For most undergraduate composers, a debut album remains a distant ambition. For Christopher Churcher, a music student and finalist at Lady Margaret Hall, it has already become a reality. His album Moonrise, a collection of choral works recorded with Somerville College Choir, has earned national attention, including being selected as BBC Radio 3’s Album of the Week.

The path to Moonrise began long before Oxford. Christopher started composing at the age of ten or eleven, shortly after beginning piano lessons. But rather than sitting down to compose, Christopher’s primary catalyst for writing music was a reluctance to practise scales. Instead of working through assigned exercises, he found himself improvising melodies and chord progressions at the piano. Eventually he began writing those ideas down.

Music entered his life through several different routes. Growing up in Birmingham, he joined Birmingham Cathedral Choir as a child chorister, learning to sight-read and performing music several times a week. Later, after his voice broke, he moved away from singing and towards orchestral performance, taking up the bassoon and playing with youth orchestras. When he arrived at Oxford, he expected his future to lie primarily in orchestral music. Instead, it was choral music that transformed his direction.

That redirection, sparked inside Somerville’s chapel, is the thread that runs in a more or less straight line to Moonrise. The turning point came towards the end of his first year. Christopher attended one of the college’s contemplations, reflective services that combine music, poetry, and readings. Listening to the Somerville College Choir perform, he experienced what he describes as an epiphany.

“I just had this sort of epiphany that I’d been missing choral music from my life for so long,” he recalls. “I realised that that was where I needed to be.” Although he had spent years pursuing orchestral performance, the artistic language that ultimately felt most natural was the one he thought he had left behind. Through Somerville College Choir and its director, Will Dawes, he rediscovered a musical tradition that had shaped him as a child.

That relationship would eventually become the foundation for Moonrise. The choir provided a collaborative environment in which Christopher’s compositional voice could develop, serving as his “most kind of significant collaborators to date” who have “have hugely inspired the way that [he] write[s]”. Looking back, he is clear that the album would never have existed without Oxford. “This album only happened because I was in the right place at the right time with the right choir and the right director”, he says.

Yet Oxford’s influence extends beyond performance opportunities. Christopher speaks of the university as a creative ecosystem whose value lies in its intellectual diversity. Although he studies music, much of the poetry featured on Moonrise came through conversations with friends studying English and modern languages. The degree itself, meanwhile, exposed him to ideas that challenged his assumptions about what composition could be.

While rooted in the choral tradition, Christopher’s music draws inspiration from far beyond the classical canon. He speaks enthusiastically about artists ranging from Joni Mitchell to contemporary popular musicians. Rather than treating classical music as a sealed cultural category, he approaches it as part of a wider musical landscape. Oxford, he says, “removed any sort of prejudices that [he] had internalised from studying GCSE music”.

But, of course, Oxford isn’t all positive for composition. Christopher is careful not to romanticise the experience. “Oxford really gets in the way of composing,” he says bluntly at one point. The Music degree (like any Oxford degree), he explains, leaves little uninterrupted time for sustained creative work. Unlike a conservatoire education, his course does not centre composition itself. Despite this, he views Oxford as a productive tension, rather than a mere obstacle. The demands of the degree may limit the time available for composition, but they also expose him to ideas, texts, and people that continually enrich his creative work. “Whilst sometimes I can feel like I’m fighting against the degree a bit to find time to write and compose”, he reflects, “it’s so great because the degree is so stimulating”. Oxford, in his view, has been a place where academic study and artistic practice constantly inform one another.

The result is a compositional style that balances sophistication with immediacy. His creative process is surprisingly architectural. Before writing notes, he sketches large visual timelines on sheets of A3 paper, mapping emotional trajectories, climaxes, textures, and harmonic developments. He compares the process to designing a building.

Describing his composition process, he says: “I’ll sit there and think, okay, I’ve got five minutes. Where do I want the high point of the piece to be? How can I create a sense of catharsis for the listener?” The language is telling. Even when discussing structure, Christopher returns repeatedly to emotional experience. Composition becomes a carefully planned emotional journey, which leads him to reject the idea that composition is inherently intellectual. Instead, his music is fundamentally personal and autobiographical. “I think actually that does make me quite different to some classical composers”, he says. While some composers prefer distance between their work and their personal lives, he actively embraces vulnerability. His music functions almost as a form of emotional testimony.Nowhere is that clearer than in the third Pride Motet. Christopher says, “I put my heartbreak and my love and my humanity into that piece”.  

For Christopher, the goal when composing music is to create music that anyone, regardless of their background in classical music, can listen to and appreciate. Asked how he would describe Moonrise to someone without a classical background, he avoids technical language entirely. Instead, he speaks about emotion. The album, he says, is an attempt “to express human emotion” and to create atmospheres that listeners can inhabit regardless of their musical experience. The words he chooses to describe the music – “warm, comforting, atmospheric, emotional, sensitive” – reveal a composer less concerned with intellectual display than with human connection.

As he prepares for the next stage of his career, including a move to Germany and new commissions for choir and orchestra, that commitment remains unchanged. The success of Moonrise has given him confidence that audiences are responding to the values that matter most to him: emotional truth, accessibility, and connection.

Moonrise emerged from precisely that conviction. Beneath its carefully crafted choral textures and ambitious artistic vision lies a simple idea: that music is at its most powerful when it communicates something real. It is an idea Christopher has cemented in his professional repertoire because of Oxford – because of a choir he wasn’t looking for, a director who became a collaborator, and a degree that left him fighting for time even as it gave him plenty to write about. That belief, and that drive to make music accessible, seems likely to remain at the centre of whatever comes next.

Scenes with Girls deserves to be seen as one of Labyrinth Productions’ (Rosie Morgan-Males and Emily Cullinan) most impressive accolades. It displayed the tension inside a female friendship to such a believable extent that at points the audience were silenced entirely. It felt particularly relevant given this year’s right-wing coverage of an emerging “angry woman” who refuses to conform to established beauty ideals, creating the concern amongst men that she may, horror-of-horrors, renounce them entirely. 

The play centres the friendship of flatmates Tosh (Juliet Taub) and Lou (Sanaa Pasha), and their ex-flatmate Fran (Georgina Cooper), and forces the audience to consider what it means to live as a feminist in today’s day and age. Each character symbolises a varying degree of conformity to the standard “narrative” – the conventional life path ascribed to women which lacks space for female platonic intimacy, and foregrounds the pursuit of heteronormative romantic relationships. Lou persistently seeks sex with men, but wishes she could leave her body as it happens, Tosh chooses not to associate with men at all, and Fran becomes the object of their ridicule as she, in their eyes, allows herself to be dominated by her boyfriend. 

The play questions whether following the narratives we’re fed makes us flawed. Underlying the flatmates’ attempts to define a new feminist consciousness is a sense of sexual competitiveness written into their psyches since “girls’ school”, and ironically it is Tosh who chooses the “desire to be desired” over forging an alternative lifestyle with Lou, briefly doing a “really good impression of a girlfriend” before the two reunite. This production was remarkable for its ability to use laughter to make the audience think. Lines which were instantly funny, such as Taub begging her boyfriend to repeat himself and him saying “you’re so fit”, prompted reflection on the reality of women allowing men’s assessment of their physical appearance to dictate their happiness. Hearing conversations after the performance’s end made me certain that this production will have an enduring impact on viewers’ understanding of heterosexual romance. 

The actors’ versatility prevented the physically intense emotional scenes from losing pace, and Rosie Morgan-Males’ stellar directing allowed the audience to observe when each friend was craving the other’s approval. In such an intimate relationship, tension was physical. Blocking made evident to everyone but Lou that Tosh wanted her undivided attention. Lou’s incessant mentions of sex made Tosh’s shoulders visibly slump, and her dissatisfied expression at times where Lou seemed more focused on her phone gave context to later anger. Later, having been persuaded that she ought to renounce men entirely, Lou is placed behind Tosh so that the audience can notice her hopeful looks as she asserts to Fran that she no longer wants to talk about boys: in a weak imitation of Tosh’s all out separatism, Lou murmurs that she now finds them “gross”. 

Cooper as Fran was a comedic highlight, and Morgan-Males’ choice to push her over-enthusiastic reactions to extremity was well enacted. Cooper’s focus was commendable: the audience could see that while constantly smiling, Fran was also constantly listening, never looking away from the relationship between the two women. This made her later assertion that she “is not stupid” and sees herself worthy of pursuing their feminist lifestyle believable. 

Pasha too is a fantastic emotional actor and it was in her character’s moments of defeat that she shone most. After Tosh confronts her and explains that she is obsessed by “the shit version of love they [men] give you”, her physicality destabilises and for much of the rest of the play she appears untethered, at one stage collapsing on the floor. The sense that she is struggling to avoid a total breakdown was impressively acted, her eyes glazing with tears as she tells Fran that she feels “mad”. 

Taub was impossible not to watch, especially in moments of climactic anger. Her ability to move between a cynical “dead-inside” attitude and brutal anger was phenomenal. In particular, her dogged confrontation of Pasha had the audience visibly uncomfortable. 

The embodiment of the joy as well as pain within Tosh and Lou’s platonic relationship was a highlight. No holds-barred descriptions of Tosh’s sex life, in which the men were always viscerally denounced – “the conversational equivalent of a nosebleed in a swimming pool” – were interspersed with tableaus that convincingly represented the pair as two friends placed firmly in our generation. Non-sensical jokes were thrown at each other while sat apart engrossed in their phone screens. In the parts of the script where their friendship was strongest they sprawled their limbs across each other. It was these unspoken moments that made their friendship seem most real: jokingly poking each other’s legs, or wrestling each other to the ground. 

The actors’ boldness and commitment to every movement gave the play its glowing quality. Their hugs – most memorably after Tosh demands that Lou “dig into this” – successfully transferred an appearance of platonic passion. Alongside whole-hearted physical intimacy, the toilet at the back of the stage was an effective way to demonstrate the lack of boundaries between the characters. The lack of bodily privacy between the two was reflected in its openness to the audience, with some of the most compelling dialogue delivered by Tosh from the toilet seat. In an extremely powerful exchange taking advantage of this set-up, a visibly defeated Taub asked “am I mentally ill?”. 

The “messiness” of the physical intimacy was well complimented by the set, with clothes strewn across the floor. It felt like an illusion to Tracey Emin’s My Bed in an era where women’s lack of total cleanliness is no longer seen as shocking. The simplicity of the costumes (relaxed tops and tracksuits, designed by Clara Woodhead and Mimi Finney) were another indicator of the friend’s closeness. 

The script, like female friendships themselves, is complicated, but the actors tackled it with professional quality. It is rare that a student production is capable of making an audience both laugh out loud, and fall completely silent. To use a cliche, it was jaw-dropping.

William Hague, Chancellor of Oxford, conferred nine honorary degrees in today’s Encaenia ceremony. The recipients include former New Zealand Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern; actress and theatre director Adjoa Andoh MBE; and literary critic and host of Finding Your Roots Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The other honorands are tennis player Billie Jean King; electronics engineer and inventor of blue LED Shuji Nakamura; Nobel Prize-winning economics professor Daron Acemoglu; Birmingham Royal Ballet director Carlos Acosta CBE; biochemist Katalin Karikó, whose mRNA research contributed to the COVID-19 vaccines; and former CEO of GSK Dame Emma Walmsley.

The procession of recipients and senior members of the University walked from Exeter College to the Sheldonian Theatre, where the ceremony took place, around 11.20am. Earlier this year, the Chancellor conferred eight honorary degrees in a Special Honorary Degree Ceremony intended to commemorate the beginning of his Chancellorship.

Encaenia takes place on the Wednesday of ninth week of each Trinity term, and sees the conferral of honorary degrees on recipients selected by the Congregation, a body of over 5,000 staff and academics. The University website describes these awards as “the most prestigious awards the University can confer”. The ceremony is traditionally followed by a lunch, hosted by All Souls College for over 100 years, and a garden party. It has been a constant feature in the Oxford calendar since the 1470s.

Dame Jacinda Ardern GNZM is one of the most prominent honorands this year. As the Prime Minister of New Zealand from 2017 to 2023, she was praised by international media for her leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, Ardern joined the Blavatnik School of Government as a member of the World Leaders Circle, alongside former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

Adjoa Andoh MBE is another recognisable face among the recipients. An actress from Bristol, she has performed with the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and is an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In recent years, she has played Lady Danbury in both Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, the latter of which included a wedding scene filmed in Merton College Chapel.

Dame Emma Walmsley DBE is the only recipient to also be an alumna of the University. She studied for an MA in Classics and Modern Languages at Christ Church, later working at L’Oréal. From 2016 to 2025, she was the CEO of GSK, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, and is the first woman to lead an international pharmaceutical company.

Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is one of the several Americans awarded today. An academic at Harvard University, he rediscovered the manuscripts of the earliest known African-American novels and is the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Professor Gates has also built a successful television career as the host of Finding Your Roots, in which celebrities are presented with their ancestral histories.

Past notable honorands include Nelson Mandela (1996), Dame Judi Dench (2000), and Sir Tim Berners-Lee (2001).