Christopher Reynolds received a B.A. in music from UC Riverside and his 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. He taught at UC Davis from 1985-2018 and spent several years as Director of Music at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church. He has held visiting professorships at Yale, Stanford, and UC Berkeley, and in Germany at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Goettingen. Reynolds has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2016) and of the Academia Europaea (2022). Additionally, he became an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society (AMS) in 2017 and of the American Beethoven Society (2023). He had previously served as President of the AMS for the years 2013 and 2014. As a teacher and scholar he received the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Research (2013).

Reynolds is the author of three books, one on music at St. Peter’s in 15^th-century Rome, another on how composers influenced each other, Motives for Allusion: Context and Content in 19th-Century Music, and a third, Wagner, Schumann and the Lessons of Beethoven’s Ninth. He was a founding editor of the annual Beethoven Forum (1994-2008). Motives for Allusion was a finalist for the Otto Kinkeldey Award by the AMS. His article “Porgy and Bess: An American Wozzeck” won the H. Colin Slim Award from the AMS, and also the Kurt Weill Prize from the Kurt Weill Foundation. Reynolds received the Richard S. Hill Award from the Music Library Association for his article “Documenting the Zenith of Women Song Composers”. He is donating his collection of more than 8000 songs composed by women to the university library, where much of it is housed in special collections as the Christopher A. Reynolds Collection of Women’s Song, 1800-1950. He is founder and co-curator of Women’s Song Forum, a blog devoted to essays about women songwriters and singers. Many of his articles and materials for the study of women songwriters are available at Academia.edu.