Chistopher H. Gibbs is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College, where he teaches music history in the College and Conservatory for Music. Gibbs also serves as the artistic co-director, together with Leon Botstein, of the Bard Music Festival, and is executive editor of the Musical Quarterly. He received his BA from Haverford College and PhD from Columbia University, and previously taught at Columbia and Haverford as well as the University at Buffalo. Gibbs is a recipient of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award and was a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies.

Gibbs is the author of The Life of Schubert (Cambridge, 2000), translated into five languages, and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Schubert (1997). He is coeditor, with Dana Gooley, of Franz Liszt and His World (Princeton, 2006) and, with Morten Solvik, of Franz Schubert and His World (Princeton, 2014). He coauthored, with Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (College Edition, 2013 and 2018). Gibbs has published extensively, including in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Opera Quarterly, 19th-Century Music, Current Musicology, and Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute. Devoted to “public musicology,” as practiced in the curation of concerts and festivals, Gibbs was the musicological director for the Schubertiade in New York and served as adviser for the bicentennial Schubert Festival at Carnegie Hall. For over twenty years, Gibbs has written the program notes for the Philadelphia Orchestra. He also frequently writes and gives pre-concert lectures for Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, among others.