The St John’s Director of Music, Bruce Forman, grew up in Bristol, where he studied piano with Christopher Northam and organ with David Hobourn and later Mark Lee (Bristol Cathedral organist) before reading Theology at Pembroke College, Oxford, where he received a choral bursary.
More recently he has completed an MA in Music with the Open University and a PhD at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire which investigated both musicological and theological aspects of the music of French composer Olivier Messiaen, including a specific study of his role as a church organist and improviser. Bruce has wider research interests in the relationships between music and theology which inform his approach to music at St John’s.
Bruce is married to Katie, a scholar of Classical Hebrew, and has two daughters, Abigail and Samantha.