Caroline Gill

Dr Caroline Gill teaches the Global Conservatoire course “Improvisation Before 1600 ”

Dr Caroline Gill is an English musicologist, critic and educator, with a career spanning the music industry’s critical, commercial and academic worlds. She is a professor of academic studies at the Royal College of Music, where her research centres on improvisation in early modern Italy. She also spent sixteen years as a critic and writer for Gramophone, including eight on its Disc of the Year award panel, alongside contributions to (among others) BBC Music Magazine, The Strad, and a guest presenting role on BBC Radio 3’s The Choir. For over a decade she was a regular critic on Radio 3’s Record Review and Building a Library, and her programme notes and essays have appeared at Wigmore Hall, King’s Place, Salzburg Festival and the BBC Proms. She has also undertaken book reviewing for both commercial and academic publications.

Before entering academia, Caroline was Musical Instruments Specialist at Christie’s. She also taught singing for over ten years, including chorister training within two Oxbridge chapel choirs and subsequent consultancy work for several cathedral and chapel choirs on chorister recruitment.

Caroline trained initially as a flautist at Dartington before specialising in musicology and completing her PhD on a fully-funded scholarship at the University of Huddersfield. Her research, on vocal improvisatory practice as a political tool in early modern Italy, sits at the heart of her teaching: the Global Conservatoire course on Improvisation before 1600 is grounded directly in her work on the political and performative dimensions of early vocal practice.

In addition to her teaching, Caroline supervises master’s dissertations, provides doctoral writing mentorship, and is a member of the RCM Senate.