Our Governance

John has been the Provost of St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral since 2017. Previously he was the Rector of St Martin of Tours Episcopal Church in Tynecastle, Edinburgh.

During his 16 years there, he helped to establish the St Martin’s Community Resource Centre in a re-developed building. Alongside that he had two spells as the Coordinator of Initial Ministerial Education in the Diocese of Edinburgh, with responsibility for clergy training, was co-Convenor of the Edinburgh Interfaith Association, and Convenor of the Diocesan Mission and Ministry Committee.

Ken is a recent pupil of St Mary’s Music School having attended from 2009-2018. He also attended the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS) Junior Conservatoire through their fair-access initiative, Transitions, and continued his education at the RCS with an undergraduate degree in Violin Performance, graduating in 2022. Directly following this, Ken was elected as the RCS Student Union President and oversaw the transformation of the Students Union over a two-year period which saw record breaking student satisfaction and the doubling of financial investment while supporting students through local, domestic, and international crises.  
Ken currently works at IMG Artists, as an Assistant Artist Manager; working with a range of international classical musicians. He is also a Board Member of the National Youth Orchestras of Scotland and has previously served on the boards of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and Harrison Parrott Foundation. In his spare time, Ken trains and competes in athletics as a sprinter, a hobby he started during his time at St Mary’s Music School.

Alistair was educated here at St Mary’s Music School as well as at Douglas Academy Music School in Milngavie and the University of Surrey.

After working as a London-based trumpet player, he returned to Scotland in 2019 to take up the position of CEO with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO). As a player, Alistair held principal positions with both the Philharmonia Orchestra and London Sinfonietta, recorded several hundred film and television soundtracks and performed extensively as a chamber musician and soloist.

As a teacher, he served on the staff of the University of Surrey, The Royal College of Music (RCM) and the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. He has given masterclasses in the UK, Europe and the USA and, in 2017, was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Music. Alistair has served on the Boards of both London Sinfonietta and the Philharmonia Orchestra, as well as multiple terms as Chair of the Philharmonia Orchestra and an extended period as its interim Managing Director.

Jamie Munn works as a Fundraiser and Consultant for arts organisations across the UK, and has spent almost 20 years working on music projects in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. As well as St Mary’s Music School, he sits on the Board of Trustees of Drake Music Scotland, and Sound Waves, for which is he Chair, and is a Fellow of the International Society of Performing Arts.

Susan Tomes has won numerous awards as a pianist, both on the concert platform and in the recording studio. She grew up in Edinburgh and was the first woman to take a degree in music at King’s College, Cambridge, when co-education arrived at the college after 400 years. Her career encompasses solo, duo and chamber playing. She has performed in 28 countries (some of them many times) and has been at the heart of the internationally admired ensembles Domus, the Gaudier Ensemble, and the Florestan Trio, winners of a Royal Philharmonic Society Award. In 2013 she was awarded the Cobbett Medal for her services to chamber music.

She has made over fifty CDs, many of which have become benchmark recordings. In 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic she was one of the artists invited by the Edinburgh International Festival to record a concert to be relayed through speakers in the trees to an audience in Princes Street Gardens. A few months later she was one of the first artists to perform to a socially distanced live audience in London’s Wigmore Hall, where she has appeared regularly for many years. She has served on many international competition juries and chaired the Piano Trio jury at the ARD International Competition in Munich in 2023.

Susan is a writer as well as a pianist. For her these activities are intertwined. In both playing and writing she is fired by a wish to understand music, explore its context and convey its meaning to listeners and readers. Her lecture-recitals have given listeners new insight into the music she performs.

She has written several acclaimed books about performing: Beyond the Notes (2004), A Musician’s Alphabet (2006), Out of Silence (2010), Sleeping in Temples (2014) and Speaking the Piano (2018). Her books are studied on performance practice courses around the English-speaking world and have inspired several PhDs. Her appeal to a diverse readership was demonstrated by her appearances at the Edinburgh International Book Festivals in 2016, 2019 and 2024.

Her sixth book, The Piano: A History in 100 Pieces, was published by Yale University Press in 2021. It was a Book of the Year in The Spectator and the Financial Times, a Scottish Book of 2021 in The Scotsman, and it won a Presto Music Award. Her seventh book, Women and the Piano – a History in Fifty Lives, came out from Yale in March 2024. It was one of the New Yorker’s ‘best books of 2024’; the Wall Street Journal described it as ‘delightfully provocative and consistently informative’ and the Financial Times made it one of their Best Summer Books of 2024. It was one of the ‘must-read non-fiction books of 2024 so far’ in Tatler Asia. In December 2024 the Toronto Globe and Mail recommended it as a gift book for Christmas, and it won a Presto Music Award for a ‘Book of the Year’. To raise awareness of the women featured in the book, Susan has been giving recitals of piano music by female pianist-composers whose music has delighted audiences.

In 2023, Susan was one of fifty women chosen to be photographed for a special exhibition of portraits by award-winning photographer Jooney Woodward to mark 50 years of female undergraduates at King’s College, Cambridge. The portraits have now been permanently installed outside the Dining Hall in the College.