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?
Keyboard Energies will address these questions via the intertwined histories of keyboard instruments, experimentation, and electricity across 20th-century New York State. By way of papers by eminent scholars, performances by musicians from across the region, and multi-disciplinary reflections from far and wide, we will investigate and demonstrate the means by which keyboard cultures have been powered in New York State since Niagara Falls started generating electricity in 1882.
Performances will include a multi-keyboard extravaganza at which electrified clavichords and pianos will be heard alongside their acoustic predecessors and harpsichord strings will vibrate in sympathy with the oscillators of the Minimoog synthesizer (designed and manufactured in Trumansburg).
For a full schedule of events (all open and free to the public), please visit the symposium's page.
The CCHK gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Rural Humanities Initiative, the Society for the Humanities, and the Central New York Humanities Corridor, funded by an award by the Mellon Foundation.
