Director of Music - Dr Joseph Fort

Joseph Fort is the College Organist & Director of the Chapel Choir and Lecturer in Music at King’s College London.

Previously, he completed his PhD at Harvard University, and is active as a Conductor and Musicologist.

Joseph is responsible for Chapel music at King’s, conducting the Choir in the weekly Eucharist and Evensong services during term.

He has broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, and on US radio. His conducting debut with Britten Sinfonia in 2017 was met with acclaim from The Times, and his recording of the Brahms Requiem (London Version) released the same year on Delphian Records was praised as ‘an intimate, highly charged performance’ (Stephen Pritchard, The Observer) and ‘utterly uplifting’ (Norman Lebrecht, La Scena Musicale). A CD of the Double Masses of Leighton and Martin was described in Gramophone Magazine as ‘a performance of astonishing intensity and musicality . . . Joseph Fort is clearly in his element with this music and drives his singers onward with an almost hypnotic zeal’.

Festival conducting appearances across the world include the Festival de México, the White Nights Festival of St. Petersburg, the Montreal Organ Festival, the London Handel Festival, the St Albans International Organ Festival and the conventions of the American Guild of Organists and the Royal Canadian College of Organists. In demand as a Chorus Master, he has assisted Sir John Eliot Gardiner CBE and Sir Roger Norrington CBE, and enjoys a long and warm association with the Cambridge University Symphony Chorus, working with the Choir in several seasons. During his time in America, Joseph conducted several choirs in the Boston area, and served for several years as the Resident Conductor of the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum.

Dr Fort's research focuses on eighteenth-century music and dance, and he is currently completing a monograph on Haydn and minuets. He has published in the Eighteenth-Century Music journal, and has chapters in books with Cambridge University Press and Leipzig University Press. He has given papers at numerous conferences, and recently featured on a panel for the Mozart Society of America entitled ‘The Future of Mozart Studies’. In November 2017 he returned to Harvard as Artist-In-Residence with the Harvard Choruses. A dedicated teacher, Dr Fort lectures on a variety of topics at King’s, and regularly gives talks for music societies and festivals. In 2018, his teaching was recognised with the Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy. Prior to Harvard, Joseph studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he was the organ scholar, and at the Royal Academy of Music, who in 2017 elected him to their Associateship.