John Butt (artistic director)

John Butt is Gardiner Professor of Music at the University of Glasgow having previously worked at the Universities of California at Berkeley and Cambridge. He has published four books with Cambridge University Press, most relating to Bach, the German baroque, or issues of performance. The latest, Playing with History, is a cultural study of historically-informed performance, which was shortlisted for the book prize of the British Academy in 2003. He is also editor or co-editor for both the Oxford and Cambridge Companions to Bach, and The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music. He is currently writing a book on Bach's passions and their relation to the development of modernity.


As a performer, John has made 11 recordings on organ, harpsichord and clavichord with the French label Harmonia Mundi. His most recent solo recordings are the Bach organ toccatas, Schübler chorales, Elgar's complete organ music and two programmes for the BBC. As a soloist or guest conductor he has featured with many orchestras, institutions and festivals, including the San Francisco Symphony, St Paul Chamber Orchestra, Philharmonia Baroque, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Göttingen Handel Festspiele, the Carmel Bach Festival and the Berkeley Festival, where he directed a newly discovered Scarlatti opera. He has been elected to Fellowships of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.  In 2003 he received the Royal Musical Association’s Dent Medal.  John is an Artistic Director of the Dunedin Consort