In 2026, pioneering cornettist Jeremy West celebrates fifty years of a career marked by more than one hundred recordings and concerts in thirty-eight countries across five continents. In a conversation with Mark Seow, he looks back on the defining stages of his journey, from his beginnings in Durham to his major collaborations, and on his pursuit of an elusive sound, as close as possible to the human voice. 
By Mark Seow
A leading figure in the revival of the cornett, Jeremy West traces a career closely intertwined with the rise of early music in Great Britain since the 1970s. Trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama at the end of that decade, alongside a generation of pioneers, he was already contributing in the 1980s to the structuring of a still nascent field, notably through the founding of His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts in 1982. His collaborations with conductor Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort, marked by the 1990 recording of A Venetian Coronation 1595, helped redefine performance practices. Alongside his career as a performer, Jeremy West has been deeply committed to transmission, particularly in Cambridge, where he continues to reflect on sound, the blending of timbres, and the place of the cornett in today’s musical landscape. Through this trajectory, one glimpses, in filigree, the story of an instrument long considered marginal, now restored to the heart of musical practice. A singular path, poised between sonic exploration and collective engagement, which this interview allows us to follow at close range.
As close as possible to the human voice
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