Annette Richards

Given Foundation Professor in the Humanities and University Organist

Overview

As a professor of music and University Organist at Cornell University, I am a scholar and performer. I am particularly interested in intersections between music and visual culture, and in the ways European music was heard, experienced, and understood from the 17th to 19th centuries. As a concert organist I play and teach on recital series and at festivals and academies in North America and Europe. My repertoire stretches from the earliest music for the organ to works composed just yesterday, and I perform on original instruments from all periods of the organ’s long history.

Research Focus

I am currently putting the final touches to a book called Music on the Dark Side of 1800 that explores death, ghosts, automata, the grotesque, and darkness – in short, the musical uncanny. I discuss music (some of it by canonic composers, other by less well-known figures) that touches the listener and player in profound, often disconcerting, even disastrous, ways, and I show how the often deeply affective sounds of a grotesque, Baroque, or simply lost, past trouble the bodies and minds of performers and listeners alike.

As I’ve worked on this book, I’ve become increasingly interested in the history of touch and music from the 17th to 21st centuries. As philosophers, critics and listeners alike have discussed, the sense of touch lies at the heart of what music is and does. Yet music remains almost entirely absent from touch studies, just as touch has been little discussed by music scholars. I hope to fill this gap by examining musical touch from perspectives critical, philosophical, historical, neurological, and technological, with essays on touch interfaces and keyboards, hands as organs of touch and makers of music, haptics, and new musical instruments.

I am always interested in intersections across and among disciplines. My first book, Acting on the Past (2000), was a volume of essays that I edited with dance scholar Mark Franko, exploring the idea of “historical” performance studies. In my first monograph, The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (2001), I showed how the aesthetics of the English landscape garden informed late 18th-century German thinking about instrumental music, and especially improvisation. My most recent book, The Temple of Fame and Friendship (2022), was a study of portraiture, sensibility, and ideas of music history in the circle of C. P. E. Bach, focusing on the extraordinary collection of music-related portraits assembled by C. P. E. Bach before his death in 1788. My rediscovery and reconstruction of that collection was supported by the Packard Humanities Institute, with whom I published a catalogue of it in 2012.

My other big ongoing project is a new history of the organ, which I’m writing with David Yearsley, for Cambridge University Press. This will be a kaleidoscopic and somewhat idiosyncratic account of the long, complex, and infinitely varied story of the King of Instruments, and one that grows out of the popular course Professor Yearsley and I co-teach at Cornell on the History, Art, and Technology of the Organ.

Performance

As a performer, I am a busy organ recitalist, giving concerts across the United States and Europe. My repertoire is broad, and includes contemporary music as well as early music, with recent recitals focusing on Neapolitan music around 1600, American organ culture c. 1940, Messiaen’s "La Nativité du Seigneur," and the mid-18th-century music of the Bach circle. As far as possible I try to perform on original instruments and their historically-inspired 20th-and 21st-century counterparts. At Cornell, I organize and perform on regular lunchtime and evening organ recital series to which all members of the Cornell community and broader public are warmly invited. I also teach studio organ lessons, and anyone interested in studying the organ should please get in touch!

I am on the advisory board of several European organ research, restoration and reconstruction projects, and I am a regular member of the faculty at the Gothenburg International Organ Academy in Sweden. I have long collaborated with David Yearsley, with whom I won first prize at the Bruges Early Music Festival in the competition for organ duo, and with whom I edited the organ works of C. P. E. Bach for the C. P. E. Bach: Complete Works edition. My recordings include the Complete Works of Melchior Schildt (on the Loft label) on the historic organ at Roskilde Cathedral, Denmark; and music from the library of Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia on Cornell’s landmark German baroque-style organ (also on Loft).

From 2007 to 2018 I was the Executive Director of the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, and I founded the journal Keyboard Perspectives, a yearbook dedicated to historical performance and keyboard culture. I won a major grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the Westfield Center at Cornell and went on to establish the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, curating programming around a world-class collection of early keyboard instruments. I was also responsible for bringing a remarkable early 18th-century-style organ to Cornell, completed in 2011 as the culmination of an ambitious 10-year research and construction project in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and in upstate New York.

Teaching

I teach courses in music history, aesthetics and criticism, and performance. I regularly co-teach an undergraduate course on the History, Art, and Technology of the Organ (Music 2244), as well as studio organ lessons. My graduate seminars have ranged from a focus on histories of historical performance practice to 18th-century theories of the sentimental and sublime; from music and touch, to the musical Gothic. I have mentored and advised undergraduate and graduate dissertations on many different topics, and I am always excited to serve on the committees of musicologists, historical performers, and composers.

Topics of dissertations I have advised include: The musical Kafkaesque; music in mid-20th-century Poland; music and multicultural civic identity in Hapsburg Czernowitz; Michael Praetorius and early 17th-century Lutheran organ culture; the Concert of Nations and 19th-century musical diplomacy; the 19th-century musical Uncanny; moving statues and Italian music-theatrical culture c. 1800; pictorial music in the French baroque; musical “commonplacing” and composing at the keyboard in the 16th-18th centuries.

I am committed to fostering undergraduate and graduate student projects, and to reaching communities beyond Cornell, by helping to support and co-organize symposia, conferences and concert festivals. Events I’ve helped to spearhead with the Westfield Center and the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards have included (more details can be found here and here):

2024. “Maria Teresia Paradis, Blind Musicians, and Musical Culture Before and After Braille” at Mount Holyoke College, with Adeline Mueller and Christopher Parton
2023. “Sustaining Keyboards,” at Cornell with Morton Wan
2023. “Between Old Worlds and New: Keyboard Encounters c. 1700-1900,” at the Sigal Music Museum, Greenville S. C, with Andrew Willis
2020. "Beethoven and Pianos: Off the Beaten Path," on-line festival, with Mike Lee
2018. "The Organ in the Global Baroque," at Cornell
2017. "Reformations and the Organ, 1517-2017," at the University of Notre Dame with Craig Cramer
2017. "Ghosts in the Machine: Technology, History, and Aesthetics of the Player Piano," at Cornell with Sergio Ospina Romero
2016. "Keyboard Networks: Technologies of the Keyboard," at Cornell with Dietmar Friesenegger, Mackenzie Pierce, and Roger Moseley
2015. "Forte | Piano: International Summer Festival," at Cornell, with Malcolm Bilson, David Breitman, Mike Lee, Andrew Willis and Tom Beghin.

Awards and Honors

2018-19. Stanford Humanities Center, Marta Sutton Weeks Fellowship
2018-19. American Academy in Berlin, Berlin Prize, (declined)
2014-15. Society for the Humanities at Cornell, Faculty Fellowship
2012 and 2004-5. Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Research Fellowship
2003-5. Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ‘New Directions’
1994. Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Pre-Doctoral Fellowship
1994. Festival van Vlaanderen, Bruges. International Organ Competition for positiv organ duo. First prize with David Yearsley

Publications

Monographs:

The Temple of Fame and Friendship: Portraits, Music, and History in the C. P. E. Bach Circle. University of Chicago Press (2022)
The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque. Cambridge University Press (2001)

Recordings:

“Music for a Princess.” German 17th- and 18th-century music from the library of Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia, on the Cornell Baroque Organ. (Recorded March 2013; released August 2014, Loft Recordings).
“Melchior Schildt and the North German Organ Art,” on the historic Raphaelis Organ at Roskilde Cathedral, Denmark. (2008, Loft Recordings).

Edited Volumes:

C. P. E. Bach Studies. Cambridge University Press (2006)
Acting on the Past: Historical Performance across the Disciplines. Editor, with Mark Franko. Wesleyan University Press (2000)
Keyboard Perspectives. Volumes I-V (2008-2012), IX (2016), X (2017, coedited with Roger Moseley)

Critical Editions:

The Portrait Collection of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Packard Humanities Institute (2012)
C. P. E. Bach: The Complete Works for Organ, edited with David Yearsley, in The Collected Works of C. P. E. Bach (Packard Humanities Institute, 2008)

Selected Articles and Book Chapters:

“Susi Jeans, Early Music, and the HIP Women Organists of the 20th Century.” The American Organist (May, 2024).
“Envoicing the Virgin Warrior: Reicha’s Glass Music for Marianne Kirchgessner.” Antoine Reicha and the making of a nineteenth-century composer, eds. Fabio Morabito and Louise Bernard de Raymond (Bologna: Ut Orpheus, 2020). 71-89.
“Mimesis.” Caryl Clark and Sarah Day O’Connell, eds., Cambridge Haydn Encyclopedia (Cambridge University Press, 2020). 213-15.
“Improvisation.” Caryl Clark and Sarah Day O’Connell, eds., Cambridge Haydn Encyclopedia (Cambridge University Press, 2020). 165-67.
“The Musical Poetry of the Graveyard.” Delia da Sousa Correa ed., Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). 360-371.
“Ghost Music, or the Otherworldy Voice of the Glass Harmonica.” Tilman Skowroneck, ed., Keyboard Perspectives VIII (2016), 1-42
„Vereint durch den erhabenen Chor: Das ästhetisch-politische Vermächtnis von Händels Halleluja im Zeitalter der Personalunion.“ In Mehr Händel ed. Wolfgang Sandberger, [Göttinger Händel Beiträge XVI], (2015).
“Gothic Musical Scenes and the Image of Performance.” Late 18th-Century Music and Visual Culture, ed., Cliff Eisen and Alan Davison (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017).
“Listening for Likeness, or C. P. E. Bach and the Art of Speculation,” Early Music Vol. XLII no. 3 (2014), 347-362.
“The Charitable Handel.” In The Power of Musick, ed. Anorthe Kremers and Wolfgang Sandberger [Göttinger Händel Beiträge XV], (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 87-108.
“C. P. E Bach’s Freundschaftstempel and the Portrait of Modern Life.” Die Tonkunst, (8/1, January 2014), 39-49.
“C. P. E. Bach, Portraits and the Physiognomy of Music History.” Journal of the American Musicological Society (Volume 66 no. 2, Summer, 2013), 337-396.
“Charlottenburg Schnitger: 1706—1931—2011.” In Keyboard Perspectives IV, 2013
“Spielräume der Musik zwischen Konzertsaal und Open Air: Beethoven, Joe Wrights The Soloist und die Idee von urbaner Freiheit” (co-authored with David Yearsley) in Kunst —Garten — Kultur (Berlin, 2010), ed. Stefanie Hennecke and Gert Gröning (Berlin: Reimer, 2010)
"An Enduring Monument: C. P. E. Bach and the Musical Sublime." In C. P. E. Bach Studies.
"Haydn's London Trios and the Rhetoric of the Grotesque." In Engaging Rhetoric, ed. Tom Beghin, Sander Goldberg and Elisabeth Le Guin. Chicago University Press.

In the news

101 Lincoln Hall
annette.richards@cornell.edu

Education

BA and MA, Oxford University
Ph.D., Stanford University
Performer's Diploma ('Uitvoerend Musicus'), Sweelinck Conservatorium Amsterdam

Departments and programs

German Studies
Music
Society for the Humanities

Affiliated Colleges

College of Arts and Sciences

Keywords

musicology; music history and culture in the long 18th century; organ; history of technology and the senses; performance