Career
Page is the founder and director of Gothic Voices, an early music vocal ensemble, which has recorded 25 discs for Hyperion Records, [3] many winning awards. The ensemble has performed in many countries, including, France, Germany, Portugal and Finland. London dates included twice-yearly sell-out concerts at London's Wigmore Hall. The ensemble gave its first Promenade Concert in 1989. The group's work has been chronicled most recently in Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music (CUP, 2007) and Richard Taruskin, Text and Act (OUP, 2006). [2] Page's work has consistently been praised for its elegant and approachable prose.
Between 1989 and 1997, he was presenter of BBC Radio 3's Early Music programme, Spirit of the Age, and a presenter of the Radio 4 arts magazine Kaleidoscope . [4] He has been chairman of the National Early Music Association and of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society (founded 1889). [4] He serves on the editorial boards of the journals Early Music (OUP) and Plainsong and Medieval Music (CUP). [4]
Page was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 2008. [5] He is a founder member of the Cambridge Consortium for Guitar Research, located at Sidney Sussex College.
In 2014, he was appointed Professor of Music at Gresham College. [6] In this role, he delivered four series of free public lectures within London.
He plays historical guitars, principally the four-course renaissance guitar and the early Romantic guitar. [4]
In 2020, a festschrift in his honour appeared, Music and Instruments of the Middle Ages. Essays in Honour of Christopher Page, edited by Tess Knighton and David Skinner (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press).
Works
- Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages. Instrumental Practice and Songs in France, 1100–1300 (London: Dent, 1987) [7]
- The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France 1100-1300 (London: Dent, 1989) [8]
- The Summa Musice: A Thirteenth-Century Manual for Singers (1991) [9]
- Discarding Images. Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France (Oxford: Clarendon Press & New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) [10]
- Latin Poetry and Conductus Rhythm in Medieval France (London: Royal Musical Association, 1996) [11]
- Music and Instruments of the Middle Ages. Studies on Texts and Performance (Aldershot: Variorum, 1997) [12]
- The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010) [13]
- The Guitar in Tudor England. A Social and Musical History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) [14]
- The Guitar in Stuart England. A Social and Musical History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) [15]
- The Guitar in Georgian England. A Social and Musical History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020) [16]
- ed., with Michael Fleming: Music and Instruments of the Elizabethan Age. The Eglantine Table (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2021)
- ed., with Paul Sparks and James Westbrook: The Great Vogue for the Guitar in Western Europe, 1800–1840 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2023)
Of Page's 2010 study, The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years, Eamon Duffy wrote: "But once or twice in a generation a book comes along which crosses disciplinary boundaries to make unexpected connections, open up new imaginative vistas, and refocus what had seemed familiar historical landscapes. Page’s musician’s-eye view of the evolution of western Christendom is one of those books". [17]
In 2017, The Guitar in Tudor England won the Nicholas Bessaraboff prize, awarded by the American Musical Instrument Society.
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