Christopher Page


Christopher Page is A British 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, where he is an Emeritus Professor in the University.

Life and career

Christopher Page, Fellow of the British Academy and Member of the Academia Europaea, was educated at Sir George Monoux Grammar School in London and Balliol College, Oxford. He was formerly a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford 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 and Richard Taruskin, Text and Act. 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. He has been chairman of the National Early Music Association and of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society. He serves on the editorial boards of the journals Early Music and Plainsong and Medieval Music.
Christopher Page was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 2008. He is a founder member of the Consortium for Guitar Research at Sidney Sussex College Cambridge, which is an affiliate of the Royal Musical Association.
In 2014 he was appointed Professor of Music at Gresham College. 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.

Works

Page's major 350,000 word study, The Christian West and its Singers: The First Thousand Years, is published by Yale University Press. In a 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".
In 2017 The Guitar in Tudor England won the Nicholas Bessaraboff prize, awarded by the American Musical Instrument Society. A book on the guitar in Georgian England will appear with Yale University Press in 2020.