Upcoming Events

Upcoming events for fall 2026 include the Cornell Organ Recital series, as well as the usual Piano Series at the Johnson Museum of Art, Friday salons at A.D. While House, and scholarly symposiums, all under the theme of Reframing the Golden Record.

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. New this year, Cornell introduces a series honoring longtime Cornell University Organist Donald R. M. Paterson, featuring two full-length recitals. See the full semester schedule below.

All events are free and open to the public.

Soundtracks to Six Chapters in the History of the Organ

Wind Power

Wednesday, September 2, 12:30–1:10 p.m.
Sage Chapel
David Yearsley and Annette Richards

Wind Power explores the organ’s capacity for endless breath. The program travels from the sublime slowness of Olivier Messiaen’s "L’Apparition de l’Église éternelle" to the hot-air fantasy of J. S. Bach’s infamous Toccata and Fugue in D minor; from Girolamo Frescobaldi’s magical coaxing of tuneful counterpoint from a free-spirited bird in "Capriccio sopra Il Cucco" to the breathless dance of twenty-first-century Canadian composer Rachel Laurin’s "Toccatina"; and finally to a Cornellian Bolero on the Aeolian-Skinner organ by David Yearsley, cleared once again for take-off.

Color and Light

Wednesday, September 23, 12:30–1:10 p.m.
Anabel Taylor Chapel
Annette Richards

Color and Light fills Anabel Taylor Chapel with the spectral timbres of the German Baroque organ, heard in music by Dieterich Buxtehude, Georg Böhm, Arvo Pärt, and Nikolaus Bruhns.

Lunch Bachs

Wednesday, October 7, 12:30–1:10 p.m.
Anabel Taylor Chapel
David Yearsley

Lunch Bachs invites audiences to marvel and mug, weep and wince at three midday masterpieces by J. S. Bach, performed by David Yearsley, with a side order of an ill-advised organ duet served up by that scurrilous would-be son of the clan, P. D. Q. Bach.

Echoes and Elaborations

Wednesday, October 28, 12:30–1:10 p.m.
Sage Chapel
Tim Pyper

In Echoes and Elaborations, the organ enters the nineteenth century with music by Felix Mendelssohn and César Franck, performed on the Aeolian-Skinner organ in Sage Chapel by Cornellian Tim Pyper (DMA, 2011). The program also features new music by contemporary composer and Cornellian Zachary Wadsworth (DMA, 2012).

Reflecting Bach

Wednesday, November 11, 12:30–1:10 p.m.
Anabel Taylor Chapel
Annette Richards, with colleagues and friends from the Eastman Rochester Organ Initiative

Reflecting Bach asks how J. S. Bach’s contemporaries, sons, students, and successors responded to the beauty, virtuosity, and originality of his organ music. This program welcomes colleagues and friends from the Eastman Rochester Organ Initiative, whose annual festival comes to Ithaca this year.

Tradition and Experimentation

Wednesday, December 2, 12:30–1:10 p.m.
Sage Chapel
Cornell organists and friends

The final Midday Music for Organ program of the fall explores Tradition and Experimentation in the Advent and Christmas seasons, with music by Louis Vierne, J. S. Bach, Nicolas de Grigny, Jeanne Demessieux, and Olivier Messiaen.

The Donald R. M. Paterson Organ Recital Series

Double Vision

Sunday, September 27, 3:00 p.m.
Sage Chapel
Annette Richards and David Yearsley

Double Vision presents original music and transcriptions for two organists at one instrument, including works by members of the Bach family, Antonio Soler, W. A. Mozart, Gioachino Rossini, and others.

Distinguished Guest Artist: Renée Anne Louprette

Tuesday, November 17, 7:30 p.m.
Anabel Taylor Chapel
Renée Anne Louprette

Cornell welcomes distinguished guest artist Renée Anne Louprette for an evening of organ music spanning the seventeenth through twenty-first centuries. Her program features works by Dieterich Buxtehude, Matthias Weckmann, Girolamo Frescobaldi, György Ligeti, and Régis Campo.

Music is one of humanity's oldest technologies of communication. Through sound, gesture, performance, and play, it creates meaning, preserves memory, negotiates identity, and imagines shared worlds across cultures and generations.

Launched in 1977, the Golden Record was conceived as a message from Earth: a curated collection of images, sounds, greetings, and music intended to represent humanity to other forms of life. This year, the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards takes the Golden Record as a starting point to ask how humans communicate meaning across bodies, cultures, traditions, technologies, and forms of listening—with keyboards at the center as active research partners.

Some of the humanistic questions the project poses are: Who would we include? What music would represent humanity now? What voices and traditions were missing the first time? Is it even worth sending? Music is at the center because it stages questions of translation, embodiment, memory, pattern, and meaning in real time, making it an ideal point of departure for broader humanistic and scientific inquiry.

Instead of trying to create a perfect “record of humanity,” the project imagines a living, unfinished archive: more open, more collaborative, and more aware of its own limits. Through music, sound, science, and technology, it asks how we represent ourselves and how we might listen differently to the world, to other forms of life, and perhaps even to signals from beyond Earth. This is also where the more scientific side of the project comes in, especially around human and non-human forms of listening, communication, and meaning.

The programming will reflect on these questions, with the fall semester more centered on the humanistic side and on the origins of some of these questions, and the spring semester more focused on the future, the non-human, forms of communication beyond earth, and imaginary worlds.

Part I: Embodiment, Playfulness, and Performance as Communication

The first part of the project focuses on embodied communication: gesture, posture, movement, play, oral tradition, and performance. At its center is commedia dell’arte, whose archetypes recur across cultures and historical periods, offering an embodied pathway into shared patterns of meaning. The three events are accompanied by a pedagogical component, with workshops in interpretation, historical dance, playfulness, and embodied performance for Cornell students and the broader public.

Commedia dell’arte, Pantomime, and Embodied Musical Meaning

5 PM, September 11
A. D. White House

This opening event introduces commedia dell’arte as a model for interpreting eighteenth-century music through gesture, character, timing, and embodied interaction. Through presentations and musical examples the event explores Mozart’s Musik zu einer Pantomime, the Concerto in F major for Three Keyboards and Orchestra, and ballet-pantomime sketches as performative materials that can be played with, recombined, and reanimated opening the door to the full theatrical range of Mozart’s world: mischief, ambiguity, erotic charge, and even slapstick. 

Mozart in France: Theatrical and Pictorial Contexts

September 29, Johnson Museum of Art
12:30 PM Lynch Conference Room, Johnson Museum Sixth Floor
1:30 PM Robinson Lecture Hall, Johnson Museum Level 2L

Works from the Johnson Museum will offer a visual counterpart to the world of fêtes galantes, commedia dell’arte, pantomime ballet, dance, flirtation, and spectacle associated with Mozart’s ballet-pantomime Les petits riens [The Little Nothings], choreographed by Jean-Georges Noverre and performed at the Paris Opera in 1778.

The event will include presentations by Andrew C. Weislogel (Acting Chief Curator at the Johnson Museum) and Rebecca Harris-Warrick (Cornell Professor Emerita and specialist in French Baroque music and dance); performances by Cynthia Roberts (violin professor at The Juilliard School) and Patricia Garcia Gil (CCHK Postdoctoral Associate and Artist in Residence); and a practical historical dance workshop led by Julia Bengtsson (New York Baroque Dance Company), accompanied by students from the Cornell Orchestra.

The event is free and open to students and the general public.

Sociability, Playfulness, and Eighteenth-Century Performance

7:30 PM, September 30
Barnes Hall

The culminating concert centers on Mozart’s Concerto in F major for Three Keyboards and Orchestra, K. 242, performed by Roger Moseley, Federico Ercoli, and Patricia García Gil on three eighteenth-century-style keyboards from the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards: Stein, Schantz, and Walter. Joined by a chamber ensemble from Cornell Orchestras under the direction of Gabriela Gómez Estévez, with Cynthia Roberts as guest concertmaster and string coach, the concerto foregrounds music-making as a playful social act: a lively exchange of imitation, response, wit, and shared virtuosity.

The program also includes Vivaldi’s Concerto for Strings in D major, RV 121, whose brilliant, physically charged writing brings the Italian side of the project into focus, and selections from Mozart’s Les petits riens, where music enters the world of ballet-pantomime: gesture, movement, character, flirtation, and comic timing. Inspired by the mischievous theatricality that runs through Mozart’s music, this performance will set Les petits riens back into motion, rearranging numbers not securely attributed to Mozart in unexpected ways and allowing playful collisions between sound worlds to emerge.

Part II. Athanasius Kircher: Music, Machines, and the Marvelous 

November 6

Carl A. Kroch Library Rare and Manuscript Collections TBD

This program frames Kircher as a catalyst for larger questions: how sound produces knowledge, how technologies shape creativity, how music acts on the mind and body, and how ideas circulate across disciplines, institutions, and geographies.

A collaboration with Laurence Ferri, Curator of the pre-1800 Collections in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, it will include performances and lectures around fantastic instruments, algorithmic music, healing with music and its broader implications for the relationship between mind and body, and the concept of a mission.

Part III. Myth and Origins

November 20

2:30 PM, Johnson Museum of Art
5 PM, A. D. White House at 5 PM

In collaboration with Verity Platt and Athena Kirk from the department of Classics, this program centered on myth—through figures such as Dido, Orpheus, and other ancient characters—explores the roots of Western civilization, where many ideas about love, loss, heroism, fate, memory, sacrifice, and the relationship between humans and the divine first took shape.

At the same time, these myths are not only “Western” stories. Their themes can be recognized across many cultures, where similar figures and narratives speak about exile, death, music, transformation, creation, and the search for meaning. In this way, myth becomes a bridge rather than a boundary: a way to understand the origins of Western values while also opening a wider dialogue about shared human questions and the many ways different cultures have imagined where we come from.