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Dr Chris Price

Chris Price is Director of Music and Course Director for the BA Music degree course.

Chris's work as Director of Music involves leadership of the most important public-facing events in the University calendar - most notably the music at Graduation ceremonies in Canterbury Cathedral and the annual Carols by Candlelight Service. In this Diamond Jubilee year, he also gathered an impressive alumni choir and orchestra to perform in the special Service of Celebration in September 2022. Alongside this activity, he organises regular concerts throughout the year and oversees a wide variety of extra-curricular musical activities.

As Course Director for the BA Music degree course, Chris has overall charge of the planning and implementation of that part of the curriculum, which sits within the School of Creative Arts and Industries in the Faculty of Arts and Education.

Chris's specialist teaching areas include history and analysis of music of the tonal period; aural skills; conducting; the history, practice and principles of church music, and the critical and analytical study of contemporary performing arts practitioners.

The large collection of vocal and instrumental music, formerly belonging to the Canterbury Catch Club and presently housed in the Cathedral Library, contains work of great variety, quality and whilst some of it is well-known and presently in print, much seems to have either never been printed or has long since been deleted from publishers’ catalogues. Part of Chris's work has been a process of sifting through the extensive repertoire to bring some of the more deserving pieces back into the public domain, so that they may once again be enjoyed by audiences and performers (online perusal of scores and recordings; live performance; public lectures; or an authentic re-creation of an evening with the Canterbury Catch Club in a local venue). Chris has been invited to give Keynote Papers for the Association RIdIM (Recherche Internationale d'Iconographie Musicale) and for the University of Köln.

Research Projects

  • ‘A feminist exploration of Jiahe Wedding Songs’. Researcher(s): Miss Menglan Li. Supervisor(s): Dr Chris Price, Professor Robert Rawson. [Postgraduate Research Project]
  • Creating a video-oriented online learning platform for music education aimed at supporting undergraduate music students, informed by experiments investigating the effects of video quality and teacher presence on memory retention.. Researcher(s): Mr Elliot Robinson. Supervisor(s): Dr Panos Ghikas, Dr Chris Price, Professor Robert Rawson. [Postgraduate Research Project]

Chris completed his PhD with Durham University on the Canterbury Catch Club, a musical society which met throughout the long nineteenth century in the city, which was published as a book by Cambridge Scholars Publishing entitled "The Canterbury Catch Club: Music in the Frame" in 2019. He has also edited a book of catches and glees from the Canterbury Collection, entitled "As Thomas Was Cudgell'd One Day by his Wife", with an accompanying CD featuring himself and fellow-lay clerks—forming the a capella group 'Cantuar'—singing examples of this rich and varied repertoire. He has given conference papers on this and related subjects throughout the UK and further afield, in Salzburg, Venice, St Petersburg, Xi'an, Hong Kong, Athens and Barcelona. Apart from his academic work, he sustains a lively career as a professional musician, undertaking regular professional work as singer and conductor in the area. Whilst serving as a Tenor Lay Clerk in the Cathedral Choir at Canterbury his work included recordings, BBC radio and TV broadcasts, and international tours, notably to the USA, Holland, Italy and Norway. His specialist interests include the music of the English Reformation; the archives of the Canterbury Catch Club; the music of Canterbury-based composer Alan Ridout; and the songs of such humourists as Flanders and Swann, Noel Coward, Jake Thackeray and Richard Stilgoe.

Chris is regularly in demand as singer and conductor. He and some fellow Lay Clerks from the Cathedral Choir have given several performances of some of the songs of the Canterbury Catch Club both at various venues including local hostelries under authentic conditions and the more refined surroundings of the Cathedral Archives Reading Room. One such concert, in collaboration with the Canterbury Festival, was a major centenary celebration in 2015 of the acquisition of the Catch Club material by the city's library. He is co-Director of the Snowdown Colliery Welfare Male Voice Choir.