Christopher Page

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Christopher Page
Christopher Page.jpg
Page performing in his role as Gresham Professor of Music
Born (1952-04-08) 8 April 1952 (age 71)
NationalityBritish
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.

Contents

Life and career

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).

Works

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.

Related Research Articles

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Sidney Sussex College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in England. The College was founded in 1596 under the terms of the will of Frances Sidney, Countess of Sussex (1531–1589), wife of Thomas Radclyffe, 3rd Earl of Sussex, and named after its foundress. In her will, Lady Sidney left the sum of £5,000 together with some plate to found a new College at Cambridge University "to be called the Lady Frances Sidney Sussex College". Her executors Sir John Harington and Henry Grey, 6th Earl of Kent, supervised by Archbishop John Whitgift, founded the Protestant College seven years after her death.

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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.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Winchester Troper</span>

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Hunter (historian)</span>

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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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Early music of the British Isles</span>

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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.

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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.

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.

Alastair J. Minnis is a Northern Irish literary critic and historian of ideas who has written extensively about medieval literature, and contributed substantially to the study of late-medieval theology and philosophy. Having gained a first-class B.A. degree at the Queen's University of Belfast, he matriculated at Keble College, Oxford as a visiting graduate student, where he completed work on his Belfast Ph.D., having been mentored by M.B. Parkes and Beryl Smalley. Following appointments at the Queen's University of Belfast and Bristol University, he was appointed Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of York; also Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies and later Head of English & Related Literature. From 2003 to 2006, he was a Humanities Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University, Columbus, from where he moved to Yale University. In 2008, he was named Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English at Yale.

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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.

References

  1. "Who's Who". Ukwhoswho.com. Retrieved 5 March 2024.
  2. 1 2 "Fellows and Staff at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge (accessed 10 April 2014)". Archived from the original on 4 April 2019. Retrieved 10 April 2014.
  3. "Christopher Page (conductor) on Hyperion Records". Hyperion-records.co.uk. Retrieved 5 January 2021.
  4. 1 2 3 4 "Faculty of English". English.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 5 January 2021.
  5. "List of Fellows at the Society of Antiquaries (accessed 10 April 2014)". Archived from the original on 9 July 2012. Retrieved 10 April 2014.
  6. "Gresham College Press Release, 13/05/2014 | Gresham College". 4 March 2016. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 5 January 2021.
  7. "Welcome | Yale University Press". Yalebooks.yale.edu. Retrieved 5 January 2021.