Ralph Allwood MBE DMus was for 26 years Director of Music at Eton College and is now a freelance choral director. He is the Director of the Eton Choral Courses, which he founded in 1980. Seven thousand 16 to 20 year olds have been students on courses over the last thirty-seven years. He co-founded the Junior Choral Courses in 2012, and in recent years has launched Courses in Shanghai. He is now planning courses in Melbourne and Dubai. The Rodolfus Choir, made up of the best singers from the courses, has produced over 20 CDs since he founded it in 1982.

Ralph is co-founder and conductor of Inner Voices, a choir made up of singers from state schools in London. He is also Director of Chapel Music at Queens’ College Chapel, Cambridge, and an Honorary Fellow of University College, Durham.

Ralph has conducted choirs for 40 live broadcasts for BBC Radio 3, is a judge for the Llangollen Eisteddfod and Cork International Choral Competition and has written much music heard worldwide on radio and television. He is Choral Advisor to Novello and to Trinity College, Oxford, and teaches at Trinity Laban Conservatoire and at his old school, Tiffin. In 2015 he co-founded the Pimlico Musical Foundation to enable children from Pimlico Primary Schools to sing in choirs, particularly at St Gabriel’s Church.

In 2012 Ralph was awarded a Doctorate of Music by Aberdeen University. He was made MBE in the 2012 New Year’s Honours list, and was appointed Director of Music at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich later that year. In 2017, the Archbishop of Canterbury presented him with the Thomas Cranmer Award for Music and Worship, and he became Vice-President of the Herbert Howells Society.