Henry Parkes

I completed my PhD in Musicology at the University of Cambridge (2012). Following a Junior Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, I taught for five years at Yale University, where I was jointly affiliated to the Department of Music and Institute of Sacred Music.

My expertise is in the musical and religious cultures of medieval Western Europe, with special attention to Christian liturgical chant (including Gregorian Chant) and sacred polyphony, and the forms of worship in which they were was sung. I am fascinated above all by the men and women who created, memorised, disseminated and discussed music in the distant past, by the experiential dimensions of medieval worship (especially the Divine Office), and by the role of writing as both an enabler and an inhibitor of musical creativity in Western Music.