Dr Tim Williams has collaborated with Professor Magnus Williamson (Professor of Music at Newcastle University) since 2017, when they met on a Lincolnshire church music engagement project. This collaboration has seen several enactment projects of early music performance practice. Professor Williamson has visited St Wulfram’s Church on several occasions, including to deliver a lecture on the history of sacred music in our church, and to deliver workshops with our youth choir on historical performance methods. Their collaboration developed significantly during lockdown as Dr Williams developed methodologies for digital, virtual and hybrid choir engagement with early music, reconstructing plainsong, faburden and polyphony from source material. Many of the results of these collaborations are on the choir’s YouTube channel (see here: https://youtu.be/iRKYsT12-Us, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-58U01dwJb0, https://youtu.be/mDgZhPVG-Hw and https://youtu.be/k6RLYMvbLOM). The project based learning helped galvanise singers to continue their engagement with the choir during the most difficult times for choirs internationally. This collaboration resulted in an academic publication in Early Music (Oxford University Press) in 2022, ‘Rethinking Early Music in a Time of Isolation’ (https://academic.oup.com/em/article/50/1/123/6595870).

Dr Williams and Professor Williamson are currently working on further engagement projects, in particular developing strategies and resources relevant to teenage singers participating in sacred music.