About

Freddy Wickham was born in 1996 to his soon-to-be long-suffering parents in South West London. He started learning about music quickly, learning singing and piano from an early age, but he always preferred composing to performing. 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 Dudley Moore.

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, Epsom College, and currently Harrow School where he is Head of Academic Music.

It was in the aftermath of Covid-19 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. 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 —