Richard Seal

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Richard Godfrey Seal (4 December 1935 – 19 July 2022) was an English organist and conductor. He was organist and master of the choristers at Salisbury Cathedral from 1968 to 1997. In 1991 Salisbury created a separate girls’ choir in addition to the boys’ choir, becoming the first English cathedral to do so, a change Seal helped lead that transformed Anglican choral singing. Born in Banstead, Surrey, he sang as a boy chorister at New College, Oxford, and studied at Cranleigh School, Christ’s College Cambridge as an organ scholar, and the Royal College of Music in London, where he also served as assistant organist at Kingsway Hall. After National Service in Malaya, he was assistant organist at St Bartholomew-the-Great (1960–61) and at Chichester Cathedral (1961–68). He married Dr. Sarah Hamilton in 1975 and had two sons. While at Salisbury, he made many recordings and broadcasts with the cathedral choir and was conductor and president of the Salisbury Orchestral Society from 1969 to 1994. He received the Lambeth degree of Doctor of Music in 1992. After retiring, he lived in Bishopstone near Salisbury and continued playing the organ at local churches. He died on 19 July 2022, aged 86.