Past Festivals featuring our Organs

In collaboration with the Westfield Center and various other departments within the University, the Cornell organs have variously starred in a variety of conferences and concert festivals. Here you can find links to further information on a selection.

2019: New meets Old: Collaborative Confrontations

A weekend festival to inaugurate the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, with a series of concerts featuring Cornell keyboardists and a keyboard colloquy of current music graduate students in the PhD and DMA programs, showing how Cornell's keyboard collection aids and furthers their academic work. Both organs in Sage Chapel took part in the opening concert of 'conversations' between the piano and organ with Annette Richards at the consoles, David Yearsley presented a concert of Bach at the baroque organ, and even Barnes Hall's chamber organ took part in the graduate colloquy.

Global Baroque Conference Banner

2018: The Organ in the Global Baroque

A festival in honor of the late Jacques van Oortmerssen, this placed the Anabel Taylor Baroque Organ at the center of an exploration of international networks in the baroque era, with a special guest appearance by our Neapolitan Organ too. Through a series of lectures, paper presentations and ample concerts, the festival posed questions about organ building and trade networks, organists and travel, global materials and musical technologies, colonialism, organs and the material exploitation of the natural world, the organ trade in Asia and South America, and the baroque organ in today’s world.

2016: Keyboard Networks

A short conference as part of a yearlong project on keyboard cultures and technologies from the French Revolution to the present. The metaphor of networks brings together recent inquiries into the embodiment, performance, and individual discipline of keyboard playing, on the one hand, with scholarly analyses of music’s imbrication in politics; an exploration of Charles Burney's musical networks saw university organists Annette Richards and David Yearsley perform on a variety of keyboards in Barnes Hall, including the Dallas Morse Coors Chamber Organ. Meanwhile DMA-candidate Jonathan Schakel took a trip to Italy with a concert of Frescobaldi and Corelli in the company of violinist David Sariti and Sage Chapel's Neapolitan Organ: Read More

2015: Environs Messiaen: Nature Rendered at the Keyboard

A wide-ranging festival exploring Messiaen's interest in birdsong, ranging from piano concerts at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to an opportunity to hear the Aeolian-Skinner in concert at Sage Chapel.

CPE Bach Conference Poster

2014: Sensation and Sensibility at the 18th-Century Keyboard

A festival celebrating the highly affective music of C.P.E. Bach, seeking to hear it in terms of contemporary theories of sentiment and the sublime. Concerts, featuring the full range of 18th-century keyboards (the Baroque organ and Chamber organ in Barnes Hall, alongside clavichords, pianos and more!), explored the constellation of philosophical and aesthetic ideas, and the conditions of musical production and reception, clustered around concepts of sentiment, feeling, and sensation in the late eighteenth century. 

2011: Keyboard Culture in 18th-Century Berlin

The inaugural festival celebrating the Cornell Baroque Organ.

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