Clive Wearing is a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 musicologist, conductor, and keyboardist

Keyboardist

A keyboardist is a musician who plays keyboard instruments. Until the early 1960s musicians who played keyboards were generally classified as either pianists or organists. Since the mid-1960s, a plethora of new musical instruments with keyboards have come into common usage, requiring a more...

 suffering from an acute and long-lasting case of anterograde

Anterograde amnesia

Anterograde amnesia is a loss of the ability to create new memories after the event that caused the amnesia, leading to a partial or complete inability to recall the recent past, while long-term memories from before the event remain intact. This is in contrast to retrograde amnesia, where memories...

 and retrograde amnesia

Retrograde amnesia

Retrograde amnesia is a loss of access to events that occurred, or information that was learned, before an injury or the onset of a disease....

, meaning that he lacks the ability to form new memories.
Clive Wearing is an accomplished musician, and is known for editing the works of Orlande de Lassus

Orlande de Lassus

Orlande de Lassus was a Franco-Flemish composer of the late Renaissance...

. Wearing sang at Westminster Cathedral

Westminster Cathedral

Westminster Cathedral in London is the mother church of the Catholic community in England and Wales and the Metropolitan Church and Cathedral of the Archbishop of Westminster...

 as a tenor

Tenor

The tenor is a type of male singing voice and is the highest male voice within the modal register. The typical tenor voice lies between C3, the C one octave below middle C, to the A above middle C in choral music, and up to high C in solo work. The low extreme for tenors is roughly B2...

 lay clerk

Lay clerk

A lay clerk, also known as a lay vicar, song man or a vicar choral, is a professional adult singer in a Cathedral or collegiate choir in the United Kingdom. The Vicars Choral were substitutes for the Canons...

 for many years and also had a successful career as a chorus master and worked as such at Covent Garden

Covent Garden

Covent Garden is a district in London on the eastern fringes of the West End, between St. Martin's Lane and Drury Lane. It is associated with the former fruit and vegetable market in the central square, now a popular shopping and tourist site, and the Royal Opera House, which is also known as...

 and the London Sinfonietta Chorus.

In 1968 he founded the Europa Singers of London, an amateur choir specialising in music of the 17th, 18th and 20th centuries.