Christopher Page

Trained first as a philologist, later recognized as a musicologist, and drawn by instinct to performance, Christopher Page unites these strands through the outlook of a humanist. He once cited with approval a review that characterized one of his volumes as “Social history illuminated by its interest in music as an essential part of human experience.” Scholarly teaching and writing shape his approach to medieval repertories on the concert platform, while practical experience with those repertories in turn refines his interpretations of medieval ideas about music and its place in society. He received a bachelor’s degree in English from Oxford University in 1974 and completed a doctorate at the University of York in 1981. While finishing a dissertation on Anglo-Saxon poetic structures, he began issuing studies on the evidence for musical instruments contained in medieval writings and manuscript illuminations, together with essays on questions of performance practice. New College, Oxford, engaged him as lecturer in Old and Middle English from 1980 to 1985; the University of Cambridge appointed him to its faculty in 1985. Cambridge promoted him to Reader in Medieval Literature and Music in 1997, the same year he became a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. In 1991 the Royal Musical Association awarded him its Dent Medal for distinguished contributions to musicology. Three of his books have proved especially relevant to performers: Voices and Instruments in the Middle Ages (1986), which contends that the genre of a medieval lyric determines the choice and character of any instrumental support; The Owl and the Nightingale (1989), which follows shifting social attitudes toward music and musicians in the emerging kingdom of medieval France; and Discarding Images (1993), which underscores the variety of experience between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries against the notion of a uniform “cultural myth of the Middle Ages,” a notion Page traces partly to earlier art historians and musicologists. Through his ensemble Gothic Voices he has rendered medieval European culture more immediate via roughly twenty recording projects and an active schedule of concerts. These recordings, accompanied by Page’s detailed program notes, encompass two distinguished series devoted to French and English medieval traditions and range from Hildegard of Bingen’s sequences and music composed for the coronation of Richard the Lionhearted to troubadour and trouvère repertories and the masses of Pierre de la Rue at the close of the fifteenth century. The group’s debut release, A Feather on the Breath of God, brought Page the first of three Grammys awarded for early-music performance. Although he has appeared as lutenist and harpist on several discs, he has also treated entirely vocal performances as a testing ground for his arguments concerning the omission of instruments in certain categories of medieval polyphony.