John Whenham

John Whenham was an English musicologist and one of the leading authorities on Claudio Monteverdi and the music of the early Italian baroque. He spent more than 40 years at the University of Birmingham, where he led the Department of Music from 2001 and drove the project that became the Bramall Music Building.

He grew up in Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire and played the tuba in the Leicestershire Schools' Symphony Orchestra in the early 1960s, sometimes under the baton of Michael Tippett, who became one of his favourite composers. The orchestra was also where he met Jenny, a violinist from the same town, whom he married in 1968. He studied at the University of Nottingham, earning a Bachelor of Music and a Master of Arts, and later took a doctorate at the University of Oxford.

Whenham joined Birmingham as a junior lecturer in 1971, one of a group of young scholars appointed by the Barber Professor Ivor Keys. His research centred on Monteverdi. He wrote Duet and Dialogue in the Age of Monteverdi (1982) and the Cambridge Opera Handbook on Monteverdi's Orfeo (1986) and the Cambridge Music Handbook on the Vespers of 1610 (1997), both regarded as definitive guides, and edited The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi with Richard Wistreich (2007). For many years he co-edited the journal Music and Letters with his colleague Nigel Fortune.

In the mid 1980s he founded the Birmingham University Liturgical Choir, later the University Singers, so that students could sing sacred music in its proper setting. From 1986 the choir visited St Michael's, Tenbury Wells, each December to sing a carol service, Eucharist and Evensong, which he directed every year until he retired. After becoming head of department in 2001 he championed a new home for music at Birmingham from a blank sheet of paper, lobbying the university and donors and following every detail down to a lift big enough for a Steinway grand. The Bramall Music Building opened as he retired in 2012.

Colleagues remembered him as a calm, unflappable and endlessly patient teacher who guided hundreds of students into careers in music. John Whenham died on 16 August 2026. Jenny, his wife of 58 years, died two weeks later, on 31 August. They were survived by their sons Nick and Chris and their grandchildren.