Mary Berry (conductor)

Berry died in 2008 and was buried in the Church of St Birinus at Dorchester, Oxfordshire, where her Schola had sung the Paschal Triduum for the previous ten years.

In 2000 Berry was awarded the Papal Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice by Pope John Paul II to honor her for her service to the Roman Catholic Church. In the 2002 New Year Honours, she was appointed CBE by Queen Elizabeth II.

In the mid-1990s, Berry led the recordings of music entitled Angels from the Vatican, which was designed to accompany an exhibition of art from the Vatican Museums that toured the United States in 1997, which was recorded in the chapel of St. Hugh's Charterhouse in West Sussex. In 1997 she led a recording in the Roman Basilica of San Gregorio Magno al Celio to commemorate the 1400th anniversary of Augustine of Canterbury's arrival in England. In June 1999, she and her group were allowed to record in St. Peter's Basilica, where they recorded an album entitled Tu es Petrus ('Thou art Peter').

Berry then became director of musical studies at her alma mater of Girton College. She later went to teach at Newnham College, where she was director of musical studies and then a full fellow and praelector, until she retired in 1984.

In 1975 Berry founded the Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge for the study and performance of Gregorian chant. The Cantors of the Schola are a group of young, largely professional singers and have performed and recorded extensively under her direction, often working from primary sources. The Schola was one of the first ensembles to perform (and certainly the first to record) music from the Winchester troper after research by Berry and others made the music accessible from the manuscripts.

On returning home to England during the 1960s, Berry embarked on a doctorate in musicology at Cambridge University. She had some difficulty, however, in persuading the musical establishment that plainchant was a suitable topic for graduate study. For her degree, she submitted a thesis on the performance of plainsong in the late Middle Ages and the 16th century. There was a problem, though, as she had written her thesis in French, so that it had to be sent to Solesmes for examination. Despite this, in 1970 she received her doctorate.

After professing solemn vows in 1945, Berry was sent to a school on the Monte Mario in Rome, where she taught English and music and was the infirmarian for the religious community and students. She served there during a typhoid outbreak in the school. She was later sent to study in Belgium, and after that in Dijon, where her French professors disparaged her "antediluvian" English. It was around this time that she started lecturing in Paris on Gregorian chant and polyphony.

In 1939, upon graduation from university, Berry joined the Red Cross and nursed at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge. In March of the following year, she went to Belgium, where she became a novice with the Canonesses Regular of Jupille, under the religious name of Mother Thomas More. But two months later the canonesses were forced to flee the invading Germans on the last train to Paris, having wrapped their few possessions in red blankets. They moved to a former Cistercian monastery in Dijon—in Vichy France, where they resumed their monastic way of life and taught local children. Eventually a fellow novice, the daughter of an ambassador, obtained travel documents for the community to take refuge in Lisbon, where they started up two schools.

Mary Berry CBE (29 June 1917 – 1 May 2008), also known as Sister Thomas More CRSA, was a canoness regular, noted choral conductor and musicologist. She was an authority on the performance of Gregorian chant, founding the Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge to revive this ancient style of music.

Berry was born in 1917, the daughter of a chemist who was vice-president of Downing College. As a young woman, she went to the Perse School before spending a year at the École Normale de Musique de Paris, where she became a pupil of the conductor and teacher Nadia Boulanger. On returning home, she was awarded a Turle scholarship at Girton College, where she studied with Thurston Dart, but continued to study during her vacations under Boulanger.