About

Freddy Wickham was born in 1996 to his soon-to-be long-suffering parents in South West London, U.K, Earth. He started learning about music quickly, learning singing from his father, piano and violin from his mother, and how to mess around from himself. As he reached his teenage years he became interested in turning “messing around” into full compositions, something he has done ever since. Freddy started life composing mostly serious music, and was a finalist in the English Schools’ Orchestra Young Composer Competition in 2014 and the NCEM Young Composers Award in 2015. However, he was also inspired by musical comedians such as Victor Borge and Bill Bailey.

Studying Music at Oxford University in 2015, Freddy became interested in two activities that would define his career – pastiche composition, and teaching. Freddy specialised in Fugue and Romantic Lied in his degree coursework and received firsts in both modules (the less said about the other modules the better). In the meantime he was planning his career as a Music teacher, something that began with a Graduate Assistant role at Magdalen College School before roles at Churcher’s College and currently Epsom College as Assistant Director of Music.

It was while teaching at Churcher’s College that Freddy’s love of pastiche composition, teaching, and musical comedy all came together to form his YouTube channel. Attempting to teach his GCSE pupils about fugues during 2020 video lessons was challenging, so he wrote his first satirical piece, a vocal fugue whose lyrics explained the features of a fugue: the Ontological Fugue. He also passed the long days indoors by writing fugues on modern pop themes – Eminem, The Avengers, ABBA, and the like. Freddy continues to “mess around”, composing musical parodies and pastiches for a modest YouTube following.

“But he doesn’t want to seem self-obsessed,
So he writes in third person
In an attempt to seem more rock’n’roll
But he suspects it’s not working.”
— Tim Minchin