Courtesy of Ars Lyrica Houston / Amitava Sarkar

Matthew Dirst will direct period music ensemble Ars Lyrica Houston Oct. 3, with soloists Dennis James (glass harmonica), Annette Richards (organ) and Sarah Mesko (soprano).

Seven award-winning alumni of Cornell’s music department will celebrate the 300th birthday of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach at a three-day conference and festival on campus, Oct. 2-4.

“Sensation and Sensibility at the Keyboard in the Late Eighteenth Century: Celebrating the Tercentenary of C.P.E. Bach” will explore late 18th-century theories of sentiment and feeling in Europe and America, focusing on C.P.E. Bach’s music and Cornell’s collection of historic keyboard instruments (fortepiano, organ, harpsichord and clavichord).

“The conference-festival will bring to Ithaca an exceptionally rich roster of scholars and performers to engage in programs of great originality,” says Richard Kramer, a professor of music at the City University of New York Graduate Center. The three days will feature more than 40 performers and scholars in addition to members of the Cornell Chamber Orchestra, Baroque Orchestra, Chorus and Glee Club.The seven alumni – Tom Beghin, DMA ’96; Geoffrey Burgess, Ph.D. ’98; Emily Dolan, Ph.D. ’06; Nicholas Mathew, Ph.D. ’06; Pierpaolo Polzonetti, Ph.D. ’03; Andrew Willis, DMA ’94; and Steven Zohn, Ph.D. ’95 – will share their expertise and musical skills with attendees at several lectures and performances. Events are free and open to the public.

Courtesy of Emily Dolan

Emily Dolan, Ph.D. ’06, recently appointed at Harvard University, returns to campus Oct. 2-4 to explore the history of Benjamin Franklin’s glass harmonica with conference attendees and Alice Cook House residents.

Since the first chair of musicology at a U.S. university was established at Cornell 85 years ago, the Department of Music has made a notable contribution to the study of 18th-century music, including a reassessment of C.P.E. Bach’s music and its place in Western music history.

“For scholars of this music, visiting the Cornell music department brings a special intellectual stimulation,” says Dolan, who was recently appointed the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of Music at Harvard University.

Several performances during the festival will celebrate the richness of late 18th-century keyboard culture. Highlights include Grammy-nominated period-instrument ensemble Ars Lyrica Houston in an Atkinson Forum concert, “America in Sentimental Europe,” and solo performances by Andrew Willis (fortepiano), David Yearsley (baroque organ), Tom Beghin and Peter Sykes (both clavichord).

A significant section of the conference and festival will consider American contributions to the keyboard culture of sensibility, from Benjamin Franklin’s glass harmonica to, in a reverberant after-echo, the Chickering-Dolmetsch clavichords of late 19th-century Boston and Andrew McPherson’s magnetic resonator piano in the 21st century.

The three-day event is organized by Annette Richards, Cornell University Organist and professor of music. Her talk at the conference, “Sensibility Triumphant: C.P.E. Bach and the Art of Feeling,” will also be a keynote speech next November at the University of Oxford conference, “C.P.E. Bach and Eighteenth-Century Keyboard Culture.”

“Sensation and Sensibility” is co-sponsored by the Atkinson Forum in American Studies, the Society for the Humanities and the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies.

The conference-festival is supported through a $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Westfield Center that will fund activities on and off campus as well as “Technologies of the Keyboard,” a multi-year initiative exploring keyboard arts across the centuries.

Damien Mahiet is program coordinator for the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies at Cornell.