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Join us tomorrow at 12:30 PM in Anabel Taylor Chapel for a captivating 40-minute program “Ancient and Modern, c. 1773” performed on the Baroque Organ recently featured in the Cornell Daily Sun article "The Titans of Anabel Taylor Chapel: Richards, Yearsley and the Baroque Organ" by Aidan Goldberg '25.
We are extending the deadline to submit proposals for the Forte | Piano 2025, a major international festival to be held from August 5-10, 2025. Submit the proposal by October 15, 2024.
We are delighted to announce that David Yearsley, Herbert Gussman Professor of Music, has just released a colorful new album, Handel’s Organ Banquet, on False Azure Records, a label founded by Ryan McCullough. Listen to the album on Bandcamp.
Experience a program of Haydn and Beethoven brought by the Smithsonian Academy Orchestra, conducted by Kenneth Slowik, and featuring our Postdoctoral Artist-in-Residence Patricia García Gil.
Organ music at Cornell begins again this Wednesday at 12:30pm, as we launch our Fall 2024 recital series with Midday Music for Organ in Sage Chapel.
Join us on Friday, September 20th, 2024 at Anabel Taylor Chapel at 7:30pm.
Join us on Friday, September 13th, 2024 at the historic A.D. White House at 5pm for the first Salon Project of the Fall 2024 semester with Malcolm Bilson: “The Opening Piano Solo of Beethoven‘s Fourth Piano Concerto: A Short Talk on a (perhaps) Long Subject“.
The CCHK opens the Fall 2024 semester with a fortepiano recital featuring the new Postdoctoral Artist in Residence Patricia Garcia Gil in a program titled “Spanish Serenades and Chopinian Charms" on Tuesday, September 10th, 2024 at 7:30pm at Barnes Hall.
We invite proposals for recitals, talks and innovative presentations from performers, scholars, organologists, builders, and technicians for an international festival to be held at Cornell University from August 5-10, 2025. Deadline is extended to October 15, 2024.
Join us July 30 - August 3 for the Forte/Piano Summer Academy events featuring Chamber Music Collective student and faculty performances, salons, and showcase concerts, all free and open to the public.
Join us tomorrow, April 16, at 7:30pm in Barnes Hall for a full-length recital “The Dawn of Modernism” by a guest artist Boris Berman, an internationally sought-after teacher and performer.
An evening of invention, surprise, and collaboration with two of today’s most distinguished experts on improvisation in historical styles, William Porter and Edoardo Bellotti, and the winner in 2020 of the American Guild of Organists’ National Competition in Organ Improvisation, Ivan Bosnar. This event is a collaboration between Cornell, Syracuse University, and Eastman School of Music.
The Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards invites applications for small grants to support research by members of the Cornell community relating to the history and culture of keyboard instruments.
Extreme Pianism: The Technologies, Gimmicks, and Aesthetics of Nineteenth-Century Virtuosity
International star pianist and CCHK Artist-in-Residence Alexander Melnikov brings his extraordinary expertise on both modern and historic pianos to Cornell for a residency on February 18th-21st.
Neil Saccamano (Associate Professor Emeritus of English) joins Annette Richards (Professor of Music and University Organist) for a conversation about her recent book The Temple of Fame and Friendship: Portraits, Music, and History in the C. P. E. Bach Circle (Chicago, 2022), with performances on piano and clavichord by Xak Bjerken, Roger Moseley, and David Yearsley.
Emahoy Tsege-Mariam Gebru at 100 is a two-day symposium celebrating the music and life of the legendary Ethiopian composer, pianist, and nun, Emahoy Tsege-Mariam Gebru. The events will include panel discussions about Emahoy’s life and archive, and presentations of Emahoy’s music (some never yet performed) in live concert performances, and from her personal recordings. All events will be free and open to the public, and hosted on Cornell’s campus.
The final salon of the Fall 2023 semester features a Spanish fortepianist Patricia Gill with conversation and music centered around Marianna Martines (1744-1812) and her keyboard sonatas.
In the Midday Music for Organ recital on Wednesday November 15th, guest organist Edoardo Bellotti of the University of the Arts, Bremen (Germany) and the Eastman School of Music will explore the early 18th-century fan-culture that bloomed around Corelli’s fame and legacy
Previously scheduled for Friday, November 3, the Keyboard Salon with Boris Berman, an internationally acclaimed pianist and pedagogue, has been postponed. Please check the events page for the most up-to-date schedule.
Guest organist Daniel Minnick joins us this Wednesday (Nov 1) from the Eastman School of Music to perform on the Aeolian-Skinner organ in Sage Chapel.
Jeffrey Snedeker will perform a Midday Music for Organ with a program featuring music inspired by the natural music of birdsong.
Lucy Fitz Gibbon and Ryan McCullough are at CCHK to perform Brahms on Friday (9/22) and Saturday (9/23).
Midday Music for Organ, Fall 2023, to begin this Wednesday, September 6. Across the semester, organ recitals this fall offer music from six centuries and three continents on three organs played by five guest recitalists and the University Organist.
The first Salon in the CCHK’s Fall 2023 series is this Friday.
This symposium asks how notions of sustainability might prompt us to think anew about keyboard histories, embedded as they are in ecologies of nature and commerce, artifice and art, craft and industry. To what extent are those histories, and the instruments that embody them, sustainable into an uncertain future?
CCHK will be the home for a Mini-Academy with internationally acclaimed artist-teachers and selected graduate students, hosting masterclasses and lectures in preparation for the 2nd International Chopin Competition on Period Instruments. Join us on May 13 and 14 for public recitals.
Guest organist Kola Owolabi visits Cornell to perform his program, "Eclectic Inspiration," on the Aeolian-Skinner organ in Sage Chapel.
Join us this Friday, March 17 for the latest iteration in our salon series at the A. D. White House.
Join us for two exciting concerts this week, featuring Professors David Yearsley and Annette Richards.
For this unique occasion, Mike will make use of the CCHK's 1850 Pleyel "pianino," an instrument of unusual artistic merit that was a mainstay of Chopin's career as a composer and teacher. Works include a selection of those Chopin composed during his 1838–39 stay in Majorca and his late masterpiece, the Sonata in B Minor, Op. 58.
Join us this Friday, February 3 to welcome organist Anne Laver in a program of dances, chorales, and fugues spanning five centuries on the Baroque-style organ in Anabel Taylor chapel.
The CCHK is thrilled to welcome Sezi Seskir (fortepiano) and Keiran Campbell (cello) on Friday, January 27 for the first salon of our Spring 2023 series, The Salon Project, co-sponsored with the Society for the Humanities.
From full length concerts and organ recitals to shorter lunchtime offerings and early evening salons, from early pianos to the Aeolian-Skinner organ, with faculty, students, and distinguished guest artists, the CCHK's Spring 2023 series runs the gamut of keyboard history and culture.
In a full roster of 13 organ recitals this semester we offer a series of glimpses into the extraordinarily long history of the instrument and its music, with Cornell’s organists and two special guests at Cornell’s three recital instruments.
Published by the University of Chicago Press, Annette Richards' new book, The Temple of Fame and Friendship: Portraits, Music, and History in the C. P. E. Bach Circle, examines the renowned portrait collection assembled by C. P. E. Bach, J. S. Bach’s second son.
We are delighted to welcome longtime friends of the CCHK, pianist Ryan McCullough and vocalist Lucy Fitz Gibbon, back to campus for the semester’s final salon event on Friday, December 2. In the meantime, listen to their new recording, “the labor of forgetting.”
Join us on Wednesday, November 2 during the usual Midday Music for Organ timeslot (12:30–1:15pm) to enjoy a special presentation delivered by world-renowned pianolist and expert on the history of mechanical music, Rex Lawson.
Join us for a special performance by composer Jerome Begin and pianist David Friend (Cornell ’19). The duo performs their GRAMMY-nominated album, Post-, in Barnes Hall.
Our previously scheduled salon, “Piano Players and Player Pianos: Mechanical Instruments, Human Performances,” has been postponed and replaced with a new salon, “The Young Robert Schumann.” The event takes place on Friday, October 28 at 5PM in the Guerlac Room of Cornell’s historic A. D. White House.
Having been painstakingly cleaned pipe-by-pipe, the reeds fully restored, and the wind chests releathered, the university’s treasured Aeolian-Skinner Organ is finally complete again, and closer to the original vision of its designer, the legendary G. Donald Harrison, than it has been for a very long time.
A History of Decay: Developing a Sonic Archive for the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards
The CCHK's inaugural Forte/Piano Summer Academy will take place next week, from July 31–August 7, on Cornell's Ithaca campus. All events are free and open to the public.
The roster of admitted pianists to our inaugural Forte/Piano Summer Academy, to be held on Cornell's Ithaca campus this July–August, has been announced. The line-up boasts exciting young artists from across Europe, Asia, and North and South America, and from high-school to post-doctoral levels.
The CCHK is pleased to reprise “The Piano Trios of Robert Schumann," featuring Professor Xak Bjerken's trio, the Taliesin Trio, which was previously given as part of our salon series at the A. D. White House. This special Mother's Day event will take place on Sunday, May 8 at the Ithaca Waldorf School.
To celebrate International Women's Day, Lucy Fitz Gibbon (Cornell's interim director of vocal studies) organized a master class and recital for students in the voice and piano studios that featured art song and solo piano repertoire by women composers.
The CCHK is excited to continue our new Friday evening Salon series as we segue into the sunnier side of Spring 2022.
Our space at 726 University Avenue has seen extensive use for external teaching. We have been able to share the resources of our center with those outside Cornell through digital technology and we have hosted guest teaching artists and students on site.
Stockhausen’s MANTRA (1970), to be performed by our fellow keyboarding colleagues Andrew Zhou and Ryan McCullough of HereNowHear, amalgamates electronics with the acoustic piano in ways that blur the line between the analog and the digital.
Over the course of January–February 2022, the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboard and its affiliate organizations, the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies and Cornell ReSounds, put on two conferences devoted to cutting-edge approaches to historical keyboards.