Conference-Concert Festival
The Organ in the Global Baroque
September 6–8, 2018
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Conference Performers and Speakers
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Internationally renowned organist and harpsichordist Edoardo Bellotti is considered a leading expert of Renaissance and Baroque keyboard music. Before joining the Eastman School of Music in 2013 as Associate Professor of Organ, Harpsichord and Improvisation, Edoardo Bellotti taught in several academic institutions in Germany and Italy. In addition to teaching and performing, he has devoted himself to musicological research, publishing articles, essays and critical editions of organ music, and presenting his work in many international conferences and symposia. He has edited the first modern edition of two important Baroque treatises on organ playing: Adriano Banchieri L’Organo suonarino (Venice 1605), and Spiridion a Monte Carmelo Nova Instructio pro pulsandis organis (Bamberg 1670). He has made more than thirty recordings on historical instruments, which have garnered critical acclaim.
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John Butt is Gardiner Professor of Music at the University of Glasgow, musical director of Edinburgh's Dunedin Consort and a Principal Artist with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. His career as both musician and scholar centers on music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but he is also concerned with the implications of the past in our present culture. Author of five monographs, Butt has written extensively on Bach, the baroque, the historical performance revival (Playing with History, 2002) and issues of modernity (Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity, 2010). His subsequent work has centered on listening cultures and embodied musical experience, and frictions between Classical Music ideology and religious practice.
His discography includes eleven recordings on organ and harpsichord for Harmonia Mundi and fourteen recent recordings for Linn Records. Highlights, as conductor of Dunedin, include the Gramophone award-winning recordings of Handel’s Messiah and Mozart’s Requiem (the latter also nominated for a Grammy award), together with significant recordings of Bach’s Passions, Mass, Magnificat, Christmas Oratorio and Brandenburg Concertos, and Handel’s Acis and Esther. A recording of Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 was released in September 2017. His performing career has taken him, over last two years, to the US, Mexico, Hong Kong, Germany, France, Holland, Belgium, Malta, Spain and Norway. As a guest conductor he has worked, or will shortly work with, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Stavanger Symphony, Hallé Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, The Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, The English Concert, Portland Baroque Orchestra, Irish Baroque Orchestra and Ars Lyrica. He made his London Proms debut with Dunedin Consort in August 2017, and opened the Queen’s Hall series with the same group at the Edinburgh Festival. He has been appointed an FBA and FRSE, and has been awarded the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Society, together with the RAM/Kohn Foundation's Bach Prize. In 2013 he was awarded the medal of the Royal College of Organists, together with an OBE.
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Philipp Christ (born 1979 in Wiesbaden) studied piano, church music and organ at the Musikhochschule Lübeck from 2000 to 2008 with Hartmut Rohmeyer and Arvid Gast. During that period he took a year, in 2003, to study with Jacques van Oortmerssen at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. He completed his organ studies with Wolfgang Zerer in Hamburg in 2011 (Konzertexamen mit Auszeichnung), and has also participated in numerous masterclasses with Harald Vogel, Edoardo Bellotti, Michael Radulescu, Ton Koopman, Naji Hakim and Bill Porter among others. Prizewinner at international competitions, he won, in 2006, the 1st prize at the Orgelconcours Leiden (NL), in 2007 the Förderpreis at the Buxtehude Competition Lübeck and 3rd prize at the Organ Competition Kazan. From 2007 to 2009 he was assistant organist at the three historic organs of St. Jakobi Lübeck, and since 2010 he has been organist at the Hauptkirche and Kreuzkirche Suhl (in Thuringia, Germany), where he presides over the historic Eilert-Köhler-Orgel (1738-40), on which he recorded the CD „Bach & Böhm. He has performed in Germany, England, Italy, France, Poland, Russia, Japan and the USA.
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Thomas Cressy was born in British Sovereign Cyprus and was educated in Scotland, studying classical guitar with Peter Argondizza. He completed his MA (first class, highest mark of the year) at the University of Glasgow in 2012, submitting a portfolio of compositions supervised by William Sweeney, also submitting a dissertation on the aesthetics and philosophy of Bach’s fugal works and their philosophical relevance to modernity (supervised by John Butt). After securing the MEXT research scholarship from the Japanese government in 2013, he explored the reception history of Bach’s music at Tokyo University of the Arts, while also studying Japanese language at Saitama University. In 2015 he entered the master’s course in musicology at Tokyo University of the Arts, achieving the Acanthus Music Prize in 2017 for his thesis on the reception of Bach’s music in 19th century Japan (written in Japanese) supervised by Kinya Osumi. He has been working as a research assistant for the anthropology department of the University of Oxford since early 2017 and is currently finishing an MSc there in social anthropology under the supervision of Inge Daniels and Roger Goodman. His work include several published translations, conference presentations, articles, and book chapters focusing on the music, history, and religion of Japan, and is also currently an administrative assistant for Bach Network. From August 2018 he will be a graduate student in Cornell University’s music program.
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Hans Davidsson is organist at the Älvsborg church in Göteborg, Sweden, Artistic Director of the Göteborg International Organ Academy, and professor of organ at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg (academic year 2018-2019). He held the position as professor of organ at the Royal Academy of Music in Copenhagen 2012-2017. 2001-2012, he served as professor of organ at the Eastman School of Music and Project Director of the Eastman-Rochester Organ Initiative in Rochester, NY. 1987–2005, he served as professor of organ at the School of Music at Göteborg University, 1994-2009 as the Artistic Director of the Göteborg International Organ Academy (GIOA), and he was co-founder of the Göteborg Organ Art Center (GOArt). 2006-2014, he served as professor of organ at the Hochschule für Künste Bremen in Germany, where he continues as the director of the Arp Schnitger Institute of Organ and Organ Building. He performs and teaches at major festivals and academies throughout the world and has made many recordings, including most recently the complete works of Matthias Weckman, Dietrich Buxtehude and Georg Böhm on the Loft label. In 2001, he was awarded the ÅForsk research prize (Research Foundation of the ÅF Group), one of Sweden’s most distinguished research awards, and in January 2004 he was awarded the King’s medal, the highest national award in Sweden, for “significant accomplishments in musicology and music, primarily in the fields of organ research and organ education”. In 2015, he was awarded the large prize by the Frobenius foundation in Denmark for “significant achievements as musicologist, pedagogue and musician”. In 2016, he was elected member of the Royal Academy of Music in Sweden.
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Barbara Haggh-Huglo, Professor of Music at the University of Maryland, College Park, specializes in the history of medieval and Renaissance sacred music and urban culture. A former chair of the IMS Study Group ‘Cantus Planus,’ she has edited the plainchant offices of St. Hilary of Poitiers (2018) and St. Elizabeth of Hungary (1995). Her two-volume Study and Edition, Recollecting the Virgin Mary in Music: Guillaume Du Fay’s Chant across Five Centuries, and a corresponding performing edition will appear in 2019. She is also completing an archival study on music in Ghent to 1559.
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Performer-scholar Randall Harlow has long dodged conventional expectations. As a performer, he eschewed the competition circuit, choosing instead to explore the outer reaches of the organ repertoire. A specialist in contemporary music, Harlow is the first organist to be awarded a coveted New Music USA Project and an Aaron Copland Fund Recording Grant. Numerous premieres include the Barlow Prize commission Exodus by Aaron Travers, and the North American premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Himmelfahrt, the First Hour of KLANG. His debut CD, Transcendante (ProOrgano), features the first complete organ transcription of Franz Liszt’s legendary Transcendental Etudes. His second album, Organon Novus (Innova, coming Summer 2018), a 3-disc anthology of works by major living American composers, features twenty world premiere tracks. A third album, Hyperorgan (coming Fall 2018), features spectral extemporizations on the Cornell Baroque Organ. An active scholar of interdisciplinary music performance studies, he has presented at conferences at Harvard and Oxford Universities, the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC), Performance Studies Network (PSN), Porto International Conference on Musical Gesture, EROI, and GOArt. He has twice been a keynote speaker at Orgelpark in Amsterdam and completed the first comprehensive study of the pipe organs of Greenland. He has been published in Keyboard Persepctives and has an article forthcoming in a special issue of the journal MUSICultures. Harlow holds a DMA from the Eastman School of Music, where he was a pupil of Hans Davidsson. He is currently Assistant Professor of Organ and Music Theory at the University of Northern Iowa. randallharlow.net
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Matthias Havinga is a concert organist and pianist. He acquired his Master of Music degree summa cum laude at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam as a student of Jacques van Oortmerssen, graduating in piano from the same institution as a pupil of Marcel Baudet. At the Royal Conservatory in The Hague he studied church music under Jos van der Kooy. He is Professor of Organ at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam.
Matthias was awarded several prizes at international organ competitions. He enjoys an international concert career, performing at prestigious venues across Europe, Russia, the USA and South America. Matthias also performed solo with renowned choirs and orchestras, such as the Nederlands Kamerkoor and the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. His CDs, J.S.Bach – Italian Concertos, Passacaglia and Dutch Delight, released on the Brilliant Classics label, have been received with widespread acclaim. Matthias is organist titulaire of the 1830 Bätz-organ at the Koepelkerk in Amsterdam, and liturgical organist of the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, playing the Vater/Müller-organ (1726/1738) and Ahrend-organ (1965). matthiashavinga.com
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Patrick Hawkins and Thomas Strange are co-authors for the newly published exhibition catalogue, Facing South: Keyboard Instruments in the Early Carolinas, for the Carolina Music Museum in Greenville, South Carolina (Clemson University Press, 2018). Patrick Hawkins holds degrees in Organ Performance from the Peabody Conservatory of Music, East Carolina University, and Arizona State University. His former teachers include Peggy Haas Howell, Janette Fishell, Carole Terry, and Kimberly Marshall. Dr. Hawkins is a church musician, educator, versatile keyboard performer, and scholar. He has presented lectures and recitals at conventions of the American Guild of Organists, the Historic Keyboard Society of North America, the International Muzio Clementi Society Conference in Lucca, Italy, and the Muzio Clementi Conference in Barcelona, Spain. He has recorded organ works of Johann Sebastian Bach (Arkay Records) and piano compositions by Franz Joseph Haydn, Maria Hester Reynolds Park and Giovanni Matielli (Navonna and Golden Square Records). A forthcoming recording of 4-hands and two-piano music by Johann Sterkel with co-fortepianist Michael Tsalka is planned for 2018-2019. Patrick lives in Columbia, SC, where he is the Music Director at the Lutheran Church of the Incarnation and is Director of Choral and Piano Studies at Spring Valley High School. In addition, he is the founding member of the Vista Ensemble, an historically-informed trio of professional musicians who present concerts of Baroque through early Romantic repertoire for the flute, violin, and early keyboard instruments.
Thomas Strange is the Founder of the Carolina Music Museum. He has an extensive background in materials science and is the author of fifty patents and numerous papers over the last three decades, covering all aspects of power component development. Following his undergraduate and graduate studies in Physics at the University of South Carolina, he led the research efforts at Philips Components, Aerovox, and dedicated the last 20 years at St. Jude Medical in Liberty, SC, leading a start-up and successfully managed buyout to create a 500 employee operation. Strange and his team are introducing new technologies that continue to define state of the art in implantable medical devices for both pacing and arrhythmia correction. Strange has presented numerous lectures on early piano development in the US and abroad and is a builder and restorer of early keyboard instruments. He has written numerous articles on the lives and work of early piano builders, including John Geib: Beyond the Footnote, John Geib in America, Thomas Loud – From Clementi’s in London, An Austrian Foothold in America, and Recreating the Minden Alter Clavicimbalum. A newly published book on the Kirkman family of harpsichord builders has greatly expanded the understanding of this early industry.
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David Higgs is chair of the Organ Department at the Eastman School of Music. He performs extensively throughout the United
States and abroad, and has inaugurated many important new instruments including St. Stephan’s Cathedral, Vienna; the Meyerson Symphony Center, Dallas; St. Albans Cathedral, England; St. Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny, Ireland; and the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in New York City. Performances with numerous ensembles have included the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Orpheus Ensemble, Chanticleer, and Empire Brass. For more than twenty years, the San Francisco Symphony featured his holiday organ recitals at
Davies Symphony Hall, and now the Los Angeles Philharmonic/Hollywood Bowl continues that tradition each year at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Mr. Higgs performs, teaches, and adjudicates at festivals and competitions throughout the world, and also at national, regional and pedagogy conventions of the American Guild of Organists, American Pipe Organ Builders Association, the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, and the Organ Historical Society; and in London, the Annual Congress of the Incorporated Association of Organists, and the International Congress of Organists.
A native of New York City, Mr. Higgs held his first position as a church organist at age ten. As a teenager, he performed rock, gospel, and soul music as well as classical. He earned Bachelor and Master of Music degrees at the Manhattan School of Music, and the Performer’s Certificate from Eastman. His teachers have included Claire Coci, Peter Hurford, Russell Saunders, and Frederick Swann. In New York City, he was Director of Music and Organist at Park Avenue Christian Church, and later, Associate Organist and choral conductor of the Riverside Church. In San Francisco, he served as Director of Music and Organist at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Berkeley, Director of Church Music Studies at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, and Organist/Choir Director at Temple Emanu-El. Mr. Higgs was appointed to the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music upon graduation from that institution, and has been on the Eastman faculty since 1992. His students have won prizes in prestigious international competitions, and hold important positions in leading academic and religious institutions. David Higgs has recorded for Delos International, Pro Organo, Arsis, Loft, and Gothic records.
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Ilona Kubiaczyk-Adler is a concert organist whose programs explore connections between early and contemporary music, the works of female composers, the music of Eastern Europe, and improvisation. She has traveled extensively throughout Europe and the US as a soloist and ensemble player. Her 2015 album Antique Sound Palette, recorded on the recently restored 1719 Hildebrandt organ in Pasłęk, was featured on American Public Radio. Since 2006, Ilona has been composing, improvising and performing new music for multiple pianos, organs, and laptops with Jacob Adler in their duo Zeelab.
Ilona graduated from three conservatoria: Academy of Music in Łódź (MA), Conservatorium van Amsterdam (MM), and Arizona State University (DMA), where she studied with Irena Wisełka-Cieślar, Jacques van Oortmerssen, and Kimberly Marshall. She worked as an Assistant Professor of Organ at the Academy of Music in Łódź, and as a Research Assistant and Faculty Associate at ASU. In the coming months she will perform an organ concerto by Margaret Sandresky with the Air Force Strings Orchestra in Washington DC and recitals at the Göteborg Organ Academy. An active musician and educator in Arizona, Ilona currently serves as the Associate Director of Music at All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Phoenix. kubiaczyk.com
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Anne Laver performs frequently in the United States and Europe, and has been a featured recitalist and clinician at regional and national conventions of the American Guild of Organists, the Organ Historical Society, the Society for Seventeenth Century Music, the Eastman Rochester Organ Initiative Festival, and the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies. In 2010, she was awarded second prize in the American Guild of Organists’ National Young Artist Competition in Organ Performance (NYACOP). Anne is Assistant Professor of Organ and University Organist at Syracuse University’s Setnor School of Music, where she teaches, serves as artistic director for the Malmgren Concert Series, accompanies the Hendricks Chapel Choir, and plays for chapel services and special university events. Prior to her appointment at Syracuse, Anne served as Instructor of Healthy Keyboard Technique and Organ Repertoire, and Coordinator of Organ Outreach Programs at the Eastman School of Music. She has over fifteen years of experience in church music, having led volunteer and professional choir programs in upstate New York, Wisconsin, and The Netherlands.
Anne is passionate about advocacy for the organ and young organists. She has served as director for various youth programs in the Rochester area, including a Pipe Organ Encounter Advanced in 2013, the Eastman Summer Organ Academy in 2014, and a Summer of Opportunity youth employment program in 2014. She also hosts frequent organ demonstrations on the Syracuse University campus and surrounding community. Anne is also active on a number of national and local organizations in the organ field. She is chair of the Editorial Resources Committee of the American Guild of Organists, member of the Board of Directors of the Organ Historical Society, secretary of the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies and a member of the Executive Committee of the Syracuse Chapter of the American Guild of Organists.
Anne Laver studied organ with Mark Steinbach as an undergraduate student at Brown University, and spent a year in The Netherlands studying with Jacques van Oortmerssen at the Conservatory of Amsterdam. While pursuing masters and doctoral degrees at the Eastman School of Music, she studied with Hans Davidsson, William Porter, and David Higgs.
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Organist of the Cathedral of Valencia and harpsichord professor at the Conservatory of Valencia (Spain), Pablo Márquez Caraballo initiated his first musical steps with Montserrat Torrent, who would influence in a great manner his musical career. He has studied at the conservatories of Valencia, Toulouse, Amsterdam and The Hague the specialties of organ, harpsichord, composition and early music, having the chance to study with M. Bouvard, J. W. Jansen, P. van Dijk, F. Bonizzoni, P. Ayrton and T. Koopman. During these years, he has been awarded with the Scholarship of Valencian Institute of Music and the prestigious Huygens Scholarship from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. During this time, Márquez has been awarded with several prizes as a performer and composer, among them the International Buxtehude Organ Competition, hold in Lübeck (Germany).
In September of 2017 he got the PhD degree in History from the University of Valencia with the highest mark "cum laude" with his dissertation "The organs of Valencia Cathedral since the 16th century to the 21st century. History and evolution". His studies on the figure of Joan Cabanilles, the most important organist of the 17th century in Spain and also organist at the Cathedral of Valencia, have been praised by the critics. He is often required as expert for restorations of Spanish organs and has lead the reconstruction of the new symphonic organ of Valencia Cathedral, built by French organ builder Jean Daldosso in 2015. Currently, he combines teaching with a busy international career as a player an as lecturer. pmarquez.com
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Kimberly Marshall is known worldwide for her compelling programs and presentations of organ music. She is an accomplished teacher, giving lectures and master classes worldwide. She currently holds the Patricia and Leonard Goldman Endowed Professorship in Organ at Arizona State University, having previously held positions at Stanford University and the Royal Academy of Music, London. Winner of the Saint Albans International Organ Playing Competition in 1985, Dr. Marshall has been a recitalist, workshop leader and adjudicator at 9 National Conventions of the American Guild of Organists.
Acclaimed as a specialist in early music, Kimberly Marshall has performed on many of the most significant historical organs in Europe. She is also a noted authority on contemporary organ repertoire, especially the music of György Ligeti. Her CDs and videos display the breadth of her interests, from Arnolt Schlick and 16th-century Italian composers to Chen Yi’s Dunhuang Fantasy. She has presented her research on Spanish repertoire and organs in the New World in master classes and concerts. Her video of the historical organ at La Valenciana (Guanajuato, Mexico) is regularly displayed at the Music Instrument Museum (MIM) in Phoenix. In 2016, she was invited to present recitals in the Jesuit missions of eastern Bolivia as part of the Chiquitos International Festival of Early Music. kimberlymarshall.com
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Andrew McCrea is Deputy Director of the Royal College of Organists and Director of Studies, in which capacity he oversees the RCO’s accreditation and educational programs, its digital and print publications (he is general editor of the annual Journal of the Royal College of Organists), and its library and archive collections. He also holds a teaching post at the Royal College of Music, London. Andrew studied organ at the RCM and continued his organ studies with Jacques van Oortmerssen at the Amsterdam (then Sweelinck) Conservatorium; subsequent postgraduate studies were at the University of Reading, on the organ historiography program. He has given papers at conferences in Europe and North America, and has published a number of articles for journals such as the Journal of the British Institute of Organ Studies, the RCO Journal, and Nineteenth-Century Music Review (CUP). He contributed an article on British organ music to the Cambridge Companion to the Organ (CUP, 1998) and an article on the organ sonata in England appears in a forthcoming volume of essays on English organ music from Routledge. He is guest editor of the Journal of the British Institute of Organ Studies in 2018. Interests in the organ culture of the Baltic countries led to work on The Nordic-Baltic Organ Book (GOArt, 2003) as co-editor. Andrew has held several posts as a church organist, has played recitals in the UK and overseas, and was a finalist in the Lahti International Organ Competition in Finland in 1997.
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Alexander Meszler is a Phoenix-based organist from upstate New York. Concerned with the future of the organ in an increasingly secular society, he dedicates himself to a wide range of research and performance addressing this issue. In October 2018 he will travel to France on a Fulbright award to investigate secularism and the organ and to study with Jean-Baptiste Robin at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Versailles. He is currently a doctoral student at Arizona State University where he studies with Kimberly Marshall. A strong advocate of music by living composers, he serves as a member of the national American Guild of Organists’ Committee on New Music. In 2017, he was awarded a substantial grant from the Arizona Center for Renaissance and Medieval Studies for a project titled “Crossroads for the Organ in the Twenty-First Century: A Precedent for Secularism in the First Decades of Sixteenth-Century Print Culture". Alexander completed a Master of Music degree in Organ Performance and Music Theory at the University of Kansas where he studied organ with Michael Bauer and James Higdon. He earned a Bachelor of Music in Organ Performance from Syracuse University where he worked with Kola Owolabi.
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Shinon Nakagawa completed her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in Music at Tokyo University of the Arts, Japan, where she studied organ with Tsuguo Hirono and Naoko Imai. She also graduated with the highest marks from the Hochschule für Künste Bremen, Germany, where she studied early music in the concert exam program with Harald Vogel and Hans Davidsson. After studying as an exchange student at the Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY, USA, she also pursued a Master of Music there. She was awarded the Ataka Prize in 2003 and the Acanthus Music Prize in 2004. Her master’s thesis about Ladegast organs was published in Japan Organist 34 in 2007. Shinon Nakagawa teaches at Keio Yokohama Elementary School and has served as organist at Hijirigaoka Church and Sakurashinmachi Church in Tokyo. She is a member of the Japan Association of Organists and the Japan Organ Society.
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Anne Page was born and educated in Perth, Australia and moved to Europe to continue advanced studies with Marie-Claire Alain, Peter Hurford and Jacques van Oortmerssen. She made her London debut playing 20th century repertoire at the Royal Festival Hall. Her career encompasses performances, recordings and broadcasts in Europe, the USA and Australia. In the pioneering spirit of her country of origin she likes to explore some of the less well trodden musical paths and has been at the forefront of the revival of the harmonium, establishing a course on the instrument at the Royal Academy of Music and performing the first all-harmonium recital in the Purcell Room in 2008.
Now based in Cambridge, during 2011-12 she performed the complete organ works of Bach in 23 recitals on 14 different organs. The series attracted capacity audiences and helped to support the educational work of the Cambridge Academy of Organ Studies of which Anne is a founder. In 2017 she returned to the Royal Festival Hall for a performance of Bach’s crowning masterpiece, the Art of Fugue. The Sunday Times wrote: "unity and diversity were one long, irresistible, emotionally satisfying interpenetration… Page rose marvellously to her immense challenge." anne-page.co.uk
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Paul Peeters studied musicology at Utrecht University, where his main teachers in the field of the organ were Dr. Maarten Albert Vente and Dr. Jan van Biezen. He studied organ with Kees van Houten and Jacques van Oortmerssen, and attended courses with Klaas Bolt, Harald Vogel, and Jean-Claude Zehnder. From 1983–1991 he was general editor of the Dutch organ journal Het Orgel. In 1995 he emigrated to Göteborg, Sweden, and was appointed librarian and coordinator of the documentation at the Göteborg Organ Art Center (GOArt) at the University of Gothenburg. From 2004–2007 he served as GOArt director. Since 2008, he has been the project leader of the Göteborg International Organ Academy and taught organ building history at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg. At present, he is completing a doctoral dissertation (“French and German Organ Building in the 19th Century. Comparative Studies of the Sound Concepts of Cavaillé-Coll and Walcker”). From its foundation in 1990 until 2013, he has been a board member of the International Association of Organ Documentation (IAOD), 2006-2013 as its chairman. In 2016, he succeeded Peter Williams as editor of The Organ Yearbook.
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William Porter, Eastman School of Music
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Carlos Roberto Ramírez is a Cornell University Graduate School Dean’s Scholar and a PhD candidate in Musicology in the Department of Music. Originally from Puerto Rico, Carlos earned a Bachelor of Music, and Master of Music in Music History and Historical Keyboard performance at the Boyer College of Music and Dance (Philadelphia, PA). He is currently a Predoctoral Diversity Fellow at the Whalen School of Music at Ithaca College. His dissertation — Digitizing Polyphony: Luis Venegas de Henestrosa’s “Libro de Cifra Nueva,” Keyboards, and the mediation of sound in Early Modern Spain — aims to re-contextualize Venegas’ keyboard book within the narrative of Early Modern music pedagogy, highlighting the relationship between vocal and instrumental practice to demonstrate how humanist ideas introduced to Spain in the sixteenth century positioned musical praxis as a socio-cultural tool capable of shaping subjectivity and creating identity.
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Annette Richards is a performer, scholar, and teacher specializing in the music and culture of the long 18th century. She was educated at Oxford University (BA, MA), Stanford University (PhD) and the Sweelinck Conservatorium Amsterdam (Uitvoerend Musicus), where she was a student of Jacques van Oortmerssen. She has won numerous honors, including prizes at international organ competitions (Dublin, Bruges) and fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center, the Getty Center in Santa Monica and from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Annette has recorded the Complete Works of Melchior Schildt (on the Loft label) on the historic organ at Roskilde Cathedral, Denmark, and music from the library of Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia on the new Schnitger-style organ at Cornell University. She is currently preparing a recording of Italian and English music on Cornell’s 18th-century Neapolitan organ, and, with David Yearsley, a set of recordings of 18th-century music for multiple keyboards, with readings from the travel diaries of Charles Burney.
For ten years she was the Executive Director of the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, bringing the Center to Cornell under the auspices of a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is founding editor of Keyboard Perspectives, a yearbook dedicated to historical performance and keyboard culture, but her scholarly work extends far beyond the organ and its music. Topics she has published on include the free fantasia and landscape theory, C.P.E. Bach, portraits and the construction of music history, Handel and charity, Mozart and mechanical music, Haydn and the grotesque, the glass harmonica and ghost music. With David Yearsley she has edited the complete organ works of C.P.E. Bach. Annette Richards is the Given Foundation Professor of the Humanities and University Organist at Cornell University. For the 2018-19 academic year she will be enjoying a sabbatical as a Martha Sutton Weeks Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.
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Anna Steppler is an organist, originally from the United Kingdom, and is working towards a DMA in performance practice at Cornell, where she studies with Annette Richards. She began playing the organ on becoming the Nicholas Maines organ scholar at St Jude-on-the-Hill, the large parish church of Hampstead Garden Suburb in North London, in 2008. She holds a first class degree in Music from Merton College, Oxford, where she was organ scholar from 2010-13. Following this she pursued a Masters degree on the Organ at the University of Gothenburg. During her time in Sweden, she studied the organ with Hans Fagius and clavichord with Joel Speerstra, and was awarded the Carl Larsson Scholarship for Music in 2015. As a performer and scholar her interests lie rooted in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries, though she always enjoys broadening these horizons, and likes to programme concerts which highlight different, perhaps unexpected, corners in the organ repertoire. In the scholarly realm she is particularly intrigued by the organ(ist)'s role in exploring theological ideas through instrumental sound, with a focus on Protestant traditions in Northern Europe.
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Born in Akita, Japan, Atsuko Takano studied piano and organ at Ferris University in Japan with O. Uehara and T. Akatsu-Miyamoto, and obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree being awarded the Prix d'Exellence in the speciality of piano. She continued her further studies at the Hochschule für Künste Bremen with H. Vogel, H. Davidsson, E. Bellotti and U. Davidsson specializing in the performance practice of historical keyboard instruments. In 2011 she was awarded the Huygens Scholarship offered by the Dutch Minister for Education, Culture and Science and finished her master study with Jacques van Oortmerssen at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam in the year later obtaining the distinction cum laude. Takano is prize-winner of the International Arp Schnitger Organ Competition (Germany) and the Westfield International Organ Competition (USA). She has performed numerous concerts as soloist as well as ensemble player in Japan, Europe and the USA, including many orchestral projects and recordings such as the national radios in Germany and the Netherlands. In 2016 she played as a soloist with the Spanish Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra The Book with Seven Seals by Franz Schmidt, being the first performance of this piece in the country. All the critics applauded her performance as “brilliant”. Since then, Takano collaborates regularly with this orchestra in Madrid. Takano also enjoys performing an Organ Duo with her husband, the Spanish organist and harpsichordist Pablo Márquez, under the name of “Duo Concertante a Quattro”. Their repertoire includes original pieces and own transcriptions, such as the 5th Symphony by Beethoven or Le Tombeau de Couperin by Ravel. In October of 2017, Takano was appointed Music Director and Titular-Organist at the St. Nicolas Church, known as the “Capilla Sixtina of Valencia” because of its beautiful fresco paintings from the 18th century. atsukotakano.com
Concert Program
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Morton Wan is a student in the PhD musicology program at Cornell. His scholarly engagement focuses primarily on the history and culture of European music in the long eighteenth century, actively seeking out junctures between music and other disciplines (especially philosophy, history, and critical theory). Drawing on his training as both a keyboardist and a musicologist, Morton’s other research interests extend to Beethoven’s late style, musical exchange between Europe and China, and Glenn Gould and the Toronto School. Prior to coming to Cornell, Morton completed an MPhil at the University of Hong Kong, where his thesis on Beethoven’s late piano sonatas and the phenomenology of embodiment was awarded the Li Ka Shing Prize. Morton also holds an MSt with distinction from the University of Oxford. He has given lecture recitals and papers in conferences including Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Conference (London, 2015), International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (Seoul, 2014), and IMS East Asian Regional Association Biennial Conferences (Taipei, 2013; Hong Kong, 2015). Morton studied piano performance with Daniel-Ben Pienaar at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and with Ilya Poletaev at McGill University in Montreal, where he was the recipient of Dr. Robert Fung Scholarship, and where he concurrently studied harpsichord with Hank Knox and worked as continuo player for Opera McGill. Other influential mentors in music performance include Laurence Dreyfus, Richard Beauchamp, and John O’Conor. Morton has participated in such festivals as Aspen, Dartington, Tafelmusik Baroque Institute, Aurora Chamber Music, and International Keyboard Institute and Festival. In 2015, He was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Schools of Music.
Lecture Abstract
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Russell Weismann is a recent graduate of the Doctor of Musical Arts program at George Mason University, where his dissertation research explored the North American influence of the German organ builder, Rudolf von Beckerath in the context of musical culture and composition. As an organist, Russell is a regular recitalist at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and has additionally performed across the United States, as well as in Europe, Central America, and Africa. As a scholar, Russell has earned distinction as a laureate of several scholarships, including the André Marchal award for excellence in the study of sacred music and the Hugh Giles award for distinction in the discipline of music and the arts. He has several articles in print and is focusing his current research on nationalistic expressions in twentieth-century organ building. Among his many community outreach efforts, Russell is in his fourth year as Artistic Director of "Music @ the Monastery," a thriving musical event series held at the Franciscan Monastery in Washington, D.C., and director of the Capital Organ Studio, a regionally-based initiative offering private music lessons to students of all ages and abilities.
Lecture Abstract
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Wim Winters studied for eight years at the Sweelinck Conservatory of Amsterdam, with Jacques van Oortmerssen and Willem Brons (piano). After having devoted much of his time to the organ and the 19th century piano, since 2008 he has regularly performed works by the Bach family, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven on a 5 octave unfretted clavichord in Saxon style built by Joris Potvlieghe. In 2014, Wim launched Authentic Sound as a YouTube channel to showcase the authentic, but relatively seldom heard “voice” of the 18th century unfretted clavichord. The channel developed rapidly into a platform presenting thought-provoking performances of music from Bach to Beethoven and even Chopin with over 700 videos at present. Particular focus today is placed on the reconstruction of original tempi, perhaps the most important, but still missing link in understanding the original thoughts of the composer.
In 2018, Authentic Sound officially evolved into a recording label whose prime goal is to deliver high quality – analog recorded - audio recordings that not only illustrate the outcome of our research, but also try to reveal long-hidden but often surprisingly powerful musical emotions in seemingly familiar musical works. While currently focusing on the work of Wim Winters, the label will soon expand to a broader group of dedicated musicians who share similar passion. In June 2018, the Authentic Sound label launched its first production, the Hexacordum Apollinis of Johann Pachelbel on LP/CD. The 6 Bach partitas will see light in December 2018. In 2019, Wim will begin recording all of Beethoven’s piano works on a newly built copy of a six-octave 1816 Fritz fortepiano also from the Potvlieghe workshop.
Concert Program
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Munetaka Yokota has been associated with the sound of European historic organs, and arts in general, since his youth. His 10 years of training on organ building includes studying with Hiroshi Tsuji (Japan) and John Brombaugh (USA). As artist in residence at California State University, Chico, he re-invented and actualized a "medieval on-site construction” in order to understand how a large organ construction project was undertaken then, and had continued until the end of the 18th century. As a guest professor at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, he performed the research and re-construction of a large 4 manual, north German Hansaic City style organ. He was responsible for the sound-related aspect including field research of historic organs, coordination of scientific research, acoustical design, pipe making, voicing and tuning. He continued working as a researcher and organ builder at the Gothenburg Organ Art Center (GOArt) and as a designer and a builder for several new organs including the A.G. Casparini style organ for the Eastman School of Music, and the Berlin Schnitger style organ in Anabel Taylor Chapel at Cornell University. After moving back to Japan in 2015, he established his own firm “Munetaka Yokota Organ Building and Research LLC.” where he works as an organ builder, voicer, as well as an organ consultant, also at his workshop he disseminates the knowledge of the antique organ building techniques and theory to young craftspeople as well. He also teaches as a lecturer at the Tokyo National University of Arts, as well as giving many lectures at several other institutions on related subjects.
Lecture Abstract
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