Staff Profile

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. 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; Society of Antiquaries, London (Fellow, 2024-)

Languages

French; Latin

Google Scholar: Click here.

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 late-medieval '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 and Co-Investigator on numerous publicly-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.

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

Society of Antiquaries of London: Fellow, 2024

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)

Interwoven Musical Networks: England, the Netherlands, and Spain, 1520–1630 (European Commission, MSCA fellowship, 2027-29): supervisor

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

Aural Histories (AHRC, 2022-25): Co-Investigator

Henry VIII on Tour (AHRC, 2022-25): 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

Undergraduate Teaching

Music History from the ninth to the seventeenth centuries, particularly 1350-1600

Historic Theory

Dissertation

Edition and transcription

Postgraduate Teaching

Research methods

Medieval and early modern studies

Notation and editing 

Performance practice

• Artefact

  • Skeaping L, Harper J, Gwynne D, Williamson M, The Cardinall's Musick, Carwood A. Music Restor'd. BBC Radio 3, 2001.

• Articles

  • Williamson M. Notes on a Suffolk Deed Box: the Cutler Fragments. Fragmentology 2025. In Preparation.
  • Byrne A, Giraud E, Williamson M. ‘Rediscovered Polyphony from Tudor Ireland: the Gloria *Amice Christi Johannes*’. Early Music 2024. Submitted.
  • Williamson M. Location, location, location: organs, liturgy and spaces at Lincoln Cathedral before 1702. Journal of the Royal College of Organists 2023, 16, 1-20.
  • Williams T, Williamson M. Rethinking early music in a time of isolation. Early Music 2022, 50(1), 123-131.
  • Williamson M. Queen Mary I, Tallis’s O sacrum convivium and a Latin Litany. Early Music 2016, 44(2), 251-270.
  • Williamson M. Voices from the past: the delicate art of reconstructing Tudor partbooks. Choir & Organ 2015, 23(4), 25-27.
  • Williamson M. The fate of the choirbook in Protestant Europe. Journal of the Alamire Foundation 2015, 7(2), 117-131, 135 (plate).
  • Williamson M. Affordable splendour: editing, printing and marketing the Sarum Antiphoner (1519–20). Renaissance Studies 2012, 26(1), 60-87.
  • Williamson M. Liturgical polyphony in the pre-reformation English parish church: A provisional list and commentary. Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle 2005, 38(1), 1-43.
  • Williamson M. 'Royal Image-making and Textual Interplay in Gilbert Banaster's O Maria et Elizabeth'. Early Music History 2000, 19, 237-278.
  • Williamson M. Pictura et scriptura - The 'Eton Choirbook' in its iconographical context. Early Music 2000, 28(3), 359-380.
  • Magnus Williamson. 'The Early Tudor Court, the Provinces and the Eton Choirbook'. Early Music 1997, 25(2), 229-43.

• Book Chapters

  • Williamson M. Henry VIII’s Royal Progresses and the Liturgical Calendar. In: Ascensión Mazuela Anguita, ed. Medieval and Early Modern Soundscapes. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2025. Submitted.
  • Williamson M. Confraternities and Music on the Eve of the Reformation: Early-Tudor Boston. In: Tess Knighton, ed. Listening to Confraternities: Spaces for Performance, Patronage and Urban Musical Experience. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2025, pp.200-224.
  • Williamson M. Performing Spaces: The Art of Polyphony Within and Beyond St Stephen’s Chapel. In: Tim Ayers, J.P.D. Cooper, Elizabeth Hallam Smith and Caroline Shenton, ed. St Stephen's Chapel and the Palace of Westminster. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2024, pp.171-185.
  • McCarthy K, Williamson M. Notes on the Petre Gradual. In: James Cook, Grantley McDonald, Adam Whittaker, ed. Manuscripts, Materiality, and Mobility: Essays on Late Medieval Music in Memory of Peter Wright. Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2024, pp.83-108.
  • Williamson M. The Eton Choirbook. In: Shepherd T; Borghetti V, ed. The Museum of Renaissance Music. Turnhout: Brepols, 2023, pp.184-185.
  • Williamson M. ‘Byrd’s Apprentice Works: *Sacris solemniis* Reconstructed and Rehabilitated’. In: Bassler, K; Butler, K; Bank, K, ed. Byrd Studies in the Twenty-First Century. Clemson: Clemson UP, 2023, pp.117-131.
  • Williamson M. Sing Here: The Physical Traces of Sacred Song. In: Julian Luxford, ed. The Medieval Book as Object, Idea and Symbol: Proceedings of the 2019 Harlaxton Symposium. Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2021, pp.239-258.
  • Williamson M. Singing the Litany in Tudor England, 1544-1555. In: Witold Sadowski and Francesco Marsciani, ed. The Litany in Arts and Cultures. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020, pp.197-219.
  • Williamson M. ‘Recovering the Soundscape of pre-Reformation Newcastle upon Tyne’. In: Kirsten Gibson, Stephanie Carter and Roz Southey, ed. Music in North-East England Before 1850. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2020. Submitted.
  • Williamson M. Revisiting the soundscape of the medieval parish. In: David Harry and Christian Steer, ed. The Urban Church in Late Medieval England. Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2019, pp.17-35.
  • Williamson M. Playing the organ, Tudor-style: some thoughts on improvisation, composition and memorisation. In: David Smith, ed. Aspects of English Keyboard Music Before 1630. London and New York: Routledge, 2019, pp.99-122.
  • Williamson M. Making Do? Musical Participation in an Early-Tudor College. In: Feingold, M; Watts, J, ed. Renaissance College: Volume XXXII/1-2: Renaissance College: Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in Context, 1450-1600. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019, pp.143-159.
  • Williamson M. Musica ficta. In: Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell, ed. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Historical Performance in Music. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp.424-5.
  • Williamson M. English Organ Music, 1350-1550: a study of sources and contexts. In: Iain Quinn, ed. Studies in English Organ Music. London: Routledge, 2018, pp.97-121.
  • Williamson M. Parish music in late-medieval England: local, regional, national identities. In: B. Kümin & M. Ferrari, ed. Pfarreien in der Vormoderne: Identität und Kultur im Niederkirchenwesen Europas. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2017, pp.209-244.
  • Williamson M. Quadring Cows: Resourcing Music in the Pre-Reformation Parish. In: Harper S; Barnwell PS; Williamson M, ed. Late-Medieval Liturgies Enacted: The Experience of Worship in Cathedral and Parish Church. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016, pp.125-153.
  • Williamson M. Double cantus firmus Compositions in the Eton Choirbook. In: Hornby, E., Maw, D, ed. Essays on the History of English Music in Honour of John Caldwell: Sources, Style, Performance, Historiography. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2010, pp.162-184.
  • Williamson M. The Will of John Boraston: Musicians within Collegiate and Parochial Communities. In: Burgess C; Heale M, ed. The Late Medieval English College and its Context. York: York Medieval Press, 2008, pp.180-198.
  • Williamson M. Liturgical Music in the Late Medieval Parish: Organs and Voices, Ways and Means. In: Burgess, C., Duffy, E, ed. The Parish in Late Medieval England: Proceedings of the 2002 Harlaxton Symposium. Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2006, pp.177-242.
  • Williamson M. Early English Organs and early Anglican liturgical polyphony: some considerations of performance practice. In: Royal College of Organists Yearbook 2004-2005. London, UK: Royal College of Organists, 2005, pp.46-53.
  • Williamson M. Evangelicalism at Boston, Oxford, and Windsor under Henry VIII: John Foxe's narratives recontextualized'. In: Loades, D, ed. John Foxe at Home and Abroad. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004, pp.31-45.
  • Williamson M. The role of religious guilds in the cultivation of ritual polyphony in England: the case of Louth, 1450-1550. In: Kisby, F, ed. Music and Musicians in Renaissance Cities and Towns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp.82-93.
  • Magnus Williamson. The Eton Choirbook: music-making within the collegiate context. In: Benjamin Thompson, ed. The Reign of Henry VII: proceedings of the 1993 Harlaxton Symposium. Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1995, pp.213-28.

• Digital or Visual Media

  • Williamson MG. Queen Mary’s Big Belly: Hope for an heir in Catholic England. Perivale, Middx: Signum SIGCD464, 2017.
  • Williamson M. Chorus vel organa: Music from the Lost Palace of Westminster [CD recording]. Wallyford, East Lothian: Delphian Records, 2016. CD.

• Edited Book

  • Harrison FL, Williamson M, ed. The Eton Choirbook: III: third, revised and expanded edition. London: Stainer & Bell, 2010.

• Musical Compositions

  • Hogg B, Williamson MG. Lost Voices. . 2017.
  • Williamson M (organ), Choir of Caius College, Cambridge, dir. Geoffrey Webber. More Sweet to Hear: organs and voices of Tudor England. . Abingdon: OxRecs Digital, 2007.

• Online Publication

  • Williamson M. The Eton Choirbook Project. Newcastle: ICMuS/CETL4MusicNE, 2012. Available at: http://research.ncl.ac.uk/etonchoirbook/.

• Review

  • Williamson M. Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England: Discourses, Sites and Identities, by Jonathan Willis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). English Historical Review 2014, 129(538), 707-709.

• Scholarly Editions

  • Williamson M. John Sheppard, III: Hymns, Psalms, Antiphons and other Latin Polyphony. In: Williamson, M ed. Early English Church Music 2012. London: Stainer & Bell, for the British Academy, 54, 300.
  • Williamson M. The Eton Choirbook: Facsimile and Introductory Study. DIAMM Facsimiles 2010. Oxford, UK: Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music, 320.