Skip to main content

Staff Profile

Professor Magnus Williamson

Professor of Early Music

  • Telephone: +44 (0)191-208-6751
  • Address: Armstrong Building G.29,
    Newcastle University
    Newcastle upon Tyne
    NE1 7RU
Background

Profile

I read music at Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating in 1990. After completing my DPhil thesis I was lecturer in music at Somerville College, Oxford, and then at Newcastle University (where I have been since 1997). My research focuses upon the music of late-medieval and early modern Europe, especially in the sources and contexts of early-Tudor polyphony. My teaching reflects these interests. I teach on several music modules in music history; medieval, renaissance and baroque music; techniques of counterpoint; notation and editing.

I am also active as a performer.  In 1988 I became a Fellow of the Royal College of Organists, while I was organ scholar at Magdalen College, and won prizes as an improviser, giving recitals in the UK and abroad. More recently, my collaboration with the Early English Organ Project and with the ESRC/AHRC-funded Experience of Worship project has drawn together my academic interests and my background as an improviser and church musician. In 1988 I became a fellow of the Royal College of Organists (with the Dixon Prize for improvisation).

External Roles

Chairman, Early English Church Music (British Academy)

Internal Roles

School of Arts & Cultures: Acting Head of School (2021-22)

Previous Posts

Lecturer in Music, Somerville College, Oxford (1995-7)

Director of Music, University Church of St Mary, Oxford (1992-7)

Assisting Organist, Magdalen College, Oxford (1990-1)

Memberships

American Musicological Society; Royal Musical Association; Renaissance Society of America; 
Plainsong and Medieval Music Society

Languages

French; Latin

Google Scholar: Click here.

Research

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1746-7905 

Research Interests

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries:

  • musical contexts: social, ritual, spatial
  • loss, damage and restoration: reconstructing lacunary polyphony, re-imagining mutilated and lost spaces
  • musical sources: manuscripts, chant and polyphony in print; choirbooks and partbooks, provenance and purpose; palaeography, codicology, notation, editing, formats: for instance, the Petre Gradual in Newcastle University's Robinson Library
  • change and upheaval, reform, innovation, reaction
  • organ and choral music in early-Tudor England
  • performance, particularly improvisation


Current Work

Since the 1990s I have focused on musical sources and contexts of the late Middle Ages, mainly in Britain, but more recently in France as well. I have several on-going research projects on the soundscape of the pre-Reformation parish, the printing of music books (particularly the often neglected but very significant corpus of printed chant books), and the Chapel Royal under the Tudors.

I have been Principal Investigator on various RCUK-funded projects, including Tudor Partbooks: The manuscript legacies of John Sadler, John Baldwin and their antecedents (Co-I: Dr Julia Craig-McFeely of Oxford University and DIAMM) (AHRC, 2014-17). I was for some years General Editor of the British Academy series, Early English Church Music (2008-2021) and am now its Chairman.

It is a great pleasure to collaborate with performers.  This has led over the years to some fascinating co-productions of CDs and broadcasts such as Queen Mary’s Big Belly with Gallicantus (2017). More recently I have been actively engaged with the choral scholars of St Wulfram, Grantham, and with the outstanding Ensemble Pro Victoria and their debut album commemorating Robert Fayrfax’s quincentenary, Music for Tudor Kings and Queens (Delphian CDC34265, 2021).

Reviews of Music for Tudor Kings and Queens include: ‘one of Britain’s finest young vocal ensembles, who in turn are supported by musical scholarship of the highest order …I can't recommend Magnus Williamson's booklet notes enough...Williamson leads the reader through the background to this music, its construction and its context brilliantly, the perfect adjunct to these brilliantly focused performances from Ensemble Pro Victoria, caught in the lovely acoustic of St Brandon's Church, Brancepeth, County Durham.’


Future Research

Pipeline projects include:

  • the music legacies of purgatory;
  • spatial and acoustic experiences in medieval Europe, 1000-1500


Postgraduate Supervision

I welcome inquiries from anyone interested in pursuing research on Renaissance musical sources, historical contexts, sixteenth-century contrapuntal techniques, keyboard improvisation, editing, notation.


Recent Esteem Indicators

Leverhulme Trust: Visiting Professorship, Dr Kerry McCarthy (autumn 2017): host

University Research Committee: Visiting Professorship, Dr John Milsom (2015): host

LE STUDIUM® Research Fellow, Centre d'Études Supérieures de la Renaissance, Université François-Rabelais de Tours, France (2013-14): guest

Palisca Prize for outstanding edition, American Musicological Society (2011)


Funded Research Projects (selected)

Bee-ing Human: An Interactive Bee Book for the 21st Century (Leverhulme Trust, 2022-2025): Co-Investigator

English Saints Offices (British Academy, 2019-20): Principal Investigator

The Sarum Hymnal in Manuscript and Print (British Academy, 2017-18): PI

Tudor Partbooks: the manuscript legacies of John Sadler, John Baldwin and their antecedents (AHRC, 2014-17): PI

Early English Church Music: the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (AHRB, 2004-7): PI

 

 

Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching

Music History from the ninth to the seventeenth centuries, particularly 1400-1550

Historic Compositional Techniques

Dissertation

Edition and transcription

Postgraduate Teaching

Research methods in medieval and early modern studies

Notation and editing 

Performance practices

Publications