Dr Grace Newcombe is a singer from southern England specialised in medieval and Renaissance music. She performs and records throughout Europe with renowned medieval-Renaissance ensembles including Ensemble Leones, Peregrina, Le Miroir de Musique, Ensemble Gilles Binchois, Ensemble Dragma, and Musicke & Mirth. She is the founder and director of medieval ensemble Rumorum. Grace is also an instrumentalist, and her gothic harp, gothic organ, and clavisimbalum feature regularly in concerts and recordings of late-medieval repertories.
Grace studied at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, and was awarded a Leverhulme Trust scholarship during her Masters studies in Medieval-Renaissance Performance there. She has a further Masters degree from the institution, with distinction, on the vocal pedagogy of Early Music. Grace has since regularly returned to the Schola as a guest or deputy teacher of voice, Tudor and Elizabethan vocal polyphony, medieval vocal polyphony, and Gregorian Chant. As a performer and teacher, Grace is specialised in non-classical vocal techniques, and she is currently also teaching Voice Development at the Jazz Institute in Basel. From the autumn semester 2024-25 she will teach voice for instrumentalists and Medieval-Renaissance ensemble formations at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis.
Grace Newcombe wrote her PhD thesis on performance practices for vernacular song in thirteenth-century Britain, under the supervision of Professor Mark Everist (University of Southampton) and Professor Ad Putter (University of Bristol). Her research brought to light previously unknown melodic and text-setting characteristics specific to Middle English verse, and the project was endorsed by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK.
Before moving to Switzerland, Grace read Music at the University of Oxford, where she was the Organ Scholar of Hertford College. Preceding that degree, she was a Junior Exhibitioner at The Royal Academy of Music in London. Her love of medieval and Renaissance music started early, when she discovered Byrd, Tallis, and Palestrina as a chorister at Salisbury Cathedral.