David Catalunya is a historian of music, culture and technology of medieval Europe and beyond. A Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, and a member of the ERC-funded project 'Music and Late Medieval European Court Cultures,' he is currently preparing a five-year research project to study and reconstruct the 12th-century organ and bell carillon of the Nativity Church in Bethlehem, whose archaeological remains are preserved at the Terra Sancta Museum in Jerusalem.

 

Earlier he has worked at the University of Würzburg, where he served as an editor of the monumental series Corpus Monodicum — music from the 11th and 12th centuries. He has also been an Associate Director of the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (Oxford Faculty of Music), and a member of the research board of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

 

His scholarly work delves into a variety of insightful topics in music, material culture, manuscript studies, intellectual history, organology, art, architecture, monasticism, and courtly culture. Catalunya regularly presents his research in international conferences, and has been invited to speak as a guest lecturer at top-class institutions, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale University, Cornell University, or the University of Cambridge (UK), among others.

 

For over fifteen years, David Catalunya carried on his academic career in parallel with a prolific artistic activity. As a keyboard player, leading his own group, and as a member of other notable ensembles in the field of late medieval music, he mainly focused on musical repertoires from the 13th to the early 15th centuries. His discography includes most notably the CD recordings Faventina (liturgical music from the Codex Faenza, 1380-1420, with Mala Punica), Meyster ob allen Meystern (15th-century keyboard music, with Tasto Solo) and Le chant de l’eschiquier (Dufay and Binchois songs in the Buxheim manuscript, with Tasto Solo), and Early Modern English Music, 1500-1550 (with Tasto Solo), which together have received more than 30 international awards, including Choc du Monde de la Musique, Supersonic Award, three times Diapason d’or, and a nomination for the International Classical Music Awards 2018. David Catalunya has performed in the most renowned festivals and concert halls throughout Europe and America, and has been invited to give master-classes, courses, and workshops at international centres of early music, such as the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (Switzerland), the Haute école de musique de Genève (Switzerland), the Conservatorium van Amsterdam (The Netherlands), the Grieg Academy (Norway), and the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya (Spain).