Cornell soon will be home to the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, thanks to two grants totaling $470,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Annette Richards, professor of music, has been executive director of the center since 2007. The grant will help establish the program at Cornell and support its programs for three years.

The center is considered the country's pre-eminent organization for advancing historical keyboard music and instruments, largely through conferences, workshops, publications and a weekly radio program. Founded in 1979, Westfield's original focus was the organ, but it now extends to keyboard instruments of all sorts and in all historical periods.

"It makes good sense to align Westfield with Cornell," said Richards. "Cornell has a distinguished record in historical performance -- especially at the fortepiano; and Cornell, like Westfield, has made an unusually successful reputation for itself in the marriage of scholarship and performance at the highest levels."

The center has a distinguished history of promoting dialogue among keyboard performers, scholars and instrument-makers. Programs sponsored by the center have brought together professionals and leading figures from around the world, often for events in collaboration with major cultural institutions.

Having Westfield at Cornell will help ensure that Cornell's fine instrument collection of fortepianos, harpsichords and organs is well used and becomes a resource for performers and scholars from outside the Ithaca area, said Richards.

"One of the new programs we're most excited about is a new International Keyboard Competition and Summer Academy aimed at young performers," said Richards. "We have just established an international performance competition coupled with master classes and symposia, a festival and summer academy. The goal is to combine performing on historical -- or historically informed -- keyboard instruments with learning about them. There is nothing like it in the United States or, especially where the fortepiano is concerned, in the world."

The project launches this summer with a fortepiano competition at Cornell Aug. 1-6, with the academy in the following week. The 2012 competition will be for harpsichordists and will be hosted by the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The 2013 competition will be for organists and will take place at Cornell on the new baroque organ in Anabel Taylor Chapel and at the Eastman School of Music.

Richards' involvement with the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies grew out of her commitment to the integration of scholarship and musical performance. Her commitment deepened, she says, through the work she did as a Mellon New Directions fellow, which enabled her to reflect on the many intersections among music and the other arts and humanistic disciplines, while continuing to develop her own skills as a performer.

Richards is the founding editor for Westfield's new journal Keyboard Perspectives; Cornell graduate students in musicology assist in all areas of its production. The journal focuses on the interaction among scholarship, performance and instrument making, and is published annually.

Linda B. Glaser is a staff writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.