Colin Mawby

Colin Mawby (9 May 1936 – 24 November 2019) was an English organist, choral conductor and composer. From 1961 he was Master of Music at Westminster Cathedral. Later he served as choral director at Radio Telefís Éireann and as artistic director of Chamber Choir Ireland, then known as the National Chamber Choir. He composed extensively for the liturgy, with an output including over fifty masses and five song cycles. His mother died when he was three, and he was among the first choristers when Westminster Cathedral choir school reopened in January 1946. Under George Malcolm, the boys sang fourteen or fifteen services a week and undertook ten hours of rehearsals, learning plainchant and polyphony. The choir performed in Rome in 1963 and again in 1970 for the canonisation of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, when it became the first ensemble other than the Sistine Choir to sing a papal mass in St Peter’s Basilica. Mawby retired to East Anglia in 2001 but later divided his time between London and Dublin. He served as composer in association with St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral, Dublin. His Ave verum corpus for choir became widely performed, and his setting of Psalm 23 gained wider recognit