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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.
On February 4–5, the CCHK’s partner organization, Cornell ReSounds, presented play | pen, a two-day virtual symposium concentrating on connections between past musical inventions and new media designs.
As a denouement to the semester, we are sharing three beautifully produced videos, including excerpts from Mike Lee’s program, “Bach’s Piano,” on September 24, and a set of highlights from the end-of-semester gala concert on December 10.
See the roundtable with eminent Brahms scholar, Jacquelyn Sholes, and a performance of Brahms’s Intermezzo in A Major Op. 118, no. 2, by Malcolm Bilson, in the videos posted in this article.
Announcement of Fall 2021 piano and organ events.
This Cornell student led project demonstrates how instruments, performance and research intersect at the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards.
The Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards is delighted to announce the arrival of Conrad Graf Opus 502 (ca. 1823-24) into our collection. The piano is the generous gift of Nancy Garrett, Professor Emeritus of Piano at the Butler School of Music, University of Texas at Austin (who is also the benefactor of our 1799 Broadwood).Opus 502 was bought...
Jen Yi (violin, Operations Research & Information Engineering '22) reflects on her participation in chamber music last fall and this semester with Madeline McCanne (piano, Chemistry '21). “Last fall, Madeline and I worked on Mozart’s Sonata for Piano and Violin, K. 304, coached by Ji Young Kim. It was an interesting semester because,...
Much of my 2018-19 academic year was spent preparing for a residency at the Museum of African American History on Nantucket Island with the Cornell Chamber Singers. Nantucket’s Quaker roots brought about an early abolitionist culture, drawing Frederick Douglass to the island in 1841 for his first public address. In March of 2018, the museum’s main...
In turbulent times, music can accompany us into places of refuge, or is itself a means of escape. Music opens up imaginary worlds. This semester’s series, Music as Refuge, reflects on these themes in a series of short recitals performed by Cornell’s pianists and organists.High points of this series are two programs by pianists Xak Bjerken and...
David Yearsley Appointed Herbert Gussman Professor Of Music
Program: All music by J. S. BachChorale Prelude: “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme,” BWV 645Chorale Prelude: “Nun komm’, der Heiden Heiland,” BWV 659Canonic Variations on the Christmas Hymn “Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her,” BWV 769aToccata and Fugue in F major, BWV 540 From the PerformerBach’s oeuvre for the organ is rich with music for...
ProgramJohn Knowles Paine: Variations on “Old Hundred”Charles-Marie Widor: Andante Sostenuto, from Symphonie no. 9, Op. 70 (“Gothique”)Max Reger: Phantasie über den Choral “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott,” Op. 27 From the PerformerWhen Bostonian John Knowles Paine premiered his Variations on “Old Hundred” in 1861, it was less than a year...
ProgramDieterich Buxtehude (1637-1707): Passacaglia in d minor, BuxWV 161Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643): Toccata terza, per l’elevazione, from Il secondo libro di Toccate (1627)Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791): Andante in F major for musical clock, K. 616Johann Ludwig Krebs (1713-1780): Chorale prelude: “Wir glauben all’ an einen Gott”...
When Covid-19 came to Ithaca in mid March, as with most other musicians, all concerts were cancelled and thus my immediate reason to practice was gone. For the first time in my life, I didn’t touch the piano for three months. I was floundering around, trying to find repertoire to inspire me—and the piece that was my refuge I present today:...
Program Works of G. F. Handel (1685-1759) arranged and elaborated by David Yearsley:Overture to Messiah (HWV 56) followed by Fugue in E minor (HWV 429)Passacaille in G (Op. 5, No. 4, HWV 399)“Lord to Thee Each Night and Day” from Theodora (HWV 68)Yearsley:Buxtehudian Fantasy on “High Above Cayuga Waters” From the PerformerOn the...
The newest addition to our instrument collection is an 1857 J. B. Streicher Opus 5294—with Viennese action—generously gifted by Alan Bostrom, a retired statistician and an accomplished amateur musician.