Academic, writer, choral director and musicologist
Christopher Howard PageFBAFSA (born 8 April 1952)[1] is an English expert on medieval music, instruments and performance practice, together with the social and musical history of the guitar in England from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. He has written numerous books regarding medieval music. He is currently a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and Emeritus Professor of Medieval Music and Literature in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. Page holds the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association awarded for outstanding services to musicology.[2] For further details, see the entries for ‘Page, Christopher’ in Oxford Music Online (formerly Grove),[3]Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart,[4] and Who's Who.[1]
Page is the founder and director of Gothic Voices, an early music vocal ensemble, which has recorded 25 discs for Hyperion Records,[7] many winning awards. The group's 1982 recording of music by Hildegard of Bingen has been described as “one of the best-selling and most influential recordings of pre-classical music ever made”[8] and credited with initiating "a craze for all things Hildegard".[9] 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 BBC Promenade Concert in 1988.[10] The group's work has been chronicled in Richard Taruskin, Text and Act (OUP, 2006) and Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music (CUP, 2007).[6] According to Leech-Wilkinson, "It is no exaggeration to claim, and easy to show, that nothing since [Hugo] Riemann [1941–1919] has so much reshaped the performance and perception of medieval music as the work, and above all the recordings, of Gothic Voices. Giving concerts world-wide, and issuing on average one disc a year since 1983, Gothic Voices has, at the time of writing, set down over 300 pieces on 20 discs, stretching from Notre Dame conductus to late fifteenth-century masses – statistically a tiny proportion of the surviving repertory, but nonetheless a very substantial sample that adds up to an exceptionally large and representative survey of medieval music."[11]
Page plays historical guitars and the vihuela.[12] His four-volume history of the guitar in England from the sixteenth century to the close of the nineteenth, published by Cambridge University Press (Volumes I, II and IV) and Yale University Press (III), has recently been completed.[15]
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).[16]
Works
Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages. Instrumental Practice and Songs in France, 1100–1300 (London: Dent, 1987)[17]
The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France 1100-1300 (London: Dent, 1989)[18]
The Summa Musice: A Thirteenth-Century Manual for Singers (1991)[19]
Discarding Images. Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France (Oxford: Clarendon Press & New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)[20]
Latin Poetry and Conductus Rhythm in Medieval France (London: Royal Musical Association, 1996)[21]
Music and Instruments of the Middle Ages. Studies on Texts and Performance (Aldershot: Variorum, 1997)[22]
The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010)[23]
Front cover of The Guitar in Victorian England: A Social and Musical History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025).
The Guitar in Tudor England. A Social and Musical History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)[24]
The Guitar in Stuart England. A Social and Musical History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)[25]
The Guitar in Georgian England. A Social and Musical History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020)[26]
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)
The Guitar in Victorian England. A Social and Musical History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025)
Mozart and Beethoven arranged for guitar, flute and strings: newly discovered chamber repertoire from Victorian England, available from the digital repository of the University of Cambridge[27]
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".[28]
In 2017, The Guitar in Tudor England won the Nicholas Bessaraboff prize, awarded by the American Musical Instrument Society.[29] The volume he edited with Paul Sparks and James Westbrook, The Great Vogue for the Guitar in Western Europe 1800-1840 was awarded the chitarra d’oro in the category ‘Musicology’ at the Convegno Internazionale di Chitarra, 2024, in Milan.[30]
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