Owen Rees

Senior Research Fellow; Professor of Music; Organist, Fellow and Tutor, The Queen's College

Owen Rees is a leading researcher and performer of European renaissance vocal music.

Owen Rees’ undergraduate studies in Music were at Cambridge, where he held an Organ Scholarship. After this, he pursued doctoral research in Portugal, and then moved to Oxford as Lecturer at St Peter’s College and St Edmund Hall. After six years teaching at the University of Surrey, he took up my post in Oxford at Queen’s in 1997. As Organist at Queen’s he directs their renowned Chapel Choir.

Owen’s research focuses on sacred music in Spain, Portugal, and England during the Renaissance. He has written about the music of William Byrd, and many of the greatest Spanish and Portuguese composers of the period. He directs the professional vocal consort Contrapunctus (http://www.contrapunctus.org.uk), for which he been nominated for the Gramophone early-music award.

Owen’s teaching covers aspects of music history from the Middle Ages to the end of the Baroque, and techniques of composition. He also supervises postgraduate students and lectures in music history and choral conducting.


Publications

‘Seville Cathedral’s Music in Performance, 1549–1599’, in Colin Lawson & Robin Stowell (eds), The Cambridge History of Musical Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 353–74

Cristóbal de Morales: Sources, Inflences, Reception, co-edited with Bernadette Nelson (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007)

‘Adventures of Portuguese “Ancient Music” in Oxford, London, and Paris: Duarte Lobo’s Liber missarum and Musical Antiquarianism, 1650–1850’, Music & Letters 86 (2005), 42–73

Polyphony in Portugal c. 1530-c. 1620: Sources from the Monastery of Santa Cruz, Coimbra (New York & London: Garland, 1995)

‘The English Background to Byrd’s Motets: Textual and Stylistic Models for Infelix ego’, in Byrd Studies (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 24–50


Where Next?