Professor Sam Barrett

Sam Barrett is Professor of Early Medieval Music, and Fellow and Director of Study in Music at Pembroke College. He is a specialist in early medieval music, with a particular interest in Latin song and issues in notation, transmission and performance. He also has interests in jazz and related genres of popular music.

His work within medieval music is driven by an interest in song, especially in the way it crosses boundaries between text and music, writing and orality, and memory and performance. These interests have focused on arguably the earliest surviving layer of the Western European lyric tradition, namely the music of the late antique and early medieval Latin lyric, in relation to which he has identified new notated sources and developed analytical techniques for assessing a musical tradition previously presumed to lie beyond detailed commentary. This research has resulted in new editions of the earliest layer of a continuous European tradition of song.

His undergraduate teaching has concentrated on topics in medieval music and jazz, including courses on plainchant and early polyphony, the Sequence, the music of Hildegard of Bingen, American Jazz (especially from the 1940s onwards), Miles Davis and the Blues. At the graduate level, he jointly taught the main Introduction to Musicology course for several years. He has supervised MPhil theses on medieval music and jazz, and is currently supervising PhD theses in the musical writings of al-Kindi, the performance of Minnesang, the performance of Old French verse narratives, and Sequences in the Winchester Troper.

He retains an interest in performance. He collaborated closely with the professional group Sequentia, resulting in contributions to several concert programmes and a CD titled Boethius: Songs of Consolation - Metra from 11th-century Canterbury. He continues to direct, perform, and record with a number of vocal groups based in Cambridge, is a Trustee of De Profundis, and is Associate Director of Music at the Church of Our Lady of The Assumption and The English Martyrs.

Sam Barrett is co-editor of the Journal of Musicology and on the editorial board of Early Music History.