, Igor Stravinsky, and, in 2018, the neglected 16th-century English composer William Mundy. As a soloist, Ferguson has recorded an album of music by Romantic-era composer William Faulkes.
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