Archive: Arts & Entertainment

The Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, with support from the Department of Music and Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University, presents a spring 2016 symposium, Keyboard Networks: Interrogating the Cultures and Technologies of the Keyboard, on Friday and Saturday, March 4-5, 2016.  Events are free and open to the public.

Keyboard Networks explores the technological guises of the musical keyboard, from the French Revolution to the present day. The metaphor of “networks” brings together recent inquires into the embodiment, performance, and discipline of keyboard-playing on the one hand, with scholarly analyses of music’s roles in politics on the other. This two-day series of lectures, performances, papers and discussion will consider how the keyboard enabled mediations and connections across disparate cultural, historical, and social spaces.

Of special note, and broad audience appeal, are the evening concerts at Barnes Hall. On Friday March 4th a lecture-recital program by Scottish pianist and scholar Kenneth Hamilton (Cardiff University), entitled 'Unauthorized Versions: Dogma and Heresy in the Performance of Chopin, Liszt and Mendelssohn,' includes Chopin etudes, Mendelssohn’s fantasy on The Last Rose of Summer, and St. Francis Walking on the Waves by Liszt.

'Charles Burney’s Musical Tour,' on Saturday night to conclude the conference, features Cornell faculty Annette Richards and David Yearsley in duo repertoire on organ, harpsichord, and fortepiano, with video projections by Bug Davidson and the Hyphen Collective. The visual commentary, created especially for this musical journey, reimagines the experience of moving through soundscapes of the past in an homage to Burney’s travels.

Scholarly sessions and additional performances on Friday afternoon and through Saturday will focus on the keyboard technologies of composers ranging from Bach and Chopin to Ligeti and Cage, and consider how the keyboard affords relationships between instrument and player, player and listener, sound and public, and past and present. Guest speakers Deirdre Loughridge, co-curator of the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments and lecturer at the University of California Berkeley, and James Davies, also from UC Berkeley, will be joined by additional visiting panelists, Cornell and Ithaca College faculty, and Cornell graduate students for discussions investigating the boundaries between digital and analog, modern and antique.

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