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Christopher Stembridge
studied languages at Cambridge University and musicology at Oxford
University. He was awarded the Turpin Prize on obtaining Fellowship
of the Royal College of Organists.
After 20 years as a lecturer
in music at University College Cork (National University of Ireland), he
moved to Northern Italy where he now lives. He gives regular master-classes
on Renaissance organs and travels widely giving lectures, recitals and
seminars in European, Russian and North American universities and
conservatoires. For ten years he was Professor of Organ and Harpsichord at
the Scuola di Musica Santa Cecilia, Brescia, and Professor for Organ
at the Accademia Chigiana, Siena 1994-6; he taught at the Montreal
Summer Academy for Organ in 2003. In 2006 (Summer Semester) he held a guest
professorship in harpsichord at the Gnesin Academy, Moscow. He has recently
directed concerts with the early music group Insula magica in
Novosibirsk, and the Baroque Orchestra of Armenia in Yerevan.
His special field of interest is Italian keyboard music
of the renaissance and early baroque. He has published various papers and edited music by de Macque, Mayone and
Frescobaldi. (He is currently preparing the new Bärenreiter edition of
Frescobaldi’s organ and keyboard music for which he was recently awarded
the Noah Greenberg Prize by the American Musicological Society. His
edition of the works of Marcoantonio Cavazzoni di Bologna for CEKM is in
the press.
He wrote the chapter on Italy
for the Cambridge Companion to the Organ (Cambridge University Press 1999).
He also plays the clavichord and the cembalo cromatico, a harpsichord with 19 notes to
the octave - a reconstruction of an instrument that was widely used in late
16th-century Italy - and together with Willard Martin of Pennsylvania has
designed the reconstruction of a 19-note just intonation keyboard similar
to that proposed by Descartes in 1643.
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