The Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards (CCHK) announces the return of the Chamber Music Collective summer festival (CMC) and Fortepiano Tech Academy. This collaboration combines CMC’s international experts in the history and performance of eighteenth- and nineteenth- century music with the CCHK collection’s representative instruments. 

Credit: Simon Wheeler for Cornell University

The week will include a series of concerts featuring distinguished performing artists and teachers, along with rising stars exploring the theme of “recreation” – a concept that embraces renewal, transformation, and the collaborative spirit of musical performance.

Young artists were selected from a competitive application process to participate in an immersion experience with the Cornell keyboards, one of the world’s most significant collections of performance-ready historical pianos. The musicians include pianists, string players and vocalists and hail from locations as far flung as Japan and Vietnam and from schools including Bard, the University of Michigan, the University of Colorado, and more, as well as Cornell and Ithaca College. Working closely with faculty members Roger Moseley (Cornell, keyboards), Patricia Garcia Gil (Cornell, keyboards), Jean Bernard Cerin (Cornell, voice) and other faculty members from other institutions, 

In addition to the performance academy, the CCHK will also host an intensive two-day academy for piano technicians to learn specialized skills for working with historical instruments. Led by restorer-technicians Ken Eschete and Ken Walkup and joined by renowned fortepiano builder Rod Reiger, participants will learn conservation principles, restoration, period action regulation, and more.

Read the full story and a schedule of public events on the College of Arts and Sciences website.