Annette Richards

As Professor of Music and University Organist at Cornell University, Annette Richards enjoys an active career as performer, scholar, and teacher. Laureate of international organ competitions at Dublin and Bruges, she gives concerts frequently in North America and Europe. Among her CDs are the Complete Works of Melchior Schildt (on the Loft label) played on the historic organ at Roskilde Cathedral, Denmark; her recording of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s complete organ music, a diverse body of compositions she also edited for the CPE Bach Complete Works, is forthcoming. Founding editor of Keyboard Perspectives, a wide-ranging yearbook dedicated to historical performance, her scholarly work extends far beyond the organ and its music. Her widely-praised book The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (Cambridge, 2001) explores the intersections between musical fantasy and the landscape garden in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music culture, across German-speaking Europe and England. She is also editor of CPE Bach Studies (Cambridge, 2006) and rediscovered and reconstructed that composer’s extraordinary collection of musical portraits. Her catalog of these pictures has just been published (Packard Humanities Institute, 2012); soon to appear is the companion volume, A Biographical Dictionary of C. P. E. Bach’s Portraits. Richards has been a fellow of the Getty Center, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. She is the Executive Director of the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies.

Contact: ar34@cornell.edu