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This fall, the Midday Music for Organ series presents Soundtracks to Six Chapters in the History of the Organ. Each of the six Wednesday lunchtime recitals follows a different theme, juxtaposing the ancient with the contemporary, the Baroque with the modern, and the old with the new.
Hosted by the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards and Cornell University's Department of Music, the Chamber Music Collective (CMC) returns to Ithaca this June, presenting three evening concerts that explore the theme of “recreation”—a concept that embraces renewal, transformation, and the collaborative spirit of musical performance.
Registration for the 2026 Fortepiano Tech Academy at the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards is now open! Join us for two days of instruction by Ken Eschete and Ken Walkup on Friday and Saturday, June 26 & 27, 2026, with an opening evening reception on Thursday, June 25.
Barnes Hall hosted a one-of-a-kind performance on Friday, April 25, as part of the larger "Keyboard Energies" symposium. The concert featured a remarkable convergence of 11 keyboard instruments — from harpsichord and clavichord to organ, fortepiano, modern piano, and multiple generations of synthesizers — with occasional additions of guitar and drums. Thirteen performers from Cornell…
A $5 million gift from the Abraham J. & Phyllis Katz Foundation to the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards (CCHK) will secure the future of its museum-quality holdings, as well as a rich program of concerts, festivals and educational offerings.
Puerto Rican director, actor, educator, mask-maker, deviser and artivist Robi Arce-Martínez will present on the historical and contemporary impact of the commedia dell’arte tradition, focusing on its origins in street theatre and its constant yet ever-changing configurations and representations over the intervening centuries. Free and open to the public.
The CCHK’s final semester salon will explore possibilities of melodic ornamentation in the music of Mozart and Chopin presented by CCHK Visiting Fellow Gebriel Merril-Steskal. By examining model compositions with written out ornaments of repeated themes, we can learn not only how to embellish one instance of a theme, but also how to structure a…
The University Organist brings the 2024-25 Cornell year to a close with two major and much-loved works by J. S. Bach. The program opens with the variations on the chorale “Sei gegrüsset, Jesu gütig,” which movingly explore the manifold colors and textures of the Baroque organ; it concludes with the magnificent Toccata, Adagio and Fugue,…
Guest organist Jeffrey Snedeker presents “L’Orgue Mystique: Music for the Feasts of Ascension and Pentecost from 17th and 20th century France.” The evocative space of Sage Chapel and its Aeolian-Skinner organ provide an ideal milieu for mystical and transcendent works by 20th-century French organists Charles Tournemire, Olivier Messiaen and Maurice Duruflé, composed for the Christian…
How might keyboard instruments be apprehended as interfaces and archives as well as material and historical assemblages? What are the elemental sources and sinks of the energy that they consume and produce? And how might the answers to these questions help us to sustain keyboard culture into an uncertain future?
In this third-annual celebration of Earth Day, the Cornell Organists turn off the electric blower. With the four large bellows in the Anabel Taylor tower operated by human pumpers, their colleagues down at the console will present a varied program of music loosely themed around ideas of the natural world, and the celebration of the…
Adam Langeveld, postdoctoral researcher in Astronomy at Cornell, explores the extraordinary organ culture of late 19th-century Paris. The program includes the complete Suite Gothique by Léon Boëllman as well as the 2nd movement Allegro Cantabile and the famous Toccata from Widor’s Symphony No. 5.
Inspired by both seasonal and cosmic ennui, Baritone Jean Bernard Cerin and Pianist Sezi Seskir explore how French, Canadian, and Haitian composers have explored melancholy and escapism in the mélodie and piano music.
Johann Sebastian Bach turns 340 on March 31st. In David Yearsley’s annual celebration of the composer’s birthday, the elegantly energetic Trio Sonata in D Minor and a canonic Orgelbüchlein chorale are framed by the sublime frenzy and magisterial counterpoint of the Toccata and Fugue in F Major.
Join us for a unique collaboration between the Johnson Museum of Art and the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards: next Thursday, our artist-in-residence Patricia Garcia Gil and Seymour R. Askin Jr. ’47 Curator of Earlier European and American Art at the Museum, Andrew C. Weislogel, will immerse your eyes and ears into music culture of…
Anette Richard's organ recital in Anabel Taylor Chapel, originally planned for this coming Tuesday, March 11th, is postponed to Thursday, May 8th at 7:30pm. We hope that you will be able to join us for that exciting exploratory program at the end of the semester.
We are excited to announce the fourth meeting of the Chamber Music Collective, a six-day intensive chamber music program (June 22 - June 27, 2025) dedicated to repertoire from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Applications are now being accepted from advanced music students and young professionals in strings, piano, and voice.
A program combining the little-known classical string trios by Haydn and Boccherini alongside Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G Minor.
Jack Yarborough (DMA candidate, piano) makes his organ recital debut performing works by Klaus Lang and Girolamo Frescobaldi. Juxtaposing early and contemporary music, both the Aeolian Skinner and Vicedomini organs will fill Sage with sounds and temperaments from the past and present.
Playful and experimental, 20th-century Argentine-German composer Mauricio Kagel’s “Rrrrrr” Suite for Organ consists of 8 short movements, each inspired by a name, or musical term, or organ stop (or whatever…) beginning with the letter ‘R’. In this exploration of the versatility and humorous potential of the Anabel Taylor organ, Annette Richards juxtaposes Kagel’s “Rrrrr” with…
Born in 1986, Louis Cole is an LA-based singer and multi-instrumentalist who plays the roles of songwriter, performer, and producer. Cole’s tastes were formed via exposure to a wide variety of music: on his recent albums, Miles Davis rubs shoulders with Meshuggah, Stevie Wonder with Skrillex, and Jamiroquai with Gustav Mahler. While such eclecticism has…
Syracuse University faculty members William Knuth and Anne Laver explore the fabulous combination of violin and organ, including a Handel sonata, a contemporary Serenade by Chris DeBlasio, and the world premiere of Natalie Draper’s 2024 work Interlaced. The program also includes new solo organ music by Draper and excerpts of Bach’s Partita in D Minor…
One of today’s most sought-after concert organists performing on the international stage, Isabelle Demers (Professor of Organ at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University) brings her extraordinary musicianship to the Aeolian-Skinner organ. Renowned for her virtuoso technique and brilliant command of the complete organ repertoire, her focus in this recital will be on the…
Inspired by both seasonal and cosmic ennui, Baritone Jean Bernard Cerin and Pianist Sezi Seskir explore how French, Canadian, and Haitian composers have explored melancholy and escapism in the mélodie and piano music.
In a varied program on both the meantone Italian baroque organ and the eclectic Aeolian-Skinner, guest organist Anne Spink explores the depth and breadth of the repertoire of the King of Instruments.
This lecture-recital will explore the differences between Viennese and English pianos at the turn of the 19th century. It will include a demonstration on how Haydn wrote differently for Viennese and English pianos, performing a fantasy he wrote in Vienna on a replica of a Schantz piano from 1800, and one of his “London” sonatas…
“Nothing is Lost”: The Reign of Terror may have claimed Antoine Lavoisier’s life, but his revolutionary contributions to science have endured. His legacy was preserved by his closest collaborator, Marie-Anne Paulze (Madame Lavoisier), who, in a male-dominated field, created a space for herself and hosted salons that blended science with the latest musical trends.
At 5 pm this Friday, December 13th, at the historic A.D. White House, Isaac Dorio, Federico Ercoli, Ariel Mo, and Matías de Roux present research they have pursued over the course of “Historical Keyboarding,” a seminar taught by CCHK director Roger Moseley this semester. The salon will include music by Jan Ladislav Dussek, Robert Schumann,…
About ten years after the appearance of Frédéric Chopin Préludes Op. 28, Alkan publishedhis 25 Préludes in 1847, with the peculiar double destination “for piano or organ”. Churchorganist and piano virtuoso himself, Alkan explored with these pieces diverse soundworlds while expanding a genre that had moved with Chopin quickly away from the free-improvisatory-introductory short piece…
Our next salon of this season is on Friday, November 15th, traditionally at 5pm in the A.D. White House. "Steps to Perfection: Piano Teaching from Clementi to Chopin" is inspired by the mutual enrichment that arises from the interaction between teachers and students. Patricia Garcia Gil and Andrew Willis will host a conversation around the…
The weekend of November 1-2, the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards presents Chao Yuen-Ren’s Art of Songs, a two-day concert-symposium-exhibit celebrating the groundbreaking Chinese-American composer and Cornell alumnus. Join us for live performances, scholarly discussions, and an online exhibition exploring Chao's fusion of Chinese and Western musical traditions. For full event details, visit this page.
Patricia García Gil, artist-in-residence at the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, will present “Voices of Influence: Exploring Power Dynamics in the Conservation of Musical Heritage in Colonial Latin America” at the Johnson Museum of Art’s upcoming symposium, Reimagining the Américas. Her presentation will focus on María Antonia Palacios, a Black enslaved woman in Chile, who…
ALL THE WRONG NOTES: CHARLES IVES AT 150 continues on October 25 featuring a recital of all four rarely-heard Violin Sonatas, performed by guest violinist KJ McDonald and DMA pianist Ariel Mo. Ives once recalled the dramatic (or dramatized) moment when he presented the First Violin Sonata to an unnamed violinist, who, after a couple…
The opening concert of ALL THE WRONG NOTES: CHARLES IVES AT 150 is this Sunday night (October 20) at 7:30pm in Barnes Hall. Soprano Rachel Schutz and Prof. Xak Bjerken perform a selection of works from Ives’ 114 Songs and inaugurate the latest addition to Cornell’s keyboard collection, a Broadwood piano from 1865. Beloved American…
On November 1-2, the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards will host a concert-symposium-exhibit celebrating the legacy of Chao Yuen-Ren, a pioneering Chinese-American polymath and Cornell alumnus (Class of 1914). This two-day event will bring together performances, scholarly discussions, and an online exhibition, celebrating Chao’s groundbreaking contributions to modern Chinese art music.
The century and a half bounded by Cristofori’s invention of a hammered keyboard mechanism and Chopin’s death in 1849 saw the world of stringed keyboard instruments completely upended by the rise of the piano, as it developed from a curiosity into anecessity. Featuring the 1749 Silbermann replica by Paul McNulty and the 1843 Pleyel grand,…
Join us tomorrow at 12:30 PM in Anabel Taylor Chapel for a captivating 40-minute program “Ancient and Modern, c. 1773” with music by Stanley, Praetorius, and C. P. E. Bach. Annette Richards will guide listeners through mid-18th century London, Berlin, Dresden and Hamburg, inspired by Dr. Charles Burney's travels for his History of Music. Discover…
Forte | Piano 2025, a major international festival to be hosted by the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards (CCHK) and co-sponsored by the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies will be held from August 5-10, 2025. Featuring recitals, presentations, and conversations among performers, scholars, organologists, builders, and technicians, the festival will be a celebration of…
The CCHK is delighted to announce that David Yearsley, Herbert Gussman Professor of Music, has just released a colorful new album, Handel’s Organ Banquet.
Kenneth Slowik brings the Smithsonian Academy Orchestra to Cornell for a program of Haydn’s “Oxford” Symphony, Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, and Haydn’s Piano Concerto in G Major, featuring the CCHK’s 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, on the sometimes spicy, sometimes cantankerous, and always alluring Italian baroque organ. David Yearsley and Annette Richards will play music from 17th-century Italy and Germany, focusing on two landmark…
Dr. Bálint Karosi has been recently appointed as Director of Music at First Presbyterian hurch of Philadelphia. Previously he served as Director of Music at Saint Peter’s Church in Midtown Manhattan. After winning the 2008 Bach Prize in Leipzig, Dr. Karosi has been in demand as a recitalist and clinician worldwide and widely known and…
In the first Salon Project of the Fall 2024 semester, Malcolm Bilson will discuss “The Opening Piano Solo of Beethoven‘s Fourth Piano Concerto: A Short Talk on a (perhaps) Long Subject“ followed by works of Schubert, Beethoven, Chopin, and Mendelssohn.
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.”
The Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, co-sponsored by the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, invites 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. We particularly encourage individual and collaborative proposals that combine insights drawn…
Join us for the upcoming concerts with the Forte/Piano Summer Academy 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. In this performance, Berman will bring the radical sounds of the extraordinary early 20th-century piano repertoire, including Prokofiev’s “Fugitive Visions,” Scriabin’s “Five Preludes,” Op. 74,…
Join us on Friday, April 26 for a day of workshops and concerts around Cornell campus exploring improvisation at the keyboards. In this workshop/symposium the focus is on the instruments themselves and how they influence musical creativity, a crucial but still little considered element in the study of improvisation. Guest artists include distinguished experts on…
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. Projects may combine research interests in history, performance, composition, improvisation, and technology, from the medieval organ to the latest digital keyed instruments, and across any global…
Salon with Theodora Serbanescu-Martin, Friday March 1, 5pm at A.D. White House