About

Stef Conner began her career performing with The Unthanks (then Rachel Unthank and the Winterset). Her two years (2008–2009) as pianist and backing singer with this narrative-driven yet virtuosic all-female four-piece plunged her into the captivating Northumbrian folk tradition, igniting an enduring passion for musical storytelling. Fresh from a master’s degree in Jazz Studies with the legendary pianist John Taylor, she approached her own music with jazz-influenced harmonic richness, but immersion in the Unthanks’ philosophy taught her to temper this desire for technical sophistication with a deep respect for the power of music to convey meaning and emotion. Since then, Stef has held fast to the belief that words are the absolute soul of song – to be served, not eclipsed, by musical techniques. After kicking off her tenure in the band with a 5* review in The Observer and performance at the BBC Folk Awards, Stef went on to perform all over the world, as well as on UK/international television and radio, with highlights including playing at the Barbican, Covent Garden Opera House, Glastonbury, and Womad; supporting Adele, Ben Folds, Lau, and the Thompsons; and performing at the Mercury Music Awards. Although Stef parted ways with the Unthanks in 2010, she has made occasional guest appearances, including for the ten-year anniversary of The Bairns at Home Gathering Festival (2018); and at the Barbican, the Sage, and Cardiff Millennium Centre in 2023.

She has since carved a niche for herself in the misty borderlands between the contemporary classical, Early, and folk music worlds, combining the intense emotional sincerity of folksong with jazz-meets-classical technique, and an approach to melodic structure derived the study of ancient music and poetry. Hord Songs, her first EP of vocal music in Old English, was inspired by the Staffordshire Hoard and performed alongside the hoard exhibits in the Potteries Museum and Lichfield Cathedral. In collaboration with the Gold Lyre of Ur Project, she released her debut album The Flood in 2014: a collection of modern songs in Babylonian and Sumerian, accompanied by a reconstruction of the 4500-year-old Gold Lyre of Ur. The album became something of a surprise viral hit, despite being recorded on a minimal budget, with press features in New Scientist, The Slate, The Guardian, FRoots, and Newsweek – the latter garnering a million+ listens on Soundcloud. A stream of exciting and unusual performances followed, at venues including Ashmolean Museum (Oxford), the Medici Institute and Museum of Archaeology (Florence), St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace, the Union Chapel (London), and the unveiling of the digitally reconstructed Palmyra Arch in Trafalgar Square. Her latest album, Riddle Songs (Delphian, 2020), features new settings of Old English riddles, and was released during the COVID-19 lockdown. It became a Presto Editor’s Choice and Recordings of the Year finalist.

Stef’s historically inspired classical works (for which she was awarded, among other accolades, the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize) have been performed by internationally acclaimed ensembles, including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Ligeti Quartet, the Nieuw Ensemble, the Dr K Sextet, Iyatra Quartet, Juice, Queens’ College Choir, the Renaissance Singers, Dark Inventions, the Marian consort, members of Ensemble 10/10, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, and the London Symphony Orchestra. Two of her compositions premiered at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and her work has been heard in such UK venues as the Royal Festival Hall, St John’s Smith Square, York Minster, Peterborough Cathedral, Waltham Abbey, and King’s College Chapel, as well as internationally, and on television and radio.

Her current performance work (as a singer + lyre, and occasional synth, player) spans 40,000 years of musical history, from duos with palaeolithic bone flutes to contemporary Northumbrian folk-rock! She is a soloist with Sequentia Ensemble for Medieval Music (directed by one of her musical idols, Benjamin Bagby), in two current programmes: the Roman de Fauvel (dir. Peter Sellars, produced by the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris), and Words of Power (performed at venues including Utrecht, Vancouver, and Boston Early Music festivals, and Music Before 1800, New York). Travelling still further back in time, she reconstructs and reimagines music from antiquity (and beyond!) with Lotos Lab – a collective of instrument makers, performers and scholars who make music based archaeological evidence – in projects including a feature on Radio 3’s Early Music Show; performances at venues including British Museum, Yale Art Gallery, and the Royal College of Music; and an album : Sounds From Classical Antiquity: Apollo and Dionysus (Delphian, 2018). Most recently, she has found herself drawn back to the captivating traditions of Northumberland, through collaborating with Kathryn Tickell and the Darkening, in stylistically diverse programmes inspired by ‘the wild, dramatic, weather-bitten countryside along Hadrian’s Wall’. Stef has performed with the group at venues including Manchester Folk Festival and the Sage, and their 2023 album Cloud Horizons features Stef’s song ‘Caelestis’, which sets a Roman inscription from Hadrian’s Wall!

Stef enjoys drawing on her folk singing experience and research into ancient oral traditions to create vocal music that mixed-ability groups can learn by ear. From pub singalongs with the many leisure-time choirs she has directed to running festival summer schools, she is in her element facilitating fun and light-hearted but artistically innovative singing experiences, with historical and heritage themes. From 2014–2015 she was the first Composer in Residence with Streetwise Opera, a charity that uses opera to help homeless people make positive changes in their lives. Her debut opera with the organisation, People Watch, premiered at Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival in 2015. In 2014, she was named, in the ‘Music-Makers’ category, as one of the Evening Standard’s ‘1000 Most Influential Londoners’ through her work with the charity. She has collaborated with countless leisure-time choirs, festivals, museums, and heritage organisations, to produce participatory compositions, concerts, and workshops, as well as experiential learning experiences, including Ad Gefrin, the Renaissance Singers, Cadenza, the Esoterics, SO Vocal, the Southern Early Music Forum, Leith Hill Place, and Medieval Music in the Dales. She conducts a weekly community choir in Cambridge, Timeline Choir, which regularly performs her original arrangements of folk and medieval music.

Stef holds a BA in music (starred first, York, 2005), an MA in Jazz Studies (distinction, 2007), and a PhD in Composition (2011). She was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Huddersfield (2017–2020), researching the use of ancient evidence as material for new music, and is now a part-time Lecturer in Music at the University of York, where her teaching and research encompasses composition, folksong, oral traditions, ancient music, and song-writing.