Christopher Reynolds - Biography#

Reynolds received his M.A. and Ph.D. in musicology from Princeton University. He began his career as a lecturer and choral director at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and then taught and conducted at McGill University. From 1985-2018 he taught at UC Davis. Beginning in 1997 he spent many years as Director of Music at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Davis, Calif.

Reynolds was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016 and an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society (AMS) in 2017. He had previously served as President of the AMS for the years 2013 and 2014.

He is the author of three books, one on Renaissance music in fifteenth-century Rome, and another on how composers in the nineteenth century influenced each other ("Motives for Allusion: Context and Content in Nineteenth-Century Music," Harvard, 2003). His latest book is "Wagner, Schumann and the Lessons of Beethoven’s Ninth" (UC Press, 2015). His research has been supported by fellowships from the ACLS, the NEH (twice), the Humboldt Foundation, and two residencies at the Villa I Tatti in Florence. He was a founding editor of Beethoven Forum and also served a term as editor of the AMS Studies in Music monograph series published with Oxford University Press.

Reynolds has had a long-term interest in women's song. He is founder and curator of the blog, Women's Song Forum (https://www.womensongforum.org/). He is donating his collection of more than 8000 songs and letters by women composers and performers to the UC Davis Library, where it is housed in special collections as the Christopher A. Reynolds Collection of Women’s Song, 1800–1950. His comprehensive database, Women Song Composers: A Database of Songs Published in the United States and England, ca. 1890-1930, is available at https://merritt.cdlib.org/m/ark%3A%2F13030%2Fm5br8stc

He has held visiting professorships at Yale, Stanford, and UC Berkeley, in Germany at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Goettingen, and in Florence at the Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies. As an administrator, Reynolds served two years as President of the American Musicological Society. He was twice chair of the Music Department and from 2002 to 2004 he directed the UC Study Center in Germany. From 2014-22 he has been faculty adviser to the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs at UC Davis.