Christopher Page

Christopher Page (born 1952) is an expert on medieval music, instruments and performance practice. He has written seven books regarding medieval music. He is currently a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, England, where he is Professor of Medieval Music and Literature.

Life and career

Christopher Page was formerly a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford (1977–1980) and Senior Research Fellow in Music at Sidney Sussex. He is the founder and director of Gothic Voices, an early music vocal ensemble, which has recorded 25 discs for Hyperion Records, 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).

Page's major 350,000 word study, The Christian West and its Singers: The First Thousand Years, has just been published by Yale University Press. In a recent review for The New York Review of Books, Eamon Duffy writes: "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". 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. He has been chairman of the National Early Music Association and of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society (founded 1889). He serves on the editorial boards of the journals Early Music (OUP) and Plainsong and Medieval Music (CUP).

Christopher Page was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 2008. He is currently working on a major reference work, Music in Medieval Literature: Readings from the Fall of Rome to Gothic Europe, for Cambridge University Press.

His instrument of choice is the early Romantic guitar, and he plays one built by Charles Valance in Paris in the 1820s. His latest composition is a seven-part Salve Regina, premiered in Sydney by the professional early-music ensemble Alamire on 1 June 2010.

Works

• Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages (1987)
• The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France 1100-1300 (1989)
• The Summa Musice: A Thirteenth-Century Manual for Singers (1991)
• Discarding Images: Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France (Oxford, 1994)
• Latin Poetry and Conductus Rhythm in Medieval France (London, 1996)
• Music and Instruments of the Middle Ages (Ashgate, 1999)
• The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years (2010)

External links

• Official homepage of Christopher Page at Cambridge retrieved 28th Dec 2010
• http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/artist_page.asp?name=page