Andrew Jones

Andrew Jones is a University Senior Lecturer in the Music Faculty, and Director of Music and Director of Studies in Music at Selwyn College. After studying violin, organ, and composition at the Royal College of Music, he read music at St Peter's College, Oxford, where he held an Organ Scholarship. He took the PGCE course at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and then returned to Oxford to carry out research leading to his DPhil dissertation, The motets of Carissimi. (The dissertation was subsequently published as a two-volume book.) He was successively a Senior Scholar at St Peter's College, Junior Lecturer in Music at Magdalen College, and the first Burton Senior Scholar at Oriel College, Oxford.

His Faculty teaching in Cambridge has covered historical topics from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, with a particular emphasis in recent years on the music of Handel and the social context in which he worked, and on performance practice. Much of his teaching focuses on technical and practical subjects: analysis, harmony, fugue, tonal composition, and keyboard skills. He supervises undergraduates in a wide variety of technical, analytical, and historical subjects. He has a strong commitment to teaching, and in 2004 he was awarded one of the University's Pilkington Prizes for excellence in teaching.

Among the topics on which his graduate pupils have completed dissertations are the musical patronage of Christopher Hatton (re-worked as a book), the psalm settings of Charpentier, Handel's opera Ottone (followed by two articles related to the dissertation and a critical edition of the opera), compositional techniques in Restoration music (published in revised form by OUP), the realisation of Italian basso continuo in the baroque (expanded into a book), a comparative study of operas by Bononcini and Mancini, Handel's operas from Alessandro to Tolomeo (followed by several articles and conference papers), and a study of Handel's borrowings in operas of the mid-1720s.

His research interests are in music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly that of Carissimi (including a book on the motets; the composer entry for the revised New Grove; articles in Music and Letters) and Handel (edition of solo cantatas for Faber; critical edition of the opera Rodelinda for the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe; articles in Music and Letters and the Händel-Jahrbuch). He is currently completing a two-volume critical edition of all of Handel's 80+ cantatas for solo voice and continuo, which will be published as two volumes of the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe.

He has acted as consultant to various professional performers, including William Christie (Les Arts Florissants), John Eliot Gardiner (Monteverdi Choir), Paul McCreesh (Gabrieli Consort), Peter Holman (Parley of Instruments), Trevor Pinnock (the English Concert), Alastair Ross (Concerto delle Donne), Michael Schneider (La Stagione), and Silas Standage (The Private Musick).

He is the Director of the Inter-Collegiate Instrumental Awards Scheme, an organisation that promotes excellence in chamber music performance among highly gifted undergraduates, and an Artistic Manager of the Cambridge University Collegium Musicum, an ensemble of undergraduate and graduate instrumentalists who are professionally coached in the performance techniques of period instruments.

In 1985 he founded the Cambridge Handel Opera Group in order to present biennial performances of Handel's operas, fully staged and in English, with professional singers in the solo roles, undergraduates and graduates in the chorus and orchestra (the latter is the Collegium Musicum), and professionals in key positions in the production team. So far he has translated, rehearsed, and conducted thirteen of Handel's operas.

Outside Cambridge he is a trustee and a member of the Council of the Handel Institute, and a director of the Gerald Coke Handel Foundation. He has given pre-performance lectures for the Royal Opera House and English National Opera.

Publications