Cecilia McDowall

Cecilia McDowall (b. 1951) is one of the UK’s leading composers of sacred and secular choral music and has won many awards including, in 2014, the British Composer Award in the Choral category for her haunting work, Night Flight. McDowall’s distinctive style fuses fluent melodic lines with occasional dissonant harmonies and rhythmic exuberance. Her music has been commissioned and performed by such leading organisations as the BBC Singers, St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Cathedral, The Sixteen, Tenebrae, Oxford and Cambridge choirs, and festivals worldwide.

In 2020 McDowall was presented with the prestigious Ivor Novello Award for a ‘consistently excellent body of work’. This was a ‘Gift’ from The Ivors Academy. Her works have been extensively recorded, and in 2021 Hyperion released an album of her sacred works by the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge. Also in 2021, McDowall was given the coveted annual commission by King’s College, Cambridge, to write the carol (There is no rose) for the Choir of King’s College and their music director, Daniel Hyde, to be part of the much-loved Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols broadcast worldwide on Christmas Eve. 

In 2023, Signum released an album of McDowall’s Da Vinci Requiem – a significant seven-movement work which creatively combines excerpts from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks with texts from the Latin Missa pro defunctis. The orchestral song cycle, Seventy Degrees Below Zero, is on the same disc. In 2025 Resonus Classics released an album of four cantatas including The Ice is Listening. Also, in 2025, the Royal College of Organists awarded McDowall its highest honour, the RCO Medal, in recognition of her ‘distinguished achievement in choral composition’. 

International Record Review has praised her for “a communicative gift that is very rare in modern music”.