William Hancox played the piano as a child and won music and academic scholarships to Canford School, going on to study theology as a Scholar at St. John’s College Cambridge. He was heading towards academia before deciding to follow music as a career.
Winning a scholarship to Trinity College of Music, William worked with Hungarian pianist Joseph Weingarten, a student of Dohnányi, Bartók and Kodály. Other major influences were Martin Isepp, formerly Head of Music at Glyndebourne, who helped to shape his approach to art song, and the Hungarian violin pedagogue Béla Katona.
William was fortunate to study and to work at the Britten-Pears School in Aldeburgh and held positions as staff pianist and vocal coach at Trinity College of Music and at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama for many years.
He has a particular love for the song repertoire. Keenly interested in vocal training, William played for many singing teachers over the years, learning most from the Italian teacher Iris dell’Acqua, whose students he played for and coached for the better part of a decade, leading to a busy practice as a vocal coach with many students now pursuing successful careers.
Although song has been a consistent strand, William has also performed as a soloist and a chamber musician, with concerts in many European countries and in China, where he gave masterclasses, solo and song recitals and two performances of Constant Lambert’s Rio Grande in the Forbidden City concert hall in Beijing.
In recent years, William has pursued music making closer to home, convinced that musicians must be able to put down vigorous roots in their own communities to avoid losing something very precious. He gives frequent local performances, plays for a number of local choirs and ran a chamber music series in his village for many years. All these activities come into focus in the Music Box Wealden project which launched in 2023. It presents an ambitious programme of concerts all over the area and aims to build a community which serves the needs both of music lovers and of the many professional musicians who live locally.