Martin Jean has announced the appointment of Henry Parkes as assistant professor of music at Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Department of Music. The four-year term begins July 1, 2014.
Parkes completed a bachelor’s degree in music at the University of Oxford, graduating with first class honors, before moving to the University of Cambridge, where he gained M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in musicology under the supervision of Prof. Susan Rankin. He is a specialist in the music and liturgy of the central Middle Ages, with particular interests in the performance and experience of religious ritual, the making of musical and liturgical manuscripts, notation and paleography, institutional history, and wider intellectual and cultural trends in the Christian West from the ninth to twelfth centuries.
Supported by a postdoctoral research fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, he is currently working on the eclectic and enigmatic tradition of liturgical, musical, and legal texts known as the Pontifical Romano-Germanique – which numbers among its contents a ritual for the ordination of women – and its place within the history of the church in tenth- and eleventh-century Europe. He is currently under negotiations with a major press to publish his first book next year, entitled The Organisation of Ritual in the Ottonian Church.
Parkes is also an accomplished keyboardist and church musician, and has worked at a number of the UK’s most prestigious choral foundations, including St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle; Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford; and, most recently, at All Saints, Margaret Street, the famous Butterfield church in London’s West End. On the concert stage, he has performed for many years with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, on the South Bank, and at the BBC Proms.
Parkes will continue his postdoctoral fellowship in Cambridge this coming academic year but will visit Yale in the near future with his fiancée, Rachel Major. His teaching will begin in the fall term of 2014.