JOHN CALDWELL'S name is familiar to scholars of music throughout the world. Author of standard works on editing and music history, creator of meticulous scholarly editions and contributor to numerous reference works, books and journals on topics as diverse as ancient music theory, chant, medieval polyphony, music in Shakespeare and keyboard music, he has touched many facets of the discipline during his long career and always with distinction and individuality.

His ascent through the academic echelons was faultless. Three years of undergraduate study at Keble College, Oxford, led to a first-class degree in Music in 1960. Postgraduate studies continued at Oxford under Frank Harrison, yielding a BMus (1961) and a DPhil (1965), by which time he was already an Assistant Lecturer at Bristol University. He did not remain long at Bristol, but returned to Oxford in 1967 as University Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow in Music at Keble College. He progressed to Reader (1996) and then Professor (1999), holding a Senior Research Fellowship at Jesus College; and he was elected an Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College on his retirement in 2005, a retirement that has been such in name alone, for his work continues unabated.

A full assessment of an output so extensive and diverse is beyond the scope of the present essay, but a brief characterization is possible. At the risk of making his work seem like a beast from a now lost Homeric episode, we might think of it as a multocular creature. There is an eye for detail (examining ‘scribal peculiarities’ in the Robertsbridge Codex), and an eye for precision (remarking a change in the use of Greek terms through the Musica enchiriadis). One eye is sceptical (‘In spite of Lowinsky's brilliant arguments, the case for a secret chromatic art remains unproven’), whilst another is not shy of speculation (‘the significance of chords is that they symbolize and to a certain extent replace the melodic functions from which they ultimately derive’).