Ensemble Isis
Applications for the 2025-26 scholarship are now open. To sign up for auditions, please complete this form no later than 5pm, Thursday 9 October (Week 0, Michaelmas 2025).
Founded in 2002 by Prof Robert Saxton and Prof John Traill (Director of Music at St Anne’s College), Ensemble ISIS is the Faculty of Music’s contemporary music group dedicated to performing new works by world-class composers as well as the music of talented undergraduate and postgraduate composers in composition workshops and public performances. The ensemble is competitively auditioned through the ISIS Scholars Scheme, engaging the strongest undergraduate and graduate student performers.
Ensemble ISIS has worked with, to name a few, composers Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Hans Abrahamsen, Tansy Davies, Christian Mason, Simon Steen-Andersen, Martin Bresnick, Elliott Schwartz, John McCabe, Anthony Powers, Nicola LeFanu, Rhian Samuel, the London Sinfonietta and James Bowman, and the Royal Shakespeare Company. The ensemble has toured outside Oxford, performing in London, at the Three Choirs Festival, the University of Durham, and at Bowdoin College in the USA. Over the years, ISIS has collaborated with local performing groups and organizations such as the Oxford Contemporary Music, Brookes University, the SAE Institute Oxford, and the Oxford Improvisers.
For more information about the ISIS Scholars Scheme please contact events@music.ox.ac.uk
Audition Information:
Auditions will take place throughout the day on Friday of Week 0 (10 October 2025). You will be allocated a timeslot the day before, when sign-ups close. You will be asked to perform a short (c. 4 minute) piece or excerpt of a larger work, unaccompanied. You will then be asked to perform a short sight-reading exercise.
Places are allocated over the weekend, with results confirmed no later than the start of Week 1.
