Hogwood

Celebrated conductor, musicologist and musician Christopher Hogwood makes his first extended visit to Cornell Oct. 25-31 as an A.D. White Professor-at-Large.

During his residency on campus, Hogwood will deliver a public lecture, participate in a symposium on collections, coach two Cornell ensembles and lead a music seminar. All events are free and open to the public.

His lecture, “The Past Is a Foreign Country: Why Making Music Matters,” is Friday, Oct. 25, at 5:15 p.m. in David L. Call Auditorium, Kennedy Hall.

The symposium, “Collections and Collecting,” Oct. 27, 2-5 p.m. in B20 Lincoln Hall, looks at the ancient cultural practice of collecting with a special focus on working collections – i.e., rare objects intended to be used in performance, study or research. From his personal collections, Hogwood will present a selection of rare instruments and visual art relating to music.

Other presenters exploring some of Cornell’s collections are Annetta Alexandridis, associate professor of classics and the history of art; Michael Webster, professor of neurobiology and behavior and the Robert G. Engel Professor of Ornithology; and Laurent Ferri, curator of pre-1800 collections in Cornell Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. The symposium also features a collection of historical instruments recently donated to the Department of Music.

Hogwood will coach two Cornell ensembles in Barnes Hall Auditorium – Les Petits Violons de Cornell on 17th-century English and Scottish music in an open rehearsal and master class, Oct. 27 at 7 p.m.; and the Cornell Chamber Orchestra on Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Five Variants of “Dives and Lazarus,” Oct. 29, 2:55-4:10 p.m.

The seminar, “The Present and Future of Historically Informed Performance,” is Oct. 28 at 7 p.m. in 316 Lincoln Hall (accessible through 220 Lincoln, the Cox Music Library).

Hogwood is an influential figure in early music performance and practice, striving in his work to discover and re-create the composer’s intentions. He is equally active in 19th- and 20th-century repertoire from such neoclassical composers as Britten, Copland and Stravinsky; and is an accomplished musician on harpsichord and clavichord.

He has worked with leading symphony orchestras and opera houses around the world. As a musicologist, he covers music from the 16th to the 20th centuries, and is currently re-editing Mendelssohn’s overtures and symphonies. A revised edition of his 1988 biography of Handel was published in 2007.

In 2011, Hogwood was a juror for the Westfield International Fortepiano Competition held at Cornell, the first competition of its kind.

He has more than 200 recordings, including the complete symphonies of Mozart and Beethoven, with the Academy of Ancient Music – the period-instrument orchestra he founded in 1973 and served as its music director until 2006. He is now emeritus director. Hogwood’s discography also contains a series of neoclassical recordings with Kammerorchester Basel, and “Secret Handel,” an award-winning CD in “The Secret Clavichord” series.

He is a professor of music at Gresham College, London, and Emeritus Honorary Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge.

Hogwood was named an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell in 2012, for a six-year term ending in June 2018. The program enhances the intellectual and cultural life of the university by inviting the world’s foremost scholars, thinkers and artists to campus.

There are 20 active professors-at-large. They visit the campus for about a week at least two times during their terms, to conduct public programs and engage in intellectual exchange with faculty and students in classrooms, laboratories and informal settings.