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Regency Medievalism and the Early-Romantic Guitar

Press release issued: 21 November 2011

Professor Christopher Page, a celebrated musician and musicologist, will be coming to the University of Bristol on Thursday [24 November] to give this year’s Tucker-Cruse Lecture in the Department of English.

The lecture, entitled ‘Regency Medievalism and the Early-Romantic Guitar’, will consider how the guitar, so favoured by amateur musicians among the nobility and gentry by 1830, came to be involved with a developing interest in the Middle Ages during the Regency period.  It will be illustrated with an original guitar of c1825 and by the tenor Christopher Watson.

Christopher Page, Professor of Medieval Music and Literature in the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, is famous for his books on medieval music, including most recently The Christian West and its Singers: The First Thousand Years (Yale University Press) and for his award-winning recordings of Early Music with the vocal ensemble Gothic Voices, which he founded in 1981.

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.  His instrument of choice is the early Romantic guitar, and he plays one built by Charles Valance in Paris, in the 1820s.  His latest compositions are a seven-part Salve Regina, premiered in Sidney by the professional early-music ensemble Alamire on June 1, 2010, and an elegy for the late Richard Campbell, set for tenor soloist and eight-part choir.

Christopher Watson is a singer with more than 20 years’ performance experience at the highest level.  He sings with some of the world's leading Early Music ensembles, including The Tallis Scholars, with whom he has made more than 200 appearances, Alamire, Gallicantus and Collegium Vocale Gent.  He also performs regularly with Tenebrae and Theatre of Voices, among others. 

The 2011 Tucker-Cruse Lecture ‘Regency Medievalism and the Early-Romantic Guitar’ takes place on Thursday 24 November at 4.15pm in Lecture Theatre 1, 3/5 Woodland Road, University of Bristol.  All welcome.

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