Convenor - Samuel Teague

Samuel Teague is a second-year DPhil Candidate at The Queen's College. His doctoral research focuses on Captain Henry Cooke, and the music of those pupils under his tutelage; the English Restoration School. Samuel moved to Oxford for his master's degree having completed his undergraduate degree at Bangor University. Alongside his undergraduate degree, Samuel sang as a choral scholar at Bangor Cathedral and also held a number of posts as a choral director. He is now supervised by Professor Owen Rees, who also directs The Choir of the Queen's College, Oxford, in which Samuel sings as a tenor lay clerk.

Dr John Cunningham

Dr John Cunningham joined the School of Music at Bangor in September 2011. He is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a member of the editorial committees of the Purcell Society and of Musica Britannica. His research covers a broad spectrum of topics and periods, though with a main interlinking theme of music as cultural history. He has published on a range of topics looking at secular music in Britain and Ireland, c.1600–1900, and he is especially interested in understanding the creative process as well as the interrelationship of music and literature. Dr Cunningham is currently the Examinations Officer for the School of Arts, Culture and Language, and at departmental level is also the undergraduate Music lead, research/impact lead, and head of Musicology.

Caroline Lesemann-Elliott

Caroline Lesemann-Elliott is a PhD candidate at Royal Holloway (though based in Oxford) specialising in early modern English convent music. She is particularly interested in early modern cross-cultural musical networks, spatial politics and song, and personal and communal spiritualities established through music. Presentation appearances include the International Women in Musical Leadership Conference, the International Biennial Baroque Conference, MedRen, and the 2021 Spatial 18th century symposium hosted by York University. Academic collaborations include the opera collage The Gentlewomen (funded by the TORCH Humanities Cultural Programme), the documentary Doors, Dwellings, Devotions: Enacting an Anchoritic Rite of Enclosure on Film (funded by the John Fell OUP fund), and a variety of concerts featuring her research.

Professor Rebecca Herissone

Rebecca Herissone is Professor of Musicology at the University of Manchester and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her research focuses on the musical cultures of early modern England, particularly issues of creativity, material culture and reception. She is currently working towards a large-scale interdisciplinary study of the material traces of Purcell’s reception and is part of an AHRC-funded network considering possible ‘digital directions’ for collected editions, partly representing her current roles as Chair of the Musica Britannica Editorial Committee and the Editorial Board of the Purcell Society. She has published three monographs, most recently Musical Creativity in Restoration England, which was awarded the Diana McVeagh Prize by the North American British Music Association in 2015. She also co-edited Concepts of Creativity in Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2013), and edited The Ashgate Research Companion to Henry Purcell (Aldershot, 2012). Her research has been published in a wide range of international journals, including the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Musical Quarterly, Journal of Musicology, Music & Letters, and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and she was awarded the Westrup Prize in 2007 for her article demonstrating that the version of Purcell’s Come ye Sons of Art we know today had been subjected to substantial mid-18th-century ‘improvements’. She co-edited Music & Letters from 2007–19 and, alongside her roles at Musica Britannica and the Purcell Society, is Chair of the Publications Committee of the Royal Musical Association, a General Editor of the Complete Works of John Eccles, a member of the Editorial Board of the Works of Aphra Behn and part of the Advisory Committee for Grove Music Online.

Professor Peter Holman MBE

Peter Holman, Emeritus Professor at the University of Leeds, has wide interests in English music from about 1550 to 1850 and the history of instruments and instrumental music. His books include the prize-winning Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the English Court 1540-1690 (1993) and Life after Death: The Viola da Gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch (2010). His book Before the Baton: Musical Direction and Conducting in Stuart and Georgian Britain was published in February 2020. At present, among other things, he is working on The Purcell Compendium with Bryan White; a volume of Restoration Theatre Airs for Musica Britannica with Andrew Woolley; and a new edition of Purcell Society, vol. 31, now entitled Consort Music, with Robert Thompson. As a performer he is director of The Parley of Instruments, the Suffolk Villages Festival, and Leeds Baroque.

Alexander Norman

Alexander Norman is a PhD student in music at Royal Holloway, University of London and is in his third year of part-time study. He is examining the transmission of French vocal music and performing styles to England between 1660 and 1710. Alex gave a paper at the 19th Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music in July 2021, hosted by Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, and has since co-authored a review of the conference for Early Music. Alex is also Director of Music at Holy Trinity Church in Coventry and a piano teacher and organist. He undertook a Masters in Choral Conducting at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and was previously an undergraduate, postgraduate and organ and choral scholar at Royal Holloway. Alex has appeared on several CD recordings as a conductor, organist, choral singer and producer and gives regular organ recitals at Holy Trinity Church, Coventry.

Dr Matthias Range

Matthias Range has published widely in both history and music, with the focus of his interdisciplinary research being sacred music and religious culture since the sixteenth century. An area of particular interest is the history of the British monarchy, which is the topic of his major book publications. He currently works as a post-doctoral researcher for the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music at the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford.

Dr Zsombor Tóth-Vajna

Dr Zsombor Tóth-Vajna is a Research Fellow and Royal College of Music Studentship holder. As a researcher his field of interest is the performance practice of Restoration period keyboard music with a special focus on the works of John Blow and Henry Purcell. As an early keyboard specialist and conductor, is one of the leading figures of the young musician generation in Hungary. He studied harpsichord and the organ at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, and he continued his studies at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam with Menno van Delft, Richard Egarr, and Jacques van Oortmerssen. He also holds a degree in medicine from Semmelweis University, Budapest. He has given recitals in many European countries and in the United States as a soloist and conductor. He is the founder and artistic director of the Hungarian baroque orchestra Harmonia Caelestis, and he is a passionate piano four-hands player with his twin brother, Gergely under the name Duo Piano e Forte. So far, he has recorded seven solo albums for different labels.

Professor Jonathan Wainwright

Jo Wainwright is Professor of Music at the University of York. He is a musicologist and performer and has written extensively on early-modern English and Italian music. His books include Musical Patronage in Seventeenth-Century England (1997) and From Renaissance to Baroque (ed. with Peter Holman, 2005); and he had edited two volumes of music by Richard Dering for Musica Britannica (2008 & 2015), Walter Porter’s Collected Works for A-R Editions (2017), a volume of Henry Lawes’ Sacred Music for Early English Church Music (2020), a further Musica Britannica volume of George Jeffreys’ English Sacred Music (2021), and a three-volume collected works of Angelo Notari is due soon from A-R Editions. Jonathan Wainwright has also been active as a performer: from 1996 to 2001 he was Director of the Girls Choir at York Minster, and his recordings range from a CD of Sarum plainsong and Medieval carols through to the first commercial recording of Percy Whitlock’s Organ Symphony, recorded in York Minster.

Dr Bryan White

Bryan White is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Music at the University of Leeds. He is a member of the Purcell Society for which he has edited Louis Grabu’s Albion and Albanius and G. B. Draghi’s From harmony, from heav’nly harmony. He is the author of Music for St Cecilia’s Day from Purcell to Handel (Boydell, 2019) and co-editor with John Cunningham of Musical Exchange between Britain and Europe 1500–1800: Essays in Honour of Peter Holman (Boydell, 2020).