Amanda Babington

Dr Amanda Babington is a Senior Lecturer at the Royal Northern College of Music and Executive Officer for the Royal Musical Association. She has published several articles on Handel, and her edition for the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe of Handel’s Dettingen Te Deum and Dettingen Anthem was published by Bärenreiter in 2016. She is regularly invited to give talks at Göttingen International Handel-Festival, and her book Handel's Messiah: the Creative Process was published in 2024.

Amanda is also a musette player, baroque violinist and recorder player, specialising in historically informed performance. Artistic Director of Baroque In The North, she has played and recorded with many of the leading British and European period-instrument ensembles.

Her debut musette album, Music for French Kings, was well-received on its release in 2022, and featured on BBC Radio 3’s Early Music Show. She appears on several recordings with Les Talens Lyrique and Ex Cathedra, as well as a recording of newly-edited and previously–unrecorded music by Giovanni Ruggieri (Aberdeen Early Music Collective, Vox Regis, 2018) and another of music by Gottfried Finger (Harmonious Society of Tickle Fiddle Gentlemen, Ramée, 2019). Her second musette album, Friends in High Places will be released in 2026 on the First Hands Records label.

Amanda was Director of the University of Manchester Baroque Orchestra, 2006-2023, Visiting Performance Fellow at the University of Aberdeen 2010-2019, and has given masterclasses at various universities and conservatoires in the UK, and at the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music in Riga.

• Handel
• Editing
• Performance Practice
• Musical culture in the North East of Scotland in the 18th century
• French Baroque music

Amanda is currently researching Musette repertoire at the Second Stuart Court in Exile (Rome), some of the findings of which will be presented in her forthcoming musette album, Friends in High Places.