Christopher Page | |
---|---|
![]() Page performing in his role as Gresham Professor of Music | |
Born | 8 April 1952 |
Nationality | British |
Occupation(s) | Academic, writer and musicologist |
Christopher Howard Page FBA FSA (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.
Christopher Page, Fellow of the British Academy and Member of the Academia Europaea, was educated at Sir George Monoux Grammar School (founded 1527) in London and Balliol College, Oxford. He was formerly a junior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford (1977–1980) and senior research fellow in music at Sidney Sussex. [2]
He 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] His 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).
Of Page's study, The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years (2010) 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". [7]
In 2017, The Guitar in Tudor England won the Nicholas Bessaraboff prize, awarded by the American Musical Instrument Society.
Christopher Jarvis Haley Hogwood was an English conductor, harpsichordist, writer, and musicologist. Founder of the early music ensemble the Academy of Ancient Music, he was an authority on historically informed performance and a leading figure in the early music revival of the late 20th century.
John Sheppard was an English composer of the Renaissance.
Sir Lennox Randal Francis Berkeley CBE was an English composer.
The Winchester Troper refers to two eleventh-century manuscripts of liturgical plainchant and two-voice polyphony copied and used in the Old Minster at Winchester Cathedral in Hampshire, England. The manuscripts are now held at Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 473 and Oxford, Bodleian Library Bodley 775 . The term "Winchester Troper" is best understood as the repertory of music contained in the two manuscripts. Both manuscripts contain a variety of liturgical genres, including Proper and Ordinary chants for both the Mass and the Divine Office. Many of the chants can also be found in other English and Northern French tropers, graduals, and antiphoners. However, some chants are unique to Winchester, including those for local saints such as St. Æthelwold and St. Swithun, who were influential Bishops of Winchester in the previous centuries. Corpus 473 contains the most significant and largest surviving collection of eleventh-century organum. This polyphonic repertoire is unique to that manuscript.
Michael Cyril William Hunter is emeritus professor of history in the department of history, classics and archaeology and a fellow of Birkbeck, University of London. Hunter is interested in the culture of early modern England. He specialises in the history of science in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, particularly the work of Robert Boyle. In Noel Malcolm's judgement, Hunter "has done more for Boyle studies than anyone before him ".
David Skinner is a British musicologist and choir director. He works at the University of Cambridge, where he is the director of music at Sidney Sussex College and is an affiliated lecturer, teaching historical and practical topics from the medieval and Renaissance periods. He is the founder of the vocal consort Alamire, and the cofounder of the vocal ensembles Magdala and The Cardinall's Musick. He has produced more than 25 recordings. He has been associated with a number of award-winning projects.
Early music of Britain and Ireland, from the earliest recorded times until the beginnings of the Baroque in the 17th century, was a diverse and rich culture, including sacred and secular music and ranging from the popular to the elite. Each of the major nations of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales retained unique forms of music and of instrumentation, but British music was highly influenced by continental developments, while British composers made an important contribution to many of the major movements in early music in Europe, including the polyphony of the Ars Nova and laid some of the foundations of later national and international classical music. Musicians from the British Isles also developed some distinctive forms of music, including Celtic chant, the Contenance Angloise, the rota, polyphonic votive antiphons, and the carol in the medieval era and English madrigals, lute ayres, and masques in the Renaissance era, which would lead to the development of English language opera at the height of the Baroque in the 18th century.
Michael Lapidge, FBA is a scholar in the field of Medieval Latin literature, particularly that composed in Anglo-Saxon England during the period 600–1100 AD; he is an emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, a Fellow of the British Academy, and winner of the 2009 Sir Israel Gollancz Prize.
David Bruce Crouch, is a British historian and academic. From 2000 until his retirement in 2018 he was Professor of Medieval History at the University of Hull.
Byron Adams is an American composer, conductor, and musicologist.
Thomas Mace was an English lutenist, viol player, singer, composer and musical theorist of the Baroque era. His book Musick's Monument (1676) provides a valuable description of 17th century musical practice.
Rogers Henry Lewis Covey-Crump is an English tenor noted for his performances in both early music and contemporary classical music. He has sometimes been identified as an haute-contre tenor. He has performed for over 50 years in choirs and ensembles such as the Hilliard Ensemble, and as a soloist. He has been especially in demand for the part of the Evangelist in Bach's St Matthew Passion and St John Passion. He also specialises in vocal tuning, and has written articles on the subject.
Marina Frolova-Walker FBA is a Russian-born British musicologist and music historian, who specialises in German Romanticism, Russian and Soviet music, and nationalism in music. She is Professor of Music History at the University of Cambridge and Director of Studies in Music at Clare College, Cambridge. In June 2019 it was announced that she would be the 36th Professor of Music at Gresham College. She has authored several books and a number of academic articles.
Mark Goldie is an English historian and Professor of Intellectual History at Churchill College, Cambridge. He has written on the English political theorist John Locke and is a member of the Early Modern History and Political Thought and Intellectual History subject groups at the Faculty of History in Cambridge.
Christopher Tyerman is a British academic and historian focusing on the Crusades. In 2015, he was appointed Professor of History of the Crusades at the University of Oxford.
Christopher Allan Stray is a British historian of classical scholarship and teaching.
Francis Llewellyn Harrison, FBA, better known as "Frank Harrison" or "Frank Ll. Harrison" was one of the leading musicologists of his time and a pioneering ethnomusicologist. Initially trained as an organist and composer, he turned to musicology in the early 1950s, first specialising in English and Irish music of the Middle Ages and increasingly turning to ethnomusicological subjects in the course of his career. His Music in Medieval Britain (1958) is still a standard work on the subject, and Time, Place and Music (1973) is a key textbook on ethnomusicology.
Mary Teresa Elizabeth Remnant, was an English musician, scholar, musicologist and medievalist. She was a leading figure in the Early music revival in the United Kingdom.
John Edgar Stevens, was an English musicologist, literary scholar and historian, whose research focused on the words of medieval and Renaissance music. He was the Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge from 1978 to 1988.
The Plainsong and Medieval Music Society (PMMS), also spelled as the Plainsong and Mediæval Music Society, is an English music society. Founded in 1888, the PMMS primarily researches, promotes and produces publications on medieval music, particularly the liturgical chant from that time to the present. A registered charity since 1987, it has been particularly influential in encouraging the revival of Anglican chant. Musicologists associated with the PMMS include H. B. Briggs, Anselm Hughes, G. H. Palmer, and George Ratcliffe Woodward, and more recently Gustave Reese, D. H. Turner, John Stevens, Christopher Page and Margaret Bent.