LYDIA JANE PUGH

Hailing from the island of Guernsey, LYDIA JANE PUGH is an award-winning singer, composer and vocal coach. Her music’s universal appeal has lead to performances around the world by several professional groups, including ‘The BBC Singers’ (UK), and the ’Empire City Men’s Chorus’ (USA). Her work has made the finals of several awards, the most recent being the Nathan Davis Prize in Composition at the Young New Yorker’s Chorus Young Composer Competition 2018 for her piece ‘Adiraï (Misplaced)’. She has also had the great joy of being selected to participate in several Composer Institutes, including the Lehigh Choral Composers Forum and the Choral Chameleon Summer Institute. Her chamber piece ‘Voul-ous enne p’tite goute?’, written for and recorded at the Charlotte New Music Festival, was released by Ablaze Records on their compilation album, ‘Millennial Masters; Volume 9’ in 2019. From the same festival, ‘Carolina’s Jig’ was recently recorded by Thomas Mesa with PARMA Recordings, for the compilation album ‘Divisions of Memory’ which was released by Nanova Records in October 2021.

Alongside her career as a composer, her immense passion for the voice sees her working also as a professional singer, vocal coach and musical director. As well as running a her own very successful vocal teaching studio, Lydia is Head of Voice with the School of Popular Music, and in 2016, she was appointed the conductor of the Guernsey Glee Singers, Guernsey’s longest standing community choir celebrating over 90 years of choral singing. In the same year she was awarded the John Owen-Jones Award, a scholarship from The Voice College enabling study for the Advanced Professional Diploma in Teaching Contemporary Singing, from which she graduated in 2017 with Distinction. She was later awarded their prestigious award for excellence; The P. J. Proby Award in 2017 for the high standards of her work and has since joined the team as a tutor and online course content facilitator.