Caleb Richards is a composer, ethnomusicologist, bass-baritone and multi-instrumentalist. His compositions cover many genres, namely choral, chamber and electroacoustic, all of which demonstrating his unique research-based and ethnomusicological approach to composition, with many of his compositions incorporating elements of non-western musical styles. Other stylistic interests of his include spectralism, serialism and modality.
Caleb’s work in ethnomusicology is largely focused on the music of the Indian Subcontinent, music and auralities of the Islamic world, and the folk music of Britain and Ireland. For the past four years he has been studying the sitar and the practices of Hindustani classical music under the tuition of Sheema Mukherjee of the Imagined Village and Transglobal Underground. As well as the sitar, Caleb plays the guitar, mandolin and is a baritone in the Chapel Choir of Queens’ College, Cambridge. Caleb is currently studying for a Bachelor of Arts in Music at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, where he is the Vice-President of the Cambridge University Indian Classical Music Society.
As an instrumentalist, Caleb has performed in a diverse range of musical settings, including folk/traditional arts festivals (Shrewsbury Folk Festival, 2022, Festival at the Edge, 2024) and several appearances on the radio (BBC Radio Shropshire, BBC Introducing). As a vocalist, Caleb is building up both an ensemble and solo career; alongside his membership of the Chapel Choir of Queens’ College, he was a member St John’s Voices from 2023-2024, through which he was involved in an unreleased recording of rediscovered Russian Orthodox choral music, and in 2024 became a founding member of the Cambridge University Schola Cantorum, with whom he is the 2025-2026 holder of the Andrew Macintosh Memorial Choral Scholarship. Caleb is also a bass choral scholar in the choir of the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and the English Martyrs in Cambridge, the centre of East Anglia’s largest Catholic parish. His solo repertoire includes Durufle’s Requiem, Mozart’s Requiem, Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad, Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel, R. Schumann’s Dichteliebe, Handel’s Messiah, S. S. Wesley’s The Wilderness and Dvorak’s Mass in D.
