Personal details

Vernon Hoyle with wife Margaret and children Matthew and Alison in July 2006.

Vernon Hoyle: Some Personal Details

Vernon Hoyle was born in 1948 at Hatfield, South Yorkshire, where he received his first music lessons from John Hubert Piper (a local schoolteacher and organist) and was a chorister at the parish church. At the age of fifteen he became a student at the Huddersfield School of Music, where his teachers included Eugenie Everest, David Ingate, Ruth Ramsden, Winifred Smith, Richard Steinitz and Harold Truscott. After five years at Huddersfield he continued his formal education at the City of Birmingham College of Education and the Open University. He has a BA (Hons) degree in music and English literature, a BSc (Hons) degree in social sciences and six diplomas in composition, piano, organ, singing and general musical disciplines, as well as other qualifications in social sciences and education.

From 1969 until his retirement in 1998 he taught music and English in secondary schools in West Yorkshire. In his sundry capacities as chorister, organist, choral director, composer, arranger and editor he has been active in Anglican church music for nearly fifty years. Having gained considerable experience as a parish church organist and choirmaster in the 1960s and 70s (much of this at Hatfield Parish Church), in the 80s and 90s, as Musical Director of the Danensian Choir, a Doncaster-based group specialising in the performance of English cathedral music, he directed the music at services in twenty-four Anglican cathedrals and at other prominent foundations including Llandaff Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, Beverley Minster and St George’s Chapel, Windsor. In 2005 he succeeded the late Dr Roger Bullivant as President of the Danensian Choir.

His compositions and arrangements, a number of which are published, comprise educational works and choral music, much of this for the Anglican church. With Dr Jonathan Wainwright he is co-editor of a major collection of psalm chants entitled Cantica Nova, collections of anthems for Holy Communion, Ascensiontide and Pentecost, a book of seven settings of the Preces, Responses and Lord’s Prayer and a collection of fifty Christmas carols for soprano alto and men entitled Nowell! Nowell!, all featuring music by contemporary composers.

He is married to Margaret and they have a son, Matthew (b.1992) and a daughter, Alison (b.1995).