Mr Thomas Neal is Director of Music and Year 6 Form Tutor at New College School. He is responsible for the provision of both academic and co-curricular Music throughout the school and oversees our team of fifteen Visiting Music Teachers (VMTs). In addition to teaching class music to Years 5, 6, and 8/8S, Mr Neal also teaches piano, composition, and music theory. He directs the Saturday morning programme, the Oxford Children's Chamber Orchestra (OCCO), the NCS Chamber Choir, Junior (Years 3-5) and Senior (Years 6-8) Choirs, and the adult Choral Society.

In recent years, the school orchestra has performed such works as Saint-Saëns's Carnival of the Animals, Mozart's Symphony nos. 22 and 25, Schubert's Symphony no.8, Beethoven's Symphony no.5, Warlock's Capriol Suite, and many other works. The Chamber Choir and Choral Society have collaborated with professional orchestras and soloists in performances of works such as Britten's Saint Nicolas and Ceremony of Carols, Saint-Saëns's Oratorio de Noël, Fauré's Requiem, Respighi's Lauda per la Natività del Signore, Alexander L'Estrange's Wassail! The choirs enjoy a regular partnership with Instruments of Time and Truth, with whom they have performed Purcell's operas Dido and Aeneas, King Arthur, and The Fairy Queen, Handel's Messiah, Vivaldi's Gloria, Haydn's Missa Sancti Nicolai, several of Bach's cantatas, a reconstruction of Bach's St. Mark Passion, and the St. Luke Passion formerly attributed to Bach. In May 2022, the whole school came together to perform a staged production of Britten's opera Noye's Fludde in Oxford's historic Sheldonian Theatre. In 2025, NCS returned to the Sheldonian to perform Britten's song cycle Friday Afternoons and a staged production of Richard Rodney Bennett's opera All the King's Men.

Mr Neal read Music to postgraduate level at Clare College, Cambridge where he was the John Stewart of Rannoch Scholar in Sacred Music. Since then, he has enjoyed a wide-ranging musical career as a teacher, musicologist, and conductor. Prior to his appointment at NCS, Mr Neal taught at the Portsmouth Grammar School and in France. For five years he was the national PSB subject coordinator for Music. He holds a master's degree in educational leadership and management.

Beyond NCS, Mr Neal's interests revolve around the music, history, and culture of early modern Italy. He has researched and written widely on music and culture in early modern Italy, with a particular focus on the life and works of Giovanni Pierluigi 'da Palestrina' (c.1525-1594), and the printed sources and patronage of sacred music in sixteenth-century Rome. Recent publications have explored the sources of Palestrina's masses, madrigals, hymns, and litanies; early modern performance practices; music and the Tridentine liturgical reform; and the literary sources of 17th-century spiritual madrigals. He has spoken at numerous national and international conferences, on topics ranging from Machaut to Monteverdi. Mr Neal is currently preparing a monograph on the chronology of Palestrina's masses and a new 'life and works' study of the same composer. He is the co-editor, with Galliano Ciliberti, of Sicut in caelo: Sacred Music in Early Modern Italy (Brepols, 2025); editor of O Felix Roma: Palestrina and his Roman Contemporaries (forthcoming); and he sits on the editorial board of the Journal of 16th-Century Music (Cambridge Institute for Renaissance Studies).